JOHN MARONE, KYIV
CRYING IN THE TURKEY
Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, November 27, but they have a lot less to be thankful for during these difficult economic times. Congress has approved a $700 billion bailout for the country to ease its financial constraint, but no one seems to know where the money is going. It hasn’t gone toward helping Americans keep their homes, the value of which has plummeted as banks foreclose on the mortgages. It’s also not going toward the creation of new jobs, which continue to flow to emerging economies in Asia and Latin America, or, alternatively, to illegal aliens willing to work for cheap in the U.S.
In short, the money hasn’t gone to the people who need it most, those who pay taxes and, more importantly, spend all their earnings on consumption.
As a result, stateside retailers aren’t expecting much of a buying spree this holiday season, when consumption traditionally reaches its peak for the year. As personal consumption makes up 70 percent of GDP in America, that’s bad news across the board, and not just at home. Emerging giants such as China have pulled themselves out of the rice paddies of sustenance farming by producing for America and the rest of the West. We Americans enjoyed the low prices of the goods we increasingly bought from abroad, sanguinely sinking into debt to pay for them. U.S. banks and corporate CEOs also enjoyed the spending spree while it lasted. When things went bad earlier this year, the banks and CEOs were the first to hold out their hands to the federal government for loans – although the former can still lend to whomever it pleases and at whatever rates it wants (i.e. not necessarily to hard-up Americans), while the latter continues to seek the cheapest labor available from anywhere.
Of course, the ‘free’ movement of capital, labor, raw material and goods has been going on for some time now. And if the big boys at the banks and multinationals get their way, these essential ingredients of production will continue to be used ‘more efficiently’. But for anyone in the fading ‘first world’ who still believes their economies will evolve into service industries, they might consider that there are only so many positions for financial analysts and investment bankers, and a whole lot more vacancies for janitors, waitresses and security guards.
The middle-class professions, such as medicine, law and engineering, which every American mother wanted her child to join, have already started looking more like assembly lines. And again, these jobs are increasingly being filled by immigrants.
In fact, the middle class in general is dissolving into an amorphous and unconscious vat of proletarians covered by an ever-richer class of elites.
It might be amusing for some, both older-generation Americans and envious foreigners, to entertain the idea that Americans themselves are at fault, victims of their own laziness, stupidity and addiction to junk food and drugs.
However, stuffing one’s face with garbage and getting high are just as often an escape from the hopelessness of economic stagnation. Why sacrifice and struggle for an engineering or medical degree, when the salaries and conditions keep getting lower, and the cost of the education is in the six-figures range?
Even if you are convinced of the softness of American students and workers, you cannot deny that they are working more to afford less of what they continue to buy and consume.
Additionally, the same symptoms of obesity, drug use, indebtedness, etc. have become more and more common in Europe and further a field.
The dissolution of the middle class, which should be defined by things such as home ownership, professional employment guaranteeing some level of autonomy, and (ideally) civic involvement, is on the decline everywhere.
The widely reported growth of a middle-class in places such as India and China is deceptive and often refers to increasing salaries among a relatively small segment of the population in these countries.
This isn’t to deny that more lawyers and financiers are appearing on the horizon in Asia and South America.
It is to say, however, that whatever capital is generated in these countries remains largely in a small group of hands. Don't expect the American dream in Asia.
The world only has so many resources (i.e. living space, clean water, food, etc.) As the third world goes first world, these resources will simply be reallocated to elites across the globe.
The ultimate loser will be the middle class, wherever they may be at the moment. Along with the middle class will decline the status of the nation state, which depends on civic-minded and independent homeowners as the backbone of society. Tomorrow’s elite, regardless of their ethnic origins or nationality, will be as international as the assets they control across the globe.
National boundaries, along with concepts like community and culture, have already been branded as anachronistic impediments if not relics of intolerance.
Groups advocating amnesty for illegal aliens in the US cry racism, as if the right of a country to defend its borders is something cruel and unusual.
Europeans have beat the same drum, making xenophobes out of those who look out for their countrymen’s interests.
Indeed, it’s not the immigrants, but those who profit from them who are the criminals.
By the same token, China has just as much of a right to develop its potential as America did. However, unlike what good liberals were taught, democracy doesn’t always accompany market economies. China, in particular Tiananmen Square, was where the wave of democratic revolutions of the late 80’s and early 90’s stopped. Now another wave of international business unfettered by national law is sweeping across the globe. It keeps its money offshore and overshadows most of the world’s nation states.
It is no more married to America than the English language or pop culture is. The American worker and ordinary citizen can be likened to the wife of an unabashed philanderer, with less and less recourse to a divorce court.
Indeed, Americans today have not much left to be thankful for - much less than 50 years ago, although still admittedly more than the people of many other countries.
This season’s retail recession in America will pass, with store closures and bankruptcies in its wake. But as production, capital and elites become more uniformly distributed across the globe, and ‘efficiency’ reaches its peak, Americans won’t be the only ones crying in their holiday dishes.
John Marone, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, Kyiv, Ukraine
December 1, 2008
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