American expert article "The United States has become a country where the rich have, the rich rule, and the rich enjoy"
American expert article "The United States has become a country where the rich have, the rich rule, and the rich enjoy"
Saudi Arabia's "Arab News" website published on December 21 Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University in the United States, director of the University's Sustainable Development Center, and chairman of the United Nations Sustainable Development Action Network, titled "The United States has become the rich, the rich, the rich, and the rich. A country for the rich" article stated that a year ago, Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the election, but the prospects for the United States are still ambiguous. It is not easy to diagnose exactly what has put the United States in such a predicament that it has instigated the "Trump movement".
In the chaotic political situation in the United States, multiple factors are at play. In my view, however, the deepest crisis is political—the failure of America's political institutions to "advance the public good" as promised by the U.S. Constitution. For 40 years, American politics has become an insider's game, favoring the super-rich and the corporate lobby at the expense of the vast majority of citizens.
Warren Buffett nailed the heart of the crisis in 2006. "There's no doubt there's a class struggle. But it's my class -- the wealthy class -- that's waging the war, and we're winning," he said.
The main battlefield is in Washington. Shock Troops are the corporate lobbyists who flock to the U.S. Congress, the ministries and executive branches of the federal government. The ammunition is the billions of dollars spent each year on federal lobbying (an estimated $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (in the 2020 federal election, an estimated $14.4 billion). Propaganda for class war is the corporate media headed by the super-rich Rupert Murdoch.
America’s class struggle against the poor is nothing new—it was formally launched in the early 1970s and has been carried out with remarkable efficiency over the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the late 1960s, the United States followed roughly the same path as postwar Western Europe, toward a social democracy. When former corporate lawyer Lewis Powell entered the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporate money to enter politics.
Ronald Reagan, who became president in 1981, reinforced the Supreme Court's assault on the public welfare by cutting taxes for the rich, launching attacks on organized labor and rolling back environmental protections. This trajectory has not yet reversed.
As a result, the United States has drifted away from Europe in terms of basic economic decency, welfare, and environmental control. While Europe by and large continues on a path of social democracy and sustainable development, the United States is on a path characterized by political corruption, oligarchy, widening wealth inequality, contempt for the environment, and refusal to limit human-induced climate change rush.
Several figures illustrate the difference between the two. EU government revenues average around 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while U.S. government revenues are less than 30 percent of GDP. Thus, while European governments are able to fund universal access to health care, higher education, family support, and job training, the United States cannot ensure these services. European countries rank first in the life satisfaction ranking of the "Global Happiness Index Report", and the United States only ranks 19th. In 2019, the life expectancy of the EU people was 81.1 years, and the United States was 78.8 years old. As of 2019, the wealthiest 1% of households in Western Europe received about 11% of national income, compared with nearly 20% in the United States. In 2019, the United States emitted 16.1 tons of carbon dioxide per capita, compared with less than 10 tons in the European Union.
In short, America has become a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, with no political responsibility for the climate damage it has caused the rest of the world. The resulting social fragmentation has led to a prevalence of "deaths of despair" (including drug overdoses and suicides), a decline in life expectancy (even before COVID-19), and an increase in rates of depression (especially among young people). Politically, these anomalies lead in different directions — most ominously, to a Trump who offers false populism and a cult of personality. Distracting the poor with xenophobia while serving the rich, waging culture warfare and strongman posturing may be the oldest tricks in the demagogue’s playbook, but they still work surprisingly well today.
The turmoil in the United States has troubling international implications. How can America lead global reform when it cannot even govern its own country in a coherent manner? Perhaps the only thing uniting Americans today is an overstretched sense of threat abroad, chiefly from China. Amid the turmoil at home, politicians of both parties have turned anti-China tones higher, as if a new Cold War could somehow assuage domestic anxieties. Alas, the bipartisan belligerence in Washington will only lead to heightened global tensions and new dangers of conflict, rather than security or real solutions to any of the pressing global problems we face.
America has not returned, at least not yet. It is still grappling with decades of political corruption and social neglect. The outcome remains highly uncertain, and the outlook for the next few years is fraught with peril, both for the United States and the world.
