Forum Post: WSWS: A tale of two cities 2011: Social reality in New York

World Socialist Web Site:

A tale of two cities 2011: Social reality in New York

In the three years since the worldwide financial crisis was ushered in by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, nothing has happened to erase or even lessen the obscene levels of inequality in the US. New York City, the home of Wall Street, remains the most vivid exhibit of the misery created by twenty-first century capitalism alongside levels of parasitism and conspicuous consumption that recall pre-1789 France and pre-1917 Russia.

A look at the news pages of the New York Times, the voice of what passes for liberalism within today’s ruling class, makes for some startling juxtapositions that illustrate the yawning gap between the ruling elite and the vast majority. This is not merely the divide between the top 1 percent and the rest of the population, revealing as that may be. The gulf between the top one tenth or even one hundredth of 1 percent and the actual living conditions of millions of New Yorkers—those who live in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, or who have been forced into homelessness and must seek refuge in the city’s notorious emergency shelter system—is even more dramatic.

One day last week, for instance, a front-page Times headline noted the “harsh” health care for the poor in Brooklyn. This New York borough of some two-and-a-half million people, far from the glittering precincts of Manhattan, has an official poverty rate of 20 percent. Forty percent of the population relies on Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor.

This near majority of the population already receives substandard care at area hospitals, but even this may disappear. It seems that 5 of Brooklyn’s 10 private hospitals are near bankruptcy. Most of their patients rely on Medicaid, and reimbursement rates have been repeatedly slashed in recent years. Democrats and Republicans are bitterly disputing, not whether, but how, to make far greater cuts in this and other programs. The unemployed and the working poor, those without other health insurance coverage, will have to travel greater distances and endure longer waits for emergency care. The three public hospitals in Brooklyn will be overwhelmed if other institutions close.

Read the rest of the article at: http://wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/newy-n15.shtml