DAVID ROSEN – Poverty in America: the Deepening Crisis

Bernie Sanders has put inequality at the center of the 2016 presidential elections.  However much the corporate media attempt to turn the election into a personality contest between Clinton and Trump, inequality will not go away as the defining domestic election issue.  Whoever are the two major party presidential candidates, they will have to address the deepening problem of inequality.

The Occupy insurgency of 2011 put inequality onto the American political agenda, redefining class struggle in terms everyone could understand – the 1% versus the rest of us.  Sadly, only one major political campaign has followed — the push for a $15 minimum wage – and it has been fought by grassroots campaigns at the local and state levels by labor unions, NGOs, community groups and ordinary workers.

The concept of inequality, of the 1% vs the 99%, is a powerful metaphor that makes clear the structure of wealth and power defining American life today.  Sadly, while framing the problem confronting the nation, the concept of inequality doesn’t delineate the forms of economic, political and moral tyranny impacting the lives of an increasing number of Americans.  To illuminate the deepening crisis the U.S. is undergoing as capitalism restructures its useful to reframe the notion of inequality in terms of poverty.

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