By Gene Ogorodov
You notice how in winter floods the trees
which bend before the storm preserve their twigs.
The ones who stand against it are destroyed,
root and branch. In the same way, those sailors
who keep their sails stretched tight, never easing off,
make their ship capsize—and from that point on
sail with their rowing benches all submerged.
--Sophocles
You notice how in winter floods the trees
which bend before the storm preserve their twigs.
The ones who stand against it are destroyed,
root and branch. In the same way, those sailors
who keep their sails stretched tight, never easing off,
make their ship capsize—and from that point on
sail with their rowing benches all submerged.
--Sophocles
There is iconic photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of people waiting in a bread line during the Great Depression under a billboard with the caption: “World's Highest Standard of Living. There is no way like the American Way!” Beneath giant smiles bedraggled and downtrodden victims plod toward a handout suited only to keep body and soul together. In each and every face the unspoken narrative is impossible to ignore – the spirit has died, hope has fled, those who had little have nothing and those who had nothing have even less.
In this picture False optimism shadows the pessimistic reality. Yet, the stark contrast of the photograph, rather than placating sense of destitution, emphatically exposes the American Dream for what it was then and is today – a perverse lie.
In the last year the NYSE has achieved renewed heights. For major investors the assets lost in 2008-2009 during the Financial Collapse have been recovered many times over. Major corporations are promising record profits. Although the markets have not completely recovered the confidence of a strong bull market, ostensibly the American Economy is no longer in recession.
But traveling around the United States one would hardly imagine that this country is not still engaged in a headlong economic retreat. Outside of enclaves of ostentatious prosperity the poverty in the United States is overt and ubiquitous. Beyond the obnoxiously visible decay of empty factories, abandoned houses, decaying infrastructure, and atomized communities, the universal tale-tale signs of aging cars and peeling paint are indicative of financial woes that have directly effected everyone and not just an unlucky few who have been destroyed.
Wall Street may have been relieved from its recession, but it is equally obvious that regardless of the GDP Main Street is still being wracked by a devastating economic catastrophe from which it will never recover without concerted public investment.
Astronomical amounts of debt, unemployment or underemployment, insecure retirement, prohibitively expensive medical care, and a bleak and uncertain future haunt every single American household except the members of the microscopically small plutocratic class.
No longer can an American live well off of his or her hard work and a good ordinary job. A High School Diploma alone will only guarantee a life on the brink of survival; a College Degree only gives one a demoralizing underpaid job stuck in a cubicle with intermittent breaks from being laid-off to keep the work cheap; and a Graduate Degree ensures that one starts their professional career a decade later with tens of thousands of dollars more in debt.
Even the professional classes have been hollowed out. Engineers and Professors are a dime a dozen. Few people can afford to be a Doctor or a Lawyer, and those that can are either driven out through exorbitant operating costs and an unreasonable amount of bureaucratic hassle or overworked because of the overwhelming need for those occupations in the United States.
Opportunity is scarce and inequitably distributed. Success has almost nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with cronyism, politics, and sheer luck. Whether one is competing for a Presidential appointment or promotion to Corporal, the system is, except for a chosen few, disadvantageous.
Working longer hours and for worse pay than Western European counterparts, Americans battle to survive in a crumbling labor market. Free-trade and Globalization have made once good-paying essential jobs redundant as American industries intentionally replaced them with poor-paying service sector jobs while the people who once enjoyed good careers now struggle to find enough work to stay alive. Fiscal uncertainty hangs precariously over the heads of all working Americans irrespective of social class like the sword of Damocles.
Under Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve lauded the virtues of disciplining labor by creating a precariate of labor to control the costs of doing business in the United States, but mesmerized by the thrill of an indefatigable bull market and bowing before the auspicious mysteries of market efficiency Washington ignored the inevitable human costs which now torment every adult American.
Both Democrats and Republicans incessantly prattle on about the unparalleled privilege and development of America promising untold abundance and ubiquitous wealth. Where is the wealth? Where is the infrastructure? Where is the good standard of living? Where is the American Dream? In the pockets of the ruling class.
In the face of unprecedented hardship juxtaposed against what is possibly the largest concentration of wealth in human history (the USA has a wealth-GNI coefficient of 0.88 and a GDP of $15 Trillion, the largest in the world) it is hard not coming to the conclusion that the United States government has forsaken its duty to the American people and thrown its might behind the interests of a small minority who are actively despoiling the country.
