As economically privileged residents of the upper Valley and as professors at local universities, we are deeply concerned about the injustice of the ever-increasing economic inequality in the United States.
At present, nearly one-third of the U.S. population is struggling to stay afloat financially while the top 1 percent controls 90 percent of the nation’s wealth, the highest level of inequality since the Great Depression. This gap will continue to increase under the Republicans’ recently passed tax law.
While the present federal budget allocates nearly a trillion dollars to military spending, the recent tax bill permanently slashes the taxes of big corporations and the wealthy 1 percent, giving only a temporary pittance (if anything) to average workers and poor people.
It will create a deep financial deficit that will be used to justify cuts in government spending for social services, including public education and Medicaid, and to slash environmental programs, including programs that are desperately needed to address the effects of toxic dumping in poor communities, profligate use of fossil fuels, and unregulated pollution of our soils, our oceans and our water supplies.
As mothers and grandmothers, we are deeply upset that small, very short-term gains for some taxpayers, as well as large, long-term gains for those who need them the least, will be used to rob our younger generations of a just and healthy future.
While we know that the only long-term solutions (short of revolution) involve policy changes, we also know that we can’t wait for the government to act. Until we can achieve a more equitable system, we believe that those of us who have them are morally obligated to find ways to transfer some of our own resources to help reduce the wealth gap. We cannot ignore the ways that wealth inequality manifests in our own region, especially the stark differences between the upper and lower Valley north and south of the Holyoke range.
Local resistance to the federal government’s savage neo-liberalism and handouts for the very wealthy is being spearheaded by local businesses and organizations that support the “solidarity economy.” They include socially responsible businesses, cooperatives, credit unions, trade unions and community organizations that are demanding development that redistributes goods and services justly by increasing solidarity between the better and worse off in our local communities.
Groups like Arise for Social Justice, the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution, Climate Action Now, and others are fighting to protect the rights of undocumented immigrant workers, the homeless and renters, those unjustly accused in the court system, and those harmed by racism and environmental injustice, such as people displaced from Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
Those of us who can do so must sustain these groups financially as a way to build our local solidarity economy, which will help to redistribute money from privileged individuals to increasingly impoverished grassroots communities in the Pioneer Valley.
We hope you will join us for two upcoming events to discuss U.S. income and wealth inequality, as well as efforts, both past and present, for just redistribution.
On April 11, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in the Woodbury Room at the Jones Library in Amherst, the Arise for Social Justice Community Resource Board will present a public forum entitled “Addressing Wealth Inequality in the Valley: The Tax Cut and the Local Solidarity Economy.”
On April 25, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., at the Forbes Library in Northampton, the Resistance! Film Series of the Northampton Committee to Stop the Wars will sponsor films and discussion about the national Poor People’s Campaign.
This campaign was first led by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and revived in December, 2017, with a western Massachusetts component chaired by Michaelann Bewsee of Arise for Social Justice in Springfield.
Ann Ferguson, of Leverett, is professor emerita of philosophy and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The column also was signed by Laura Lovett, history professor at UMass; Jane Mildred, social work professor at Westfield State University; Fareen Parvez, sociology professor at UMass; and Sigrid Schmalzer, history professor at UMass. All are members of the Arise Community Resource Board.