How Much Wealth Has Your Government Stolen From You?
Scientists develop vaccines, governments create poverty, and democracy is an illusion.
In the eighth month of Covid, requests for food relief reach an all-time high in the United States of America. Food banks in Pennsylvania distributed aid to 2.75 million people within the first three weeks of October and nationwide one in five Americans rely on the provisions. Whilst the Heroes Act is held hostage by the Senate, 54 million financially impacted victims are likely to experience hunger by the end of December. The US government wins the first-place prize for the world’s wealthiest, cruelest country, and the unemployment payments expiring the day after Christmas is the rotten cherry on top. An economy as expansive and robust as the US could/should have eliminated poverty within its borders decades ago, yet millionaires become billionaires whilst the rest of the country holds on for dear life because financial security isn’t for the people who built the economy, and a pandemic or economic recovery plan is a lot of work.
Although 63% of the American public state the government should provide health care for all, universal coverage continues to be a very tricky ordeal in the US, but 67 countries (many of them developing) across six continents have solved the healthcare riddle. The established bureaucratic systems in the UK, EU, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada expedite and simplify disbursing financial aid via direct deposits to bank accounts, and Americans wait for a check to arrive in the mail. None of the economic stimuli adequately provide for all members of society, but none are as ruthlessly apathetic as the US, and at least people aren’t concerned with healthcare as well as figuring out how they’re going to pay the bills. Whilst fear of deficits constrains the US, New Zealand’s Finance Minister announced the country will be increasing their debt to alleviate New Zealanders’ financial suffering; what a concept!
The US, UK, Australia, and other wealthy countries have the capacity to provide basic necessities for all, but they rather watch or ignore (malevolence varies) people starve than deviate from the lopsided neoliberalist model (trickle-down, globalization, deregulation, rich get richer quicker, economic ideological scam). Free-market capitalism is not free; it’s a government-planned economy for the small minority of wealthy elites and corporate owners, and the US is the best planner.
Democracy
- government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
- a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
- a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges.
- political or social equality; democratic spirit.
- the common people of a community as distinguished from any privileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.
If governments recommence investing in the public (yes, this was a thing pre-1980s), it would raise expectations and people might realize the diminishing social services or lack thereof, are the result of the government selling, deregulating, and privatizing public services. The opportunity cost of aiding the wealthiest (if you must work for an income this is not you), is at the expense of society’s livelihood, health, and financial security. It’s possible government believed the privatization of public goods and services awarded lower prices by “letting the market compete” and overlooked the corporate business models’ objective to increase profit margins, and it’s impossible to refrain from screaming DUH! Citizen owned utilities like energy, were sold to private businesses for billions, but did anyone agree to sell or at least receive the dividends?
Promising competition would decrease energy costs, the Australian government privatized the energy market in 1999. By 2012 costs increased by 170%, and in 2019 the number of deaths in homes from hypothermia for the elderly pensioners was a record high. The Australia Institute
The US government’s funding for infectious disease control ended in 2019, and the US scientists working in collaboration with the Chinese in Wuhan were sent home in September 2019. Scientists were screaming an outbreak was imminent, but federal governments weren’t interested, and the research went unread whilst the warnings rejected. Unfortunately, we’ll never know what could have been had the collaboration continued, but we do know every single federal government in the world let us down because they were forewarned with solid, irrefutable evidence as well as an approximate timeline. The US military, and as we learned earlier this year; the police, are prepared for combat at any time and anywhere, but protecting the interest of the public isn’t really their job anyway.
Like sitting ducks vulnerably exposed to a predator, the wrath of a pandemic ransacks our life, future, and health, and governments forgetting how to govern people, shut down the economy, or make us choose between Covid and hunger, and force us into poverty. Will they be held accountable for the avoidable deaths, emotional agony, health implications, and financial suffering? Will Covid be the catalyst invoking a restart to the era of people at the center of economic planning? Probably not. We’ve already normalized the hunger, homelessness, and hopelessness in our streets; 70 million more people is no big deal… Right?
The current hunger crisis in the US, in photos by Vox, is just the beginning of the nightmare haunting our every waking moment, but rest uninsured! This will only get worse… if only there was something we could do?
