Vol. 74/No. 37      October 4, 2010

BY JACK BARNES  
The gap in economic and social conditions between workers who are white and those who are Black has narrowed since the 1960s. But not because times have gotten better for most African Americans. The reason is that wages and living standards have declined for a growing majority of workers of all skin colors.

While the rate of births to unwed teenagers has risen sharply among both whites and African Americans since the 1960s, for example, the gap between young women who are Black and those who are white has dropped from a twelvefold difference to about two to one today.

A comparable driving down of the conditions facing all working people, with African Americans hit the hardest, is registered in the colossal increase in the size of the U.S. prison population over the past three decades. As of 2005 more than 700 U.S. residents out of every 100,000 were in prison or jail in this country. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States holds nearly 25 percent of all prisoners on earth—more than 2.2 million people! The highest incarceration rate of any country in the world—yes, any country! And if you sum up all those behind bars, on parole, or on probation, the total comes to more than 7 million people—more than 3 percent of the adult U.S. population.

The largest increase has been among African Americans. Some 577,000 Blacks were in prison or jail in 2005, a 58 percent increase just since 1990. Black men are eight times more likely than white men to be behind bars. Altogether some 14 percent of Black men in their twenties were in jail or prison at some point in 2004. The numbers soar when you add in those on parole, probation, or doing “community service.”

At the same time, in the years since 1980 there has also been a threefold increase in the imprisonment rate of white men in their twenties. Three times greater.

Working people in the United States, especially those with the lowest incomes, are also being hit hard by the disastrous consequences of the rulers’ drive over the past quarter century to float their rate of profit on a sea of debt, in which we are left to drown. With real wages slowly declining throughout this period, it became more and more difficult for workers to cover the cost of basic necessities without relying on credit. This has reached the point in recent years where growing numbers of us have little or nothing left at the end of the month to pay off interest and principal on loans. We simply can’t pay the bills.  
 
Fettering working people with debt
How did this situation come about? Since the late 1960s the capitalists have confronted pressure on their average profit rate, which has gradually been trending down. The first post-1930s worldwide recession occurred in 1974-75. In face of this more than three-decade-long slowdown in capital accumulation, the rulers have held back expenditures for the expansion of productive capacity and large-scale employment of labor. In order to counter this stagnation, the political servants of the propertied rulers in the White House and Congress—Democrats and Republican alike—together with the Federal Reserve Board, have expanded the use of credit on a massive scale. They have done so not only by increasing the amount of funds on loan to previously unheard-of levels, but also by spreading the use of credit deep into the working class, including those with the lowest incomes. As the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song goes, many workers over the past century and more have “owed our souls to the company store,” but never before in history has such debt spread its entangling roots so widely throughout the working class as in recent years. Nor so extensively throughout layers of toilers in the semicolonial world.

Since the mid-1980s, Washington has not only flushed trillions of dollars into the banks but throughout the imperialist financial system has encouraged a degree of leverage that would make Las Vegas blush. The U.S. rulers have intervened continually in world markets to keep interest rates at historically low levels. In combination, these measures have kept banks in the United States awash with funds they needed to lend in order to boost their profit rates above those of competitors worldwide. The result has been a cascade of bank-driven “debt crises.” Among the earliest targets of the banks were working farmers in the United States and the governments of oppressed nations across the Americas, Africa, and Asia—who were increasingly pushed toward default, and, in the case of farmers, into foreclosure and the loss of the land they tilled.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home