Commentary: Letters from abroad: Europe’s (Leftist) view of America

The Nissan Versa: Many Americans would not qualify for a loan to buy this budget-priced car, according to one report. Photo: NissanUSA.com
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Editor’s note: The opinions below are the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.

By Barbara Franz

In contrast to all other industrialized countries, life expectancy is shrinking in the United States.

This is the case while people all over Europe and in other developed areas of the world are living longer and longer every year. This is what András Szigetvari analyzes in Der Standard, an Austrian daily newspaper.

Barbara Franz
Barbara Franz

He cited data published this month by the National Center for Health Statistics, claiming that the average life expectancy in the USA has decreased by one month in both 2015 and 2016.

The federal agency’s explanation is based upon Americans’ drug and alcohol abuse. Some 63,600 Americans died in 2016 because of drugs or alcohol. Two-thirds of these deaths resulted from heroin and pain killers, such as Fentanyl, with the rest from alcohol abuse.

The number of substance abuse deaths increased by 21 percent from 2015 to 2016, a trend that can be expected to continue. It affects specifically the population between 21 to 55 and, Szigetvari argues, thus dramatically impacts America’s economy.

More than 10,000 workers are missing from the US labor market, the author claims, and the percentage of people who died because of drug abuse while in the work force has increased to 22 percent.

Szigetvari cites Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, which found deaths related to drug abuse, especially heroin, Fentanyl, and other opiates, caused economic damage in 2015 of $500 billion–about 3 percent of the American economic output.

The number might be somewhat inflated, argues the author, but this does not diminish the fact that American economic and political power are declining.

The reason for this deterioration is insightfully explained by Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, whose warnings about the downfall of neo-liberalism have been spreading all over Europe.

His commentary “Wider den Klassenkampf gegen die Armen” (Opposed to Class Warfare against the Poor) also appeared in Der Standard. 

It is a beautiful and angry analysis of the failure of American and British liberalism in 2016. Citing Federal Reserve data, the author notes that more than half of all families in the United States would not qualify for a loan that to buy the cheapest car for sale (the Nissan Versa Sedan, priced at $12,825).

In the other hub of neo-liberalism, the United Kingdom, over 40 percent of families relied on either credit or food banks to feed themselves and cover basic needs in 2016.

In reference to Hillary Clinton’s loss in last year’s presidential election, Varoufakis claims that America’s “liberal establishment is convinced it was robbed by an insurgency of ‘deplorables’ weaponized by Vladimir Putin’s hackers and Facebook’s sinister inner workings.”

He emphasizes that instead of looking at class and the diminishing opportunities for workers and their children, America’s “liberal establishment” bang on interminably with “conspiracy theories about Russian influence, spontaneous bursts of misogyny, the tide of migrants, the rise of the machines,” and so forth.

Varoufakis emphasizes that 20 years ago, liberal commentators were cultivating the impossible dream that globalizing finance capitalism would deliver prosperity for most.

At a time when capital was becoming more concentrated on a global scale, and more militantly against workers (and in favor of stockholders), class warfare was declared to be passé. But 2016 has shown this is not the case.

Indeed, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism and other phobias based on identity politics are highly correlated with the “militant parochialism fueling Trump and Brexit,” as Yaroufakis calls it.

Yet they are only tangential to the deeper cause – the war against the poor. For example, Britain’s Tory government, which has adopted Brexit’s populist aims, has recently announced a multi-billion-pound reduction in social security, education, and tax credits for the working poor. Those cuts apparently are matched exactly by reductions in corporate and inheritance tax cuts.

It is true that Brexit and the electoral success of Donald Trump had more to do with working people’s disillusion with middle-of-the-road politics–which intensified the class war against them– than with any overall disillusion with capitalism.

To be sure, the power that these men and women gave to Trump would be deployed against them later. Tax reform is just the first of many policies distinctly directed against America’s working people to aid the 1 percent and big corporations.

Trump has used his working-class support, in the words of Yaroufakis, to buttress a tax reform whose “naked ambition is to help plutocracy, while millions of Americans face reduced health coverage and, as the federal budget deficit balloons, higher long-term tax bills.”

From the European leftist perspective, all of this—tax reform that increases the concentration of capital by the wealthy at the expense of the working poor, declining life expectancy, increasing substance abuse deaths—paints a cohesive picture: That, even though few citizens may realize it, class warfare is alive and well in the U.S.A. and Britain.

Barbara Franz, Ph.D., is a political science professor at Rider University, and a Morristown resident.

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