“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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The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
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The “American disease” is simply late stage,
globe-trotting capitalism with American
characteristics. Although the coronavirus
provided the trigger for the current global
shrinkage, the economic crisis was already
looming when the pathogen made its physical
appearance. As economists told the Washington
Post
,
U.S. corporations were $10 trillion in debt on
the eve of the Covid-19 crisis, equal to about
half the gross national product. Goldman Sachs
estimated that “one-quarter of the country’s
largest companies had more cash going out than
coming in.” And, the so-called “repo
market
”
crisis erupted before Covid-19’s debut in the
U.S, necessitating a $400
billion bailout
.
A meltdown was coming, with or without the
intervention of tiny bits of viral DNA. The
recent $2 trillion “stimulus” is really another
corporate bailout, justified by the coronavirus.
Crises are
endemic to capitalism. In the United States, where
corporations have achieved near-total political
hegemony, the harshest contradictions of capitalism are
no longer mitigated and softened by state intervention,
under prodding by “peoples” forces such as unions and
social movements. Rather, the US government is a
capitalist tool, as is the tag-team of duopoly political
parties. Capitalism entered its “late” stage when
finance capital became supreme over all the other
sectors of capital and made the state its abject servant
and golden goose.
The “American
disease” – late stage capitalism with U.S.
characteristics – is the most virulent strain of a
centuries-old system. As the world’s most successful
white settler state and the first truly bourgeois
republic, the U.S. was from its inception dedicated to
the rule of money over humankind and the environment;
and to the supremacy of whiteness, the forceful
expropriation of other people’s territory and resources,
and the subjugation of non-whites. While European
colonialism looted far-flung lands and peoples, the
United States became a major economic power through
Black chattel slavery within its own borders, genocide
of the natives on whose land the Republic stood, and
expansion through the seizure and incorporation of its
darker neighbor’s territory (Mexico). From the
beginning, colonialism was U.S. domestic policy,
and empire-building its national project – all for the
enrichment of a white ruling class.
Beginning in
the late 1970s, the Lords of Capital deployed U.S.
imperial military and financial power to initiate a
worldwide Race to the Bottom in which all of the Earth’s
workers would compete for employment, including the
Empire’s own domestic workforce. Productivity would
skyrocket as the costs of labor (wages) plummeted.
Billionaires became as common as millionaires used to
be, even as the superpower’s cities and national
infrastructure crumbled and living standards stagnated
and fell. With the collaboration of the fraudulently
pro-labor and pro-Black Democratic Party, the corporate
rulers slashed social services and labor protections
under an “austerity” regime whose real purpose was to
make working people so desperate and insecure they would
accept any job, under any conditions and wage – a
capitalists’ paradise, and the purpose of the Race to
the Bottom. The banks were unleashed to float
mega-bubbles and package worthless assets – until the
inevitable burst.
With both
political parties in the oligarchs’ pockets, and social
movements largely inert, there was nothing to stop the
U.S. ruling class from indulging in every speculative
excess imaginable, creating new and more exotic
financial “instruments” that yoked the nation’s and
world’s destinies to “derivatives” notionally valued at
20 times the worth of all the goods and services
produced by humanity. U.S. healthcare – which was never
a “system” worthy of the name – was shrunken and
privatized, including much of the nation’s only
“socialist” medical institution, the Veterans’
Administration healthcare services.
"Every broken
piece of our society restricted us from responding to
this crisis, from welfare reform to post-2008 austerity
to the war on crime. You can't divorce any of it,"
writes David Dayen, of The American Prospect.
But of course, the damage was systematically inflicted
by the corporate-bought politicians of both parties –
including every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter.-- at
the behest of the ruling oligarchy. The transfer of jobs
and production to the low wage East and South was the
consensus policy of the U.S. and European ruling
classes. Austerity (The Race to the Bottom) reigned
supreme on both sides of the Atlantic and was enforced
in the formerly colonized world by Western-dominated
international financial institutions.
The profoundly
racist nature of U.S. society -- born in slavery and
genocide and unrepentant – allowed the capitalist rulers
to strip away even the thin veneer of a welfare state
that had been thrown together in the Sixties, and then
to dismantle and sell off the health care
infrastructure. Race has always ruled politics in a
nation founded as a White Man’s Country, and which now
pays its citizens what W.E.B. Dubois called
“psychological wages,” constantly exhorting the populace
to bask in the glow of empire and exceptionalism. But,
the Race to the Bottom cannot coexist with a living wage
or a truly universal national health care system. The
Lords of Capital have prospered fantastically in this
Race, and have no other vision for the future. The
rulers have drawn lines in the sand and their minions in
both corporate parties dare not cross them – come hell,
high water or pandemic,
Joe Biden is
proof that the rulers will not allow their operatives to
give an inch on austerity/Race to the Bottom. Even as
the people’s lives and livelihoods are threatened by the
worst epidemic in a century, Biden stands fast with the
oligarchy: no Medicare for All.
What happens
when the “American (political-economic) Disease” meets
the pandemic? Nothing, if the people don’t demand an end
to the Race to the Bottom that has left them with less
defenses against disease than any other developed
nation. Everything, if they resist. Some folks are
calling for a general strike on May 1st.
BAR
executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com . "Source"
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