Looking for the American Dream
It must be around here somewhere. Doesn’t it strike you as bizarre that America’s leaders always seem to be looking for something that doesn’t exist, that they know doesn’t exist, but they keep looking for anyway, especially when election time rolls around.
Notable examples proliferate but one stands out. Its 2004 and the U.S. has just finished destroying Iraq, a country that posed absolutely no threat to the U.S. and once had the second largest economy in the Arab world. In 2003, claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (it didn’t), the US invaded Iraq, killing over 200,000 Iraqi civilians while displacing 9.2 million. 4,400 American soldiers came home in body bags and 32,000 were wounded many grievously, casualties of a lie that destroyed a country.
Not everyone was horrified by the slaughter and mayhem. In 2004 at a black-tie dinner for the national press corps, President Bush narrated a skit about the fruitless search for WMDs in Iraq (fruitless because there weren’t any). Bush looked behind furniture in the Oval Office — “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.” Looking somewhere else — “No, no weapons over there.” It mercifully ended after several more unfunny scenarios.
You know who thought it was hilarious? The journalists who populate the U.S. mainstream media. Imagine their dismay when they awoke the next morning to find that the entire world deplored and disdained their shocking lack of feeling for the carnage and death of innocents the US had caused. The best they could hope was that they like the WMDs had not been outed by the cameras.
It’s two decades later and the U.S. is on the hunt again — this time looking for the American Dream which a whole slew of politicians and rich folk tell the 99% that’s what they’re living in. In case you didn’t get the memo, the American Dream is an ironclad guarantee that all Americans have the opportunity to succeed and improve their lives.
That’s why we’re looking for it. Despite the fact that the American leadership hierarchy has always been rife with virtual gangsters living in the lap of luxury in their tidy sinecures of big economics (location of corporate looting which has gone since the founding) and big tech, big education, big healthcare (new entries in the gangster capitalism sweepstakes). The American Dream has been fighting for its survival for decades, if not centuries. Over one hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson (he was the one who campaigned on the promise to keep us out of war, then began the presidential tradition of embroiling U.S. soldiers in devastating wars after his election, this time WWI) was dragged, undoubtedly kicking and screaming, to that realization: “The great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly.”
More recently in 2008 when Senator Charles Grassley (fancy that, a Republican) tried to increase taxes on private equity firms (which control $6 trillion in assets) from a measly 15% to a slightly less measly 35%, he was stymied when Blackstone (the world’s largest PE firm) poured $9 million into lobbying congress. No doubt about it, the American Dream is becoming harder to find as politicians get richer.
Let’s ask the 99%. Is the American Dream is working for them? Seems we don’t have a lot of happy campers out there. In a New York Times poll taken right before the election, 45% of Americans said the economy was not working for them. Considering that the average American blue-collar worker is the victim of wage stagnation making virtually the same as a worker made 50 years ago and in the same 50 years $50 trillion dollars changed hands — from the bottom 90% to the top 1% — it’s hardly shocking.
When all else fails, we can count on the future. Can’t we? A new administration headed by what passes for a member of a different party (although speculation abounds that there’s only one party in the U.S. with two wings) Hardly an encouraging sign that the president elect’s cabinet is stuffed with —you guessed it — billionaires. It turns out he, his vice-president, cabinet nominees and his transition team are worth $613 billion. More bad news. America’s 815 billionaires added $280 billion to their already bloated wallets in the week after the election? Whose American Dream is it really?
Wait a minute. I may have found it. Aren’t the politicians, usually on the campaign trail, always telling us that healthcare is a human right? How better to improve your life than to have good healthcare? The state of U.S. healthcare today makes it clear that as usual the U.S. does not practice what it preaches— “The US is failing one of its principal obligations as a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its people…The status quo—continually spending the most and getting the least for our health care dollars—is not sustainable...Too many Americans are living shorter, sicker lives because of this failure.” [Commonwealth Fund] Affordability and availability of medical care, two imperatives of the Dream have gone missing. Maybe that’s why Americans have the shortest life expectancy among wealthy nations. The entire U.S. healthcare system is awash with profiteers who get fabulously wealthy trading on the sickness and suffering of sick Americans. One example should suffice. Nine drug company executives became billionaires during the pandemic as a result of their monopolies on COVID vaccines. Despite a number of eminent virologists crusading for the use of cheaper, possibly more effective remedies, the fix was in and big pharma maintained its hold on pandemic remedies. How life-saving were big pharma’s remedies? Over one million Americans died during the pandemic.
It seems that the American Dream like so much else in America is reserved for the 815 U.S. billionaires and the rest of the 0.1%. For them, healthcare is their American Dream.
In our thus far fruitless search for the American dream, perhaps we should pay attention to U.S. leaders who claim they know where it’s located. The president elect knows or at least he knew in 2016: Trump — “We want the American Dream. We want to own our own home” Gotcha. At last, we found it. No doubt about it, home ownership must be the key to the American dream. But there’s a fly in this particular ointment. The top 1% of the US population owns around 2/3 of the country’s privately held land [US Department of Agriculture] That leaves a puny one-third for the 99%. Not American Dream territory unless you belong to the 1% club.
Looking high and low for the American Dream has yielded no results. Maybe in education? Oops. The US education system compares unfavorably with other wealthy countries, failing to make it it into the top ten highest ranked education systems. Doesn’t sound too dreamlike, does it? Could it be that America’s failure to have a first-class education system stems from a lack of equal access especially for students in the bottom 50% of the population. How do you create an education system which gives all students equal access to excellence in a country that is number in the world for its wealth and income inequality? The simple answer is you don’t.
We may have exhausted the possibilities. Economic access? Nope not there. Healthcare? Definitely not there. Home ownership. You gotta be kidding me. What about the president elect? Will he make a difference? Judging by his cabinet picks —billionaires as far as the eye can see the American Dream is DOA. “They’ve [the president and his cabinet picks] have already announced plans…to further enrich large corporations and wealthy elites…while advocating for cuts to vital programs that working and middle-class Americans depend on.” [David Kass, Americans for Tax Fairness]
Maybe George knows where the American Dream is hiding. Although come to think of it he didn’t have much luck with WMDs.
