The New World–America–was the destination of eager choice for emigrants desperate to leave the Europe of serfdom, both de facto and de jure, that distinguished us so starkly from the Old World’s constraints on the lives of its majorities. Until, that is, the 1980s, when changes in our economy began rapidly to erase and often reverse the differences that drew so many to our promising and welcoming shores.
The persistent ignorance among Americans generally about life in other nations has served to insulate most of us from an awareness of the creeping effects of these unique changes in our own society and from comparisons with others.’ Ask any American today whether we are still Number One in every respect–America’s traditional July 4th boast–and he’ll cheerfully insist that we are, without question, despite the presence of much glaring evidence to the contrary of which he remains blissfully unaware.
The annual State of the Union addresses by our Presidents were never, except perhaps in their earliest versions, much more than political speeches stressing the positive and euphemizing the negative aspects of the country’s current state and direction under administrations in power at the time.
What’s needed today, more than ever, in view of the press of troubles afflicting our fragile democracy, is something more realistic, specifically an assessment of where we are and whither we’re heading, so that we might embark on courses–possibly radically different–toward improvement and even salvation.
That is, if improvements are urgently needed (and possible), of course. Let’s take a critical look at where we stand and our outlook under present trends, programs, and policies.
The USA at the end of World War II stood in an enviable place among nations. We had been the winner in fighting, almost entirely at a safe distance from its battlefields, the most destructive war in human history. Both of our defeated enemies, Germany and Japan. and our co-victorious allies, principally the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, were in various stages of physical and economic ruin, from which it took them all decades to recover. Our starting point, at war’s end, was far in advance of theirs.
Flush with this success, and suddenly the world’s sole superpower, the United States of America, flaunted its role as Number One in everything by hosting the United Nations organization in New York City, newly the capital of the world. Beginning at war’s end in 1945 and not diminishing for nearly four decades, America was richest, most powerful, best educated, healthiest, most productive, sold the most, bought the most, and kept its citizens’ standard of living enviably high, an inspiration to peoples everywhere.
This position is no longer ours. The status of first in the world in all these criteria of dominance, except expenditures on maintaining military forces, pursuing warfare and military occupations in foreign countries, has now been diffused to other nations, as we’ll show by means of statistical evidence, hard facts, disputable only by wishful thinkers mired in fond retrospection.
Here’s how we rate, as a nation among nations, in 2011, compared with our rankings at the height of our power, wealth, and glory only a few decades earlier. Student test scores afford an interesting index. Of the 65 countries tested in 2009, the US scored 25th in math, 14th in reading, and 17th in science. In view of these data, it was striking to see the hostility to science expressed by all nine of our GOP presidential candidates during a September 2011 debate.
How do we rank today in such a key quality-of-life criterion as life expectancy? We are 36th in the world, just a shade better than such Edens as Albania, Slovenia, and Brunei. Infant mortality rates also sharply distinguish the healthful societies from those in the deprived world. We now rank 34th (UN data) or 46th (CIA data), far worse than, say, Slovenia, Macau, and Cuba.
One important index of the overall happiness of a society’s inhabitants is the free time its workers are allotted to spend recreationally with family and friends. Vacations and paid holiday times are best examples. Here are the numbers: Today we rank absolutely last among the industrialized democracies of Europe plus Japan and Canada. American sociologist Lisa Wade says, “When I show these figures [including those for parental leave and work hours required] to my students, they are STUNNED. (Her emphasis] Most Americans are woefully ignorant of how US policies compare with the policies of like countries.”
In France and Finland, 30 days of paid vacation annually are mandated by federal law. The United States mandates none. Sixteen other European nations require between 20 and 25 paid vacation days. These, it should be noted, are minima, with many employers offering more to their valued employees.
