In the Dead Zone of Capitalism: Lessons on the Violence of Inequality from Chicago

In the Dead Zone of Capitalism: Lessons on the Violence of Inequality from Chicago

Tuesday, 04 June 2013 11:07
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed


Americans are confronted daily with the violence of inequality. The rich have longer life spans, better health care, access to better educational opportunities and an abundance of food. Many live in palatial homes in gated communities and wield a disproportionate amount of control and power over the major social, cultural, and political apparatuses that shape everyday life. Unlike most Americans, the extravagantly rich are protected from the massive degree of violence produced by poverty, poor health, joblessness, inadequate social provisions, decrepit housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and even environmental disasters. While the superrich also live in an age of precarity due to the free-market economic models they support, they largely escape its consequences through the obscene amount of wealth at their disposal that enables them to buy private solutions to public problems. As Naomi Klein points out, such wealth offers more than economic advantages. It also creates a world in which the penthouse and mansion set

protect themselves from the less savory effects of the economic model that made them so wealthy. In the past six years, we have seen the emergence of private firefighters in the United States, hired by insurance companies to offer a ‘concierge’ service to their wealthier clients, as well as the short-lived ‘HelpJet’—a charter airline in Florida that offered five-star evacuation services from hurricane zones (whose ad shamelessly states): ‘No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience that turns a problem into a vacation.

The corrupt bankers, hedge fund managers, and financial services elite who caused the housing crisis and the economic recession of 2008 have little fear of finding themselves homeless or in debt, a fate suffered by millions of Americans, especially young people. The hedge fund managers who pour millions into charter schools as a first step towards privatizing them don’t worry about draining valuable resources from public schools because their kids only attend the most elite and expensive private schools, and they also get a hefty return from such investments as a generous tax credit. Transferring wealth from the public to the private sector has become a sport rather than a liability - a despicable act of looting the public treasury that is viewed strictly as a financial transaction divorced from any sense of civic duty or ethical consideration. The ultra-rich do not have to worry about being unemployed, even though their search for profits produces austerity policies that put millions out of work. In this instance what emerges is a savage form of casino capitalism along with an army of walking dead zombies who celebrate a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in other people and civic life. For the new financial elite of the second Gilded Age, the challenges of a global world are private, not collective, and can only be addressed by pursuing one’s own desires, financial interests, and security.

The obligations of citizenship and social existence in this brave new world of egregious inequality in which the "top 8% of global earners are drawing 50% of this planet’s income" have been abandoned to the narrow dictates of the private realm, consumerism and an arrested notion of individualism and freedom. In the United States, "the 400 richest people . . . have as much wealth as 154 million Americans combined, that’s 50 percent of the entire country (while) the top economic 1 percent of the US population now has a record 40 percent of all wealth, and have more wealth than 90 percent of the population combined." It gets worse. Half of the jobs in America "now pay $34,000 or less a year . . . 42% of single-mother families with children under 18 are poor (and) 20.5 million people have incomes that amount to less than $9,500 a year. That’s half the poverty line, which is currently pegged at $19,090 for a family of three." Moreover, the myth of upward mobility has been replaced by the reality of downward mobility, given that wages for most Americans are stagnant; youth now face a future of low-wage jobs, if not long-term unemployment, and economic and educational opportunities are tied almost exclusively to income and wealth. What the cheerleaders for neoliberalism refuse to acknowledge is that the choices people make are tied to constraints, and "nearly all of the constraints are intimately tied to the material circumstances in which we find ourselves." ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16738-in-the-dead-zone-of-capitalism-lessons-on-the-violence-of-inequality-from-chicago