Death of the American Dream
The American dream is dead, said famed Nobel Prize laureate in Economics Joseph Stiglitz a few days ago. The passing of that dream is seen not only by him, but also by many Americans.
What some forward-thinking social scientists and certain visionaries once predicted —which is not as a prophecy to be fulfilled over the course of centuries, such as the prophecies of Nostradamus— but in the short-term, in the times in which we are now living.
If the idea is still not palpable to millions of those Americans who still live atop the bubble of hedonism and consumerism, it will become more so to the degree that this illusion is inevitably punctured by the heat generated by domestic policies. This also points to the contradiction of a régime that flaunts the well-being of its population and to high consumption as its principal badge of honor.
A system based on voracity and destruction will have no safe harbour, not even for its own people, to continually employ methods that harm people. Not only the war, with its blood-soaked dead and wounded soldiers; or the price of food, which has already become a concern for very low-income people—especially in this era of the ethanol— and other well-known actions are de-legitimizing and tossing the “American dream” overboard.
In a conference last week, Stiglitz said that Americans live worse than they did 30 years ago. There is no doubt about this, as revealed by publications such as the Chicago Tribune that draw on extensive reports showing there are 36.5 million poor people in the United States – and 47 million currently without medical insurance.
The US Office of the Census announced in September that suffering is growing among citizens due to this lack of medical insurance, with another 2.2 million people —among them 700,000 children— added to the list of those lacking this basic service.
The same report indicates that, in 2006, more people worked for more hours to achieve financial balance, and that there was a growth in the number of families with all their members working full time in various jobs.
“It is a moral insult that in the richest nation in the world, one in every ten families lives in poverty and that almost 50 million Americans don’t have medical insurance,” said Democratic Senator Barack Obama recently.
Despite everything, a few days later Bush vetoed a bill that looked to expand medical insurance to millions of children from low-income families; it had called for a $35 billion increase in funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
Nor did the US president support the Energy Assistance Program for Low-Income People, aimed at helping those families to cover their heating expenses, since the current funding level of that program allows aid to only 16 percent of those households that are eligible.
Nonetheless, the emperor requested a staggering figure of close to $200 billion for the war.
Chicago Tribune provided a startling fact: “In 1987, the fifth wealthiest portion of Americans collected 46.2 percent of all income; that figure increased to 50.5 percent in 2006. On the other hand, while the fifth of the population with the lowest income earned only 3.8 percent of all income in 1987, last year this quintile earned only 3.4 percent.”
The Nobel Prize winning economist did not exaggerate in what he said about the American dream, an aspiration realized by a very few and one that has never been enjoyed by the many sleepless, who continue to search for it.