Two Australian bloggers (on “Sociological Images”) boast six weeks paid leave, plus two weeks at Christmas, plus ten days’ sick leave, plus nine paid public holidays. The typical US worker can only gasp in awe. One of the Aussies adds, “The gulf between poor and rich over there [in the USA] is staggering, and the rich devote all their energy to maintaining and widening that divide.” A view from a distance, but remarkably accurate in its reflection of what we can discern here on our own.
Our pay disparity ratios allow the US to retain Number One ranking, although it’s not one that anyone but an oligarch can cheer. In 1960 the average ratio of American CEO to worker pay was 42 to one. In 2007, it was 344 to one, and increasing. In Europe today it’s about 25 to one.
The combined pay of 299 CEO of Standard and Poor’s 500 Index corporations would support 103,325 workers who earn today’s median wage–not minimum, but median. Put another way, an average S&P 500 CEO’s earnings equal that of 225 teachers, 178 nurses, 213 police officers , or 753 minimum-wage workers.
It has come to this: In our purportedly classless, equitable, fair, egalitarian, equal-opportunity American society, the lives of some of us now bear a dollar value of 1/753d of those of certain others. And these disparities are widening, year by year, with worker pay consistently declining, as none but a few widely ridiculed “radical” Democrats and independents protest and offer constructive alternative policies.
To an extent unmatched by any other constituents, dollars available to a person translate into quality of life, an observation that remains one of America’s best-kept secret scandals, for good reason. The incomparably stupid myth that we can all be as rich as Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and George Soros, if only we take advantage of the opportunities that surround us, continues to be peddled aggressively as reason enough for Americans to sit down and shut up, satisfied with what they’re permitted to enjoy as the status quo.
The gross national product of the United States has a certain annual value, and that value is shared among the nation’s residents by procedures set in place and enforced by the political and judicial branches of our government. As we have seen, these procedures today result in highly inequitable distribution of that national product, and are likely to remain so, given the present direction of established policies.
The Supreme Court’s recent “Citizens United” decision, made by a distinctly partisan Republican Court majority in shocking contravention of both precedent and the Constitution, gives to the wealthiest few Americans considerably more power to influence elections by means of lobbying and campaign contributions. The decision is sure to increase this disparity in sharing our wealth, at the further expense of the non-affluent majority, and to increase the levels of economic and political repression the majority now endures.
A perhaps irreducible majority of American workers are trained and educated to be employed at unskilled or semiskilled life occupations. But a very large proportion of jobs they need to be open to them–jobs in which their parents used to make wages enabling them to live acceptably comfortable lives–have been shipped to low-wage countries for the sole purpose of further enriching their already rich former employers, the owners and top executives of thousands of our nation’s corporations.
The present scarcity of livable-wage jobs in America, engineered by the political Right’s funders and enabled by Republican politicians frankly in their employ (and Democrats also mired in thoughtless obeisance to laissez-faire economic principles) is at the core of our present–worsening and probably permanent–Great Recession.
America’s long-pursued permanent state of war against one imagined threat after another, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, impoverishes the country simultaneously in another way, pulling trillions of dollars from policies and programs that are needed at home and further enriching owners and top executives of our highly lucrative war industries. The uniformed military takes only a minority of these totally wasted funds. Privatization of the military is the new rule. Contracted services and contract personnel, in numbers exceeding those of our armies and often paid at up to ten times what our soldiers earn, are raking in enormous profits as they further impoverish the nation to no perceptible good effect.
The mini-wars of punishment on Iran and Afghanistan that were intended to somehow negate and avenge the 9-11 attacks by 19 religious fanatics from Arabia have now cost more than 6,026 US military lives (twice the Twin Towers toll) and over $1,370,000,000,000 in US tax dollars. Benefits to America from these costs are still hoped-for, but only by diehard optimists (most with tell-tale investments in the program). But the beat goes relentlessly on.
One of the highly visible results of this severe loss of national affluence can be seen in reduced government services at every level. Our city and county public libraries are being closed or operated on sharply reduced schedules. Our state vehicle licensing offices now have reduced hours, fewer staff, and higher fees. National, state, county, and city parks, many of which used to be free to users, have begun charging admission and other fees. The poor pay more, proportionally, and thus become poorer.
