The American Nightmare: No Exit, No Entry

The American dream is turning sour. It was turning sour for years but now its faithful followers are more disgruntled than ever. For the greater part of this century, Americans thought productivity and efficiency were the two core values they could live by. Be efficient, be productive and earn the right to a big house, a big car and a happy family. Get a job, sell yourself, sell well, and thou shall reap.

But when the lion’s share of the big house, and the big car goes to a finance company, and all the nice things have a higher price than what you paid, Americans feel the terrible trap of consumer debt.

Whenever the economy shows signs of weakening, the spending numbers are emphasized—retail spending is an index that all mainstream media faithfully follow. If people spend, the American economy will create jobs. If the American economy creates jobs, you will have money and then you can buy some nice things that will make you happy. Or as in the past few decades, the jobs will help you pay off your credit card, car, store card and loans for things you consumed today.

But the Financier’s dream that America had become is souring. For the past 5 years the finance industry has not grown. Bank merger after merger have consolidated debt (aka bank assets) however, there just aren’t enough people who can buy more. Finance companies are trying to sell financial services to a bilious overfed consumer who cannot buy more debt because he doesn’t have the spending power that he had before. American incomes have not grown in the last 4 years and in fact fallen steadily from 2000. This big fact is glossed over in mainstream media. Instead consumers are informed about the overall growth in GNP.

The American dream of liberty turned into an American nightmare of debt. With falling or static incomes, debt is a nasty thing to have.

The American nation created amazing Universities that Americans don’t have the money or time to attend anymore. An American’s life is a graph of lifetime earnings in which education is a terrible expense that reduces credit worthiness.

Why don’t we hear more about it in America? Apart from a few watered down, offbeat ‘opinions’, Alan Greenspan’s world-view rules. Just what has happened and who knows about it?

First let’s understand the core tenets of the Alan Greenspan world.

1. Faith, Trust and The Popular Rationale

The stock exchange (the largest mirror of whatever we lump under an economy) works on faith (perhaps to differentiate from religious faith it is called consumer confidence). When people believe that things are good, share prices rise. When people doubt, share prices fall. Over time this is interpreted to mean that facts that help people believe are good for the economy, and facts that cast doubt are bad for the economy. Even war does not cast doubt when translated it may mean consumption, profits and introducing more people to the American Dream.

Americans are very responsible people and realize the importance of faith very early on in life. They interpret consumer confidence to mean that they must not criticize when things aren’t so good, because it makes them worse. A false optimism is part of the American national character. They have learnt in the last 70-80 years that they must be always positive. This positiveness can be a delusion, but delusion keeps the market going and can help in evening out the peaks and the troughs in a free market system. This is the essence of Greenspanomics.

A related concept to consumer confidence is trust. More developed countries have the highest trust in the social system and the less developed have lower trust. The relationship of trust to productivity is an outward bending curve, meaning that a little bit of trust goes a longer way to increasing productivity. In mathematical terms, it means one unit of trust results in more than one unit of productivity.

But lately, the thinking world isn’t even sure what it means to be developed or less developed. Does it mean that the poor are not free? Does it make sense that a country dangerous to the environment, consuming 80% of the world’s resources is accorded the status of developed and free regardless of how irresponsible that freedom is? Perhaps it is an intellectual argument but how can a country without free access to doubt, whose ordinary citizens live every day life on faith, be called a modern country?

In the last few years, the Amartya Sen type of welfare economists have expanded the narrow definition of development. Dr Sen’s work is politicized because of the relationship he has drawn between Famine and Democracy, but its more interesting contribution is that it recognizes a different goal—Freedom over just ‘Development.’ His book, ‘Development as Freedom’ is based on the idea that Freedom is the real goal, of which development is a path, or way. This is a significant departure from mainstream economics. Mainstream economists did not recognize social emancipation as an important factor in the success of an economic system. In fact mainstream market economics really saw the world as a board game of prices where hazy and fluffy concepts from the social sciences had little relevance. In that respect, Amartya successfully imported a little bit of Eastern thought into mainstream understanding of economics and integrated two hitherto unrelated phenomena successfully. Just to recognize development as a way, rather than as an end, is a huge step forward for economics.

Today more and more people are questioning the older ideas of capital being a cure-all in the absence of a supporting social system. The IMF’s and the World Bank’s experiments with slower economies have led to waste and crisis, but the obvious alternative, get thee to a democracy and then fool around with your markets is on uncertain grounds in spite of research like Dr Sen’s.

