U.S.: Unrest and Necessary Corrections

Yesterday, while hundreds of U.S. citizens were demonstrating in the streets near the financial district of Wall Street in an attempt to establish a permanent campsite in protest against the greed of the global economic power center, the president of the United States, Barack Obama, reiterated his call to those controlling the largest fortunes to pitch in to reduce the country’s deficit, referring to the proposal that he will present to Congress tomorrow. Hours later, The New York Times reported that the plan will include the creation of a new tax for those who earn more than $1 million per year. The tax would ensure that the aforementioned sector pays at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers.

The U.S. leader’s posture hits the right mark, not only as an obviously necessary measure in order to tourniquet the abysmal deficit of the country’s economy — which was provoked in good measure by the spiraling tax cuts for the rich inaugurated by the conservative regime of Ronald Reagan —, but also as an act of basic political as well as moral correction. As has occurred in other latitudes of the Western world, social unrest in the United States begins to grow due to evidence that the stimulus programs implemented to overcome the still-prevailing economic crisis have served only to reward the voraciousness of the financial institutions and their officers (those responsible for the recession) with resources from the public coffers. Consequently, the astronomical costs of the economic crisis continue being transferred to wage-earners.

In the concrete case of the United States, the context for this unrest is an economy increasingly punished by social inequality — almost half of the country’s wealth is accumulated by the most affluent 10 percent — and by the growth of poverty, which currently affects 15 percent of the population, or nearly 50 million people, according to the statistics recently revealed by our neighbor’s Census Bureau. These figures represent a monumental blow to the economic model of the nation and a good part of the world, and can be read as a logical consequence of the George W. Bush administration’s disastrous management (receiving finances in surplus and handing them over in deficit), but also of the Obama administration’s erratic performance. Whether through his own errors, inherited sluggishness, or resistance from the opposition, the current leader has not been able to fulfill his promise of putting the economic management of his country at the service of “Main Street” (a euphemism referring to the common citizen): “We cannot only have a plan for Wall Street. We must also help Main Street.”

If something is at the root of the setbacks in the U.S. financial sector nearly three years ago, it is that the proprietors of the great firms are not interested in correcting the vices and imbalances that provoked the crisis. Like it or not, the elements of rationality, restraint, control and redistribution of wealth, so necessary in scenarios of economic disparity such as the present one, cannot come only from the state.

In these circumstances, Obama’s insistence on introducing basic measures of imposed equilibrium is a positive and healthy sign. Certainly, the approval of the measure will depend on the negotiations that are generated and developed from within our neighbor’s legislature, but it also depends on the capacity for mobilization by the nation’s clearheaded, critical and committed factions. In this sense, the incipient awakening of expressions of unrest, like those that took place yesterday on Wall Street, is a hopeful element. One could hope that this sector of the population exercises, by means of renewed political and social pressure, an effective counterweight against the powers that represent the great U.S. firms and even the vacillations and inconsistencies that have characterized their own leader.