Americans Live in a Failed State

If we want to survive as a country, we all need to do our part to destroy the systems that oppress and build a better country that serves all of us

I’m just going to get right to it: the American Experiment has failed. The Atlantic published a great article outlining some of the reasons that COVID-19 has exposed how the system has failed most of us, and I encourage you to go read that. I don’t plan on mincing words or putting too much fluff here, so I’ll get right to it.

From my perspective, there’s a lot of reasons why we’ve failed as a country — too many to get into with any kind of depth, so I will do my best to keep each section concise.

1. Healthcare is not a human right

Simply put, health insurance exists. This leads to a whole class of people who do not have health insurance and another class who are underinsured. In 2018, 27.5 million Americans had no health insurance. This is unacceptable.

Even for those who do have insurance, the cost of healthcare is much higher in America than elsewhere, leading to incredibly high medical bills. Over 137 million Americans deal with health-related debt. This often leads them to draw down their retirement plans early, take out loans and credit card debt to cover it, or, in the worst case, file for bankruptcy.

As it stands, if I get cancer and my odds are 50/50 or lower, my best bet to not cripple my wife’s chances without me is to get my affairs in order and put a bullet in my brain. The alternative is to subject my wife to bankruptcy to treat my illness that may or may not pay off. Even if I survive the cancer treatment, my finances and life will likely be ruined, even with my insurance.

This is becoming stark during the COVID crisis. People who wind up in the hospital with COVID-19 often wind up with crushing hospital bills. Considering that, as of writing, we’re approaching 2 million nationwide cases, that is a lot of people who will suddenly find themselves with massive bills to pay, all for having the gall to catch a virus.

Healthcare should be a human right afforded to all Americans and covered by a universal single-payer system. I am tired of hearing people say they don’t want to pay for healthcare for someone who “didn’t earn it.” You don’t have to earn the right to be healthy and maintain good health. It is not a prize for being a good citizen, it is a basic human right. If you disagree, I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.

It is the responsibility of those with more to care for those with less, period. We live in a society where we depend on each other, and the objections of those with more resources that they don’t want to use some of those resources to help those less fortunate ring hollow to many of us. When you have more money than you could spend in a lifetime, why hoard it?

2. Billionaires exist

Jeff Bezos has over $100 billion, and it’s been speculated that he will become the first trillionaire. Nobody needs that much money. It is literally more than he could spend in a lifetime. The sheer scale of $1 billion is absurd, and when you multiply it by more than 100, it’s a thought exercise that is mind-boggling, to say the least.

There are numerous examples of what billions of dollars can buy. Here’s one for $1 billion. Here’s another for $100 billion that has both fun and serious purchases (live-action Battleship between two real fleets or 757,000 students through college, take your pick). Here’s a fun one from Tumblr (take with a grain of salt) that goes through a whole bunch of mind-boggling figures, both crazy-billionaire-stuff, and real-world-impact stuff.

Many of the modern billionaires made their money by starting businesses and riding the stock market windfall when those businesses went public. We’re talking Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the aforementioned Jeff Bezos. They built successful companies that changed the world, so haven’t they earned their money?

Sure, I guess, but what will they do with it, except use it to make more money? Billionaires like to buy sports teams and start new businesses without worrying if they’ll fail, but when Mr. Bezos can end world hunger and still have upwards of $100 billion, I have to question whether anyone really needs $100 billion, or even $1 billion.

As a typical worker, I expect that in my lifetime, I’ll earn maybe $10 million if I’m lucky. Does anyone really need 100 times my lifetime earnings just sitting in the bank (or stock market, or bonds, or real estate, pick your asset)? What good are they doing with their money? Sure, the Giving Pledge exists, but there’s no guarantee that the money will make it to charity, and there’s no guarantee thereafter that the money will be used to help the greater good.

We need to build a government structure where millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes to help the common good. We put too much stock in rich people to “create jobs,” and we give them massive tax breaks that they only use to enrich themselves as a result. The marginal tax rate on rich people has been much higher in the past, and it’s higher in other countries where billionaires do just fine. It needs to return here.

