The Erosion of the American Dream
What has gotten us to this point?
The Erosion of the American Dream
What has gotten us to this point?
If you take a survey of Americans nearly universally they’ll tell you that the country is in decline. The thing that Americans can’t agree upon is the cause of this decline.
Right-wingers will tell you that it’s due to immigrants coming in and “draining the system”, while left-wingers, or what the U.S. has that claims to be such, will tell you that it’s because there aren’t enough taxes being collected on the rich.
I think that right-wingers fail to realize that the U.S. has always relied on a cheap labor force, from its founding. In the earliest days, it relied on slave labor sourced from Africa and indentured servants sourced from Europe to a much lesser degree, as well as immigrant labor from neighboring countries just like it does today.
One way that the U.S. has supplemented this workforce is by keeping the largest prison population in the world, and utilizing taxpayer money to house and feed this current-day slave population…after all the 13th amendment only banned slavery except as a punishment for a crime, so the U.S. figured out ways to fill those prisons with the “war on drugs”. This is essentially the poor, and taxpayers, subsidizing corporations.
When that doesn’t work our lawmakers pass laws to send labor overseas, whether that be Ford factories down to Mexico or call centers over to the Philippines, they make sure that those jobs don’t stay inside the country.
Meanwhile, they cut your salary so you’re desperate for those lower prices that they can source by using sweatshops overseas, after all if those products were being made by union workers domestically the cost would be higher right?
Left-wingers in the U.S., and by that I mean Democrats, not actual left-wingers…think that taxing the ultra-wealthy will fix the problem, and I do think that in theory that could help, except when you see that the U.S. by far the highest military budget of any nation on Earth, more than the next 7 combined, with most of those being U.S. allies…I just don’t think that the government would actually use that money to help things, they’d likely just jack the military budget up even higher and continue to destabilize other nations.
Why do they do this? Because they need enemies to excuse the military budget, and when they send these “aid packages” over to our allies in those nations they then spend the aid money on purchasing weapons and other things from U.S. corporations. This allows a form of money laundering, U.S. taxpayer money into the hands of private corporations who then cut checks to the lawmakers who signed off on the aid bills in the first place.
Once you realize that essentially every member of Congress is on the payroll of various corporations it all makes more sense why nothing gets done that benefits the citizens of the country.
Recently there has been a lot of fighting on the right about H-1B visas, these essentially allow people who have higher degrees to come in and work in the U.S., so programmers for example. These workers can be brought in at a lower wage than a domestic graduate, and then if they want to keep their visa they’re more likely to keep the job rather than rock the boat and jump to another opportunity. Basically, they’re modern-day indentured servants.
Now these sorts of immigrants actually are more likely to take away an American job, rather than the ones working in fields or meat processing that most Americans would never consider taking as a job, especially for the wages that immigrants are paid. But of course, corporations are in favor of this because they get highly educated workers to come in to build out their software platforms and can pay them a fraction of the price and not run the risk of unionizing or anything that may threaten their profit margins.
Let’s not forget that corporations have historically shown us that if they can ever get away with paying their workers absolutely nothing they will. At every turn historically they have chosen to cut safety standards for workers, environmental protections, and compensation.
They essentially are an entity whose only purpose is profit regardless of any moral or ethical implications, and the U.S. chose to give that money demon the same rights as any other voters when “Citizens United” passed.
“The government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity.”-Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
So lobbyists from the pharma and insurance industry make sure that you can’t afford healthcare, which oftentimes ties a person to a less-than-ideal job just to maintain some level of health coverage.
Even if you obtain a health plan from the ACA aka “Obamacare” oftentimes the premiums are high, and the deductibles are astronomical. While this law did help many to obtain some level of coverage it also became an insane transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the health insurance industry with their annual profits soaring over 230% after the passing of the law.
Lobbyists from private schools and lawmakers choosing to cut public funding are some of the largest factors that cause education to be outside the reach of many, which then leaves a vacuum for citizens of nations with publicly funded education to obtain a visa and secure some of these higher paying jobs in the U.S.