Does America Hate The Poor?

English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903). Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Poverty, Disease, & Social Darwinism

Does America hate the poor? COVID-19 has cast this question. A virus so small that it's measured in mere nanometers is ravaging humankind without effort, ripping through imperial boundaries and militarized borders with a ferocity unseen since the 1918 Spanish Flu, which effaced close to 100 million lives.

SARS-CoV-2, the single-stranded virus responsible for the COVID-19 illness, currently holds hostage nearly all of our civilization. The global death toll, at this present moment, has claimed 100,000 lives. Leading researchers have projected that COVID-19 will cause between 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US alone.

April 1st of this year saw over 1,000 American deaths from COVID-19 on a single day. This trend has yet to substantially decrease.

In New York, COVID-19 has unleashed pandemonium. A torrent of deaths has overwhelmed morgues, forcing hospitals to recruit forklifts to transport the deceased into refrigerated semi-trucks, as "bodies are piling up". Amidst this horror, however, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's fiscal response was to issue $billions in cuts to Medicaid.

While governmental treachery proceeds as usual, the public scrambles towards self-protective measures through physical-distancing and acquiring or manufacturing homemade Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

Yet, major segments of society are dislocated from the freedom to act in such self-preservation, and thus exist in dislocation from an essential human imperative. Among them are incarcerated Americans, who are not accorded such human rights. They remain trapped and overcrowded, watching as their viral predator ominously marches in their direction.

The US is home to the world's largest prison population, a reflection not of civilian criminality, but of a capitalist criminality through a prison-industrial-complex that deliberately targets the nation's historically vulnerable and oppressed populations, including children, through well-documented punitive laws and practices.

Meanwhile, Trump is openly defying historic Congressional and grassroots efforts that demand the end to Saudi Arabia's genocide of Yemen, by Trump persisting the sale of offensive military arms to Saudi Arabia, in explicit violation of US and international law. Prior to Trump's most recent, unabashed sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, numerous national organizers, institutions, and even activist organizations have begun organizing boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Saudi Arabia in order to stop its open genocide of Yemen — one worthy and essential act towards stopping this needless genocide.

I openly endorse boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) of the Saudi Arabian government for its grotesque human rights atrocities.

Entombed without human rights, prisoners in New York, Ohio, and elsewhere fear the worst as COVID-19 affliction spreads among inmates while tests remain unavailable to them. This, however, is not lost on the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who closely tracks the virus's rapid spread throughout the nation's prisons. While some US states and nations—including Iran and Afghanistan—have rushed to release prisoners as a public-health measure, the US Federal Government has been obstinate in fulfilling the Five-Policy Virus Response proposed by the Prison Policy Initiative and prison abolitionists.

 

US Imperialism Amidst COVID-19

The US's inadequate response to COVID-19 in prisons is not restricted to its own territory. Such recalcitrance in releasing prisoners is mirrored by Israel — the US's geostrategic ally in the Middle East. COVID-19 has compelled Israeli leadership towards a potential full-scale lockdown within Israel. Yet still, Israel maintains its complete blockade upon Gaza, the consequences of which are obstructed shipments of lifesaving aid into Gaza. Thus, Gaza remains the world's largest open-air prison and among the most overcrowded places on earth, unfit for human life and incapable of physical distancing.

Gaza's devastating human-indices, however, were established prior to the additive nightmare of COVID-19, which has breached Gaza, where the deadly virus has already unleashed misery, rapidly moving towards an inevitable yet unfathomable magnitude of suffering and loss-of-life, chiefly due to the socioeconomic, sanitary, infrastructural, and agricultural devastations wreaked by the blockade and countless Israeli-military aggressions upon Gaza.

Elsewhere in Palestine, incarcerated Palestinians within Israel's apartheid prison-system have begun to protest the inhumane conditions they endure without PPE and other life-saving precautions—a glaring violation of international humanitarian law—which explicitly protects the rights of prisoners to the highest quality of physical and mental health. Concurrently, Palestinian organizations have likewise begun to demand the release of Palestinian prisoners, but demands been met with complete resistance from Israel.

Although the US has long facilitated Israel's violations of international humanitarian law, the US is likewise committing its own upon Iran, where the scourge of COVID-19 has been profoundly amplified by a socioeconomic, pharmaceutical, and medical structure, whose tragic deterioration is but the purposeful and coordinated outcome of long-standing US sanctions and oil-embargoes.

