The Realization Of Our Economic Deprication
This article is a response to my observations of the skid-row area in the city where I live, where countless numbers of people are living under bridges, in industrial parks, at abandoned bus stops, and along sidewalks.
Sadly, this situation is unique to almost every city and even small towns across America. These communities have effectively sectioned off a small area for the "untouchable," a place where you must fend for yourself because there is no police to help and no place for refuge. Imagine the working poor who live nearby and must navigate this lawless landscape daily just to stay safe. I have been extremely poor myself and dealt with similar situations in the building where I once lived; that visit certainly awakened my own difficult memories.
Describing the Area
The specific area in my city that has become a skid-row—or has simply been completely abandoned by the local government—is now a no-man’s-land. It lies between the heavily gentrified old downtown and the abandoned industrial section near the city.
My city used to be designed so that factories, once the backbone of our economy, were built close to the downtown area. This allowed people who did not have transportation or who relied on public transit to easily reach their workplace if they lived in or near the city center. Even into the 1990s and 2000s, some companies were still operating near downtown. We had a meatpacking plant, a steel company, a lumberyard, and many small shops like car repair garages, parts stores, and welding shops. A few gas stations and small retail shops, like a Dollar General, along with many fast-food places, also operated in that area. Since the old downtown had not been gentrified then, many people who lived or worked in that area used the services in the adjacent neighborhood.
Gentrification began around 2008. A few years later, rent prices started to climb sharply in my town. Politicians then mysteriously agreed to a wage increase which resulted in rent prices going over the roof. As for the gentrified old downtown, no one can afford to live there now unless they belong to the upper class.
The city also, in the name of progress and environmental stewardship, pushed the few remaining companies outside the downtown city limits, implicitly suggesting it is acceptable to go and pollute somewhere else, but not near the new, desirable downtown.
P.S. The real downtown, separate from the old gentrified downtown, seems to be abandoned by my city government, and it is now turning into a new skid-row in the making. This is telling me it will be gentrified soon, and all those people who live there will have to leave too.
This story is not new, and if you live in North America, this phenomenon seems to be infecting every city and town, even small ones. But why?
The Financialization of the Economy
The leaders of our country moved away from an industrial economy in this big dream of outsourcing industry in order to grow and compete globally, while countries like China pounced on the opportunity while various oligarchs deposited their excess wealth in Wall Street. Our country, having no competitor after the USSR fell, felt the world was ours, and we no longer had to worry about the communists nor worry about our workers being infected by socialist ideas. After all, if the most prominent socialist in our country is a Zionist millionaire called Bernie Sanders, then believe me, there is no reason to worry.
So the new system is in charge: the Wall Street mega-global companies are free to do whatever they want. In the name of the free market, people can be disposed of. The saying at the place where I work is that you are a number, but my company cares only about is numbers. A worker can easily lose his or her job if the company's bottom-line number is affected, so therefore you are less than a number.
(Here is a strange formula that explains the value of a worker: Worker = Infinity / 1 cent. That was a joke, a sad one.)
These publicly traded companies work for the sole purpose of inflating their stock value. The people in charge of those mega-corporations care only about the value of the stock based on the quarterly market evaluation. If those companies fail, other large companies will take them over, and those in charge will often get a generous payout from the sale for making the takeover easy, or perhaps the government will bail them out. There is no risk to those on top, only rewards.
How Does This Financial World Work?
Some of the money that may come back to our countries is invested in government bonds and securities, which creates more incentive for government and individuals to take on loans. That money also goes into real estate, which demands the gentrification of many of our cities. More so, I speculate a new kind of real-estate gentrification: the move to build only apartments intended for rental, due to the fact that most people can’t buy a home because of inflation and wage stagnation, and the rental market provides greater financial benefit to those mega-corporations.
A year ago, I decided to take a drive to the edge of the city where I live. The majority of buildings being constructed were large apartment complexes, and the few single homes being built were little mansions which cost upward of a million dollars. Mind you, I live in the Midwest, and most people around here make less than $18 an hour, and many unskilled laborers make less than $11.
The Financial War
Did I fail to mention the wars? In the last 30 years, we have gotten involved in many conflicts—wars that we lost, wars that we borrowed against, and wars that did not achieve even a single victory. You might think this would make our leaders think and hesitate to get into more conflicts, but they don’t and will not.
Why? Because it is a financial war. If you are a company that makes weapons, it is a winnable deal. You can sell the government all these things, and the government can simply print money, drive inflation, or borrow and make you, the future taxpayer, deal with it. We fund these wars with debt, not treasure, delaying the economic effect of that spending. Meanwhile, our politicians get rewarded financially through campaign contributions, and more so through shady investment opportunities and lavish jobs for them and their families.
This has become so ridiculous that we have apps that advertise mirroring investments solely based on congressmen stock buys. I also want to mention the immoral sin of killing innocent people in those zones. If you think a government that does that will care about your life, then you are mistaken.
What Must Be Done
Before even attempting to answer this question, let me elaborate about this failed policy of robbing the poor and protecting the rich. It is a policy so corrupt that if you read it in a novel you would never believe it: a story will tell you the tale of a government so corrupt to the point where when a recession takes place due to mortgage fraud, no one is punished. Worse, those same thieves receive generous bonuses from the bailout the government borrowed from its poor people.
These failed policies have left us, as a collective, almost bankrupt. Whether on the individual level, where most Americans are a few paychecks away from homelessness, or as a country, where we are $35.6 trillion dollars in debt and counting. So what are the people in charge doing? Even more corporate welfare, and pushing for even bigger and more dangerous wars.
What we should do is very simple: invest in our people.
We should reach out to the world—a world that we have bullied and bombed for years—and make fair deals with them. China does this in Asia and Africa, where it makes a profit while building roads and industry. Imagine if all those failed states that we created throughout our wars were intact and were economic partners, engaging in energy and agriculture trade and industrial cooperation. That would be a win for everyone.