Inequality, poverty partly why America burns
America is a great country to live in as long as you’re not old, sick, black or poor.
This was the reality in the 1960s, when I emigrated from the United States to Canada, and very little has changed since.
To my mind, America’s failure to provide a more level playing field for its people redefines “American exceptionalism.”
The United States is the richest country in the world, but has an underclass of at least 100 million people, the size of a Third World country, who are disenfranchised economically, educationally, socially and medically. It’s a virtual “Brazil,” with wealthier citizens living behind gates, security guards or in suburbs, away from poor neighbourhoods and their teeming populations of impoverished people.
This is partly what the riots currently sweeping across the U.S., as they did two generations ago, are about, not just racism.
The street uprisings were sparked by a cellphone video that captured four Minneapolis policemen attacking, and ultimately killing, a black man who was arrested for a non-violent crime and not resisting arrest.
One cop has been charged with murder and the others have been fired and are under investigation as accessories. This was a travesty that was made all the more dramatic because it took place in liberal Minnesota, not in uncivilized Mississippi.
Adding fuel to this outrage is the damage wreaked on America’s unprotected underclass by the COVID -19 pandemic.
In the United States, the virus has disproportionately devastated elderly, poor and black communities. This is because they often lack access to health care, live in squalor and are crowded into substandard housing, nursing homes and congested neighbourhoods.
Worse, the lockdown “cure” was worse than the disease for them. It isolated elderly people who were unable to fend for themselves, or even dial 911 in some cases. It decimated the homeless, indigent and transient populations. It economically destroyed black, brown and impoverished communities of people who live from paycheque-to-paycheque on a measly $8-an-hour minimum wage.
These people could not self-isolate and they could not set up computers at home to work remotely, collect benefits while on furlough or live off savings, because they have none.
America’s only solution is to undertake a Marshall Plan — in the form of a massive redistribution of wealth through taxation — directed at matching the world-class and egalitarian social services that other developed countries provide. This is about levelling the playing field by improving schools, health care, housing and employment prospects, so that all Americans have a fair shake. Right now, it’s a completely rigged game.
Yet this much-needed conversation isn’t even on the radar of America’s privileged. To make things worse, the Republican party, Fox News, the current occupant of the White House and other organizations have scapegoated the protesters as left-wing anarchists or criminals, while encouraging police to crack skulls, thus inciting more civil unrest. While there should be no tolerance for anyone who is violently protesting, looting or committing arson, blaming bad actors simply changes the subject and doesn’t address it.
The national conversation must start with the admission that America is not a just society and that it must change. The solution isn’t about “socialism” versus “freedom” or “free enterprise.” The European Union, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and other enlightened nations have free societies and prosperous capitalist economies, but also provide great schools, health care and housing for a large number of their citizens. They haven’t swallowed the American myth that low taxes for those who can afford to pay more results in “trickle down” benefits to everyone below them. The numbers prove that the taxes that individuals and corporations do not pay don’t create jobs for the rest. The spare cash is mostly invested in automation, offshoring to Mexico or China, buying stock back to benefit shareholders, doling out high executive salaries or flooded into offshore bank accounts to further reduce or eliminate taxes for the rich.
The only “trickle down” benefit that works is the creation of equal social services that help create equal opportunities.
Until that happens, the American Dream remains a crock.