The Trump administration has defied all calls for even temporary suspension of the embargo and sanctions. This is despite Iran's economic sources for combatting COVID-19 having become so decimated by the US that it recently requested a $5 billion loan from the IMF, a first in nearly 60 years. And yet, it appears that the US deployed its veto-power to block Iran from receiving the much-needed loan. Iran has thus become yet another US prison of fatal consequences.

Both Venezuela and Cuba under COVID-19 are likewise victims during to US embargoes and sanctions, which heavily obstruct shipments of life-saving resources, while simultaneously deteriorating their effective national responses to the disease.

These examples of deadly US imperialism and fiscal depravity emerge from a deeper pathology-of-power within the US power-structure.

And thus, the true question upon us is not, "does America hate the poor?", but instead, "does America create the poor, both at home and abroad?", for which the unequivocal answer is an unfortunate but resounding "yes".

Let's devote special attention to this matter. 

Shortly before recent clinical trials began towards a hopeful COVID-19 vaccine, the US Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, refused before Congress to assure that the vaccine would be ‘affordable’. A costly vaccine would obstruct access to anyone without adequate health insurance or necessary personal savings.

An unaffordable vaccine is cause for horror in a nation that has systematically tethered health insurance to employment, while the COVID-19 quarantine has led to a historic spike in US unemployment claims, 6.6 million during last week alone and a total of 10 million unemployment applications for the month of March.

This historic drop in employment was met with a $2 trillion stimulus package, whose overwhelming portion is comprised of $500 billion for corporate aid, not including $32 billion in bailouts for the commercial aviation-industry, nor the $17 billion provided to “businesses critical to maintaining national security”, whose primary beneficiary will be none other than Boeing — a state-funded entity in all but name. Meanwhile, adult American citizens—not undocumented Americans, among many others—are allotted a one-time $1200 check to last an indefinite self-quarantine period.

COVID-19 Has Removed a Different Mask

Scarcity of N95 masks and other PPE has fueled COVID-19's transmission and its pathogenic tragedies.

Yet, the virus has established a secondary function: removing the mask of deception with which power-systems have long justified their concentrated affluence and influence. COVID-19 has laid bare the naked truths of inhumanity, greed, and exploitation — each being intrinsic to our neoliberal capitalist order, which corrupts the worldview of society at-large.

As COVID-19 slammed the US mainland, hoarding has became ubiquitous. Some have even stockpiled countless essential medical supplies. Elsewhere, formal price-gouging complaints erupted across the US, as companies willfully inflated prices for their products, ranging from rubbing alcohol to medical-equipment to life-saving medical supplies and more.

Such anti-social behaviors—and the analogues emerging from other systems—in response to a shared, societal crisis merits special consideration.

During this deadly pandemic, 8 million undocumented Americans—who have fled nations destabilized by the US—are without health insurance, as the Affordable Care Act explicitly bars coverage for this population, despite the billions in taxes they pay annually, the $13 billion they pay into Social Security, and the $3 billion they pay into Medicare, to none of which they have access. Their rightful fears of deportation upon entering healthcare settings during COVID-19 poses yet another obstacle, as explored here.

Brand new research conducted by Rubix Life Sciences evidences that, although COVID-19 is indiscriminate in its infectivity, racial and economic biases are already appearing through the public-health and healthcare allocation of resources and diagnostic testing.

These are among many socio-econo-political obstacles to vital resources and to survival as COVID-19 rampages onward. The spread of disease facilitated by these barriers have forced even the most ardent supporters of capitalism to realize that our institutions of ‘rugged individualism’—which inherently foster anti-social ideologies and behaviors—vastly belie humankind’s inexorable dependence on one another and our most ancient imperative: collective solidarity.

The American public must now re-examine the matrix of institutions that erode solidarity—the longest running lynchpin of Homo sapiens—namely the advent of a socioeconomic arrangement that has instead ‘divided and conquered’ the public, fracturing us into isolated ‘units’. The outcome is bitterly visible through "slow, uneven, and unequal wage growth over the last 40 years", while democracy decays as an ever-receding pipe-dream, and the rich get richer, while the poor become poorer, sicker, and mentally unhealthier.

