The mother of all crises
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Certainly the United States has endured more acute crises than the one the country is mired in today. But seldom, if ever, has the country simultaneously faced such deep troubles on so many fronts – economic, political, social, and moral. Most if not all of these problems have had a long gestation, but it is only now that we are feeling their full brunt.
Fresh data from the Census Bureau bring news that would have been nearly unthinkable in the post-war period of unprecedented prosperity, the creation of the world’s largest middle class, and the invention of “the American century” and the “affluent society.” The new statistics tell us that nearly one of every two Americans is currently living under conditions of low income or outright poverty. Those worst hit: children.
In launching the New Deal in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, FDR decried that one third of the nation was ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. Since then, the country’s aggregate wealth, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has increased dramatically. How is it possible then that in 2011 the cold statistics of the Bureau of the Census show a country in which half of the people live on the edge of poverty or immersed in it?
The United States is a nation whose politicians never tire of calling it the richest country in the world. It is easy to believe these reiterated boasts if you look at the opulence reflected in the advertisements in the pages of such magazines as New York, Cigar Aficionado, or even Men’s Journal. Their ads show that the politicians are not lying, but their statements about America’s unequalled wealth fail to reflect reality. This is indeed a rich country. The GDP figures are there in black and white. And someone is buying those $30,000 watches, $10 million mansions, and $100 t-shirts promoted in the glossy magazines. But it is not the 50 percent that is barely scraping or even the 49 percent just above them buying the big-ticket items. Who is? Who can?
U.S. corporate honchos, for one, surely can. The headline in the December 11 British newspaper The Guardian tells the tale: “Revealed: huge increase in executive pay for America’s top bosses.” The story, which for obvious reasons has not made headlines in the U.S. corporate media, is summarized in the lead paragraph:
“Chief executive pay has roared back after two years of stagnation and decline. America’s top bosses enjoyed pay hikes of between 27 and 40% last year, according to the largest survey of U.S. CEO pay. The dramatic bounceback comes as the latest government figures show wages for the majority of Americans are failing to keep up with inflation.”
The corporate CEOs are just one segment of the 1 percent that can afford to buy at Tiffany’s or wager $10,000 on a whim. The two leading Republican candidates for the White House, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are in the same class, as are about half of 600,000 other Americans (in a population of nearly 313 million).
The social and economic disaster implicit in the fact that half of the population in the self-described “richest, most powerful, and most democratic nation in the history of the world” exists under conditions of serious economic distress requires no additional comment.
But the moral and political components do. The Christian faith was the foremost moral underpinning of this society from its founding. You don’t have to believe in liberation theology to wonder how the teachings of the man from Nazareth can be made consistent with a system that not only allows but fosters, through its laws, institutions, and policies, the coexistence of immense luxury for a tiny minority and economic misery for half of the population.
This conundrum is especially acute in regard to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, groups who identify most closely with the Christian faith while fiercely championing the most un-Christian politics, including fostering wars of aggression, privileging the richest, demonizing the poor and their advocates, and carrying out capital punishment with alacrity.
The key political question is how this situation has for so long stood in an allegedly democratic society. A November poll by NBC-Wall Street Journal cited in an article in the December 5 issue of New York magazine (one of the honorable exceptions to the drivel), found that “three quarters of voters agree that America’s economic structure unfairly favors the very rich over everyone else, and the power of the banks and the corporations should be constrained.”
Yet Republicans in Congress have fought successfully against any and all restrictions on corporations and financial institutions as well as carrying out very mild attempts to reduce economic inequity by increasing taxes on the very rich. And both leading GOP contenders for the White House believe the way to revive the economy is to lower taxes, cut regulations, and generally “unleash capitalism.” Thus the U.S. political crisis, which the pundits summarize as “Washington is broken” and “partisan polarization prevents getting anything done” is real but requires a deeper analysis. Why would Republican politicians, whose paymasters are doing very well, want to cede any ground, and especially if it would improve the economy and Obama’s reelection prospects?
The prevailing American narrative foregrounds freedom, the rights of citizens, prosperity, and the Statue of Liberty’s welcome of immigrants. Today we have more people incarcerated than any other country including China with its gigantic population; President Obama just signed a law that authorizes the government to indefinitely detain without trial any American citizen; deportations are at a record high; and a recent study of a sample of developed countries found the United States dead last in upward mobility. Perhaps most serious of all, a good portion of the American people are in denial about the origins, breadth and depth of the nation’s current multifaceted crisis
The Occupy Wall Street Movement, which is a response to the totality of the systemic rot and not just to Wall Street’s excesses, offers the one glimmer of hope in this bleak landscape. It remains to be seen if the OWS partisans turn out to be summer soldiers and sunshine patriots or are able to endure and channel the convergence of their views with those of the American people to build a movement able to bring fundamental change to a system rife with injustices and contradictions.
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