Is this a 38-year-long market failure? Or is this an institutionalized class conflict?

I recently saw a United Way ad on the back of a bus, which actually connected with me and made me stop and think for a moment. It said, “Nothing changes, if nothing changes.”

A few days later, at the movies, I saw a hard-hitting United Way commercial before the film. It shows footage of a ghetto, with the following words, “Since hurricane Katrina: the poverty rate is 25 percent, births to teens are the seventh highest in the U.S., unemployment in the inner city is close to 50 percent. What’s most alarming is this is not New Orleans. This is Milwaukee, this is our community. Help. It’s the United Way.”

The United Way’s new campaign has generated a fair amount of controversy, since it is neither beaming with optimism nor as uplifting as their typical campaigns. However, it is important not to sugarcoat issues of life and death. It’s plain to see that a radical new approach is needed if the crisis of poverty, which stands at the crux of nearly all of our city’s dire issues, is to be solved definitively.

Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Milwaukee has to stop thinking in capitalist terms. The crisis in Milwaukee is far too serious and prolific to dismiss with a wave of the hand, and we cannot simply blame those in poverty for being in that situation due to laziness or immorality.

As Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”

Rather, since poverty is a socio-economic issue, we need to reevaluate our economic system of capitalism.

A system which pits every man, woman and child against everyone else on the market (as labor-power is a commodity bought and sold on the market) in an uneven struggle for jobs is not going to relieve the problem of poverty, but only worsen it. The solution is going to have to be much more proactive than letting the invisible hand of the market finger-paint the situation a drearier shade of gray.

Something more humanizing than ruthless competition drawing on primitive, egoistic instincts is needed. The concept of “looking out for number one” hasn’t worked for the 1-in-4 Milwaukeeans currently living in poverty. So I’m going to state the obvious and propose that cooperation could serve Milwaukee a lot better.

Rehabilitating poor people apparently isn’t good business, as measured in revenue over operating costs. Instead of capitalism, Milwaukee needs community-ism, or if you’d like, communism.

It takes a community to raise a child, not a capitalist. It takes a community to create a fully developed individual, and it will always take a community to raise children and fully develop their potentials; but capitalists are a fifth wheel.

Looking nationwide, some 37 million Americans live in poverty. That’s no less than 12.3 percent of America, land of the free. To put things in perspective, the poverty rate was 12.1 percent in 1969. Over the course of a generation, relatively more Americans are in poverty, even though the GDP has grown more than 160 percent in that time. Is this a 38-year-long market failure? Or is this an institutionalized class conflict?

To quote Dr. King again, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

The annual rate of poverty understates the problem. At some point over 10 years’ time, 40 percent of Americans will experience poverty. Poverty doesn’t just affect the poor and unemployed, but directly affects the working class and all of society in turn.

When the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 passed, marking the beginning of the “War on Poverty,” 19 percent of the nation was oppressed by poverty. In the following nine years poverty fell 7.9 percent to its historic low of 11.1 percent in 1973.

From all the statistics given above, three important lessons can be drawn. First, it’s possible to significantly reduce poverty in just a few years. Secondly, capitalism can not maintain its progress. Poverty shadows the business cycle, which will only cease along with capitalism. Third, capitalism is incapable of ending poverty because it’s only concerned with raking in profit.

Tellingly, the poverty rate for U.S. youth is 21.9 percent, the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation.

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