1-17-06, 8:42 am
While happy to wage imperialist wars abroad, the very heart of the empire itself is beset by appalling levels of poverty, deeply rooted racism and a lack of social welfare provision that makes many western European countries look positively benevolent.
Inequality matters, a collection of over 20 essays recently published by the pioneering New Press, takes the US to task over these issues and tries to suggest ways that present day divisions could be overcome.
One of the first things that strikes the reader is that the key points are exhaustively argued, sometimes almost repetitively and sometimes with an almost overbearing use of statistics.
Read in one sitting, it's often a bit of a tedious and fairly depressing read, although the wealth of information given will no doubt make it an essential text for anyone trying to get to grips with the ongoing class polarisation of US society.
Some of the other contributions take a bit more of a personal line and are none the less powerful for it.
Earth to Wal-Mars by Barbara Ehrenreich is a searing indictment of the company that we have all come to love to hate, while Meizhu Lui's essay The Snowball and Treadmill is a moving and succinct exploration of the racial dynamics of US capitalism.
Of the Few, By the Few, For the Few by Charles Lewis is also an unusual and interesting piece in that it looks at the links between corporate capital and the political elite of the US, territory which was often ignored until the more overt connections of Bush and co to the whole military industrial complex began to become common knowledge.
Where the book does fall down is in its understanding of why these patterns of inequality have emerged and in its weak proposals for change. A fairly centrist populism is the order of the day and the cry of the anti-globalisation movement, that another world really is possible, has little resonance here.
The touchy-feely approach of Franks's essay about how the middle class is injured by gains at the top becomes almost laughable when he signs off by urging 'us' to start looking at ourselves and to start learning to talk again.
Wallis's article A Prophetic Politics, although a valuable contribution in its recognition that Christian evangelism is not always a reactionary force, is still marred by a social conservatism that exalts family values and denies women's reproductive freedoms.
A key feature of many of the essays is a marked reluctance to go beyond the parameters of mainstream political debate. There's a great deal of romanticism about the New Deal era and, while this is understandable in today's climate, there's little in the way of explaining why the US ruling class found it necessary to introduce these reforms and nothing in the way of pointing out their often limited nature.
There also seems to be an unspoken assumption that much of what is happening in the US today is relatively new, something that will come as a shock to anyone with a basic grasp of labour history.
The idea of completely changing the US social system is kept well off the agenda, the dreaded 's' word is never mentioned and you'll look in vain for any kind of appraisal of societies like the Soviet Union, which tried to take a non-capitalist road to development.
The legacy of anti-communism as state religion remains, but in the light of Hurricane Katrina, an event which highlighted not only the inequalities in the US but also its complete failure to cope in the way that its much poorer neighbour socialist Cuba did, one cannot but hope that some of the contributors might today adopt a much more radical approach.
The future of the US and indeed of the world demands nothing less.
From Morning Star
