Evert Cilliers on USA

If Trump represents the worst of us, does that mean we're totally F'd? Evert Cilliers, 3QD. Aug. 21, 2017.

America voted for Donald Trump.  

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What does that say about us? 

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Let's run it down. 

1. All the ways the USA is bad 

Welcome to America, the real one we think we're not, but we actually are. Look in the mirror, Americans. See who lives here on our continent. 

Here lives the only nation on earth born from two crimes against humanity: the dispossession and genocide of the original native Americans, and the harvesting of African people to serve as slaves of a brutal white race. 

Here lives a nation so savage, they turned upon each other in the deadliest civil war in human history, in which one out of ten men of military age became very dead. 

Here more people die from gunfire than anywhere else on earth. 

Here lives a quarter of all prisoners on earth, even though America represents only a twentieth of the world's population. 

Here you can torture people -- even unto death -- and get away with it. 

Here animals suffer more cruelty than anywhere else on our planet, in factory farms that stick cattle and pigs and chickens in confined stalls where they cannot move, walk or run for their entire lives, eating and shitting where they stand, till the day they're slaughtered. 

Here you can be a war criminal and still get on TV to plead your case. 

Here you can wreck the economy with fraudulent derivatives, causing a hundred million folks all over the world to lose their jobs, and get bailed out for your criminal activities by the folks you ruined, without fear of prosecution. 

Here lives the wealthiest family on earth, who own more than the bottom 40% of Americans, who are the biggest employers in America, and who don't pay their employees enough to eat, so their workers have to go on public assistance for food stamps, costing taxpayers $6.2 billion a year. The Waltons of Walmart, happily mooching off taxpayers for their profits. 

Such is the chasm between the 1% and the 99% in America, the most unequal of all the developed countries. 

Here rich people pay 13% of their income in taxes while people who are not rich pay 35%. 

Here, in the richest country on earth, one in five children go hungry. 

Here women work in the only industrialized country that doesn't have paid maternity leave: their country doesn't value motherhood. 

Here more than 70% of Americans aren't confident that their children's generation will do better than them – poof! there goes the American dream. Today middle-class families in America are worth less than they were in 1969. 

Here, with a nation at peace, and on a continent that will never be invaded, more money gets spent on war-making capability than the rest of the world does together. 

Here the nation's leaders call our frequent killing of foreign women and children, in some place that represents no threat to America, "defending our freedom." 

Here the entire country threw themselves with great enthusiasm into a barbaric war crime, when they killed between a half-million and a million Iraqis because the leader of that country signed oil deals with Russian, French, Italian, Spanish, Indian and Chinese companies instead of American oil companies, a snub that our leaders, both from the oil state of Texas, could not abide. 

We have spread far more terror, and killed many more humans, than all the terrorists in the world since the dawn of violence. 

Here is a list of countries attacked by America since the end of WW2: Philippines, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Panama, Belgian Congo, Dominican Republic, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, El Salvador, Oman, Chile, Angola, Bolivia, Virgin Islands, Haiti, Macedonia, Yemen, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Syria. 

All within easy reach of our more than 800 military bases all over the world. 

What silent village, in some faraway land, is waiting for the next plane or drone to interrupt its sleep with American bombs? 

How long will America keep on being the bad guy? How long will we continue our history of primitive savagery? 

Not long, thank God. At this point in time, after Obama made the world love us, under Trump, the world is finally getting tired of our shit. Angela Merkel, at this point the real leader of the Western world, has said that the world now cannot rely on America anymore, and that Europe, the last bastion of Western values, has to go its own way. 

Thank God, America is not the leader of the world anymore. Our new leaders now are Germany and China, and at least Germany is a good leader, who gives it workers representations on their company boards, and China is a good leader because it leads the world in its investment in renewable energy and will help fight climate change, which we've given up on. 

America has now decided that they don't want any part in its foreign policy of spreading democratic values across the globe. At least that is not hypocritical: we long ago stopped being a democracy ourselves, and since the Citizen United decision, have finally become a plutocracy, an oligarchy, a country in which most laws favor the 1%, with a lousy welfare net compared to that prevailing in Europe. 

2. All the ways the USA is a kleptocracy 

We are a country which does not do the first thing a democracy has to do: to stop the rich from stealing everything. They are stealing everything, because we are actually worse than a plutocracy: we are a straight-out kleptocracy. We are a nation in which Goldman Sachs openly pays Hillary Clinton $250,000 dollars for a 40-minute speech. That's plutocracy, my friends. 

Take wage stagnation. Our wages are what they were in 1970. Stuck in the remote past. Yet worker productivity has sky-rocketed since then. The average household income of Americans today is around $50,000 a year. However, if we were paid for how much more productive we have become, the average household income today would have been $92,000. Imagine what a thriving economy we'd have today if that were our median household income. Where did that extra $40,000 a year go that we should have been earning for our improved productivity? To the top 1%. To CEOs, who used to make maybe 20 times what an average worker makes, and now make between 300 to 500 times that. 

Neoliberalism means shifting the tax burden from corporations to individuals. After WW2, for every dollar that individuals paid in taxes, corporations paid $1.50. Today it's 25 cents. Corporations used to pay more taxes than people, but now people pay more taxes than corporations. Goldman Sachs often pays less than 2% in taxes, and GE often nothing. Us hard-working regular folks (Romney's notorious 47%) are not the takers who mooch off the government tit -- our big corporations are. So are our 1%. Since 1997 the 400 richest Americans have more than tripled their average annual income to $345m, while their taxes have gone down by 40%. A billionaire like Romney pays 13% in taxes, far less than you and I.

And take Wall Street. Its job used to be to lend money to businesses — to start businesses, to expand businesses, to fuel business. Now only 15% of its money goes to funding businesses with productive lending (that's why startups — which is how new jobs get created — have declined by 44% from 1978 to 2012). Wall Street uses the other 85% to make money for itself from debt-fueled speculation. Financialization: the corroding worm inside the apple of neoliberal capitalism. 

Remember that old anti-Semite, Ford. He paid his workers double the going rate, to the horror of his fellow moguls, so they could afford to buy the cars we made. That's what I call a Ford economy, where the bosses pay their workers a fair wage. But today we have a Walmart economy, as I've explained. 

We are fucked, and Trump has done us the greatest favor: shown us the image of what we are. 

America is Trump. 

We are not Bernie Sanders. 

But then, there is a sliver of hope. 80% of young people felt the Bern, and was part of his burgeoning revolution.

So that's our hope, that our children are not like us, and may finally turn America into a democracy, give our capitalism a human face. A majority of our youth think more highly of socialism than capitalism. 

That, my fellow Americans, is our only hope.