3. Trickle-down economics has failed

I’ll keep this section short, since I covered a lot of this above, but we have built our economic system around giving money to rich people to “create jobs.” Those in power are conveniently ignoring the fact that the jobs being created are often low-quality, low-wage, and have no benefits. Workers are treated as disposable, hours are reduced to prevent companies from having to pay benefits, and wages are low both by law and by market forces.

The minimum wage needs to go up. Numerous reports talk about how hard it is to survive on the minimum wage. Here’s one for reading. Here’s another article discussing the minimum wage in the U.S. It is mentioned that the minimum wage is meant to be a living wage, and it currently is absolutely not. This needs to change.

The premise that giving businesses tax cuts as an incentive to create jobs has proven wrong. Companies enrich themselves while offering low-wage, low-quality employment to the detriment of the majority of Americans. Even when companies like Target voluntarily raise their wages, workers suffer in other ways, such as through cuts in hours. Every change is designed to serve the company first.

4. Shareholders should not come first

Most big companies work on the premise that what’s good for the shareholders is good for everyone else. This, by and large, has led to many of the conditions described above. Keep worker wages low and benefit loads down so we can report good quarterly profits. Appease the shareholders.

The shareholders, as a group, are mostly the wealthiest people in the U.S. The richest 1% of Americans own 56% of stocks. The top 10% owns 84%. The money in your 401(k) or IRA doesn’t have anything on a hedge fund manager or investment banker.

This has led to a lopsided recovery from the Great Recession. The stock market has soared to record levels in the past 10 years before the COVID crisis, but that benefit was reaped by the aforementioned shareholders. In that same period, the minimum wage has stayed the same even as inflation has driven costs up. The wealthiest 20% have dominated the recovery, while most of the rest of us are treading water if we’re lucky or drowning if we’re not.

People often defend this system as part of the American Dream. Work hard and you, too, might land in that top 20%, or even the 1% if you’re lucky. Statistically, you won’t be lucky. Even a life’s worth of hard work may land you the privilege of working part-time in retirement to pay the bills.

Americans, however, often have a unique trust in businesses to do what’s right. “We need to run the country like a business” is a common refrain among a certain group. The thing is, most businesses only benefit those at the top by design.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a lot of trust in the government right now, but I trust businesses even less. In my mind, the government is of the people, by the people, for the people, while businesses are of the people, by the C-suite, for the shareholders. The government is at least supposed to have my best interests at heart. Businesses, if they are operating properly, have no such promise.

5. The government has failed us

With the current administration, I have next to no trust in the government. The president is a proven serial liar who wields corruption like he wields Twitter: as often as possible. He and his cronies have spent a lot of time dismantling the things that keep this country together, stoke partisan divides, and work constantly to drive a wedge between Trumpettes and everyone else. Trump is not the President of the United States; he’s President of the Trump Fan Club, and everyone else can die in a fire for all he cares.

When given the opportunity to lead the country through the COVID crisis, something that should unite us, he instead uses it as an opportunity to make political attacks. He’s doing a great job, and if you disagree you’re an un-American partisan hack.

He has pushed through laws and reforms that benefit the upper class while hurting the poor and minorities. He stokes racial tensions at every opportunity. He has no regard for the office he holds, nor the people he governs. He engages in nepotism and self-dealing.

The impeachment played out as everyone expected it to, with no repercussions and nothing decided. You either agreed with the result or you didn’t, and there was little in-between. The wedge was driven a bit deeper, and life went on.

Those close to Trump have also worked to destroy the agencies they’re in charge of. A climate change denier was put in charge of the EPA. Someone with no experience in housing policy was put in charge of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. People were assigned to jobs they had no qualifications for.

The Justice Department has been stripped of any teeth it may have had by its masters in the administration. Instead of pursuing justice, it is used as a bludgeon by the administration to get what it wants. Corrupt law enforcement is ignored, as long as the corruption is directed at the right people. There is no support for the rule of law anymore.

