America: The Best Country in the World at Being Last -- How
Can We Change That?
The data is piling up to confirm that were Number One, but
in exactly the way we dont want to beat the bottom. Where did we go
wrong and what can we do about it?
March 1, 2012 |
Orion Magazine
/ By
James Gustave Speth
Like you and other Americans, I love my country, its
wonderful people, its boundless energy, its creativity in so many
fields, its natural beauty, its many gifts to the world, and the freedom
it has given us to express ourselves. So we should all be angry,
profoundly angry, when we consider what has happened to our country and
what that neglect could mean for our children and grandchildren.
How can we gauge what has happened to America in the past few decades
and where we stand today?
One way is to look at how America now
compares with other countries in key areas.
The group of twenty advanced
democraciesthe major countries of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD),
including the United Kingdom,
France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and otherscan be
thought of as our peer nations.
Heres what we see when we look at these
countries. To our great shame,
America now has
the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
the greatest inequality of incomes;
the lowest social mobility;
the lowest score on the UNs index of material well-being of children;
the worst score on the UNs Gender Inequality Index;
the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all
this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the
highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate,
the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost,
the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest
life expectancy at birth;
the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling
performance in science and reading;
the highest homicide rate;
the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;
the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption
per capita;
the lowest score on Yales Environmental Performance Index (except for
Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for
Denmark);
the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian
assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and
Italy);
the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP;
and
the largest international arms sales.
Our politicians are constantly invoking Americas superiority and
exceptionalism.
True, the data is piling up to confirm that were Number
One,
but in exactly the way we dont want to beat the bottom.
These deplorable consequences are not just the result of economic and
technological forces over which we have no control. They are the
results of conscious political decisions made over several decades by
both Democrats and Republicans who have had priorities other than
strengthening the well-being of American society and our environment.
Many countries, obviously, took a different pathone that was open to us
as well.
I wish that were all the bad news. Unfortunately, international
comparisons only give us a glimpse of what we now face. They miss many
of the most important challenges, including in the critical areas of
social conditions, national security, and politics. I will spare you the
litany of environmental bad news; most of you have already heard it.
When it comes to social conditions, its important to recognize that
nearly 50 million Americans now live in povertyone in six. If youre in
poverty in America, youre living on less than $400 per week for a
family of four. Poverty is the bleeding edge of a more pervasive
American shortcomingmassive economic insecurity. About half of American
families now live paycheck to paycheck, are financially fragile, and
earn less than needed to cover basic living expenses, let alone save for
the future.
Back in 1928, right before the Great Depression, the richest 1
percent of Americans received 24 percent of the countrys total income.
Starting with the New Deal, public policy favored greater equality and a
strong middle class, so that by 1976, the share of the richest 1
percent of households had dropped to 9 percent. But then the great
re-redistribution began in the 1980s, so that by 2007, right before the
Great Recession, the richest 1 percent had regained its 1928
positionwith 24 percent of income.
As for national security, the U.S. now spends almost as much on the
military as the rest of the world combined. If one totals military and
other U.S. security spending, the total easily climbs to over $1
trillion annually, about two-thirds of all discretionary federal
spending. In what has been called a key feature of the American Empire,
America now garrisons the world. Although the Pentagon officially
reports that we maintain a mere 660 military bases in 38 countries, if
one adds the unreported bases in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and
elsewhere, there are likely as many as 1,000 U.S. military sites around
the world. By 2010, we had covert operations deployed in an estimated 40
percent of the worlds 192 nations. On the home front, in 2010, the
Washington Post reported that the top-secret world the government
created in response to 9/11 now contains some 1,300 government entities
and 1,900 private companies all working on programs related to
counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in some 10,000
locations across the United States.
When youve got an armful of hammers, every problem looks like a
nail, and the U.S. has tended to seek military solutions to problems
that might be addressed otherwise. The costs have been phenomenally
high. When all told, our wars since 9/11 will cost us over $4 trillion
and more than 8,000 American lives, with another 99,000 U.S. troops
already wounded in action or evacuated for serious illness.
Another sorrow is the huge, draining psychological burden that U.S.
actions have on its citizens. We see our own military, the CIA, and U.S.
contractors engaged in torture and prisoner abuse, large killings of
innocent civilians, murders and the taking of body parts as souvenirs,
renditions, drone assassinations, military detention without trial,
collaboration with unsavory regimes, and more.
