Quantum Note
Kerry or Bush?
In October 1994, Second Harvest, the largest food bank in the United States, reported that one out of ten Americans rely on charitable food agencies to eat their daily meals. This report was carried by major newspapers and TV stations across America. Then it disappeared from the scene. That was ten years ago. Translated into real numbers, it meant that 26 million men, women and children were driven “into the slime of the swelling legions of the destitute,” as Frederic F. Clairmont, one of the most perceptive economists of this century called it. Of course, most of these men, women and children belonged to poor and broken families, without any social clout.
In order to understand these numbers, let us also recall that in 1994, more than 40 million Americans were living below the poverty line. According to more recent data of the US Labour Department, that number has dramatically risen. These disempowered human beings live in slums, their children do not go to schools or if they manage to go to a school, they drop out before reaching grade 8 and join the lengthening queue of the disempowered and the destitute.
These desperately poor human beings do not live in isolation; they are, in fact, the backbone of the riches of a small minority in the same country which thrives on the exploited labour of tens of millions of Americans.
There is no other country in the world where the disparity between the hyper-privileged and the dispossessed is so stark in terms of numbers; the United States is the most inegalitarian country in the world, a true showpiece of the capitalist economy. According to the data of the US Federal Reserve Board (1989-95), merely 1% of the US households owns nearly 40% of nation’s wealth. Half of that 40%, owns nearly 80% of US wealth.
Obviously, this wobbly social order calls for a deeper reflection on the system that has produced this inequality over a long period of time without any remedy in sight. These appalling numbers also tell us something about the US political system which has consistently produced mediocre leadership chained to the interests of Corporate America which, in turn, is the agent for making the rich richer by helping them to accumulate wealth at the expense of others.
These indices of hunger, deprivation and mass impoverishment also cast light on the social conditions of a populace and their human rights. These numbers also tell us something about the farce being conducted in the political arena with so much fanfare. After all, if such a vast majority of Americans has remained economically disempowered over such a long period, what is the difference between the democrats and the republicans? It is obviously the political system that has been supporting the inequalities whose horrible harvest is millions of disempowered Americans whose economic interests have never been the concern of the democrats or the republicans and who have no means of bringing to the stage an alternative third option.
The American political system is, indeed, a unique system with an amazing capacity to produce leadership that looks after the interests of the same families, no matter who comes to power. It is always the same people who remain poor and the same people who become more and more rich. And this system is integrated into the international monetary system, a large ensemble of financial institutions, legal procedures and arrangements governing currency flow and transactions within and outside America. It is a massive aggregation of economic and political power that has no parallel in human history.
Behind this unparalleled power stands a military-industrial complex that has defined, formulated and dictated US policies over more than 150 years around the world and within the United States. This confluence of State and corporate capital is simply not present anywhere in the world and this unique American phenomenon has made mockery of every achievement of the dispossessed. For example, one of the most important items of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights pertains to everyone’s right to work. Article 23 says: “Everyone has the right to work, to just and favourable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment with remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, supplemented if necessary by other means of social protection.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is sometimes hailed as the most important document of the 20th century, has become a worthless document, because how can millions of dispossessed Americans dream of such rights when their daily existence is marred by poverty, violence and hunger?
Those who are deluded by the apparent choice of candidates in the US elections and by the nauseating rhetoric about freedom, liberty, democracy and human rights should look at the founding documents upon which the whole political and economic system of the United States has been established and find out for themselves how a Bush or a Kerry can change the course of a state whose very foundation rests upon inequality and racial supremacy. The father of the nation and the first president of the United States, George Washington, had clearly pointed out the future direction of the United States in his 1783 letter: “Indians,” he wrote, “have nothing human except the shape… the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire; both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
This notion of white supremacy and extermination of the native population of the United States, so powerfully recorded by Dee Brown in his Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1971), is built into the foundation of the country whose history clearly establishes that it has at least remained faithful to the dream of its founding fathers.
Thus no matter who wins the coming elections, nothing will change, within or outside America. Nothing. Merely a new face will replace the old and the corporate America would find itself doing exactly what it is doing now.
History of a people is the most accurate scale to judge their future. And the history of the ruling oligarchy of the United States is steeped in blood. Since its inception, the United States of America has always lived like a hungry wolf and no amount of human blood is sufficient to satiate its thirst. Yesterday, it was the South Americans who bore the brunt of this thirst, today, it is the Muslim world. Whether it is Iraq or the Philippines, Bush or Kerry, American savagery will remain unchanged.