6. The police are untrustworthy at best and racist at worst

Innocent, unarmed black people are dying at the hands of cops at alarming rates. It is being captured on camera and broadcast on the news, and yet little happens to the cops until there is an outcry. Even then, police often go unpunished due to a system of laws that makes them more or less immune to prosecution. Those that make it to trial are rarely found guilty.

There have been protests, and now there are riots. Black people, and the white people that support them, are fed up with a police brutality state where cops regularly break the law to arrest, assault, and kill black people extrajudicially. This has escalated to the point where riots are starting to get more frequent. In response, police are cracking down hard.

Police in riot gear moving through a residential neighborhood opened fire on residents sitting on their porches. One officer maced a child. Journalists are being attacked and arrested by law enforcement. Police are engaging in senseless acts of brutality across the country.

On the sidelines, our president is egging on the police. He posted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” which seems very much like an instruction for law enforcement to murder the citizens they’re sworn to protect. Of course, he claimed that wasn’t what he meant, and was unaware of the history of the phrase.

Of course, there was more. He chided governors to crack down on protestors, saying the protests made them look weak. He suggested that he would use the “unlimited powers of the military” to crack down on protests and egged his supporters to attack the protestors. As usual, it was all blamed on Antifa.

There are calls for the protests to remain civil and peaceful, that riots are not the way this should go. The only respectable way, according to many, is for the protesters to not resort to violence and looting. This was echoed by Mike Pence, who, in a display of hypocrisy that has become disturbingly common among the administration, walked out of the peaceful protest of Colin Kaepernick. For the administration and its supporters, there is apparently no good way to protest injustice.

So now we’re in a situation where you either support the protestors or you support the police. You either have a #BLM yard sign or you have a Blue Lives Matter American flag on your car. Particularly die-hard supporters have a Blue Lives Matter sticker that features the Punisher logo. This is a particularly galling lack of self-awareness, as the Punisher is a comic book anti-hero known for his extrajudicial killings in cold blood. Even the Punisher is aware of the irony.

Epilogue: is there anything left for us?

So, healthcare isn’t affordable or accessible, the economy and businesses are skewed in favor of the rich, and the government and law enforcement aren’t trustworthy. Unless you’re white and reasonably wealthy, the system is working against you.

This all feels very much like a failed state to me. So, what is there left to do?

If you ask me? Fight the power.

Protest in the streets. Riot if you have to. Once upon a time, I was one of those white people calling for peace and sensibility. No more. Peaceful protest has gotten us very little, and it will get us nothing with the current state of the country. As a white man in America, it is not my job to tell the oppressed how to protest.

Support the protests wherever you can, however you can. If you are the type to go into the thick of it, do it. Learn first aid, become an organizer, lead the charge. If you’re not, support defense and bail funds. Offer help to the protestors however you feel comfortable, and there are many ways to do that.

Vote like mad. Trump has broken many things, and many things are likely broken beyond repair, but if he gets four more years, we’re probably doomed. Create a blue wave that clears out the gunk in the Senate and the White House.

At the same time, recognize that Biden probably isn’t enough. Biden, for all the good he did during the Obama years, isn’t progressive enough to address many of these issues. He is a stopgap at best, but a stopgap is better than active destruction.

Support your friends of color and LGBTQ+ folx. I’ve barely touched on racial injustice and not touched on LGBTQ+ injustice here, but know that there is plenty of it to go around in this country. Do what you can to support your friends and acquaintances. Don’t let racism or homophobia stand, be it in private or public.

Wade into internet discussions if you have the energy and patience. There are people whose minds you will not change and who will argue with you tooth and nail. Fight with them anyway. For every one of them, there’s two more on the fence, who may not be commenting but who may be swayed by your points. Stand against homophobia and racism, not to convince the homophobes and racists, but to demonstrate to the black, brown, and LGBTQ+ folx that there are people on their side.

Fight the good fight. We are living in a failed state right now, but I have hope that we can be brought back from the brink. However, if we want to survive as a country, we all need to do our part to destroy the systems that oppress and build a better country that serves all of us.

Good luck.