But, why aren’t welfare economists stepping forward to analyze the Development As Unfreedom of America? Why don’t we hear more voices of dissent?


2. The Complicity of Media

In America, the mainstream media, alternative media and Universities are ineffectual in helping understand or adapt to global change. Voices from the left are weak. Greenpeace is marginalized. Democracy Now is a place to go to sound intellectual. The word frozen comes to mind. Ironically, Madonna has a song by that name, wearing a black robe with henna on her hands, she writhes to the song, ‘ooo… frozen’ Perhaps she intended to draw a parallel with middle-eastern societies that restrict women’s freedom. Quite oddly, it isn’t just the black robed woman who is frozen. The brightly colored, sensationalized gibberish that passes for news in America is also frozen. As are the independent news and news channels frozen—behind the label, ‘left.’

3. The Metaphor of the new Ignorance: Copypaste

Is it inertia? Like elsewhere in history, people are frozen just when it matters the most. Or can it be that America today lacks the very language to understand what is happening. That the problem of America, like the majority of the world is also ignorance. It is a special kind of ignorance. An ignorance not borne from the absence of Science, Religion, Language or any intellectual tool known to humanity. But, an ignorance in spite of all the above.

To understand this ignorance we have to explore it. What does this ignorance look like? Who are the perpetuators of the myths that this ignorance is based upon? Who has done this to America?

This ignorance looks like paper and the Internet. Ancient papyrus, man’s first expression is the death of forests a few thousand years later. Yet, tons of newspapers, printed literature, packaging and words cannot produce the language required to penetrate the new ignorance. Ideas are negligible, drowned in the noise.

This ignorance has a copypaste quality. Everything is on the Internet. There is no need to know anything. There used to be a phrase in development economics called ‘transfer of technology’. And now the only word that the world needs is ‘copypaste’. The world copypastes America and America copypastes itself. And there is little need to discover, to examine or to explore. The beauty is that copypaste is a virtual truth, it can be copypasted anywhere. The economics of information is puzzling. Varian and Shapiro told us that copy cost of information is 0. Their argument is that if you can convince someone to pay for information, you can get very rich very fast because copy cost is 0. Copy cost is also the loss of billions and trillions of creative thoughts. But the future as a concept is non-economic. Money today has a higher value than money tomorrow. There is little economic incentive in investing in originality today because it is worth nothing today.

Business Universities suffer a loss of ideas. Except for jargon, it all seems so familiar, so repetitive. For example, the networked enterprise changed to ecommerce to real-time to on-demand in a few years. A certain know-it-all sense of dejavu characterizes research.

A central tenet of American life is that all problems are treated with the same solution; change the price and fit a model. Price, interest, exchange rates are all economic tools with limited social impact, yet these are the only tools available to us. This is a narrow and restrictive lens because all problems are not economic and many do not have economic solutions. Ultimately solving social needs through monetization and products leads to a kind of chaos that the market cannot solve.

American democracy is founded in the volunteer association, the grassroots group that comes together and addresses an issue. But now those associations and community groups that were the backbone of the American system are not so active.

The most successful and effective grassroots coalition in the recent past is the church. Something the rest of the world and American non-christians don’t trust since it excludes non-christians. It is a sign of the times, that the America that stood for grand idealism now is satisfied with a narrower definition of itself. America was the antithesis to the European worlds. It defied the rules of religion, of race, of ethnicity. Yet today, at the peak of its power it has shrunk to the size of the same church that it left behind to establish the New World.

4. The New Racism: Plastic Vs. Metal

Even if there are associations on the left of the divide, they are absolutely powerless because they tend to be marginalized people outside the Corporation who cannot influence it—Democracy Now is a failed organization regardless of the well meaning intellectuals that support its efforts to provide the truth to people. A metaphorical sorting bin somewhere in high school, successfully picks the appropriate personalities for the right jobs. Back when the sorting bin was called a caste system, now it is called a personality type.

Mainstreaming of American life perpetuate. What this means that all the people in positions of power have the same values, otherwise they don’t get there. Thanks to a filtering process adopted by all corporations that weeds out all nay-sayers, the Corporate only hires its own kind.

5. Money Solves All

America uses money as a problem and solution for the entire globe. When countries carry out nuclear tests, up come sanctions. Exchange rates dip, duties accelerate and after a while, since these methods are fairly useless to resolve conflict, down go all sanctions, all duties and all trade restrictions.

