America’s Real Problems

The WikiLeaks revelations may have damaged America’s image, but its image was already battered. The superpower is getting weaker — and not only economically. How is America doing?

No nation in the last 100 years has been as dominant as the United States. Dominant not only in the world, but also in the thoughts, in the dreams and in the imaginations of people everywhere. America stood for freedom and equality, for the wide-open prairie, for the spirit of invention and prosperity and for the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. America attracted millions of immigrants to its shores. Today, the immigrants are caught in the midst of a political battle between cheap labor and deportation. The only inventions these days are high-tech gadgets. America’s industry is nearly extinct, unemployment is high, and politics is polarized. Two costly wars have driven the country to the brink of economic ruin while simultaneously destroying the country’s international image. Now the latest disclosures by WikiLeaks have embarrassed the nation as well. America is shell-shocked.

Where do America’s problems lie?

People used to call America the land of unlimited opportunities. Now the assessment is shockingly different. Several months after the midterm elections and a few weeks before the swearing in of the new Congress, political gridlock threatens America. An unbridgeable chasm has developed between Republicans and Democrats — the only two players in this two-party system. Republicans even block bipartisan initiatives solely in order to deny Democrats any political successes. Just this past week, higher medical payments for first responders who continue to suffer chronic effects of dust they inhaled in the wake of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks failed to pass. Higher standards for food safety are also in danger of being dropped due to Republican opposition; Republican lawmakers complain that the new standards constitute meddling in the free market.

The economic recovery proceeds to plod forward, unemployment is high, and the nation suffers record deficits. The infrastructure between New York and California is wretched. Highways, bridges, tunnels, trains, power grids and canals are largely decades-old. The education system is undergoing its own major crisis, and the population is rapidly becoming obese. One in three Americans is overweight, and the number of diabetics is on the rise. Pentagon leaders worry that they will soon have difficulty finding soldiers healthy enough to serve.

What’s really dangerous is that a majority of Americans either deny these facts or just ignore them. The once-healthy American sense of patriotism has morphed into a sort of blind fanaticism in many areas of the nation where criticism of the country is no longer permitted. Whoever dares to voice a grievance against America is labeled as “un-American.” At the same time, it’s clear that a critical examination of actual problems is necessary in order to solve them.

How is the U.S. economy doing?

At first glance, the casual observer might well conclude that the United States has recovered from the financial crisis in great shape. Stock markets are at their highest levels in more than two years, and the holiday shopping season is in full swing. Long lines at retail stores prove that consumers are spending once again. But appearances are deceiving.

Wall Street, where many stocks and indexes have doubled in value over the last two years, no longer reflects the health of corporations or of the economy. Investors no longer look for solid, long-term returns but for short-term price fluctuations. So-called high frequency trading controlled and directed by computer programs now makes up more than half the trading volume. Investors gamble not only with stocks, but with commodities and currencies as well. Even gold — traditionally a safe haven in times of crisis — has now degenerated into an object of speculation.

Just as the Dow Jones numbers paint a deceptive picture, so do the long lines at retail stores. On Black Friday, the traditional start of the Christmas shopping season, stores reported record sales figures. But most customers were looking for drastically reduced prices. They were shopping for bargains. Nothing moves unless it has been deeply discounted, because the average American is heavily in debt and keeps a close watch on his or her finances. Example: Tiffany, New York’s premier jeweler, recently reported brisk sales and increased profits. But that was only the case with items costing over $500 — anything less expensive didn’t sell. What that shows is that the wealthy are doing the shopping, while the middle class is staying home.

What’s Washington doing about it?

The senseless duel between the political parties does nothing to ensure that things will change anytime soon for the American people. And American voters themselves are largely to blame for their predicament. In the United States, people regularly vote against their own self-interests. That stems from a misguided belief in the American Dream. They cling to a vision that someday they too will belong to the upper class, raking in the big bucks. With that vision before their eyes, millions of laborers and employees with no savings to speak of, working for slave wages and taking second jobs just to get by, still support tax breaks for the wealthiest segment of the population.

The fronts are clearest in the tax-policy debate. Democrats want to continue the Bush-era tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 a year while raising tax levels for those earning more to the levels they were before the Bush cuts. Republicans strenuously object to that, despite the fact that continuing the cuts for the wealthiest would add over $600 billion to the deficit — money that America simply doesn’t have.

Republicans made major gains in the midterm elections and are in no mood to compromise. Conventional Washington wisdom predicts that the cuts will stay in place for everyone regardless of income, something that will dramatically increase the budget deficit and require massive cutbacks in government outlays for, among other things, infrastructure, social programs, schools, hospitals, law enforcement and cultural institutions.

Where does Obama stand in all this?

The last best hope of 2008 stands in his own shadow, and in two ways: Obama was unable to realize many of his ideas during the first two years of his administration. He was unable to close the prison at Guantanamo, despite his promise to do so; the hoped-for employment miracle remains elusive; gays are still prohibited from openly serving in the nation’s military forces; and lobbyists still have near-unimpeded access to Congress. The list goes on and on.

But the list of Obama’s successes is also quite long. Long-overdue health care reforms have begun; the automobile industry was rescued from its worst crisis ever; fees for schools and students were reduced, and educational loans were made easier to get; new regulations on the financial sector were put in place; and a consumer protection agency was implemented. Obama’s other problem, however, is that he has done a poor job of selling these to the people as legislative victories. That, or he has just let the opposition talk them down.

Example: the labor market. The unemployment rate is officially 9.6 percent, and experts say the actual figure is closer to 17 percent. Blame for this is put on Obama, even though the recession was precipitated by the policies of the Bush administration. The fact that Obama created more new jobs during his first two years in office than were created in the entire eight years of the Bush administration goes largely unnoticed.

Is there hope?

America’s problems are more likely to increase over the next few years. President Obama lost his comfortable majority in Congress. Anything he was unable to accomplish up to now is essentially off the table once and for all. That said, the Republican election victory in 2010 may lead to a long-term turnaround. If nothing changes significantly in the economy over the coming two years, Obama won’t get all the blame. The 2012 election could well be marked by another change in public opinion.

How does it look for America’s foreign policy?

The WikiLeaks disclosures of things said in private by U.S. diplomats were a source of global embarrassment. Whether they will cause any real international damage, however, is doubtful. America’s relationship with its allies is viewed in diplomatic circles as stable enough to survive such glitches. When Ambassador Murphy refers to Chancellor Merkel as “unimaginative” and Foreign Minister Westerwelle as “arrogant,” it might not be nice or professional, but it’s not sufficient to derail international relations between allies. How to deal with other nations is somewhat more problematic, but even offhand comments about Afghan or North Korean leadership are unlikely to have serious consequences.

America’s reputation has clearly suffered more from the policies of the recent past and the cultural changes now underway than from anything WikiLeaks has done. Where once John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali and Bill Clinton embodied America, today we have Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Sarah Palin. The election of the first black to the White House resulted in a new wave of racism in many parts of the country. Violence against homosexuals is on the rise. Religious hardliners are enjoying more support, as evidenced by Texas, for example, where creationism is about to be granted equal importance with evolution in school curricula.

Such developments will affect America for many years to come. Leaks about diplomatic gossip are just a mere passing distraction.