Staff layoffs in all kinds of government services further increase the rolls of unemployed, as formerly well-paid workers become unable to meet their mortgage obligations, default on their loans, and are thrown, with their families, out of their homes. The “official” national unemployment rate stands today at just under ten percent, but the actual rate, including workers employed part-time or who have given up looking for work, is between 16 and 17 percent.
The Republican governor of Florida boasted in late September about his administration’s having “created” over 87,000 private-sector jobs (probably an exaggeration) while firing more than 125, 000 state employees (probably accurate). What he omitted to mention was that many of the 87,000 may well have been minimum-wage fast-food jobs taken by some of those former fair-wage earners he dumped, further depressing the average earnings of Florida’s middle class.
This reduction of all government jobs promoted by leaders of the radical Right is part of the plan to, in their words, “starve the beast.” This is effective at a far deeper level than some observers recognize, for it makes all government services less responsive to citizens’ needs and thereby increases distrust of the idea of “government” in the hearts of the people. This, in turn, makes them ever more receptive to the notion that all government is bad and the less we have, the better.
For oligarchs plying their trade in an ostensible democracy, this is, of course, one of their most valuable outcomes. Any democratic government must fail to the extent that its residents can be made to distrust and fear it.
In a democracy, government–that is, the laws and their enactment and enforcement–originates in and is maintained by the people, in their needs and wishes, as expressed at ballot boxes in elections. The Right has always opposed, and in fact was everywhere, in all societies, created to oppose, the aspirations of the many, the demos, to share more equitably in the benefits their society generates. These were benefits that were, before democracy reared its dangerous head, always reserved for the rich and powerful few by laws imposed, like it or not, on the people from above by the rich and powerful. Thus it becomes a very important strategy of the Right in any democracy to actively sow distrust and, if possible, hatred of government.
The introduction of the voice of the people into political decision making is a very recent phenomenon. In all history, until only the late 18th century in the United States and France, all government was imposed from above, by small power elites. To the extent that our government still expresses the voice of the people, it remains a voice to be silenced to the degree possible, and the chief aim of the GOP-dominated Tea Party, financed by our current power elite, is to widen hatred of their own “government” among blue-collar Americans who increasing see it as the “enemy.”
The “great right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton once warned us about (ridiculed as illusory by the Right’s captive media) is real and readily observable in action.
Intrinsic to the Tea Party’s current dominance of the Republican Party is the hostility to discoveries of science that call into question ideological positions that TP adherents cherish. Thus evolution, environmental protective legislation, global warming warnings, and even some disease-preventive inoculations are feared and opposed as evil plots designed to weaken and destroy America. This antipathy grows while it is clear to rational observers that it is precisely those societies most hostile to science that are least advanced in every measure of quality of life.
Critic Jonathan Schell has noted, “The list of delusions and absurdities that play an active role in political life–from the widespread belief that the current President is foreign-born and a Muslim to the fear that Sharia law is poised to take over American jurisprudence–steadily lengthens.”
As the influence of the more fanatic and ignorant and highly religious Right (in its current manifestation, the largely blue-collar Tea Party and its fellow travelers) grows in our society, its efforts to destroy labor unions and generally weaken the already limited power of wage workers to make their voices heard pushes America’s living standards ever downward from their peak before the beginning of the “Reaganomics” era’s start in 1981.
This once-far-fetched dream of the Right’s leaders–to create in workers a fear and hatred of labor unions, their own last, best hope to achieve a fairer share in society’s wealth–has in the Tea Party found organized fruition at last. A heart-wrenching spectacle.
