Beacon To The World

Those who think the super-rich are smarter than the rest of us might want to take a look at the foreignpolicy speeches given in the millionaire-laden United States Senate recently. In one thick headed orationafter another, the pro-war majority of the nation’s "elite" legislative chamber gave some remarkablydippy reasons for authorizing the daft George W. Bush to attack Iraq. Against all the evidence and commonsense, they claimed that Saddam Hussein is a serious threat to the US, that Hussein can no longer be deterredexcept by pre-emptive U.S. military action, and that there is a serious link between the Iraqi dictator andextremist Islamic terror networks.

Few of the "elite" legislators surpassed Texas’ Kay Bailey Hutchinson, however, for sheer Senatorialstupidity. At the end of a 5-minute oration that repeated many of her colleague’s inanities regarding Iraqand the War on Terrorism, Hutchinson came to her version of a political and intellectual climax. "Mr.President," she announced, in words repeated on her official web-site, "we are going to meet this test ofour generation. We are going to protect the freedom and the way of life that the beacon to the world of theway life should be. We can do no less."

Say what? Yes that second sentence, if that’s what it deserves to be called, needs to be read at leasttwice. Welcome to the oratorical statecraft of Texas, home to Bush-onics, perfected by that notorious serialkiller of spoken language George Junior. To cringe at hundreds of statements that rival and even go beyondHutchinson’s, see Marc Crispin Miller’s marvelous book The Bush Dyslexicon: Reflections on a NationalDisorder (2002), recently updated to include numerous examples of Bush’s post-911 podium wizardry.

Syntax aside, the deeper horror is Hutchinson’s narcissistic belief, shared by the President and most ofHutchinson’s Congressional colleagues, that America is the embodiment of human existence at its very best.As any good American historian knows, her statement mangles a deeply rooted American faith that America is aGod-ordained City on a Hill, one that "stands taller and sees farther" (as the more grammatically correctMadeline Albright put it years ago) than the rest of the world. It is consistent with the more carefullyconstructed declarations of many past American rulers of greater intellectual and oratorical capacity thanHutchinson (e.g., John Winthrop, James Madison, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, to name afew). It expresses a central part of the world-view of American policymakers and, no doubt, a considerablenumber of more ordinary Americans.

As such it deserves to be taken with the utmost seriousness. Consider, then, the following not-so shiningfacts of life in the nation that, according to Hutchinson, shows the world "the way life should be":

The US is by far the most unequal of all industrialized societies, with the richest 10 percent of thepopulation owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth and the richest 5 percent of familiesreceiving as much income as the bottom 50 percent.

These numbers are prior to George W. Bush’s tax cut, which gives the top 1 percent of taxpayers nearly 40percent of a tax reduction that will cost the US Treasury at least $1.8 trillion.

In 2000, at the peak of the heralded Clinton economic "boom," 11 million households (10.5 percent ofall US households) were food insecure; black and Hispanic households had hunger and food insecurity ratesthree times greater than those of whites.

More than 12 million or 17 percent of US children live in poverty, including more than 4 million under theage of six and the US child poverty rate is substantially higher than that of other industrialized nations.

More than one in three US children live in or near poverty and more than 8 million people, including 3million children live in homes that frequently skip meals or eat too little

America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s leading network of food banks, reports that 23 million Americansrelied on their agencies in 2001; 40 percent of those came from working families.

One in eight US households has recently reduced the quality of their diet to utilize financial resources inother essential areas (rent, day care, clothing, medical care, transportation and utilities).

As much as 20 percent of America’s food goes to waste annually, enough to feed 49 million people, equalto more than twice the number of people in the world who die of starvation each year.

Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion per year on pet food, $4 billion more than the annual cost ofproviding universal health care and nutrition for everyone in the world.

40 million or 16 percent of Americans, including million children, lack health insurance.

Nearly eight of every ten US adults (79 percent) think that their health care system requires eitherfundamental reform (51 percent) or complete rebuilding (28 percent) and half of US adults with below averageincome report they did not see a dentist in the last year because of the expense.

American have the longest working hours and commuting times in the industrial world, exacerbatingwidespread job dissatisfaction and further degrading capacities for civic engagement that are already gravelychallenged by corporate media and the wildly disproportionate political and ideological influence exercise bythe wealthy owners and managers of giant corporations.

Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population contributes more than of 80 percent of all money in federalelections in amounts of $200 or more. The vast majority of such wealthy contributors are wealthy white menwith annual family incomes higher than $100,000.

The winners of the political finance race (the "wealth primary" in the words of American campaignfinance reformers) win 92 percent of the races for the US House of Representatives and 88 percent of the racesfor the US Senate.

African-Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as whites. To attain equal employment in the U.S.between blacks and whites, 700,000 more African-Americans would have to be moved out of unemployment andnearly two million African-Americans would have to be promoted into higher paying positions.

The poverty rate for blacks in the US is more than twice the poverty rate for whites.

Nearly one out of every two blacks in America earns less than $25,000 but one in three American whitesmakes that little.

Median black household income ($27,000) is less than two thirds of median white household income ($42,000)in the U.S.

Black families’ median household net worth in the U.S. is less than 10 percent that of white families.The average white household has a net worth of $84,000 but the average black household is worth only $7,500.

While white men make up 43 percent of America’s Fortune 2000 workforce, they hold 95 percent of theFortune 2000 senior management jobs.

