Rich-poor gap wider than ever
By
LeiLani Dowell
New York
Published Sep 10, 2005 9:07 PM
The increasing gap between
the rich and the poor in this city was highlighted in a Sept. 4 article in the
Metro section of the New York Times entitled, “In Manhattan, Poor Make
2cents for Each Dollar to the Rich.”
According to recent data, New
York, the center of U.S. finance capital, now has the widest income gap in the
country: the top fifth of wage-earners make 52 times the amount that the bottom
fifth make. New York University economist Edward Wolff is quoted as attributing
the disparity to an increase in Wall Street incomes coupled with a decrease in
wages for low-income workers.
Not surprisingly, the article tells that
compared with the poorest in Manhattan, the top fifth of wage earners are
disproportionately white and male. The author describes the lowest-income tract
in Manhattan, a public housing project called the Wagner Houses in East Harlem:
“The median household income there is $9,320, most of the residents are
black or Hispanic and do not have high school degrees, 56 percent live below the
poverty level and about one in 10 are foreign-born.”
The
highest-income tract is a mere 60 blocks away, where, the article says
“none of the residents identified themselves as black.”
The
article also reports that the Bronx, which is both a borough of New York City
and a county, is now the poorest urban county in the United States. These
numbers are striking for the area, especially considering that the Bronx
includes the Riverdale area, an enclave of multi-million-dollar houses
overlooking the Hudson River. Yet even with this averaged in, the poverty rate
in the Bronx is at 30.6 percent, making it fourth in the country on the list of
high-poverty areas.
A Census Bureau report a week earlier said that across
the country incomes have stagnated and poverty rates risen, “even as the
economy grew.”
The only thing missing from these reports in the
corporate media is Karl Marx’s analysis of how capitalism works. He proved
conclusively that, without militant struggle by the working class, the tendency
of capitalism is to drive down workers’ wages and other compensation even
as the rich get richer.
This ruthless downward pressure from the bosses
does not spring from the personal greed of individuals but from the capitalist
system itself, and will only end when capitalism has been replaced by social
ownership of the vast productive wealth now in the hands of billionaires.
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