by Oliver Wells
A four-year-old boy was found by police in his home severely malnourished and unconscious in Harlem last Sunday. He was taken to the hospital and died the next day, with the medical examiner ruling that he died from starvation.
The child’s parents have been arrested and charged with his death. Neighbors who spoke with monopoly media reported the desperate conditions of poverty the family lived in, with one neighbor telling NBC New York, “[the mother] had on the same outfit basically for like two years.”
While monopoly media has been quick to blame the child’s parents for the death, they have conveniently ignored the despicable conditions of poverty the imperialists force upon the people. In a society in which the concentration of wealth is directly correlated to the accumulation of poverty and misery, the starvation of the poor is the fault of the ruling class alone; this is all the more so in New York City, which has the highest concentration of wealth in the world.
The extended family of the child, community members, and others held a press conference demanding justice, pointing at the failures of the city to support the parents and child. The aunt has opened a lawsuit against NYC’s child-welfare agency for failing to prevent the starvation despite having contact with the family for years prior. One speaker highlighted that the mother had reached out to the city for support on multiple occasions and questioned the efficacy of the system that allowed the starvation to happen.
The starvation and ensuing lawsuit add to the growing pressure on NYC Mayor Eric Adams and his administration. Adams has recently been indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign donations, while a number of other members of his administration have resigned over the past few months.
The system is designed to serve the interests of the rich, funneling money from workers into the hands of the ruling class and covering their crimes. For example, the recently-completed $25 billion luxury real estate project Hudson Yards in West-Side Manhattan—the most expensive real estate project in the history of the US—was funded in part using a loophole that siphoned real estate funding set aside for impoverished areas. Developers drew the boundary of West-Side Manhattan to include impoverished areas of Harlem to redirect the funds.
The mouthpieces of millionaires and billionaires blame the poor and oppressed for their problems to distract from their own responsibility in creating the very conditions of poverty and starvation they supposedly condemn.
Photo: Billionaire’s row. Retrieved from Flickr.