The lack of active and effective government in the United States is painfully obvious. It is not necessary to recount the inhuman conditions in American Cities that willful neglect and machine politics have wrought. Poverty, crime, illiteracy, life expectancy, and a host of other negative statistics place the worst urban neighborhoods at levels unseen anywhere in the World outside of sub-Saharan Africa. When Washington, D.C. has a HIV/AIDS rate of infection slightly behind the HIV/AIDS rate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Detroit has a homicide rate similar to Johannesburg one cannot talk of American municipal governance.
Gun control, mushrooming costs for higher education, student debt, financial regulation, medical costs, rampant functional illiteracy and innumeracy, an unfair tax code, ballooning prison population, and a dysfunctional judiciary are all issues that have remained un-tabled while Congress has quibbled over deficit reduction and redefining morality. Health care reform was passed, but without cost control sixteen times the cost per patient between the US and Western Europe could easily turn into a hundred times the cost per patient.
American foreign policy is not any better. No one alive needs to be reminded of the criminal atrocities the United States has committed in the last twelve years ostensibly to rid the world of terrorism. Other than the festering embarrassment of Gitmo, the morally suspect act of bombing civilians with drones, and the birth of a police-state in America that would make the Stazi envious, both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were overly expensive, useless, and blatantly illegal. Preemptive war is the War-Crime of Aggression. It is somewhat suspect to compare extent political systems with the Third Reich, but as a point of reference one should remember that more than a few Nazis were hanged or jailed at Nuremberg for the War-Crime of Aggression.
After two decades of demonstrating a complete ineptitude at directing its own affairs or the affairs of the world, the American people and the world sill pretend that the United States is still the world's only hyper-power.
The United States is a paper-machete tiger. Bound to a byzantine 18th Century government and an almost religious devotion to its founding fathers that prevents it from enacting meaningful reforms, the United States obviously lacks the dynamism necessary for the 21st Century. Engrossed in war-mongering and profiteering it is sapping its remaining strength and alienating its people. Sweeping political reform in the United States is absolutely necessary; one can but hope that it is on the horizon.
Beyond the meaningless cant of “liberty,” “freedom,” and “democracy” there are two types of government – good and bad. The good government promote justice, general prosperity, stability, the redress of grievances, the mediation of conflict, and social equanimity. To pretend that the United States government has in recent years even attempted (much less succeeded) in pursing any of those goals would require exceptional powers of imagination – but the United States is the land of superheroes. Let us just hope that Rip Van Winkle wakes from his slumber before the curtain falls on another era.
In this picture False optimism shadows the pessimistic reality. Yet, the stark contrast of the photograph, rather than placating sense of destitution, emphatically exposes the American Dream for what it was then and is today – a perverse lie.
In the last year the NYSE has achieved renewed heights. For major investors the assets lost in 2008-2009 during the Financial Collapse have been recovered many times over. Major corporations are promising record profits. Although the markets have not completely recovered the confidence of a strong bull market, ostensibly the American Economy is no longer in recession. But traveling around the United States one would hardly imagine that this country is not still engaged in a headlong economic retreat. Outside of enclaves of ostentatious prosperity the poverty in the United States is overt and ubiquitous. Beyond the obnoxiously visible decay of empty factories, abandoned houses, decaying infrastructure, and atomized communities, the universal tale-tale signs of aging cars and peeling paint are indicative of financial woes that have directly effected everyone and not just an unlucky few who have been destroyed.
Wall Street may have been relieved from its recession, but it is equally obvious that regardless of the GDP Main Street is still being wracked by a devastating economic catastrophe from which it will never recover without concerted public investment.
Astronomical amounts of debt, unemployment or underemployment, insecure retirement, prohibitively expensive medical care, and a bleak and uncertain future haunt every single American household except the members of the microscopically small plutocratic class.
No longer can an American live well off of his or her hard work and a good ordinary job. A High School Diploma alone will only guarantee a life on the brink of survival; a College Degree only gives one a demoralizing underpaid job stuck in a cubicle with intermittent breaks from being laid-off to keep the work cheap; and a Graduate Degree ensures that one starts their professional career a decade later with tens of thousands of dollars more in debt.
