Native Intelligence:

a column by

Jack D. Forbes

Native American Studies

University of California, Davis

This column's focus: The Attack on the Family (II)

The right-wing assault upon the family is inevitable, given the atheistic nature of modern capitalism and the drive of the rich investors for maximum profits at the expense of any ethical or moral or spiritual considerations. Atheistic capitalism's demand for profit leads inevitably to the establishment of tax codes and systems of subsidies which favor the wealthy classes and the corporations which they control. The Republican Party in the U.S. and the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada have long been controlled by the giant corporations. But also the Democrats, the Liberals and other parties fall prey to corporate control because of the need to raise ever-increasing sums of money for campaign purposes. Thus, most major political parties tend to come under the control of the corporate owner class.

The welfare system in the United States which provides billions of dollars in gifts and subsidies to the wealthiest classes each year is by its very nature anti-family. Why? Because these billions must be paid for by ordinary taxpayers who cannot take deductions for business expenses or who are ineligible for these subsidies and giveaways. Someone has to pay! Similarly, families are cheated because they are being deprived of the basic infrastructure which we need in North America for jobs and quality of life. Public transportation, for example, is in miserable shape. The railroads need to be rebuilt with high-speed track and new lines going to places where people need to go (airports, new cities, new job locations, etc.). Our schools and other public services have deteriorated. Schools and libraries need new facilities, new equipment, and better trained professionals. Our hospitals and clinics are under attack as huge corporations seek to replace registered nurses with poorly-trained substitutes and to assembly-line health care (for more profit).

Why are we losing jobs? Why are we seeing the quality of our lives deteriorate? Why are our cities becoming unsafe? It is because our wealthy "rulers" are unwilling: (1) to give up their billions in subsidies and, (2) to pay their fair share of taxation.

When the wealthy classes refuse to pay taxes and when they use their political influence to be subsidized the burden must inevitably fall upon ordinary people, including especially families. This is why, in the United States, we have lost our deductions for health care expenses, for job-related costs, and for interest on consumer purchases. The wealth-controlled Republicans and their Democratic allies simply took those deductions away in order to give themselves huge tax breaks.

We can also characterize the attack on the family as an attack on fathers (and mothers). Why? Because the working-class father is being eliminated by the elimination of jobs. And why are the jobs disappearing? There is one answer that stands out above all others: because profit-seeking corporate owners are taking our jobs to low-wage countries (with the help of our obliging politicians) while millions of other jobs are being needlessly replaced by machines. For example, we recently read that 450,000 bank tellers are to be replaced by ATM machines (cash tills) and telephone machines over the next several years. Soon we will have to pay to talk to a live teller! Many are already being penalized for seeing a teller Is this necessary? Absolutely not! The banks are making lots of money and the big banks are gobbling up smaller ones. There is no rational need to eliminate employees. The cause is an irrational greed which will eventually put so many people out of work that the entire society may collapse or deteriorate into civil war and social chaos.

Many Native families, fathers and mothers, have long been under assault by viciously racist policies directed against Native communities, such as taking children away from families, discriminating laws (such as denying women membership in their own tribe if they marry a non-member, etc.) and lack of economic opportunity. Now these same conditions are spreading to the treatment of all families.

We must see to it that our reservation, reserve, band, tribal, and state/provincial laws are revised to rebuild our families and to guarantee jobs to fathers and mothers. Here is what we need to do at the national level: (1) guarantee that everyone has the right to a decent job at a decent income; (2) require every corporation which moves a job overseas to replace that lost job with another in the U.S. or Canada or to pay a tax equal to the cost of the lost job; and require every corporation which replaces a person with a machine to pay a tax to replace the lost job or to create a new job; or (3) create new jobs for all by investing in more railroads, new schools, new civic centers, new parks, and in the rebuilding of our cities, in the cleaning up of our devastated rivers and toxic zones, and in the creation of a better quality of life with greater funding for music, arts, crafts, non-profit films and broadcasting, publishing, etc.

We can also adopt codes which restore the legality of our extended families and clan structures and which make it easier to adopt relatives into our extended families. We can make all of our tribal tax codes and legal codes favorable to our traditional family survival techniques. But as Native people we cannot "go it alone." Most of us have become economically enmeshed in the larger society and so we have to work together with other people in order to bring about a future that has hope built into it! [Sept. 20, 1995]