Went up to see the kids a few days ago. Hadn't been in the real America in a while, having spent most of my traveling time over the last decade in China, Korea and Japan. Interstate 95 is still full of potholes, a worn and dangerous thoroughfare. The colonial church spires that adorn malls and thruway stops are still there. Nothing much has changed. The crisp, new artifacts of post World War II suburbanization are in place, aging and tired. Empty factories, New England's version of the rust belt. The town of Northampton basically given over to Smith College's institutional expansion. A one crop economy--the education business. The action is all overseas.
In China, everywhere one looks there is excitement. Booming economies, exciting new architecture designed by the most talented architects from all over the world. Cities large and small are crawling with entrepreneurs from the U.S. and South Korea. A Chinese economist states that "America has become its own economic back yard." In distant Jiayuguan, a city in Xinjiang province where one sees acres of propellers generating electricity, one goes into the best hotel in town and finds evidence of visits by Robert Rubin and others of the U.S. "brain trust." Plumes of flame come from oil derricks on the horizon.
Here in the U.S., we have been told this week, the top one percent of Americans have the equivalent in wealth of the lowest fifty percent of U.S. wage earners. Ten percent of Americans earn over $100,000 a year. The gap between rich and poor is as extreme as it was in 1928, just prior to the Great Depression or the period of the Robber Barons.
Union membership is at a low point. Pensions have become a thing of the past. Those that do exist are in constant peril of being raided or eroded. The "greatest economy in the world" still lacks universal health care and nervously eyes its social security system.
Yet we spend a trillion dollars on a foreign adventure, more or less guaranteeing that we will not have funds available for social programs. Three quarters of a trillion dollars every year on weaponry and the military. A thousand overseas bases. Our schools--except in the enclaves of the affluent--are underfunded, spirtually corrupted by racism and the impact of illegal immigration. The best a progressive new governor of New York State can do is cut back on medical services to balance his budget. New York City, "the safest city in the country," has begun warehousing pieds-a-terre for the rich while forcing ordinary working people to search for housing in the hinterlands. A real estate boom for the one percenters.
The Republican counter-revolution has been an enormous success. Medieval feudalism has been restored. God save the king!