It’s inescapable that America’s already grossly inequitable economic system has now deteriorated to the point where 15.1 percent of us (46.5 million Americans) now live in poverty, an increase from 22.9 million in 1973. (Source: U. of Michigan, Gerald Ford Center) This while the richest one percent of us own 42.7 percent of the national wealth and the bottom 80 percent of us share a paltry 7 percent. But debt is not so sparing of the poorest: The bottom 90 percent owe 73.4; the top one percent owe 5.4 percent. And another startling fact: In 2004 the top one-tenth of one percent had more pre-tax income than the bottom 120,000,000 Americans. It seems that egalitarianism is racing away from us at an ever-increasing rate, as we see quality of life for the many descend further.
All of the dominant GOP’s presidential candidates vie in their debates for the title of staunchest defender of the cruelest feature of this cruel status quo, as the Democratic executive branch makes do with economic advisers many of whom were instrumental in engineering the financial meltdown that plunged us into this Great Depression. The two parties fated to rule America into the foreseeable future share an unshakeable faith in the 18th century economic tenets of the endless boom-and-bust and devil-take-the-hindmost religion called free-market capitalism.
Critical analysis of the basic dogmas of this faith is prohibited, according to the present rules of our society, with no less intensity than critical analysis of the dominant organized religions. “Equality of opportunity” is holy writ, while equality of outcome is damned as a heretical aspiration. The former myth pretends that a semiliterate child of the barrio crack-head single mother has the same chance of being appointed to the Supreme Court as the coddled son of lawyers, graduate of Choate, Yale, and Harvard Law. Which is no less inane a conceit than faith in playing the state lottery is a rational career choice.
Myth, pretense, thoroughly discredited economic wishful thinking, with rigid adherence to them all–these are hardly useful guides to guaranteeing any society’s enduring expectations of survival in our competitive world.
Another well-worn traditional activity among the Right’s propagandists is the promotion of mutual suspicion and distrust among and between various categories of working Americans. Christians against Muslims, Mormons, Jews, and agnostics; Italian Americans against Hispanics; higher-paid skilled AFL workers against the CIO’s lower-paid unskilled or semiskilled; Irish Americans against blacks; straights vs. gays; Protestants against Catholics—any group that can be riled up on any pretexts against any other to ultimately divide and conquer by fragmentation of democracy’s necessary unity of purpose.
It works so often, it’s so pathetic, and it’s increasingly being pressed into service by the mainstream GOP. A nation of interest groups kept well-differentiated and kept squabbling with each other is unlikely ever to join together in rational opposition to the cabal of oligarchs who are its true oppressors.
In a related and effective divide-and-conquer strategy, those who buy the legislators and own the media find a useful tool in our present criminal justice system, in which there is huge class of persons called “criminals.” This class comprises fully 3.1 percent of the males in our society. In 2009, 7,225,800 US adults were under criminal justice supervision; that’s 31 out of every thousand. Of these, 2,292,133 were in prison or jail. We imprison more than 7 times as large a percentage of our citizens as Canada, Germany, or Italy, and more than ten times that of Sweden, Denmark, or Iceland. Our figures are up over 800 percent in the last 30 years alone. We’re Number One in locking up our own, twice as punitive as China.
Our prisoners, we are instructed, are best confined, deprived, and tortured (within currently acceptable limits) for periods of time as “punishment” for their offenses (primarily drug-related) and then released back into society, well-trained, by their treatment and their prison associates, to re-offend and be recycled through the process.
A typical American felon is released from prison upon completion of his sentence by being given five 20-dollar bills and a one-way bus ticket to a destination of his choice. Supposed to be adequate to make re-introduction into non-criminal civilian life possible for him and prevent his falling back into criminal behavior, such cruel policies have proved highly effective instead in ensuring his re-offending.
Not only is there no organized societal interest in the causes of criminal conduct, but any glimmers of such interest are actively discouraged by political pressures. The question is prohibited: How does this cooing babe-in-arms in a mere twenty-odd years become a convicted criminal, in numbers to overfill the prisons of this most crime-ridden by far of all the world’s industrialized democracies? We simply do not want to know–period. We’ll continue to deal with symptoms, and that’s that!
