[YEAREND BAILOUT] Naziism's rise
December 26, 2010 |
The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.
The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured;132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.
Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media. On the Tea Parties:
Full of Hatred: "The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn't quite know what he wants to be -- maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher -- and he doesn't know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn't come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred."
The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.
Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)
Jobless Benefits That Never Run Out
Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.
In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.
In another piece the Spiegel magazine steps away from statistics and tells the story of Pam Brown, who personifies what is coming to be known as the Nouveau American poor. Pam Brown was a former executive assistant on Wall Street, and her shocking decline has become part of the American story: American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight. The crisis caught her unprepared.
"It was horrible," Pam Brown remembers. "Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed." Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That's all she orders -- it's too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she's long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx.
It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.
For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.
Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.
Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac
A shocking headline from a Swiss newspaper reads (Berner Zeitung) “Hunger in the Land of the Big Mac.” Though the article is in German, the pictures are worth 1,000 words and need no translation. Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized.
Two mothers collecting food boxes from the charity Feed the Children.
Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don't have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?
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Response from a reader:
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Now you know why I understand the lure – and wisdom -- of socialism. Few things frustrate me as much as the average American’s anathema towards spending enough of our income to strengthen our social safety net. We have never learned – nor do we want to accept the idea – that we are no stronger than our weakest link, that link being anyone of us who has “fallen through the cracks.” We refuse to accept the moral responsibility for our fellow citizens, preferring to blame the unfortunate for laziness or shiftlessness or failure to plan properly for his/her welfare.
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Yes, those things occur but the average person prefers to hold his/her head up as a productive member of society. Sometimes no matter how motivated a person is, bad things beyond our control happen. Those of us secure in our own little world fail to see or accept this. For a nation that calls itself “Christian,” we have failed to learn one of the things that Christ spoke of repeatedly – treating our neighbor as ourselves.
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We think of ourselves as a generous nation – witness the Marshall Plan for Europe after WWII or our willingness to donate to the Red Cross when the latest disaster strikes. Yet we shriek like mad at the prospect of shelling out enough of our income to provide universal health care or unemployment benefits that do not expire. In this we are a “band-aid” people.
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We are unwilling to see the USA as it truly is, where corporate prosperity and capitalism run amok are never-ending threats to democracy. Our tendency to allow the wealthiest among us to become even wealthier has happened again and again in our history, yet most of us know so little about our history that we do not recognize this fact, or we are too dishonest to admit it and work to change it.
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We need look no further than both Roosevelts – bluebloods if ever there ever was one -- yet both showed great concern for the most unfortunate among us. Somehow or other, we’ve got to accept the idea that a strong federal government is better by far than the piecemeal social care we practice.
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Rampant nationalism in Europe is one of its ongoing and biggest problems, and its major threat to European unity. But the EU’s “social contract” with its citizens puts ours to shame.
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I don’t know about you – and I’ve never breathed this to a living soul – but when I see the mess this country is in, I am thankful that my remaining time on earth is short. I’m not sure I could stand the agony of seeing the country I have loved life-long come apart at the seams. Yet this is exactly what will happen if we do not get our act together.
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