Meanwhile, outside our borders, a world of wounds has festered
without much help, and often with harm, from the United States. We are
neglecting so many problemsfrom world poverty, underdevelopment, and
climate change to emerging shortages of food and water and energy,
biological impoverishment, and transnational organized crime.
The following are among the many treaties ratified by all nations,
except for a few rogue statesand the United States: the Convention of
the Rights of the Child, the Convention Against All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women, the Land Mine Convention, the
International Criminal Court convention, the Biodiversity Convention,
the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocol of the Climate Convention, and
the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The U.S. is the main
reason we do not now have a World Environment Organization.
In these respects and in many others, the U.S. posture in the world
reflects a radical imbalance: a hugely disproportionate focus on the
military and on economic issues and a tragic neglect of some of the most
serious challenges we and the world now confront.
These many challenges require farsighted, strong, and effective
government leadership and action. Inevitably, then, the path to
responding to these challenges leads to the political arena, where a
vital, muscular democracy steered by an informed and engaged citizenry
is needed. Thats the democracy we need, but, unfortunately, it is not
the democracy we have. Right now, Washington isnt even trying to
seriously address most of these challenges. Neglect, stalemate, and
denial rule the day. It is estimated that American politics is more
polarized today than at any time since Reconstruction. Polarization, of
course, is father to gridlock. Gridlock and stalemate are the last thing
our country needs now.
The American political system is in deep trouble for another
reasonit is moving from democracy to plutocracy and corporatocracy,
supported by the ascendancy of market fundamentalism and a strident
antiregulation, antigovernment, antitax ideology. The hard truth is that
our political system today is simply incapable of meeting the great
challenges described here. What we have is third-rate governance at a
time when the challenges we face require first-rate governance.
America thus confronts a daunting array of challenges in the
maintenance of our peoples well-being, in the conduct of our
international affairs, in the management of our planets natural assets,
and in the workings of our politics. Taken together, these challenges
place in grave peril much that we hold dear.
The America we must seek for our children and grandchildren is not
the America we have today. If we are going to change things for the
better, we must first understand the forces that led us to this sea of
troubles. When big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of
national life, it cannot be due to small reasons. We have encompassing
problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political
system. By understanding these flaws, we can end them and move forward
in a very different direction.
I THINK AMERICA GOT OFF COURSE for two primary reasons. In recent
decades we failed to build consistently on the foundations laid by the
New Deal, by Franklin Roosevelts Four Freedoms and his Second Bill of
Rights, and Eleanor Roosevelts Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Instead, we unleashed a virulent, fast-growing strain of
corporate-consumerist capitalism. Ours is the Ruthless Economy, say
Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus in their influential
textbook, Macroeconomics. And indeed it is. In its ruthlessness at home
and abroad, it creates a world of wounds. As it strengthens and grows,
those wounds deepen and multiply.
Such an economy begs for restraint and guidance in the public
interestcontrol that can only be provided by government. Yet, at this
point, the captains of our economic life and those who have benefited
disproportionately from it have largely taken over our political life.
Corporations, long identified as our principal economic actors, are now
also our principal political actors. The result is a combined economic
and political systemthe operating system upon which our society runsof
great power and voraciousness, pursuing its own economic interests
without serious concern for the values of fairness, justice, or
sustainability that democratic government might have provided.
Our political economy has evolved and gathered force in parallel with
the course of the Cold War and the growth of the American Security
State. The Cold War and the rise of the American Empire have powerfully
affected the nature of the political-economic systemstrengthening the
already existing prioritization of economic growth, giving rise to the
military-industrial complex, and draining time, attention, and money
away from domestic needs and emerging international challenges. This
diversion of attention and resources continues with our response to
international terrorism.
So what are this operating systems key features, which have been
given such free rein by these developments? First, ours is an economy
that prioritizes economic growth above all else. We think of growth as
an unalloyed good, but this growth fetish is a big source of our
problems. Weve had plenty of growth in recent decadesgrowth while
wages stagnated, jobs fled our borders, life satisfaction flat-lined,
social capital eroded, poverty and inequality mounted, and the
environment declined. Today, U.S. GDP has regained its prerecession
level, but 15 percent of American workers still cant find full-time
jobs.
Another key feature of todays dysfunctional operating system is how
powerfully the profit motive affects corporate behavior. Todays
corporations have been called externalizing machines, so committed are
they to keeping the real costs of their activities off their books.