COVID-19 has forced the realization that housing and public-health are inseparable, as homeless Americans must continue assembling in encampments, a literal inability to fulfill the public-health order on physical-distancing. And yet, police continue to brutally demolish homeless encampments, while ultra-wealthy cities like Seattle have produced high-tech apps to embolden residents towards reporting homeless encampments, a high-tech update to the US history of slave patrols.

This virus has highlighted broader inequalities and inequities that historically operate through race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, geography, mental or physical disability, discriminatory hiring practices, poverty-wages, wage-stagnation, outsourcing, insourcing, and more — each of which are responsible for the US’s current 567,715 homeless Americans, as well as for an emerging class of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, known as the "precariat", a portmanteau of “precarious” and “proletariat”.

To this end, so damning was a 2018 United Nations Poverty Report unleashed upon the US that it has since been erased from Western memory. One excerpt stunningly summarizes the report, but I implore readers to commit special attention to the full report.

“For almost five decades the overall policy response has been neglectful at best, but the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship.”

Clearly, Trump’s catastrophic response to the pandemic is a mere symptom. So, what is the disease?

Wretchedness 

I wish no poverty, nor other injustices, on anyone. And yet, there are times when I wish I could impart, for just a moment, the feeling of hunger, when the pangs are so severe that they pulse through every thought. For, there’s a profound difference between looking at suffering and looking from suffering.

I come from the parts of America where this magnitude of hunger is widespread; where people are “so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread”, and from whose consequences of poverty I have lost nearly everyone I have ever loved.

Among them was my childhood friend, who took his own life near my 17th birthday, because he eventually believed the terrible misjudgments that society had cast upon him: that being ‘uneducated’, poor, and black was proof of a futile existence.

Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. 

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

The well-off do not bear witness to this wretchedness, upon which capitalism fundamentally depends.

...this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen...: that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it...but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Growing up amidst such tragedies directed me to investigate why the power-elite were apathetic towards the barriers to our basic health, social mobility, and self-actualization. Yet now, amidst COVID-19, their collective inaction towards such socio-structural barriers is crystal clear. 

As Thucydides warned, “the strong do as they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.

In the 5th grade, I was briefly placed into a temporary foster home, located in middle-class suburbs, outside of the squalor to which I was accustomed. Arriving there, I was blown-away at the sight of a bread-toaster, a luxury of extraordinary height, relative to the underworld from which I came. Seeing my awe, my guardians responded humbly, “Oh — It’s only another human-made material, just like money.” 

Those words catalyzed in my young mind a life-altering epiphany: If money is a human-made construct, then so, too, is poverty. Poverty was not a force of nature, I realized, but an outcome of morally-evacuated policies that allow a small sector of society to hoard higher life-indices, resources, social-mobility, and even higher life-expectancy.

Thus, at 11 years old, a cascade of questions emerged upon me: Why is my community needlessly perishing without access to healthcare for treatable diseases? Why are my people languishing like dogs in a land of careless elites?

Soon after, neighborhood elders—predominantly black women of the anarcho-syndicalist tradition—introduced me to the term capitalism. I embarked upon my 12th year of life by spending my days in the public library, studying this term through the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemberg, Frantz Fanon, and other founding theorists or critics of capitalism.

What follows are the essentials of what I learned in pursuit of why heartlessness seems an intrinsic component of our socioeconomic reality.

The Underlying Disease: A Political Economy of Heartlessness

Fundamentally, capitalism is an amoral—not immoral, but amoral, 'without conscience'—economic system. Its essential motive is the consumption of raw or natural resources for the purpose of generating an exponential-rate of short-term profit, by any means necessary, but chiefly through the exploitation of labor. (Yet, as I would later come to learn, something much worse than capitalism exists in the US.)

Moreover, the “Father of Capitalism” was Adam Smith, who wrote his main work in 1776 — a time when greed and extreme disparities between poverty and wealth were relatively taboo. He believed that in a society of “perfect liberty”, “perfect equality” would result as a natural consequence of capitalism, which he called the “free market”.

