THE BANKS ARE (STILL) MADE OF MARBLE

HARRY TARG

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report written by its representative, Philip Alston, after an extensive visit to the United States. The report was called “A Journey Through a Land of Extreme Poverty; Welcome to America” and was based on personal observations and an examination of longitudinal and comparative data. He found in California, West Virginia, Alabama, Puerto Rico and elsewhere extremes of poverty and inadequate access to housing, health care, education, and other social needs. He noted that along with the increasing economic misery for the many there was a growing concentration of wealth for the few (the guardian.com, December 15, 2017)

In an NPR interview Alston noted that every other wealthy country provides more for its citizenry than the United States and is more equal in wealth and income. China, he said, a newly developed country, has lowered the gaps in wealth, income, and social well-being more effectively than the United States over the last 15 years.

Paradoxically, this damning report appeared at the same time as the Congress and the President are finalizing a new tax bill that will dramatically increase wealth, income, and security for the tiny ruling class at the growing expense of the vast majority of the United States population: workers, women, African Americans, immigrants, and children, youth, and the elderly.

Many economists are systematically analyzing the impacts of these negative economic trends across time and the draconian effect the new tax bill will have on the whole structure of reform programs that were put in place since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But sometimes the analysis, critique, and call for action is most effectively reflected in song. Thus the repost below:

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Reposted from New Clear Vision, August 10, 2011

Sometimes We Have to Sing and Cry and Hit the Streets…

by Harry Targ

I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx until the 1970s. I don’t know when I decided I was a Marxist. I didn’t start teaching Marx and political economy until the late 1970s. But I became a small “r” red when I first heard the folk group, The Weavers in the 1950s. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and later Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.

I still listen to the music that makes me angry, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine tuned lectures I listen to (and even give) on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization — and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home.

The deficit battle (now “tax reform”), which is a farce except for the pain the outcome will cause working people, reminded me of the Weavers blasting out “The Banks Are Made of Marble.” They sang of travels around the country seeing all the suffering that the capitalist system was causing; “the weary farmer,” the idle seaman, the miner scrubbing coal dust from off his back, “heard the children cryin” as they froze in their shacks, and the suffering of workers everywhere.

Why does the song suggest there is so much suffering all across America? The answer is so simple:

The banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for

The song, written by Les Rice in 1948, said the antidote to this situation was workers getting together and making a stand. He predicted that the result would be a good one:

Then we’d own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we’d share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for

I was also thinking about an old Robin Hood song written by Woody Guthrie in the 1930s about an Oklahoma legend, Pretty Boy Floyd. According to Woody’s rendition, Pretty Boy Floyd got into a fight with a deputy sheriff and killed him. Floyd was forced to flee and allegedly took up a life of crime. At least authorities and journalists blamed Floyd for every robbery or killing that occurred in the state of Oklahoma. “Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.”

But in true Robin Hood fashion, Pretty Boy Floyd stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Floyd, the outlaw, paid the mortgage for a starving farmer. Another time when Floyd begged for and received a meal in a rural household, he placed a thousand dollar bill under his napkin when he finished dinner. One Christmas Day Floyd left a carload of groceries for starving families on relief in Oklahoma City.

And in these days of massive unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, criminal wealth, and staggering poverty, through the voice of Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie tells the wrenching story of capitalism that today is not too much different from during his time:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

Originally from Diary of a Heartland Radical