The Wages of Sin in the USA: the consequences of non-collective mindsets, of yielding to short-term competitive pressures, of absentee governance, and of a captive political class
As a domiciled USAn, residing, studying and working in the country for over half a century, watching this short but telling video hurts.
Setting that hurt aside, however, I recall being perplexed and worried, even in the 1980s and 1990s, as the US establishments—within both the private sector and government, seemed to be focused on short-term profits and fixes, and not on the longer-term good of the people of this country, let alone of others.
From the 1990s onwards, we saw the outflow of US manufacturing jobs to countries with lower costs of production, with large US corporations leading the charge.
Little or no thought was given to maintaining a manufacturing base for essentials here, so as to preserve basic national self-reliance, ensure security, and protect workers, including with training to help them adapt to a changing manufacturing world.
Surely, the government, as well as consortiums of corporations, should have had a role in this, as individual corporations are often caught in competitive races, with cost of production, including the cost of labor, being a very important consideration, as is share price value.
The focus on stock price values, projected changes in which helped determine the inflows and outflows of investments in a corporation, seemed indeed to drive much of the decisions of business executives, with longer term considerations being set aside for shorter term ones.
Soon enough, remote service jobs began to move abroad as well, and that trend has continued and accelerated ever since.
Corporate takeovers and mass firings of employees to boost shareholder values, and other such profit-taking actions added to the mayhem. Job stability and pensions came to regarded as liabilities by private corporations and were basically done away with.
Within the USA, outsourcing, automation and competition with immigrant labor added to the pressures on workers. The rise of the Internet marketers, led by Amazon, dealt a series of blows to retail businesses with physical stores and to their sales- and other employees.
Free trade agreements such as those concluded, through NAFTA, with Mexico and Canada, and then with the Pacific rim countries, unconstrained by input from workers' organizations and even from legislators here and abroad, added to the outflow of jobs, as had been predicted, for instance, by the self-financed, billionaire presidential candidate, Ross Perot.
This was largely ignored by both the Republican and Democratic establishments. Obama even sided with the Republicans and against the majority of Democrats in Congress in trying to push through free trade agreements with China and other countries that were predicted to hurt workers here and did.
Both the Republican and Democratic establishments continued to focus on and celebrate economic booms that mainly benefited only certain sections of workers as well as those with surplus income that they were able to invest wisely.
These booms also greatly benefited, of course, the ever more wealthy and powerful oligarchs who exert great influence over both the major political parties here and so also largely determine or strongly constrain legislative and executive actions at federal, state, and municipal levels, over time also affecting the composition of the judiciary.
The alliances between the Zionist lobby, very affluent corporate and individual donors, the war hawks in the two parties and in the military, and the arms manufacturers and marketers led the USA into multiple regime-change operations abroad, including through coups, covert operations and overt military assaults.
In retrospect, one sees more clearly the influence of AIPAC and its allies in the involvement of the US in multiple highly destructive wars and other destabilizing actions in West Asia and North Africa.
All of this involved massive military and other expenditures, even as Republicans, especially, but also corporate Democrats like Andrew Cuomo waged what one sees, again in retrospect, as austerity campaigns within the USA, at all levels.
These put increasingly hard squeezes on many workers and those with limited means, with what remained of the labor unions increasingly coopted and crippled.
Moving to more current times, the economic pain and anxiety inflicted on large segments of the US working classes manifested themselves not only in things like rising suicide rates and the lethal opioid epidemic, but also in resentment against the increasingly affluent elites that had benefited from what was effectively a massive “upward” transfer of wealth withiIn the USA.
This transfer began in earnest during the 1980s, in the Reagan years, and has continued through subsequent administrations, both Republican and Democratic, accelerating more in the Republican ones.
Rising awareness and resentment of this led to the Occupy Wall Street movement, the identification of the role of the “1%”, and subsequently to the rise of populist movements within both the major parties.
The movement within the Democratic party was genuinely social-democratic and inclusive, led by Bernie Sanders in his Democratic-primary challenge to Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the 2016 general election.
The corresponding movement within the Republican Party was strongly nativist, capitalist, and reactionary in the dictionary sense, coalescing around Donald Trump.
I began to notice and be startled that many working-class residents of New York City, including long-term Democratic voters, were moving towards supporting Donald Trump, and that they did in fact vote for him.
Some had supported Bernie Sanders but could not stomach Hillary Clinton, with her very close ties to the Wall Streeters, her support for and even active involvement in wars of aggression abroad, etc.
She had also been subject to many smears from the Republican propaganda machines during and after Bill Clinton’s two terms. Some of these smears have stuck.
Unfortunately, many Democratic politicians, with exceptions such as Zohran Mamdani, remain blind and deaf, as it were, to some of the genuine concerns of many USAns whom they lump together as MAGA morons.
I noticed this recently in the clever but arrogant comments made by Mehdi Hassan in an encounter with mainly MAGA folk, including many young people.
He repeatedly dismissed their economic concerns and their worries about competition from new immigrants for scarce good-paying jobs.
In one case, he noted that the GDP and employment had been rising during the Biden years and that he himself, a recent US immigrant, had founded a company and had hired workers here in the USA.
It is noteworthy that Bernie Sanders has been getting record crowds at his rallies, including in "Red" (Republican) areas.
One can be against blind, callous nativism, the hero-worship of a narcissistic, bullying clown, and other such problematic developments.
There is also no doubt that newer immigrants have long helped to power, in multiple ways, the economy of the USA, in addition to providing many essential services.
One should still be careful not to be blind and deaf oneself to genuine human concerns.
The Democratic establishment has not even come to grips yet with our deep complicity in the daily, deliberate, systematic slaughter of trapped, defenseless civilians, mainly women and children, in Palestine and adjacent areas, ongoing now for almost two years.
Here again, they have lost touch with much of their own electoral base.
2025 Sep 4., Thu.
Berkeley, California
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