Down and out in Scranton

Vanguard August 2012 p. 11
Nick G

Scranton, Pennsylvania is a town on the skids. The former coal mining and steel-making city boasted a population of 143,000 in 1930, but has only 76,000 today. It’s a traditional white working class town with only 15% people of colour.

To look at its official website is to look at a lie. Its banner reads “Scranton: Pennsylvania’s Progressive City” and tells business investors that “the future is here in Scranton”. It quotes Money magazine as ranking Scranton as “one of the 10 fastest growing real estate markets in the Country”; Forbes ranks it at 30^th “as one of America’s fastest recovering cities”. Which just goes to show that the production of snake oil hasn’t suffered at all in the Global Financial Crisis.

When Scranton finished writing cheques for its public employees on July 6 it was left with $5000 in its coffers. That prompted the Democratic Party mayor Christopher Doherty to cut the wages of all people on the public payroll to the US minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour (last adjusted by 70 cents in July 2009). The public employees include police, fire-fighters, and other municipal workers.

In the richest country in the world, in the country that dares impose its way of life on others at the point of the gun, measures reminiscent of the worst days of the Great Depression are being played out. For an eight hour, five-day-of-the-week employee, the minimum wage works out at about $15,000 per year!

Municipal bankruptcy is becoming a serious problem in the US.  In the weeks before the Scranton decision, three Californian cities filed for bankruptcy. California is the richest state in the richest country!

In their own country, the US imperialists fly the flag of patriotism and enlist the poor to die in their foreign wars of aggression, and the bottom line reward for all this is $7.25 an hour – if you have a job. Unless, of course, you are an employee in receipt of tips, where the legal minimum can dip to as low as $2.13 an hour in Wyoming and Utah.

This is tragic testimony to Lenin’s observation that imperialism is “a colossus with feet of clay”.

And the sooner it collapses the better!