LOOKING BACK TO THE STONE AGE

By H.N. BURDETT

The tax cut for the wealthiest Americans triggered my memory of a piece published by the nonpareil, I.F. Stone, on May 13, 1968, on the Poor People's March on Washington that was to be held later in that same month. After I found the article, my intention was to quote from it and discuss it within the context of the tax-cut deal the Obama administration made with the Republicans in Congress. It was the best deal President Obama thought he could make during the lame duck session, especially since he is looking ahead to two years of choosing between stagnation, capitulation or compromise. Upon reading Stone's insightful column, however, I couldn't bring myself to excerpt the piece; it is just too damn good. So here it is in its entirety:

THE RICH MARCH ON WASHINGTON ALL THE TIME

By I.F. STONE

No other western country permits such a large proportion of its people to endure the lives we press on our poor. To make four-fifths of a nation more affluent than any people in history, we have degraded one-fifth mercilessly.
REPORT OF THE CITIZENS INQUIRY INTO HUNGER

To see the Poor People's March on Washington in perspective, remember that the rich have been marching on Washington ever since the beginning of the Republic. They came in carriages and they come on jets. They don't have to put up in shanties. Their object is the same, but few respectable people are untactful enough to call it handouts. Washington owes its very existence as the capital to a deal for the benefit of wealthy speculators. They had bought up the deflated bonds issued to finance the revolution, paying as little as 15 cents on the dollar to the needy original investors. The speculators wanted repayment at full face value. It was only by promising to move the capital from Philadelphia to a new city to be built on the Potomac that Alexander Hamilton could get enough Southern votes to swing the deal.

The fiscal and banking system of the new republic was thus solidly established on the basis of a $20 million handout to the rich and on the Hamiltonian theory that if the new government would channel enough of the national wealth to the top some of it would eventually trickle down. In the meantime the farmer and the consumer would pay the taxes and the tariffs to keep the investor fat and happy. Ever since then the public treasury and the public lands have been a major source of the great American fortunes down to our own day of never-ending oil depletion allowances. The tax structure and the laws bear the imprint of countless marches on Washington; these have produced billions in hidden grants for those who least need them. Across the facade of the U.S. Treasury should be engraved, "To him who hath shall be given."

One easy and equitable way to finance an end to abject poverty in this country would be to end the many tax privileges the wealthy have acquired. A 12-man committee of industrialists and financiers has just recommended to Governor Rockefeller of New York a form of that guaranteed income the marching poor will demand. The committee proposes a negative income tax to raise 30 million of our neediest above the poverty level. Instead of paying income taxes they would receive enough from the Treasury to bring their incomes up to a minimum of $3,300 a year for a family of four. The additional cost would be about $11 billion a year. That is what the more obvious tax loopholes for the rich now drain from the U.S. Treasury.

Few people realize that our present tax and welfare structure is such as to encourage the wealthy to speculate and the poor to vegetate. If a rich man wants to speculate, he is encouraged by preferential capital gains which give him a 25 percent cushion against losses and take less than half as much on his speculative gains as on his normal earnings. But if a poor man on relief took a part time job, he had until very recently to pay a 100 percent tax on his earnings in the shape of a dollar-for-dollar reduction in his relief allowance. Even now after a belated reform in the welfare system, a poor man on relief, after his first $30 a month in extra earnings, must turn back to the Treasury 70 cents on the dollar while the rich man need pay the Treasury only 25 cents of every dollar he wins on the market even when his normal income tax rate is more than 50 percent. Such is the topsy-turvy morality of the Internal Revenue laws.

A heart-breaking report on hunger by a Citizens Board of Inquiry has just lifted the curtain on why the poor are marching. In the richest country in the world people eat clay to still the pains of an empty belly, children come to school too hungry to learn, and the infants of the poor suffer irreversible brain damage from protein deprivation. Much of the crime in the streets springs from hunger in the home. Much of this hunger is also linked to hand-outs for those who do not need them. Some of its roots may be found in subsidy programs designed to encourage farmers to make more money by producing less food. The effect has been to push the poor off the land and into the ghettoes. A program designed 30 years ago designed ostensibly to help the desperate family farmer has become a source of huge handouts to big farmers and farm corporations.