Even the professional classes have been hollowed out. Engineers and Professors are a dime a dozen. Few people can afford to be a Doctor or a Lawyer, and those that can are either driven out through exorbitant operating costs and an unreasonable amount of bureaucratic hassle or overworked because of the overwhelming need for those occupations in the United States.
Opportunity is scarce and inequitably distributed. Success has almost nothing to do with talent, and everything to do with cronyism, politics, and sheer luck. Whether one is competing for a Presidential appointment or promotion to Corporal, the system is, except for a chosen few, disadvantageous.
Working longer hours and for worse pay than Western European counterparts, Americans battle to survive in a crumbling labor market. Free-trade and Globalization have made once good-paying essential jobs redundant as American industries intentionally replaced them with poor-paying service sector jobs while the people who once enjoyed good careers now struggle to find enough work to stay alive. Fiscal uncertainty hangs precariously over the heads of all working Americans irrespective of social class like the sword of Damocles.
Under Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve lauded the virtues of disciplining labor by creating a precariate of labor to control the costs of doing business in the United States, but mesmerized by the thrill of an indefatigable bull market and bowing before the auspicious mysteries of market efficiency Washington ignored the inevitable human costs which now torment every adult American.
Both Democrats and Republicans incessantly prattle on about the unparalleled privilege and development of America promising untold abundance and ubiquitous wealth. Where is the wealth? Where is the infrastructure? Where is the good standard of living? Where is the American Dream? In the pockets of the ruling class.
In the face of unprecedented hardship juxtaposed against what is possibly the largest concentration of wealth in human history (the USA has a wealth-GNI coefficient of 0.88 and a GDP of $15 Trillion, the largest in the world) it is hard not coming to the conclusion that the United States government has forsaken its duty to the American people and thrown its might behind the interests of a small minority who are actively despoiling the country.
The lack of active and effective government in the United States is painfully obvious. It is not necessary to recount the inhuman conditions in American Cities that willful neglect and machine politics have wrought. Poverty, crime, illiteracy, life expectancy, and a host of other negative statistics place the worst urban neighborhoods at levels unseen anywhere in the World outside of sub-Saharan Africa. When Washington, D.C. has a HIV/AIDS rate of infection slightly behind the HIV/AIDS rate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Detroit has a homicide rate similar to Johannesburg one cannot talk of American municipal governance.
Gun control, mushrooming costs for higher education, student debt, financial regulation, medical costs, rampant functional illiteracy and innumeracy, an unfair tax code, ballooning prison population, and a dysfunctional judiciary are all issues that have remained un-tabled while Congress has quibbled over deficit reduction and redefining morality. Health care reform was passed, but without cost control sixteen times the cost per patient between the US and Western Europe could easily turn into a hundred times the cost per patient.
American foreign policy is not any better. No one alive needs to be reminded of the criminal atrocities the United States has committed in the last twelve years ostensibly to rid the world of terrorism. Other than the festering embarrassment of Gitmo, the morally suspect act of bombing civilians with drones, and the birth of a police-state in America that would make the Stazi envious, both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were overly expensive, useless, and blatantly illegal. Preemptive war is the War-Crime of Aggression. It is somewhat suspect to compare extent political systems with the Third Reich, but as a point of reference one should remember that more than a few Nazis were hanged or jailed at Nuremberg for the War-Crime of Aggression.
After two decades of demonstrating a complete ineptitude at directing its own affairs or the affairs of the world, the American people and the world sill pretend that the United States is still the world's only hyper-power.
The United States is a paper-machete tiger. Bound to a byzantine 18th Century government and an almost religious devotion to its founding fathers that prevents it from enacting meaningful reforms, the United States obviously lacks the dynamism necessary for the 21st Century. Engrossed in war-mongering and profiteering it is sapping its remaining strength and alienating its people. Sweeping political reform in the United States is absolutely necessary; one can but hope that it is on the horizon.
Beyond the meaningless cant of “liberty,” “freedom,” and “democracy” there are two types of government – good and bad. The good government promote justice, general prosperity, stability, the redress of grievances, the mediation of conflict, and social equanimity. To pretend that the United States government has in recent years even attempted (much less succeeded) in pursing any of those goals would require exceptional powers of imagination – but the United States is the land of superheroes. Let us just hope that Rip Van Winkle wakes from his slumber before the curtain falls on another era.