No formula for long-term success, this, unless we count our world’s largest, most expensive and expansive, rapidly privatizing prisons industry as something other than a disastrous liability.
The trends we have discussed here, now in their fourth decade, are broadening, accelerating, and intensifying nationwide. Their effects must become apparent once a disinterested observer makes an effort to step back from his forgivable somnolent acceptance of the present stages of our national decline. We’ve called attention to some of them in the foregoing paragraphs. To extrapolate them over the next 20 to 40 years is a frightening exercise but one that also should be undertaken except by those committed to resolute denial of the obvious.
One of the most self-destructive policies pursued diligently for short-term electioneering advantage by all of the US political parties is our unwavering support of all policies and actions of the nation of Israel. This we do in contravention of America’s own political and moral principles and in brazen defiance of the protests, needs, and wishes of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims.
Defending and promoting bad deeds by what much of the world sees as the kleptocratic political gang ruling a tiny rogue state halfway around the world serves long-term American interests not at all. The gang’s rule can lead only to the eventual annihilation of that country’s people, as their increasingly hate-filled neighbors acquire the means to destroy them. Sure, Israel has nuclear weapons and its leaders may even have the insane determination to use them, but that represents a better plan for self-destruction than successful self-defense. Our current administration’s determination this week to veto in the UN Security Council the Palestinians’ request for statehood recognition is only the latest foolish act in six decades of masochistic US obstructionism based on one short-term fear alone: We dare not follow through on our declared preference for a two-state solution to the “Palestinian problem,” for to do so would alienate powerful American Jewish interests in the next domestic elections.
Added to the powerfully self-immolating societal influences recounted in the foregoing paragraphs are the immensely destructive economic effects of the mortgage/housing crisis and the subtly negative impact of consumer–particularly credit card–indebtedness in the USA. A poorly kept secret is the number of defaulted mortgages that lenders, primarily banks, are currently closeting, unforeclosed, in addition to the smaller number of real estate properties (the “shadow inventory”) they’ve already repossessed from borrowers but haven’t yet re-marketed.
If all bank-owned properties were to be put on the market today, the crashed market values of American homes would reach another, truer bottom, sparking a further re-collapse in real estate values nationwide. The banks are apparently waiting, their top executives impotently hoping, for something to happen to the nation’s economy that might make this whole (self-induced) horror go away.
These are not short-term or minor blips in an advancing or stable society’s course. Most or all appear to be characteristics of a culture in severe decline.
Ill-chosen grand policy decisions for short-term gain made by ruling cliques have always played a pivotal role in the declines of past empires along with persistent pressures of long-term aspirations of peoples whom the empires exploited and over whom they ruled for a time. From Persia‘s apogee (522 B.C.) to China’s (221 B.C.) to Rome (27 B.C.- 476 A.D.) to the Byzantine (476 A.D. - 1453 A.D.) to the Austrian (1453 - 1918) to the British (1500 - 1945) to the American (1944 - 2025?), empires have come and mostly gone, affording hegemony and unearned wealth and ease to a thin, privileged upper veneer of their home populations at the considerable expense and deprivation of subjugated peoples. Ours has been in conspicuous accelerating decline now for about three decades, and like the singers of imperial praises in those of our predecessors as they collapsed or merely disintegrated, our own odists are still at it here.
In view of so many glaringly apparent trends impelling this path of diminishing wealth and power of the United States, our day of reckoning seems to be at hand. Our leaders and their courtiers pretend that our former preeminence continues unchallenged. What then, if anything, emerges from this depressing review and prognosis as a course of action for an ordinary concerned American? Political action and protest are futile; they require numbers to become even faintly audible, much less effective. The prevailing forces are all massing mightily in the directions described.
Can it possibly–unthinkably–be time to consider emigration from, for any of the many compelling reasons our forebears immigrated to, these promising shores? Can our now inescapable concerns for the nature of the society our children are likely to grow up in soon actually force us to conclude that a better life for them, and for us, ought conceivably to be best pursued elsewhere?