In 1798, renowned economist Thomas Malthus carried forward Smith’s torch. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus built upon Smith’s ideas of open and free-market competition, but chiefly asserting his own belief in the necessity of rugged competition across human society, as Malthus was convinced that, in his era, the earth would be depleted of its global food supply. Thus, he fused the concept of depopulation into the architecture of capitalism; that is, millions of people must perish, facilitated by the economy, for the sake of our species’ survival.

Malthus understood humankind through the framework of strong versus weak, each of who must compete for the same, finite resources. In order to survive, one must sell their labor or their goods. Those who can not must either go elsewhere or simply perish, but certainly not expect assistance from the government. Essentially, only the strong survive. Malthus indirectly contributed to the groundwork for social-Darwinism, and his arguments of 1798 directly translate into contemporary policies and practices, one example being Republicans’ “right to work” laws.

At 19, I was badly injured in a terrible incident, requiring immediate reconstruction of my lower right leg. But I was without health insurance. Thankfully, however, a social-program at a public-hospital paid a portion of the cost. 

As I was heading into surgery, and in response to this financial support, a healthcare worker quipped, “maybe Darwin’s natural selection will play out its course”, suggesting that I, the economically vulnerable, might simply die during surgery. Once more, social Darwinism was thrust back into my social analysis.

After my (successful) surgery—which eventually led to my restored ability to walk—I sat alone in my hospital room, reflecting on that employee's depraved humor. She had inspired me to plunge into Charles Darwin’s works, thus uncovering that Darwin’s theories on natural selection were heavily guided by his respect for Malthus.

In Descent of Man, Darwin writes, 

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for...the sick…Our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment…Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”

Even a cursory reading through the first sections of this essay—those on inequality and inequity—will elucidate the ideological association between what is captured in this excerpt and the reality around us, today. 

Darwin influenced his cousin, Francis Galton, who misused Darwin’s work to establish the field of eugenics. In Memories of My Life, Galton defines eugenics as “the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally”. 

The misuse of Darwin’s work caused a rift between Darwin and Galton. This, however, did not halt the dissemination of Galton’s ideas.

Galton’s contemporaries developed eugenics into a formal discipline and infused it into political economies, while Galton—not Darwin—lent great support to it, thoroughly of the belief that talent and other forms of human “superiority” were inherited. This, as Galton instructed, warrants the politico-economic engineering that would generate population-control over who is allowed to reproduce, populate, and predominate our world.

The ideology of eugenics became so prevalent that they emerged even through the US's most famous 19th-century writers, Walt Whitman. Whitman was initially an ardent supporter of the US's move to annex a large swathe of Mexico. In his advocacy for annexation, he echoed the popular sentiments shared among US leadership through the language of eugenics,

"What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?"

Eugenics was founded on the idea that the scientific-method must be used to prove that certain groups of humans had heritable traits — traits that made some “races” superior and others inferior. Populations deemed “inferior” were disallowed from reproduction. Thus, racial extermination.

Scholarship explains that eugenics “science” was transformed into real-world policies and practices. Findings are so stunning that they merit a full excerpt (emphasis mine):

"Despite the fact that both the U.S. and Britain shared similar liberal values, eugenic policies were widespread in the [U.S.] and essentially nonexistent in the [U.K.]. 

...American eugenicists focused on the ‘racial’ inferiority of nationalities whose entry into the U.S. threatened the American gene pool. These ideas enjoyed extensive support. Exploiting the ‘prestige of science,’ political elites cited eugenic research in support of policies to sterilize selected patients and, as this article illustrates, in support of restrictive immigration policies based on a purportedly scientific hierarchy of 'races.' Such motives are evident among the eugenicists advising on U.S. immigration policy.

In the U.S., immigration policy was famously open until the 1920s, when eugenics arrived with a vengeance. Race-based quotas were implemented, and the country became until the 1960s kein Einwanderungsland (not a land that welcomed immigrants)."

Herbert Spencer was another paramount figure in the early eugenics movement, from which many others have sprung. Spencer, a distinguished biologist, was greatly influenced by Darwin’s ideas, and Francis Galton was effusive in public support and admiration of Spencer. Spencer is the “Father of Social Darwinism”. It is his eerie image of which this essay bears its cover.

After studying Darwin’s theory on natural selection, Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest”.

