“The
American Disease”: Only the Overthrow of the
Oligarchy Will Cure It
By Glen Ford
Although
the coronavirus provided the trigger for the current
global shrinkage, the economic crisis was already
looming when the pathogen made its physical
appearance.
Donald Trump mouths the words “Chinese disease” with
a racist sneer, playing a juvenile game of “dozens”
while the world economy shrinks. Although the
geographic origin of Covid-19 is open
to question
, the
prime vector of chronic global economic sickness is
indisputably the United States – the place where all
the symptoms of late stage capitalism in chaotic
decline are on full display.
In
2008, British authorities initially resisted
collaborating with Washington’s plans to bail out
failing corporate financial institutions. The Brits
didn’t want “to import the “American disease,” said
U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank
Paulson
.
Most of the world caught the disease anyway, in the
same way that global capitalism was brought to the
brink of death from the economic pestilence that
originated on Wall Street in the Great Crash of
1929.
The
United States is the planet’s breeding ground for
virulent capitalist disease, having spawned both of
the great meltdowns of the 20th and 21st centuries
and most of the less lethal crises that flare with
regularity in global “markets.” As the endemic host
of capitalist chaos, the U.S. has also become
indelibly identified with the jobs-killing
self-medications conjured by Wall Street and its
political servants to save “the markets.” When Japan
went into a long, deep economic stagnation
characterized by “the excessive and virtually
continuous distortion of income distribution at the
expense of employees,” Business
Insider
diagnosed that as the “American disease” – an apt
assessment, since the United States by then led the
developed world in income and wealth inequality. Researchgate
describes largescale corporate downsizing of
workforces as “’the American disease,’ caught by
numerous countries in times of economic recession.”
Actually,
the “American disease” is not so much “caught” by
other nations, as actively spread by a
globe-swallowing superpower that insists on the
right to penetrate every nook and cranny of the
planet with its corporate spores, under the
protection of 800-plus military bases and
multinational “trade” treaties that obliterate
governments’ abilities to resist U.S.-based
corporate contagion.
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