The U.S. is the only nation in the developed world without
free universal health coverage. Nearly 47 million Americans, or 16 percent of the population, were without
health insurance in 2005. And the
Bush administration plans to cut the State Children's Health
Insurance Program, a popular federally-funded initiative that
provides coverage to six million children.
One of the main points of Michael Moore's film, Sicko, is that the collusion between politicians and the healthcare
industry is a barrier to having a free and universal health
system. Moore's exposé on the crisis of health insurance in
America is an indictment of the healthcare corporations that
deny medical treatment to the ill, and allow people to die,
all for the sake of profits.
Meanwhile, the world's most advanced nation has a crumbling infrastructure.
The deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis, and the breaking
of the levees in New Orleans two years earlier, occurred in
the midst of a war in Iraq that could cost the taxpayers as
much as $1.5 trillion.
That unpopular war has been promulgated by an administration with
more than tenuous ties to the oil and defense industries,
and war profiteers such as Halliburton. The president, an
oil man in tune with the financial interests of that business,
repudiated the Kyoto Protocol and the scientific realities
of global warming, and allowed the clock to tick on climate
change.
Overcrowded prisons are bursting at the seams and prison spending
exceeds funding for education in state budgets throughout
the country. Encouraging economic development through the
captivity of others is an unseemly activity. The for-profit
prison industry trades on Wall Street, as did, years earlier,
businesses involved in the slave trade. With factory jobs
exported overseas, spanking new prisons built in predominantly
white communities — filled disproportionately with men of
color from the inner cities — are the new company town.
During the Jim Crow era, a collusion of lawmakers, law enforcement
and industry resulted in the convict lease system. Unjust
and arbitrary laws resulted in incarceration and forced labor
for poor former slaves, and profits for industry. Similarly,
today's special interests favor draconian get-tough-on-crime
drug policies that target and warehouse African Americans
and Latinos. These policies fail to address rehabilitation
and the root causes of society's ills, but fuel the burgeoning
$60 billion a year prison engine.
Meanwhile, Bush's pro-business Supreme Court has made it more difficult
for employees to sue for discrimination, has overturned a
century-old antitrust precedent that barred price-fixing collusion
between manufacturers and retailers, and tossed
out damages awarded to the widow of a smoker, against Philip
Morris. Globalization has meant a downward shift in wages,
outsourcing, poisonous food imports and lead toys from China.
Something
is wrong in the self-described land of opportunity. Although
Americans are the hardest working people on the planet, the
American Dream, it appears, is elusive. As the Pew Charitable
Trusts recently reported, there is far less economic mobility
in the United States than was previously thought. In fact,
America is less economically mobile than many other nations,
including Canada, France, the Scandinavian countries, and
Germany. As
the United States is experiencing the most dramatic shift
in wealth in the nation's history, exacerbated and hastened
by Bush's regressive policies, never have so few owned so
much. And never has an administration manipulated the apparatus
of government to such an extent for its own financial and
political gain.
Median household income
has declined over the past three decades, and the present
generation is worse off than the generation that preceded
it. Between 1972 and 2001, the income of people in the top
1 percent grew by 87 percent. For people at the very top -
the 99.99th percentile - the income gain was 181 percent.
By contrast, the bottom 20 percent grew by only 3 percent.
The top 1 percent of households
owns almost twice as much of the nation's corporate wealth
as they did 15 years ago. Between 1978 and 2005, CEO
pay increased from 35 times an average worker's pay to 262
times, making more in an hour than a worker makes in a month.
Meanwhile, in 2004, 23 million people used food stamps, according
to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 17 million
in 2000.
Perhaps the most troubling and most significant chapter of
the G.O.P. legacy has been the attempt to erase all traces
of the New Deal and the Civil Rights era. Denigrated and dismissed
by conservatives as archaic and part of the bloated welfare
state, the New Deal provided the nation with Social Security,
the Securities and Exchange Commission, relief for the poor
and unemployed, and public works and jobs programs. This represented
government intervention that served to balance the power relationship
among business, labor and agriculture. The New Deal provided
relief, recovery and reform for an economic system run amok.
It saved Americans from capitalism and the effects of an unfettered
and unregulated free market, and saved capitalism from itself.
But nowadays, who will save the people, and democracy, from
capitalism? For all of its lofty democratic rhetoric, the
U.S. is turning into an oligarchy, and the concerns of people
are taking a back seat to the needs of corporations. Surely,
there are higher values than profit for profit's sake, in
a nation that has profited from just about everything, including
human bondage, war and misery. Morality dictates a higher
standard.