Excerpt from The New Poverty

By Dr. Regina Li, Ph.D
Originally Published in Shawshank Magazine, April Issue, 2326

Excerpted from Dr. Li's new book, The New Poverty. Please note that this is based upon an unfinished draft of Dr. Li's book, and may differ somewhat from the final version.

Before the war began, it was estimated that 36% of American families would be reliant on Federal Aid of some form or another (Food Stamps, FEMA Relief, etc) for their continued livelyhoods by 2330. A further 15% would be reliant on local or State-level aid programs, and 7% of American families would be reliant on Corporate Welfare programs. That means that approximately 58% of American families would be relying on external aid rather than gainful employment. Though the war has, admittedly, mitigated this by increasing the demand for soldiers and security specialists, this alleviates poverty primarily amongst young men, which does not make much of a dent in the figures for family poverty. Family poverty is the real issue, since the likelyhood of a man or woman relying on federal or state aid increases dramatically if they relied on such aid during childhood.
But what alternative do these families have? America's manufacturing sector is again on the downturn after the American Resurgence of the nineties made outsourcing manufacturing to America undesirable for Asian and European firms. The few manufacturing jobs that remained in America, mostly luxury goods for export to the European Union, came to an end when the war made American exports too expensive for consumers in other nations to afford. This is the peril of underengineering an economy. The Europeans, Asians, even the Africans understand this, but somehow the United States has failed to develop an understanding of Economics beyond the twentieth century.
Unchecked Corporate Power inevitably leads to this kind of market failure. I'll assume that people reading my book are familiar with Marxist rhetoric though, and avoid talking in the same vague, general terms of “capitalist oppressors” and the “downtrodden underclass”, and instead look at a specific industry where a similar market failure occured in the twenty-first century: Telecommunications. In the United States in the twenty first century, telecommunications were almost as unregulated as the robber barons of the nineteenth century. It wasn't always this way. For many years, telecoms were regarded as neccessary for the public good. But that changed when the Republican Congress refused to ratify Network Neutrality, which set a precedent for the commodification of information.
The result was the retardation of American Economic Growth for almost a century. Telecoms barons were far too busy trying to gain a larger market share than other firms to upgrade existing system architecture, and punitive measures throttled traffic traveling outside of the infrastructure owned by particular firms. The result was that the communications infrastructure that the country had come to rely on was pulled out from underneath it. Ultimately, the problem was only solved when the late President Ruth Lindsay and the Liberal-Democratic Coalition Congress nationalized telecoms briefly between 2101 and 2108, before selling the infrastructure off to a single firm at the end of President Lindsay's term.
This example doesn't seem immediately relatable to the war, and only vaguely similar to the years of corporate piracy that preceded it, consider: the war has devastated America's infrastructure, particularly the interstate highway system, which today is only intact on the West Coast. This is where the lasting damage to America has been done. The interstate highways, interstate power-grids, all kinds of infrastructure. Even if the war is won, a possibility looking ever the more remote at the time of writing, America will be torn asuder for years until its infrastructure can be rebuilt, and for that time, it will continue to lag behind the European Union, Venezuela, and the Southeast Asian Republics in technological, economic and sociological development.
Corporate Greed has catastrophically stunted our country.

Doctor Regina Li has a Ph.D in Economics from the University of New York, and served as chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago until the University was evacuated in February. Her new book The New Poverty will be on bookstore shelves and available for digital download on July 11.