The U.S., the nation that proclaims itself the homeland and headquarters of world freedom, comprises 5percent of the world’s population but houses roughly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

The rate of incarceration in the US is 699 per 100,000, up from roughly 100 per 100,000 in 1970. The nexthighest rate in the world is Russia at 644 and the American rate is six times higher than those of Britain,Canada, or France.

Blacks are 12.3 percent of US population, but they comprise roughly half of the roughly 2 million Americanscurrently behind bars. On any given day, 30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to 29 are undercorrectional supervision – either in jail or prison or on probation or parole.

Between 1980 and 2000, the number of black men in jail or prison grew fivefold (500 percent), to the pointwhere there were more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the US.

While blacks and whites in the U.S. are victims of murder in almost equal numbers, 82 percent of prisonersexecuted since 1977 were convicted for the murder of a white person.

Only China, Saudi Arabia and Iran execute more prisoners than the U.S. and the U.S. has highest known deathrow population in the world.

American schools and communities are so racially segregated that the average American black child’sschool is 57 percent black even though blacks make up just 12 percent of the nation’s population.

A typical African-American individual lives in a neighborhood that is only 33 percent white and more than50 percent black.

There are 10 to 15 million alcoholics or problem drinkers in the US and more than 100,000 American deathseach year are attributed to alcohol. Drunk driving kills 8,000 Americans each year

More than 60 million Americans smoke cigarettes, thereby drastically expanding their incidence of cancer,coronary heart disease, chronic bronchitis and emphysema and other deadly ailments.

The United States has the highest substance abuse rate of any industrialized nation.

Each year, roughly 300,000 US adults dies of causes attributable to obesity. The American obesity rate is19 percent, the highest in the world.

40 percent of American adults do not participate in any leisure time or physical activity.

The average American watches 3 hours and 46 minutes of television each day (the equivalent of 52 days ofnonstop TV-viewing per year). By age 65, the average American will have spent the equivalent of 9 yearswatching television

American children spend considerably more time each year watching television (1,500 hours) than they do inthe classroom (900 hours)

The typical U.S. citizen is exposed to between 50 and 100 advertisements each morning before 9 AM.

Nine corporations own more than 50 percent of all American media (including both print and electronic),exercising a degree of concentrated private influence over public information, imagery, and consciousness thatis without historical precedent.

Sixty percent of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.

Every year, 40,000 Americans, including 7,000 teenagers die in automobile accidents.

In 1999, there were 28,784 gun-related deaths in the U.S. – over 80 such fatalities each day. Fifty-eightpercent of these deaths were suicides and 38 percent were homicides.

Firearms killed 3,365 children and teens age 19 and under in 1999. Of these, 1,990 were murdered, 1,078committed suicide, and 214 were victims of accidental shootings.

The U.S. gun industry produced 85,644,715 firearms, including more than 39 million handguns, from 1977 to1996.

In 1997, 6,416 young people 15-24 years old were murdered and 6 percent of students reported carrying afirearm at least once in the previous 30 days.

Children’s television programming contains more than 26 violent acts per hour and by the time the averageAmerican child leaves elementary school he or she will have witnessed at least 8,000 murders and 100,000 otherassorted acts of violence on television.

Almost two-thirds of children 7 to 10 years old in the U.S. are afraid that they might die young.

Domestic violence is the single greatest cause of injury to women in the U.S. and each day four Americanwomen are murdered by a relative or a partner.

Four in 10 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 in the U.S. report that they or a friend their age has beenphysically abused by a boyfriend.

More than 40 percent of U.S. rivers, lakes and estuaries are too polluted for safe fishing or swimming andindustry was allowed to legally dump more than 260 million tons of toxic chemicals directly into Americanwaters in 2000.

Each year, an estimated 18 million Americans suffer from depression and more than half of these people havemajor or clinical depression. Women experience depression at twice the rate of men in the U.S.

Suicide took the lives of 29,350 Americans in 2000 and suicide was the 11th highest cause of death for allAmericans and the 3rd highest cause for 10-14 year olds, 15-19 year olds, and 20-24 year olds.

After all this, it seems only fitting to add that:

In 1999, just 6 percent of respondents to the U.S. Gallup poll reported having confidence in the U.S.Congress

The list of societal failures in the US goes on but this is enough, I think, to suggest that Hutchinson andher comrades in Marie-Antoinette-like Senatorial comfort are in no legitimate position to make decisions oflife and death significance for the masses of the Middle East or anywhere else. What does it say about theirplans for the rest of the world when they view a society with such grave internal problems as the "beacon tothe world of the way life should be?"

But then, as radicals have long argued, such deep domestic contradictions and the domestic power structure’sdesire to escape their dangerous consequences are precisely the point. They are the "taproot," in theearly 20-century British writer J.A. Hobson’s excellent word-choice, of the modern imperialism in which Bushis now so gloriously engaged under the guise of defending the chosen land from terrorism.

That imperialism made the 20th century one of murderous mass warfare. It promises now to widen the riversof blood for at least another hundred years, including now more than a few victims within the leading imperialstate. And so perhaps it will unless and until the people of America redefine "the way life should be" byun-doing the illegitimate power structures that create so much poverty, misery, violence and sheer stupidityat home and abroad.

Paul Street is an urban social policy researcher and freelance writer in Chicago, Illinois.