We're Witnessing an American Tragedy

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

The Coronavirus pandemic has created a massive economic contraction around the world, and its effects have been particularly devastating in the United States, which has suffered by far the highest death total, now inching upwards towards 200,000 people.

COVID-19 saw 40 million Americans lose their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down. Many analysts predict that the U.S. unemployment rate will remain in double digits through the middle of 2021, which will surely doom President Donald Trump’s chances of re-election.

Thousands of enterprises will never re-open, eliminating millions of jobs – almost half of all Americans work for small companies, mainly in the low-wage service sector, and such businesses are more vulnerable to bankruptcy. Younger people entering the work force may not get a good job in the first place for years to come and their overall lifetime incomes may never catch up.

These economic dislocations fall disproportionately on those with lower incomes and savings. Temporary government programs to help those in dire straits will only mitigate the problem. The road to recovery will be long.

This crisis has illuminated the deficiencies of the American economy, its ruling elites, and its Social Darwinist political culture, which places value on individual freedom and getting ahead at all costs, at the expense of community and family.

This has led to an ever-widening chasm between Americans who are beyond rich and those who have little or nothing. In the 1950s, the salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees. Strong unions saw to that.

But during the 1980s politicians began to dismantle social protections, undermine labour rights and slash taxes on the rich.

Today, those at the top levels of corporations earn 400 times that of their salaried staff. One per cent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while those at the bottom have more debt than assets. They live on the edge of bankruptcy and if they lose their jobs, there is little of a safety net. They are on their own.

Entire segments of the economy, especially in manufacturing, have been outsourced overseas, and much of industrial America is a hollowed-out economic wasteland. In the 1960s, manufacturing made up 25 per cent of U.S. gross domestic product.  It is barely 11per cent today. More than five million American manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000.

Uncontrolled immigration and the corporate hunger for ever-cheaper labour has frayed the social fabric. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

Fully 37 percent of African American families have zero or negative net worth. The median wealth of Black households is a tenth that of whites. And 41 percent of all Black-owned enterprises have closed since March. This is the backdrop to the rage that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis this past May.

America, like many a hegemonic power before it, also suffers from imperial overreach. Policing the international system does not come cheap. After World War Two, the U.S. became a military behemoth abroad. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in domestic infrastructure, including education and health care.

Deindustrialisation, deregulation, low-wage work, underemployment, and a dysfunctional health system have long been evident but, as in a war, they now point to the nation’s underlying weakness. The reliance on unfettered markets with minimal government intervention has proved inadequate to repair the damage.

Americans today find themselves members of a failing state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government. The bonds of community and trust have almost vanished, replaced by anger and resentment that has led to levels of political polarization not seen since the Civil War 160 years ago. This will remain the case long after Trump is a memory.

Yet, in the midst of a pandemic and what is clearly an economic depression, Americans are about to elect as their president a run-of-the-mill machine politician born just a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.