An old saying goes, “Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.” Columbia, South Carolina now punishes its homeless citizens by arresting them on sight. The city council recently unanimously passed its “Emergency Homeless Response Plan” with a hotline to report the homeless to police. Once arrested, the homeless are confined to a 24-hour “emergency shelter” on the outskirts of town—which is more like jail because they are not permitted to leave. There is no due process in a court, no judge and no sentence.
Arrest even extends to anyone attempting to feed the homeless. In Raleigh, North Carolina, police told church volunteers who have been feeding the homeless for years, “Now if you pass out food, you will go to jail.” At the same time, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City has made it illegal to donate food directly to homeless shelters. These are not just the acts of a few mean-spirited city administrations. It is systemic and nationwide. More than 50 other cities around the country including Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego have such laws.
These laws criminalize the homeless as well as anyone who may want to help them and deny basic rights we take for granted. If this reminds you of something in our country’s past, it should. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, nicknamed the ‘Blood Hound Law,’ turned the entire country into slave catchers and defenders of an inhuman system. It threatened anyone who aided or refused to retrieve runaway slaves with huge fines and jail. Anyone accused of being a runaway slave had no rights to defend themselves or speak in court. This led to many previously free people finding themselves in chains. Preservation of the right to own human beings as private property in a dying slave system was the goal of that law.
Today as in the past, laws passed by politicians cannot cancel out economic laws. Electronic automated production is killing jobs and destroying the foundation of capitalism which is based on the buying and selling of labor power. Workers are pushed further into poverty, unable to buy back the very necessities of life their labor has produced while corporate profits soar. In a move to save the dying system and maintain profits, all things in the public domain, including the government, are becoming the private property of the corporations. Government, which should be responsible for the well being of the people, attacks first the most vulnerable, and then everyone else with austerity measures and the sequester. Children, the elderly, disabled war veterans—in short, anyone pushed toward destitution is blamed for their own plight and then stripped of their rights.
We, the people, must go on the offensive. We need to build a powerful movement based on the interests of those who are forced out of the system into poverty. We must demand that corporate government be replaced by a true people’s government that provides the abundance, now produced with the new methods of production, to all based on need. This is the first step toward creating a new cooperative society where private property, now in the hands of the corporations, becomes public property, to be shared by all.
I am 78-years old raised on a small dairy-farm. Continued to live on the farm until 1964, at that time, I could no longer make enough money to support my wife and 4-children. Fortunately jobs in the big-city were plentiful, as I was semi-skilled in welding and carpentry. I was lucky enough to obtain jobs in which I advanced to a management position, which now provides a substantial monthly retirement check to add to our meager SS check.
Today, there are no job opportunities like I had. Farms are now run as a Corporation, farm children have limited access to the skills I learned. I-Corporation farm now replaces-25-Family farms. The same thing is happening in the Steel-Fabrication shops I worked in, automation has eliminated 50% of the workers and it will only increase, along with a decrease in wages.
We must find jobs for everyone at a decent standard of living wage. Living on the dividends from Stocks is the same thing as stealing money from the laborer that made that Stock profitable.