By Milly Silva
It is unconscionable that millions of Americans’ livelihoods are being jeopardized as a result of a fiscal crisis fabricated by our own elected leaders. That Washington is enacting drastic and intentionally indiscriminate cuts to vital programs that keep Americans safe and healthy should alarm every citizen who cares about the future of our democracy.
Who are the people whose lives will be affected by these outrageous cuts? Their stories have been lost amid the squabble of Washington elites, who are willing to jeopardize the lives of their constituents just to win political points.
Here in New Jersey, sequestration will affect thousands of residents in very real, immediate ways. It will have an especially devastating impact on our state’s most vulnerable people.
The children of New Jersey will be particularly hard hit: Head Start services will be eliminated for 1,300 children and nearly 4,000 fewer children will receive vaccinations for infectious diseases.
Many of their mothers and fathers, too, will be put at greater risk: hundreds of victims of domestic violence will not receive help from the STOP Violence Against Women Program and 3,000 fewer people will be admitted to substance abuse programs.
Their grandparents will also be affected: Low-income senior citizens who require nutrition assistance will lose nearly half a million dollars in food aid and nursing homes will lose $37.5 million in Medicare funding. The list of cuts goes on and on.
Programs set to be pillaged by sequestration are critical lifelines for millions of families across New Jersey and the nation who have for decades seen their quality of life decline. As inflation outpaces growth in wages, health care costs skyrocket and opportunities for upward mobility vanish, many Americans have become increasingly reliant on an ever-shrinking social safety net.
At the same time, those at the very top have seen their share of our country’s wealth grow exponentially. Wealth inequality in America today is so immense that the numbers become difficult to comprehend.
The richest 1 percent of households own 35 percent of our nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns just 1 percent. That is to say, the top 1 percent controls 35 times more wealth than half of the country.
Taking a closer look at the super rich — the top tenth of 1 percent — we learn that about 300,000 people (a population just slightly larger than the city of Newark) earn a yearly income roughly equal to that of the poorest 120 million Americans.
And if we focus solely on the 400 wealthiest Americans, who, according to Forbes Magazine, controlled $1.7 trillion in assets in 2012, we find that these ultra-rich individuals have more combined wealth than half of America.
We can debate the merits and demerits of having a degree of inequality in a free market, but certainly there comes a point at which an overwhelming concentration of wealth becomes a destabilizing force in our society and to our politics.
It is no coincidence that the polarization and gridlock that now characterize our political climate have occurred at a time when millionaires and billionaires are using their vast resources, buoyed by the Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision, to flood our elections with corporate cash and preserve economic and tax structures geared heavily toward their interests. The result has been the ascendancy of hard-line, ideologically rigid politicians who are willing to take extreme positions to prevent meaningful changes to the way our government responds to the needs of working families, the young, the sick and the elderly.
Many bold leaders in New Jersey and in Washington are tireless advocates for working people, including many in the House of Representatives, who rightly refuse to give in to tea party extremists who attempt to dictate our country’s future by threatening economic suicide. But counting on our elected leaders to do the right thing isn’t enough.
In order to set our nation’s priorities straight, a grassroots effort by millions of ordinary Americans, organizing in their communities, is needed to overcome the combination of big money and rigid extremism aligned against them. The battle over the sequester puts into stark relief the reality that we are at a critical point in our country’s history. Just as the Great Depression sparked a labor movement that created the 20th Century’s middle class, so, too, do we need to seize this moment and demand fundamental change in the way wealth and power are distributed in our country.
At stake is whether we will continue down the road of allowing our politics to be dominated by moneyed interests who will take us over the brink to get their way regardless of the human cost, or whether we will become a nation in which the lives of the most vulnerable are protected in times of need.
Milly Silva is an executive vice president for 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, a union representing more than 375,000 health-care workers in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida and the District of Colombia.
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