Profit can be increased by keeping wages low and real social,
environmental, and economic costs externalizedborne by society at large
and not by the firm. One can get some measure of these external costs
from a recent analysis of three thousand of the worlds biggest
companies. It concluded that paying for their external environmental
costs would erase at least a third of their profits. Profits can also be
increased through subsidies, tax breaks, regulatory loopholes, and
other gifts from government. Together, these external costs and
subsidies lead to dishonest prices, which in turn lead consumers to spur
on businesses that do serious damage to people and planet.
Given such emphasis on inexorable growth and profit, the constant
spread of the market into new areas can be very costly environmentally
and socially. As Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book, The Great
Transformation, To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of
the fate of human beings and their natural environment . . . would
result in the demolition of society. . . . Nature would be reduced to
its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted,
military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials
destroyed. With its emphasis on privatization, commercialization, and
commodification, American capitalism has carried this demolition forward
with a vengeance.
But the system that drives the capitalism we have today includes
other elements. The corporationthe most important institution and agent
of modern capitalismhas become both enormous and hugely powerful. Of
the hundred largest economies in the world, fifty-three are
corporations. Of the three hundred largest corporations in the world, a
third are U.S. companies. American business wields great political and
economic power and has routinely used that power to restrain
ameliorative governmental action. Our corporations have driven the rise
of transnational capital as the basis for economic globalization, along
with all the challenges that equation introduces.
Then, there is what our society has become. Dominant American values
today are strongly materialistic, anthropocentric, and contempocentric.
Todays consumerism and materialism place high priority on meeting human
needs through the ever-increasing purchasing of goods and services. We
say the best things in life are free, but not many of us act that way.
Instead weve embraced an endless cycle of work and spend. The
anthropocentric view that nature belongs to us, rather than we to
nature, facilitates the exploitation of the natural world. And the habit
of focusing on the present and discounting the future leads us away
from a thoughtful appraisal of the long-term consequences of the world
we are making.
Next, there is what our government and politics have become. Growth
serves the interests of government by boosting politicians approval
ratings, keeping difficult social justice and other issues on the back
burner, and generating larger revenues without raising tax rates.
Government in America doesnt own much of the economy, so it must feed
its growth habit by providing what corporations need to keep growing.
Meanwhile, Washington today is hobbled by partisanship, corrupted by
money, and typically at the service of economic interests. It is focused
on the short horizons of election cycles and guided by a pathetic level
of public discourse on important issues. Finally, our government seeks
to enhance and project national power, both hard and soft, in part
through economic strength and growth and in part through sustaining a
vast military deployment.
And there is what our system of money and finance has become. We
think of money as the cash in our pockets or the bank, but, in truth,
virtually all the money in circulation today is created by the banking
system when loans are made. If everyone paid off all their debts, there
would be hardly any money. Money is a system of power, and Wall Street
wields that power. Today, among other things, the big banks are
financing the destruction of the planets climate. In 2010, Citi raised
more than $34 billion for the coal and oil industries. Within Citis
portfolio is $1 billion raised for the proposed pipeline intended to
carry tar sands oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries. Since January
2010, ten big banks have supported mountaintop removal coal mining to
the tune of more than $2.5 billion.
These features aptly characterize key dimensions of todays operating
systemthe political economy of todays American capitalism. Its
important to see these features as a system, linked and mutually
reinforcing. Taken together, they have given rise to an economic reality
that is both colossal and largely out of control. An unquestioning
society-wide commitment to economic growth at any cost; powerful
corporate and banking interests whose overriding objective is to grow by
generating profit, including profit from avoiding social and
environmental costs; a government beholden to corporate interests and
thus not strongly inclined to curb corporate abuses; and a rampant
consumerism spurred endlessly on by sophisticated advertisingall these
combine to deliver an ever-growing economy insensitive to the needs of
people, place, and planet.
The prioritization of economic growth is among the roots of our
problems. Todays reigning policy orientation holds that the path to
greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity,
profits, the stock market, and consumption must all go up. This growth
imperative trumps all else. Growth is measured by tallying GDP at the
national level, and sales and profits at the company level. The pursuit
of GDP and profit can be said to be the overwhelming priorities of
national economic and political life.
Economic growth may be the worlds secular religion, but for much of
the world it is a god that is failingunderperforming for most of the
worlds people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more
problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall
U.S. economy undermines families and communities; it is leading us to
environmental calamity; it fuels a ruthless international search for
energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and
it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting our deepest
human needs.
Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with
the real issuesfor doing the things that would make us, and the
country, better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that
while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply
in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and
levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially. We have
entered the realm of what ecological economist Herman Daly calls
uneconomic growth. Environmentally, we see a world in which growth has
brought us to a situation where more of the same will quite literally
ruin the planet. Politically, the growth imperative is a big part of how
we the people are controlled: the necessity for growth gives the real
power to those who have the finance and technology to deliver it.
IT IS UP TO US AS CITIZENS to inject values of justice, fairness, and
sustainability into this system, and government is the primary vehicle
we have for accomplishing this. Typically, we attempt to do so by
working within the system to promote needed reforms. We work the media
and other channels to raise public awareness of our issue, and try to
shift public understanding and discourse in our favor. We lobby
Congress, the current administration, and government agencies with
well-crafted and sensible proposals. When necessary, we go to court.
With modest resources, we devote what we can to the electoral process
and to candidates for public office. And we hope somehow that lightning
will strike and events will move in our favor.
But it is now abundantly clear that these reformist approaches are
not succeeding. The titanic forces unleashed by the American brand of
capitalism are too powerful. The ceaseless drive for profits, growth,
and power and other system imperatives keep the problem spigot fully
open. Reform rarely deals with the root causesthe underlying drivers.
The forces that gave rise to these problems in the first place continue
to war against progress. And our enfeebled political life, more and more
in the hands of powerful corporations and individuals of great wealth,
is no match for these forces.
Pursuing reform within the system can help, but what is now
desperately needed is transformative change in the system itself. To
deal successfully with all the challenges America now faces, we must
therefore complement reform with at least equal efforts aimed at
transformative change to create a new operating system that routinely
delivers good results for people and planet.
At the core of this new operating system must be a sustaining economy
based on new economic thinking and driven forward by a new politics.
The purpose and goal of a sustaining economy is to provide broadly
shared prosperity that meets human needs while preserving the earths
ecological integrity and resiliencein short, a flourishing people and a
flourishing nature. That is the paradigm shift we must now seek.
I believe this paradigm shift in the nature and operation of
Americas political economy can be best approached through a series of
interacting, mutually reinforcing transformationstransformations that
attack and undermine the key motivational structures of the current
system, transformations that replace these old structures with new
arrangements needed for a sustaining economy and a successful democracy.
The following transformations hold the key to moving to a new
political economy. Consider each as a transition from today to tomorrow.
Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from
mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined
priorities.
The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the
public interest.
The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from
one ownership and motivation model to new business models and the
democratization of capital.
Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created
through bank debt to money created by government.
Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast
inequities to fundamental fairness.
Indicators: from GDP (grossly distorted picture) to accurate
measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.
Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful
consumption, from more to enough.
Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to
vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and
solidarity.
Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to
giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart
from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from
today to tomorrow.
Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy
and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty.
Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to
America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military
prowess to real security.
We know that systemic, transformative change along these dimensions
will require a great struggle, and it will not come quickly. The new
values, priorities, policies, and institutions that would constitute a
new political economy capable of regularly delivering good results are
not at hand and wont be for many years. The truth is we are still in
the design stage of building a new operating system. That system wont
be yesterdays socialism, by the way, but it wont be todays American
capitalism either.
It follows that effectively addressing the many serious challenges
America faces will take a lot more time than we would like. Meanwhile,
Americas decline will persistdecline here not referring to losing
world power relative to China and other countries, but to decline in
human and natural conditions. That is a very depressing conclusion, but
we must face it. More importantly, we must use it as a framework for
understanding what we must now do. Indeed, there can be a very bright
light at the end of this gloomy tunnel. There is the great gift of
plausible hope that we can find our way forward.
In this period of decline, the imperatives we face as citizens are
threefold: to slow and then halt the descent, minimizing human suffering
and planetary damage along the way and preventing a collapse, the
emergence of a fortress world, or any of the other dark scenarios
plotted for us in science fiction and increasingly in serious analysis;
to minimize the time at the bottom and start the climb upward toward a
new operating system; and to complete, inhabit, and flourish in the
diversity of alternative social arrangements, each far superior to ones
we will have left behind.