Saudi Arabia's "Arab News" website published on December 21 Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University in the United States, director of the University's Sustainable Development Center, and chairman of the United Nations Sustainable Development Action Network, titled "The United States has become the rich, the rich, the rich, and the rich. A country for the rich" article stated that a year ago, Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the election, but the prospects for the United States are still ambiguous. It is not easy to diagnose exactly what has put the United States in such a predicament that it has instigated the "Trump movement".
In the chaotic political situation in the United States, multiple factors are at play. In my view, however, the deepest crisis is political—the failure of America's political institutions to "advance the public good" as promised by the U.S. Constitution. For 40 years, American politics has become an insider's game, favoring the super-rich and the corporate lobby at the expense of the vast majority of citizens.
Warren Buffett nailed the heart of the crisis in 2006. "There's no doubt there's a class struggle. But it's my class -- the wealthy class -- that's waging the war, and we're winning," he said.
The main battlefield is in Washington. Shock Troops are the corporate lobbyists who flock to the U.S. Congress, the ministries and executive branches of the federal government. The ammunition is the billions of dollars spent each year on federal lobbying (an estimated $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (in the 2020 federal election, an estimated $14.4 billion). Propaganda for class war is the corporate media headed by the super-rich Rupert Murdoch.
America’s class struggle against the poor is nothing new—it was formally launched in the early 1970s and has been carried out with remarkable efficiency over the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the late 1960s, the United States followed roughly the same path as postwar Western Europe, toward a social democracy. When former corporate lawyer Lewis Powell entered the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporate money to enter politics.
Ronald Reagan, who became president in 1981, reinforced the Supreme Court's assault on the public welfare by cutting taxes for the rich, launching attacks on organized labor and rolling back environmental protections. This trajectory has not yet reversed.
As a result, the United States has drifted away from Europe in terms of basic economic decency, welfare, and environmental control. While Europe by and large continues on a path of social democracy and sustainable development, the United States is on a path characterized by political corruption, oligarchy, widening wealth inequality, contempt for the environment, and refusal to limit human-induced climate change rush.
Several figures illustrate the difference between the two. EU government revenues average around 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while U.S. government revenues are less than 30 percent of GDP. Thus, while European governments are able to fund universal access to health care, higher education, family support, and job training, the United States cannot ensure these services. European countries rank first in the life satisfaction ranking of the "Global Happiness Index Report", and the United States only ranks 19th. In 2019, the life expectancy of the EU people was 81.1 years, and the United States was 78.8 years old. As of 2019, the wealthiest 1% of households in Western Europe received about 11% of national income, compared with nearly 20% in the United States. In 2019, the United States emitted 16.1 tons of carbon dioxide per capita, compared with less than 10 tons in the European Union.
In short, America has become a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, with no political responsibility for the climate damage it has caused the rest of the world. The resulting social fragmentation has led to a prevalence of "deaths of despair" (including drug overdoses and suicides), a decline in life expectancy (even before COVID-19), and an increase in rates of depression (especially among young people). Politically, these anomalies lead in different directions — most ominously, to a Trump who offers false populism and a cult of personality. Distracting the poor with xenophobia while serving the rich, waging culture warfare and strongman posturing may be the oldest tricks in the demagogue’s playbook, but they still work surprisingly well today.
The turmoil in the United States has troubling international implications. How can America lead global reform when it cannot even govern its own country in a coherent manner? Perhaps the only thing uniting Americans today is an overstretched sense of threat abroad, chiefly from China. Amid the turmoil at home, politicians of both parties have turned anti-China tones higher, as if a new Cold War could somehow assuage domestic anxieties. Alas, the bipartisan belligerence in Washington will only lead to heightened global tensions and new dangers of conflict, rather than security or real solutions to any of the pressing global problems we face.
America has not returned, at least not yet. It is still grappling with decades of political corruption and social neglect. The outcome remains highly uncertain, and the outlook for the next few years is fraught with peril, both for the United States and the world.
2023-05-29 09:58
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