New Deal Hard Times Art (8/10): "Poverty"

Above: "Poverty," an aquatint by Dorothy Rutka (1907-1985), created while she was in the WPA's art program, ca. 1935-1942. Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

A few days ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report highlighting America's looming retirement catastrophe ("Government report sounds alarm on retirement crisis," CNBC, October 19, 2017). This wide-scale, old-age poverty crisis will be due to a number of reasons (some are explained in the article, some are not), including: Stagnant wages; the exportation of good-paying jobs; decreased union participation; rising healthcare costs; the growing and pathetic "gig economy"; rising levels of personal debt; recent & cold-hearted limitations on bankruptcy relief; financial fraud; the replacement of fixed pension plans with inadequate 401k's (if anything at all); the refusal of right-wing politicians to expand Social Security; and the greed & selfishness of the super-wealthy.

If millions of voters keep electing Republican, Tea Party, and "centrist" (i.e., Republican-Light) politicians, and millions of others keep sitting on the sidelines in apathy, little or nothing will be done to address old-age poverty. We can expect even higher rates of suicide and other deaths of despair, while younger generations are trained by right-wing millionaires and billionaires--via think tank "researchers," political advertisements, and mainstream media talking heads--to blame impoverished senior citizens for their plight. "Personal responsibility!" they'll scream at the elderly. "Rugged individualism!" they'll admonish. "Tough sh&t!" they'll laugh, "You should have saved more!" And the fact that they couldn't have saved more because of pathetic wages, outsourced jobs, and crushing debt won't matter a bit to the right-wing boneheads who will be scolding them.

Free market fanaticism, and the refusal to accept the existence of market failure, breeds sociopathy - and that's going to cause a lot of suffering for older Americans in the very near future.