United States: Congress or a Club for the Rich?

In Argentina, many people still regard the United States as a good “example” of democracy. Among them there are the biggest, most influential journalists that go out of their way to propagandize the goodness of the northern nation and prefer to ignore the most serious problems: the domination of large corporations and the huge social inequities. The recent financial crisis was a clear example that showed how large banks, thanks to the lack of regulations, collapsed from speculating with high-risk mortgages and lines of credit. In order to prevent them from completely collapsing, the government arrived to protect them with the support of huge amounts of money from the U.S. Treasury that will now never be used, for example, to combat poverty or to better the health care system that doesn’t cover tens of millions of people.

As the crisis unfolded, it has become known that almost half of the legislators in Congress are actually millionaires with investments in large financial companies and in the private health sector. The website Open Secrets published a report that revealed that while millions of American families are struggling to stay afloat during the economic crisis, the assets of those who call themselves “representatives” in Congress continue to grow without stopping. The information is significant because just 1 percent of the U.S. population belongs to the class of millionaires, but in Congress almost 50 percent of the legislators have large fortunes of more than six figures.

With this revelation, those citizens who do not belong to that extremely small but privileged club that currently has so much power are able to better understand why there are so few legislators concerned about serious problems plaguing the country like unemployment, homes being repossessed by banks or the vanishing savings of millions of people in the middle and lower-middle classes. Simply, they aren’t worried because they are among the richest in the country and control substantial amounts of resources which the majority of those they “represent” aren’t able to access.

The recent information from the U.S. Labor Department show that the national rate of unemployment almost topped 10 percent and that they have not gotten back the almost nine million lost jobs during the banking crisis. However, the banks were aided with enormous sums of money by the state and the regular citizens were abandoned — many of them losing not only their jobs, but also their homes. It’s hardly surprising that suicide rates have gone up dramatically.

The investigation revealed that 261 of the legislators on Capitol Hill (435 in the House of Representatives and 100 in the Senate) are rich; that one out of five of them has assets of at least $10 million and that the wealth of eight legislators tops $100 million or more. Also, they found out that between 2008 and 2009, in the middle of the recession, the congressional members’ assets grew by more than 16 percent. That growth of wealth of the congressional members can be explained because a good number of them have investments in the main health and financial sectors, mostly in Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Merck. These are the same economic groups that received money from the bailout after exploiting the real estate bubble.

Can we still keep affirming so carelessly that the United States is the democratic paradise of the world?