Social Darwinism was eventually exported to Nazi Germany, as explicitly visible in Hitler’s writings, who repeatedly referred to Darwin. The Third Reich, however, was a right-wing distortion of Darwin’s work, as Darwin did not advocate for or lend himself in support of eugenics. And yet, Darwin's work on ‘allowing the weak to die-off’ was the essential architecture for the Nazi’s social-Darwinian ideology and eugenics practices.

What We Now Face

This machinery of social Darwinism remains wedded to our current US political economy.

As a result, gross inequality and inequity are inexorable wherever ideologies and policies of ‘rugged individualism’, antagonistic-competition, and amorality—the fundamental features of capitalism—are widely instituted and implemented in place of an ethos of ‘mutual aid’. 

And what inevitably follows are precisely as we see everywhere under US-control: higher yet needless spread of disease, crimes, and deaths of many preventable causes, precisely for which the UN Poverty Report excoriated the US.

Special training and scholarship are not required to discern that social Darwinism remains a chief element within today’s prevailing economic policies and social behaviors in the US. A simple observation of the world before you is sufficient. Our fellow humans lay dying through homelessness from preventable causes, right before our eyes, despite ubiquitous wealth and resources that could, at the snap of a finger, resolve it all. 

Social darwinism and eugenics also remain fused into our conception of our responsibility to society at large, poverty, wealth, and justice. Yet many fail to question the insidious role of social Darwinism in shaping those mental conceptions. What results is a bystander-effect of inaction that enables this worldview to continue reproducing catastrophic outcomes — the rapid spread of disease being but one outcome.

In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe they are free.”

Yet, Homo sapiens, as we are today, have been in existence for approximately ~200,000+ years. For our initial ~188,000+ years, we largely survived through the evolution of egalitarian societies, which essentially boiled down to one prevailing principle: no matter how much you brought to the table, you would not go hungry and would not get left behind. 

Fortunately, the recent advent of anti-social economies, like capitalism, have not extinguished from Homo sapiens our prosocial, egalitarian tendencies. 

What emerges through this history is a fateful conclusion: 

Capitalism and democracy cannot coexist. Each, by their nature, are incompatible.

Capitalism is an economic-system of unequal power between laborer, manager, and merchant. Government action inevitably reflects the 'wealth of the nation'.

Democracy is a political-system of equal power across society. Government action inevitably reflects the public will and the public good.

Only an economic-system that reflects the public is truly democratic. That system, by definition, is called 'socialism', in which:

"Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism". 

— Lowell Mill Girls of 1840

Replacing our plutocracy with genuine democracy demands political will, which—by the very nature of a capitalist-government—requires a torrent of public pressure, as Fredrick Douglass noted,

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one...but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted...The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” 

Disobey

In 1963, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram sought out to understand how ordinary people in Nazi Germany could commit such unthinkable evils. He investigated how far ordinary people would go to obey an authority figure. This investigation took the form of an experiment, in which healthy, everyday people would administer increasing levels of electric shocks to someone (an actor), who was located elsewhere and thus was not seen by the test subject under instruction. The subject was neutrally instructed to administer shocks, so long as that person (the actor) answered certain trivia incorrectly. 

A prevailing number of subjects administered fatal levels of shocks by just passively following the neutral orders of an authority figure, despite hearing the wailing of the person being shocked. 

In Milgram’s report, he wrote: 

“This is perhaps the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terribly destructive process.”

In our everyday lives, such authority figures are personified in many forms each of whom influence members of society in accordance with 'survival of the fittest' and to behave against the collective-good. One predominant form emerges as the quotidian but central institutions in our modern social structure—economy, politics, academia, and otherwise—as the purveyors of this ‘survival of the fittest’ ideology. 

Virtually every institution in our society operates through the punitiveness and antagonistic-competition of social Darwinism, instead of prioritizing mutual-aid and solidarity. And it is within these institutions that our worldviews are developed and within which we indoctrinate our youth before sending them off to become leaders of our world and our future.

Disobedience is thus incumbent upon us. Disobedience towards the dictates of these institutions. Disobedience towards any mechanism that sacrifices the collective-good at the altar of capitalism. Disobedience against the ideological hyper-individuation that fractures us from mass-scale, collective, grassroots organizing in pursuit of true democracy, equity, and justice for the masses, not simply justice for the oligarchs and plutocrats.

"...you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem...Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience...Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

— Howard Zinn, November 1970