Rich-poor gap wider than ever

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from the personal greed of individuals but from the capitalist system itself, and will only end when capitalism has been replaced by social ownership of the vast productive wealth now in the hands of billionaires.