In 1967 the 41.7 percent of farmers with incomes of less than $2,500 a year received only 4.5 percent of total farm subsidies paid by the government while the top 10 percent, many of them farm corporations or vertical trusts in food processing, received 64.5 percent of these subsidies. The contrast between these handouts for rich farming interests and the stingy surplus food allotments for the poor is dramatically displayed in the statistical appendices of the Citizens Report on Hunger. In the calendar year 1966 a quarter billion dollars in farm subsidies was paid to a lucky landowning two one-hundredths of one percent of the population of Texas while the 28.8 percent of its population below the poverty line received less than $8 million in all forms of food assistance. Such grotesque maldistribution of federal aid is not limited to the South. That same year the U.S. Treasury paid almost $36 million in farm subsidies to one-third of one percent of the population of Nebraska while only $957,000 in surplus food allotments went to the 26.1 percent of its population which is in poverty. One farm company in California, J.G. Boswell, was given $2,807,633 in handouts by the Treasury that year and the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company got $1,236,355 in federal sweetening.

Such are the huge hogs that crowd our public trough. Other even bigger corporations live on the gravy that drips from the military and space programs. We may never reach the moon - or know what to do with it when we get there - but the race for it has already created a new generation of Texas millionaires. The arms race and the space race guarantee the annual incomes of many in the country club set.

Even before the marchers began arriving, the President at his latest press conference was already inviting them to leave. Their demands would be "seriously" considered, he said, "and then we expect to get on with running the government as it should be." For years "running the government as it should be," i.e., with a budget allocated 80 percent to the Pentagon and 10 percent to health, education and welfare.

Ours is a warfare, not a welfare state. And unless the better conscience of the country can be mobilized, it will wage war upon the poor, too. Only twice before in our history have the poor marched on Washington - Coxey's Army of the jobless back in 1894 and the bonus marchers in 1932. Both times they were easily dispersed by force. The last heartless chapter of the flinty Hoover Administration was the attack of General MacArthur's troops upon the encampment of the bonus marchers on the Anacostia flats. This time the shanties will not be burned down nor the poor scattered so easily. A clash would set off the hottest summer yet of our nascent civil war. The poor may prove an irresistible force. The Congress is certainly an immovable object.

At this dangerous juncture we need a crusade of the progressive well-to-do to supplement the efforts of the Poor People's March. We are glad to see that SANE and a group of other organizations is calling for demonstrations of stupport throughout the country for Saturday, May 25. We need volunteers to stand on street corners and collect money to feed the encampment of the poor in Washington. And we need an army of young white idealists to ring doorbells in the suburbs and awaken the middle class to the crisis the poor may precipitate. What lies ahead may be far more important than the election.

We wish the unaware millions of the suburbs could have heard the extraordinary collection of spokesmen for the poor whom the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy brought to Wesley A.M.E. Church for a preliminary rally here last week. The volcanic despair of our Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Spanish Americans and poor whites has thrown up new and unknown leaders able to present their case with an untaught and unmatchable eloquence. The descenders of the enslaved, the conquered and the dispossessed have found voices which makes one realize what human resources lie untapped among them. It was also thrilling in a time of rising separation to join hands again with blacks in singing, "We Shall Overcome" and to feel how truly this movement stems from Martin Luther King's teaching. If this fails, multi-racialism and non-violence will fail with it. Yet fail it must unless the middle class and the suburbs can be aroused to pressure Congress for the steps required to wipe out poverty. "There is nothing," Martin Luther King said, "except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war." Now is the time for the white and the fortunate to organize for this work of solidarity. This - it cannot be said too often - may be our last chance.