I recently had a very nice american lady in my car. I was taking her home from the airport and we got into a conversation about the american dream, well actually we got into lots of conversations, but this was just one of the things she talked about that gave me food for thought.
Oh, by the way, this is going to be one of my heavy blogs, light ones start again later this week.
Anyhow, she explained in her gorgeous LA accent, how the premise of the dream was that you could be anything you want to be if you worked hard enough, and fought long enough, and that because you paid so little comparitively in taxes than some other countries, you could spend your money on you and your demands, re-invest in your business etc.
That the dream promoted success in all areas including business, and achieves an industrious committed workforce.
It's an interesting notion, and it's worthy of note that the US is the most powerful and successful nation on the planet and so therefore deserves every degree of credit.
I have a problem with it though. Surprise surprise. If you ever have read my political and economic rants before you will know I am not the biggest fan of corporatism, or the free market economy.
The thing is, I dont really want to be rich. I know, I know, it's a bit of a thing to say, but like many people in the UK, I never saw myself ending up rich. If I won millions of pounds on the lottery, I already have a plan as to how I will give most of it away.
So, the idea of working hard to achieve my goals is a bit of a misnomer. Dont get me wrong, I'm not after handouts. I like working as a rule, I just work to live, not the other way around.
My ideal future involved a pretty wife, a couple of kids, a house mostly paid for, a job thats secure enough, a little bit of savings for emergencies and a lot of time to spend with my family. I always thought the purpose of life was to enjoy it as best you can and to give my children a good and stable upbringing. I never imagined this would be without struggle or hardship, but I always believed that just like having a badly maintained car, the occasional break down can be a bit of an adventure.
After Hurricane Katrina, we all watched in shock at the pictures of a society shattered, and our hearts went out to the people of New Orleans.
What seemed so surprising about the disaster though, apart from the single biggest contributor to the relief effort being from Qatar (I believe), was that people whose lives were in ruins, who had no homes to go to, who had no income, seemed to be left predominantly to their own devices. Standard grants of $3200 were given, but thats not enough to rebuild a house, re-establish your kids schooling, re-build a business and fight a rising desperate crime wave, thats put New Orleans right near the top of the murder charts in the US.
FEMA even left people deperate for food and water in the football stadium for ages before finally getting there, even though the reporters seemed to find the place no problem.
And yet within days of the disaster, corporations a plenty were divvying up rights to knock down their schools and houses, and build more expensive, more exclusive houses. The fact that the people displaced were mostly black and the people likely to move in were white has very little to do with it. The fact that the people displaced were poor however, and the people moving in were wealthy does bother me.
Now most of the schools are private, the wealthy districts are on their way to be built, water and electricity are all back on, well in the good districts, all with tax payers $27bn (of which only about a third has actually been spent.... what can they actually be doing with the rest of it???), and as for the camps built in Texas and the surrounding areas to look after the victims, mostly paid by charity organisations with donations coming from around the world and not by the government or FEMA, they were stretched to the limit with the influx of refugees, and now have all but gone. People, well poor people in particular will have to look after themselves.
It may be the case that if I were living in New Orleans during those terrible days, I too would have stayed in the camps, my job would no longer be there, my life would have been torn apart, and my meagre savings would never support my small family. Combine that with the insurance company that is fighting to hang on to the money I had invested in insurance policies for 20 years means that, going back to the car analogy, my car would be totalled, which is most definitely NOT an adventure. The help I would get from the government would have been minimal too, but because I didn't subscribe to the american dream, people would say it was my own fault.
Maybe they are right. Maybe there is something about taking care of your own future first and foremost, but what is so wrong with wanting a simple life, and asking for simple things. I dont want to spend every waking hour worrying about work. I want to spend it enjoying watching my future kids run in the public park, that I paid for with my taxes. I want to spend it with my elderly parents who have been given a state pension and healthcare, which they paid for with their taxes.
The biggest problem to me with the american dream however is not the poor that occasionally need a helping hand, but the super rich who seem to take advantage of every situation and make more than a healthy buck out of peoples misfortune.
The biggest problem is responsibility. Whilst americans may well argue that it is everyones duty to be responsible for the safety and security of their own family, when it comes to a multi-national corporation, it's no-one's responsibility. It's all very well to say that if someone owns a river, they are responsible for it, but corporations have never been responsible. Just look at Enron or the AOL business to see how multinational corporations dont own up to their responsibility.
But who takes the blame. Therein lies the problem with the free market. Do the shareholders who have made the profits year on year take any responsibility. As a rule no, especially if they buy their shares through dummy corporations and slush funds. If you are lucky you may get a corporate MD to go to jail, but it rarely happens. And it will never compensate the millions of people who have lost money on the stock market because of the crash, or even worse the victims from the chemical manufacturers who have been spilling their waste products into rivers for decades.
We all know that corporations will do anything to save a buck, and that the guy next door doesn't matter, never matters, particularly if he's poor.
The US government has pretty much given over it's homeland security responsibilty to private enterprise, and clearly FEMA did a bang up job on getting New Orleans back on it's feet.
As corporations begin to take over the US, shouldn't you be asking who are you voting for now, a democrat, a republican, or a leading shareholder from Halliburton (Thank you Donald Rumsfeld, major shares in one of the biggest weapons firms in the world, just at the time you were advising the US president to go war with Iraq over WMD!)
The american dream has its place, for sure. The spirit of enterprise and accomplishment is an important factor to the country's success, but surely more should be done for the people at the bottom of the ladder, or perhaps just the people who were doing fine before a dirty great hurricane blew their houses away.
Perhaps not everything in life should be about the money.
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