The United States: a country where the rich are governed by the rich and enjoyed by the rich

On December 21, Saudi Arabia's Arab News Network published an article entitled "the United States has become a country where the rich have, rule and enjoy" by Jeffrey Sachs, Professor of Columbia University, director of the University's Center for sustainable development and chairman of the United Nations Action Network for sustainable development. It said that Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the election a year ago, But the outlook for the United States remains uncertain. It is not easy to diagnose exactly what caused the United States to be in such a dilemma that it incited the "trump movement".
In the chaotic political situation in the United States, multiple factors are at work. However, in the author's opinion, the deepest crisis is political - the political institutions in the United States have failed to "promote public welfare" as promised by the U.S. Constitution. In the past 40 years, it has become a game of lobbying for the interests of the super rich and the inner circle at the expense of the vast majority of American citizens.
"The war of the rich against the poor"
Warren Buffett pointed out the essence of the crisis in 2006. "There is no doubt that there is class struggle. But it is my class, the rich, who is waging war, and we are winning," he said
The main battlefield is Washington. Commandos are corporate lobbyists who flock to the U.S. Congress, federal ministries and executive departments. Ammunition is billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying (estimated at $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (estimated at $14.4 billion in the 2020 federal election). The propagandists supporting class war are corporate media led by super rich Rupert Murdoch.
The American class struggle against the poor is nothing new - it was officially launched in the early 1970s and has been implemented with great efficiency over the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the late 1960s, the development path of the United States was roughly the same as that of Western Europe after the war, and was moving towards a social democracy. After Lewis Powell, a former corporate lawyer, entered the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, the Supreme Court opened the gate for corporate funds to enter politics.
After Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he strengthened the Supreme Court's attack on public welfare by reducing taxes for the rich, attacking organized labor and abolishing environmental protection measures. This trajectory has not yet reversed.
"Drifting away from social democracy"
As a result, the United States is moving away from Europe in terms of basic economic dignity, welfare and environmental control. Europe generally continues to follow the path of social democracy and sustainable development, while the United States is moving forward on a path characterized by political corruption, oligarchy, widening gap between the rich and the poor, contempt for the environment and refusal to limit human induced climate change.
Several figures illustrate the difference between the two. The average government revenue of the EU is less than 30% of GDP. Therefore, European governments can provide funds for universal access to health care, higher education, family support and employment training, but the United States cannot ensure the provision of these services. European countries ranked first in life satisfaction in the global happiness index report, while the United States ranked only 19th. In 2019, the life expectancy of people in the European Union was 81.1 years and that in the United States was 78.8 years. By 2019, the share of the richest 1% of households in Western Europe in national income was about 11%, while that in the United States was close to 20%. In 2019, the per capita carbon dioxide emission of the United States was 16.1 tons, while that of the European Union was less than 10 tons.
In short, the United States has become a country owned, governed and enjoyed by the rich, and bears no political responsibility for the climate damage it has caused to the rest of the world. The social split that led to this phenomenon led to the prevalence of "despair of death", including drug overdose and Dutch act, and the incidence rate of depression (even before the outbreak of COVID-19), the incidence of depression increased (especially among young people). Politically, these dislocations have led in different directions - most ominously, to trump, who provides false populism and personal worship. While serving the rich, using xenophobia to distract the poor, launching a cultural war and posing as a strong man may be the oldest tactics in the tactics Manual of demagogic politicians, but they still work surprisingly today.