Online only: War on the poor

Award-winning journalist and death row resident Mumia Abu-Jamal once wrote, “In every phrase and facet of national life, there is a war being waged on America’s poor... In America’s 1990s, to be poor is not so a much socioeconomic status as it is a serious character flaw, a defect of the spirit.”

Early Monday morning, the Obama administration officially unveiled their 2012 federal budget proposal to congress, continuing the war on the poor Abu-Jamal was referring to.

For instance, the proposed $3.7 trillion dollar budget, following with the narrative of fiscal responsibility, if passed will cut $2.5 billion dollars from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.   

The LIEAP is expected to help around 8.9 million impoverished people pay their heating and cooling bills this calendar year, at a cost of $5.1 billion dollars. Under Obama’s budget proposal, it is estimated that 3.1 million people will be forced off the program.

Compared to the $671 billion dollars going to be spent by the “defense” department, a number that does include many military-related items that function outside of the department, only spending $5.1 billion dollars on a program that helps provide heating and cooling for the poorest of Americans is essentially criminal. This would be a human rights issue that, if an official enemy were to take away these essentials. Take the old Soviet Union for example, it would be ridiculed nightly on the television news for its barbarism, inhumanity, and social Darwinian implications.  

During his 2008 campaign, president Obama was called a variety of things.  Socialist.  Communist.  Marxist.  As if the terms were interchangeable.  Not to suggest talk radio hosts and television pundits have even the slightest clue what something like socialism actually entails.    

However, the administration’s budget cuts to the LIEAP do provide a clear example of what essentially amounts to a form of Marxism in practice, albeit a kind of perverted version.

Not that Obama probably had to read “Das Kapital” or “The Communist Manifesto” in order to engage in the class struggle.  

As social critic and Linguist professor Noam Chomsky pointed out, “I think he (Marx) would take it for granted that elites are basically Marxist - they believe in class analysis, they believe in class struggle, and in a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time… and they understand…they’re instinctive Marxists; they don’t have to read it.”

The budget cuts to social programs, particularly programs directly related to providing things like heat, housing, and food for the poor and underprivileged, should be understood for what they are.  A form of class warfare.  Not only on the lower class but the middle class, as well.