Even though that is about American govt., ordinary people think exactly the same way. ‘Why is there terrorism, division and chaos in South Asia?’ Ask an American and he will tell you, ‘because they don’t have money. If they had more money they would stop fighting.’ Ask California state school, how come public schools are rotten? the answer is lack of sufficient funds. American schools have more funds available then British, Canadian or Indian, yet turn out the least number of college entering graduates. Oh. Well, American’s don’t look to the outside world.

6. The Corporation Knows Best

The market is, in its ideal form, you and I. Simple people at the grassroots can solve problems if they co-operate. That is a beautiful principle that was at the heart of market knows best. The system was fair when simple people were the core of the economy. Simple people ended up making conglomerates and now they don’t let other simple people get successful. In fact they look for the toughest and slimiest among us to bring the spoils of the market economy back to them. It is a battle out there. The American corporation grows by conquest. Instead of a few minds, it absorbs hundreds of minds from all over the world who devote their energy to the survival and profitability of the corporation. The corporation is ruthless, it spits out those who do not bring in money, yet it keeps their work intact ready to be utilized a few years down the road. By systematically buying out competition, enhancing product lifecycles, producing at minimum costs and selling high volume, low margin, the Corporation has become the cockroach of free market economics. It is the bogey that is turning the American dream into a nightmare.

The corporation has no allegiance to people. Those who own a corporation, are only interested in the profits that it creates. Therefore the Corporation is inherently disloyal. It does not care about the American dream per se. Like the East India Company which acted as the arms of the British Empire, the modern day Corporation will go to any country and in its wake lay to waste the natural ecology, culture, businesses and way of life of that country. There are strong oligopolistic, crony capitalism elements in the global system that are working against the success of the free market in resolving what, where and how to produce. Say’s law prevails. What is sold is bought because so much is produced that the market creates an illusion of choice. One company produces 20 brands of shampoo to capture all parts of the market. Countries unto themselves, corporations are the true imperialists who are completely indifferent, which may be worse than anything before. Unlike missionaries who spread a value system and enriched people, unlike even the East India Company, which had certain strong value systems and ethics, modern day imperialism has no law and no ethics.

Corporations succeed because of the world’s American dream of the good life. It will seduce with a house, a car, a mobile phone, a good life and the promise that if you work hard enough and if you are smart enough one day you can sell something to the world that makes you rich and solve all your problems. In the meanwhile, if you feel like a slave, the corporate culture will drop you from its rank; it will determine that you lack the drive. The market solution would be to take Prozac.


7. The American Dreamer Is Clueless

Quite unlike many less developed countries, which find conspiracy in all global events, the average American does not see the foreigner as a threat to his system. Manufacturing goods in a number of countries means that nothing is completely American, yet the American is the biggest buyer for all production in the world.

At heart, the American is sure that others in the world are exactly like him with the same American dream. There is proof of that in the way so many people used to make their way to America to earn the right to be American. In his open generosity, the American just wants the whole world to be like him. Crack the same jokes, have the same concept of what’s fair and good, take the same responsibility for the good life that he does and just get on with it. To the American, this is at the heart of the democracy that he wants to world to have. America wants the world to be like America, and is unwilling for America to follow the same rules as the rest of the world.

America relies on George Bush as a man who will protect the American way of life. As a president of America, George Bush’s role has been to perpetuate the myth that the American system is working at full potential. He must convince the American that his life will remain unchanged regardless of Islam, global warming, oil shortage or war. The average American hears from Bush, ‘All will be ok, they will change, not you. You don’t have to change anything that you do today. Except one thing. Just don’t venture outside America or you will be killed.’ Many find this a bit too much. However, America recently has not found a political alternative or a political leader who addresses its needs and the worlds at the same time. It seems the America is in constant tug of war with the rest of the world and doesn’t know what to do.

Going global with a one-way ticket is hard.


The Result: The New Iron Curtain Country

In a cruel twist of fate, America is closer to being the new Russia of the world than the dream of liberty that it was. In the wake of the Patriot Act, and increased surveillance, it is harder for foreigners to live in America than ever before in history. But, in fact, the American population is heavily skewed towards Mexican, Asian and Indian. The new policies will marginalize naturalized Americans.

The INS for the last several decades had a strong anti foreigner bias. But it would effectively look the other way when the economy needed 18-hour workdays. It was ok with letting students enter America, if they had the brains. The world’s brightest minds came to America and gave much of themselves. From food, to literature, to science, to media, to sports, to business, to yahoo, to hotmail, to Nasa, to gymnastics, the world gave to America its best people. There was a well-trodden path to becoming American that worked for decades. Now there are barriers and hurdles to that path.

