President Biden marks Indigenous People Day by continuing the genocide against Native Americans

 

This morning I read a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer that made me angry. The article reported on Joe Biden’s presidential proclamation to refocus the federal holiday of Columbus Day to an appreciation of Native peoples. 

Reading this story, I was thinking about the hundreds of treaties the United States government signed, and then violated against Native Americans. I thought about all of the Native American children who the government took from their homes, and forced them to attend horrendous schools where so-called teachers demanded that students forget their heritage. I thought about the fact that today Native Americans are the poorest nationality in this country, where many live without direct access to running water or electricity.

However, when we look at the genocide against Native Americans, we need to go back to the birth of the United States of America. Every year July Fourth is a national holiday. This date marks the signing of the Declaration of Independence. When we read that document we notice that the founding fathers of this country labelled Native Americans with the racist word of “savages.” One of the reasons for the revolution of the thirteen colonies was a protest against the fact that the British were not giving enough aid to the colonist’s war against the first nations of this part of the world.

Dasani

Also, this morning, I read a review of a book in the New York Times titled, Invisible Child – Poverty Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott, and reviewed by Mathew Desmond. This is the story of Dasani who was an 11-year-old homeless Black girl, who was featured on the front page of the New York Times for five straight days in 2013. 

While I was reading the story about Dasani, I came across a sentence that made me think about President Biden’s speech on Indigenous Peoples Day. Andrea Elliott had this to say about the contrast between the front-page coverage of Dasani’s story and the reality of her life. “Whatever power came from being in The Times was no match for the power of poverty in Dasani’s life.” We might also argue that, whatever the power of Joe Biden’s proclamation, it was no match for the routine criminal discrimination and poverty Native Americans experience every day.

So, thinking about these two stories, we might ask the question: why is there routine poverty and discrimination in a nation that claims to represent “liberty and justice for all?”

Karl Marx

Karl Marx answered that question in his analysis of the capitalist system. Marx argued that the natural functioning of this system leads to a tiny minority of the population living in opulent wealth while the masses of people live in dire poverty. Today, there are three individuals in this country who own $300 billion in assets, while about eighty percent of the world’s population lives on $10 per day or less. 

In the years 2008 and 2020, there were severe downturns in the world economy. We might consider a few facts concerning those events. In the capitalist system there is a continuous flow of capital from the production of commodities, to sales, to the distribution of assets derived from the sale of those commodities. During the downturns of 2008 and 2020, that flow essentially stopped. What did this mean?

Commodities only have value when people are willing to purchase those commodities. If no one is willing to purchase commodities, they have absolutely no value. 

So, in 2008 and 2020 since people were not purchasing many of the commodities on the markets, for a time, commodities had no value. Then, the government got together with corporate officers where they made decisions about how to get the economy going again. 

Those decisions meant that millions of people might be evicted from their homes. Millions would also live their lives without having enough food to eat. At the same time, the government would dump trillions of dollars on corporations, so they could continue their drive to gouge out maximum profits. Nowhere in any of these decisions was there any concern about the life of Dasani or the lives of Native Americans. 

In the past, the poverty that millions of people in this country experienced was kept a secret in the news media. Today, as the economic crisis deepens, we see how the gross disparity of wealth is being protested by larger and larger numbers of people.

Human needs are more important than profits. Only when we have a worker’s government will we have the power to combat the power of poverty that is affecting the lives of billions of workers all over the world.