Survival is the Name of the Game in the US Today
According to the recent article published by the Foreign Policy that goes under the title – Survival is the new American Dream, young Americans are disillusioned in capitalism. The article presents the results of the Harvard University study, which found out that 51 percent of the people aged between 18 and 29 years are against the capitalist model, while only 42 percent support it. It’s curious that 33 percent say they support socialism.
All the hopes that were attached to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the recent Fight for $ 15 demonstrations (basic minimum hourly wage in the US) have now crumbled. There’s radical change to be seen anywhere, while the standard of living keeps going down.
The Washington Post would quote the words of Zach Lustbader, a senior at Harvard involved in conducting the above mentioned poll:
The word ‘capitalism’ doesn’t mean what it used to. For those who grew up during the Cold War, capitalism meant freedom from the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. For those who grew up more recently, capitalism has meant a financial crisis from which the global economy still has not completely recoveredAmerican work life has become so corrupt, and the pursuit of basic stability so insurmountable, that modest ambitions – a salary that covers your bills, the ability to own a home or go to college without enormous debt – are now fantasies or luxuries.
Against this background, Gallup has been observing a sharp decline in patriotic moods among Americans. According to sociologists, the steadily declining patriotism associated with general dissatisfaction the way things are going in the US, since January 2004 was the last when satisfaction has been at the majority level, and the percentage of those satisfied has been mostly below 30 percent ever since 2007. It’s no wonder that the least patriotic demographic group in the American society today is the young people aged between 18-29 years.
The negative attitude of the US population towards the White House policies can also be explained by the staggering amount of debts that American families have to face. According to the report prepared by the Nerd Wallet, an average American family owes more than 90 thousand dollars to banks. Combined with low paying jobs and the rapidly growing goods prices and that would show the scale of the disaster, notes the report prepared by Investopedia.
However, as numerous analysts have noted, the growing poverty of common Americans and the staggering disparity between the rich and the poor has never been mentioned by the Democratic presidential candidates, as noted by many US analysts. Moreover, as it has been pointed out by The New York Post, Hillary Clinton gave her speech on income inequality dressed Giorgio Armani tweed jacket that are sold for 12 thousand dollars per piece. Clinton, who loves to say that she left the White House “dead broke,” is now dressing the part of someone who can spend over 325 thousand dollars on a single speech. Factoring in the designer labels she’s wearing, she’s likely spent at least 200,000 on new clothes to wear on the campaign trail.
The Economic Collapse blog notes that the economic situation of common Americans has hit the rock bottom, since 102.1 million working age Americans cannot find a job right now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that the number of Americans “not in the labor force” increased by 664,000 from April to May.
The World Socialist Web Site would note:
Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level. Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts of 20-40 percent poverty.
According to the 2014 Census 14.5 percent of Americans, or over 45 million people, live in poverty, up from 11.3 percent in 2000. Child poverty is especially troubling, with an estimated 16 million Americans under the age of 18 living below the poverty line. Americans are literally a million times more likely to live in poverty than to have been killed by “jihadi terror”. The average American is more likely to be killed by home furniture than a terrorist.
Against this background, Forbes notes that there’s an abnormal growth in the number of suicide cases in the US these days. From 1999 to 2014 the age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States went up by 24%.
Sooner or later, the US society that is going through a deep will begin begin to crumble, American analysts say. That is why today we can witness anger assaults, dissatisfaction and desperation, violence and civil unrest slowly crawling across the American soils, often manifested in the use of firearms against civilians and law enforcement officers.
This is the unfortunate result of the modern day “American democracy” that Washington is trying to impose upon the rest of the world through the use of propaganda and military interventions.
Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
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