But if we are failing at modest, incremental reform, how can we hope
to achieve deeper, transformative change? The decline now occurring will
progressively delegitimize the current order. Who wants an operating
system that is capable of generating and perpetuating such suffering and
destruction? One good thing about the decline of todays political
economy is that it opens the door to something much better. People will
eventually rise up, raise a loud shout, and demand major changes. This
is already happening with some people in some places. It will grow to
become a national and global movement for transformation, demanding a
better world.
As the old system enters its death throes, we are already seeing the
proliferation of innovative models of local living economies,
sustainable communities, and transition towns, as well as innovative
business models, including social enterprises and for-benefit and
worker-owned businesses that prioritize community and environment over
profit and growth. Initiatives that may seem small or local can be
starter wedges that lead to larger changes. These initiatives provide
inspirational models for how things might work in a new political
economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities. Such
initiatives are growing rapidly in America.
While the struggle to build a new system goes forward, we must do
everything we can to make the old system perform. For example, if we do
not act now on climate change, both nationally and internationally, the
consequences will become so severe that the dark visions of those
predicting calamity will become all too real. The situation we face in
regard to climate disruption is already very grave. Should we fail to
act now on the climate front, the world will likely become so nasty and
brutish that the possibility of rebirth, of achieving something new and
beautiful, will simply vanish, and we will be left with nothing but the
burden of climate chaos and societies endless responses to it. Coping
with the wreckage of a planetary civilization run amok would be a
full-time job. On this issue and others, then, reform and transform are
not alternatives but complementary and mutually reinforcing strategies.
Important here is a theory of change. The theory adopts the view
that people act out of both fear and loveto avoid disaster and to
realize a dream or positive vision. The theory affirms the centrality of
hope and hopes victory over despair. It locates the plausibility of
hope in knowledgeknowing that many people will eventually rise up and
fight for the things that they love; knowing that historys constant is
change, including deep, systemic change; and knowing that we understand
enough to begin the journey, to strike out in the right directions, even
if the journeys end is a place we have never been. The theory embraces
the seminal role of crises in waking us from the slumber of routine and
in shining the spotlight on the failings of the current order of
things. It puts great stock in transformative leadership that can point
beyond the crisis to something better. The theory adopts the view that
systemic change must be both bottom-up and top-downdriven by
communities, businesses, and citizens deciding on their own to build the
future locally as well as to develop the political muscle to adopt
system-changing policies at the national and international levels. And
it sees a powerful citizens movement as a necessary spur to action at
all levels.
So imagine: As conditions in our country continue to decline across a
wide front, or at best fester as they are, ever-larger numbers of
Americans lose faith in the current system and its ability to deliver on
the values it proclaims. The system steadily loses support, leading to a
crisis of legitimacy. Meanwhile, traditional crises, both in the
economy and in the environment, grow more numerous and fearsome. In
response, progressives of all stripes coalesce, find their voice and
their strength, and pioneer the development of a powerful set of new
ideas and policy proposals confirming that the path to a better world
does indeed exist. Demonstrations and protests multiply, and a powerful
movement for prodemocracy reform and transformative change is born. At
the local level, people and groups plant the seeds of change through a
host of innovative initiatives that provide inspirational models of how
things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human
and natural communities. Sensing the direction in which things are
moving, our wiser and more responsible leaders, political and otherwise,
rise to the occasion, support the growing movement for change, and
frame a compelling story or narrative that makes sense of it all and
provides a positive vision of a better America. It is a moment of
democratic possibility.
In the end it all comes down to the American people and the strong
possibility that we still have it in us to use our freedom and our
democracy in powerful ways to create something fine, a reborn America,
for our children and grandchildren. We can realize a new American Dream
if enough of us join together in the fight for it. This new dream
envisions an America where the pursuit of happiness is sought not in
more getting and spending, but in the growth of human solidarity, real
democracy, and devotion to the public good; where the average American
is empowered to achieve his or her human potential; where the benefits
of economic activity are widely and equitably shared; where the
environment is sustained for current and future generations; and where
the virtues of simple living, community self-reliance, good fellowship,
and respect for nature predominate. These American traditions may not
prevail today, but they are not dead. They await us, and indeed they are
today being awakened across this great land. New ways of living and
working, sharing and caring are emerging across America. They beckon us
with a new American Dream, one rebuilt from the best of the old, drawing
on the best of who we were and are and can be.James
Gustave Speth teaches at Vermont Law School. He is an American
environmental lawyer, advocate, and author. His article in this issue,
the first of a two-part series, is based on his forthcoming book from
Yale University Press, America the Possible: Roadmap to a New Economy.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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