In the American melting pot, the immigrant sacrifices their first identity for the American identity. Somehow the American identity seems big enough to take care of the first. But becoming American is a long journey with many phases. American. There is home, and across the metaphorical river that souls must cross there is America. And what a crossing it is, two deaths in one lifetime. There are those who visit home often but slowly go away. Those who never come home but still call. Those who stop calling home eventually, because there is no one to call and nothing to say. In return all that the immigrant wanted was livelihood. The exchange rate difference means that the families of those who live in America had a better life. And the quality of immigrant work meant taxes, new products and services in America.

The immigrant trades perpetual loneliness of America for dollars. But there is a key difference in immigration today from what has been understood before. The immigrant does not come to America to give up his indigenous culture or way of life but to strengthen it. Perhaps America has never appreciated the subtleties of what this may mean and always misunderstood immigration as a public avowal that American culture and life is being adopted. The fact is that even though they become fully American over time, people remain attached to their sub-group in America, and that even the most successful American immigrants support charities and institutions back home.

Now, when America is sending out signals that your original identity is not quite ok, more and more people ask, is this a good trade? On the one hand your trade with people back home is bittersweet through out your new life in America. Your life = their happiness. Your confusion = their loss. Your success = their pride. Your individuality= their aloneness. Your life, their life = never the same again. In the end all that sacrifice seems to result in is that Your life = America’s GNP but nothing more.

What is happening now is that in return the immigrant is not even accorded the status of an immigrant. He is an illegal worker, a foreigner, an H1B wannabe, always on the ready to leave without bags but with tons of baggage.

On the very top of the pile of immigrants are green card holders who couldn’t travel while their applications are process and later don’t travel out of the country for fear that their cards will be revoked at any time. Citizenship takes anywhere from 10-15 years, which is a third of a lifetime’s peak years. All this time, what is the true status of an immigrant in America? He is a consumption statistic at best with a credit history. Immigrants have become marginalized people without status other than tax id #x.

It is clear that the American government does not trust the foreigner. The American people may trust enough to do business or give jobs. But for how long?

Who knows about the above in American government?

Effectively, only the immigrant.

If America imagines that all loyalties and identities are sublimated underneath being American never to return, it is wrong. People’s first identity is also their last. The Salmon always returns to where it was born. This phase of globalization is not about blending and merging identities into an amorphous global identity. This phase is about sharpened awareness and conflict between all identities. We are all more of what we were, not less. The Hindu Bengali migrant will take on the mask, he will learn the language, he will dress as locals do, yet, he will cook his Bengali food more often here than in Bengal. He will mingle more with fellow Bengalis, not less. The Muslim will blend in completely, but here and there his family will cover their heads and go to mosque. They will all strengthen their first identities, because it is the most vulnerable core of their self, which has led to their decision to take on another identity. Gaining self-esteem for the adopted second identity would tempt them to do the same for the first—the one pressured to change. Some will enjoy the process of reflection between the two selves, for others the process will be pure agony. This phase is at its best about the rich man going back to his village to change it for the better, but at its worst, we don’t really know.

The immigrant is invisible in American public space. It is as though he is ‘outsourced’ and is not really there in America. He pays taxes, he works but his identity, and his concerns and needs are of no interest to anyone but himself. America does not recognize the immigrant in public. However in private industry he is accepted as a worker. Compare this to the neighbor, Canada. Here the immigrant has a face, a concern and a politics in public space. However, he is rejected as a worker. Immigrants in Canada have a very rough time finding comparable work. But politically, Canada adopts several languages in government communication, multicultural days in school, holidays and recognition of traditional festivals at the workplace in cognizance of the problem of integrating a super diverse workforce.

Which is better? Which is easier to correct? The market or the government?

Perhaps it isn’t really fair to compare the two Governments. The American system has a life of its own. The bird has literally flown the coop. Years of propaganda have taken the place of facts, people lack the language, the concepts and the tools to acknowledge, describe or address political problems. Perhaps numbed by the American lifestyle, Americans cannot even think. The immigrant in any case is marginalized, looking always to blend in and succeed. Quite profoundly, people in America are ‘comfortably numb’.

The time has come to increase interest rates because the dollar was losing value against other currencies, which means other costs must be lowered. So there is Bush, getting the FTAA signed to getting the poor South Americans to help out with cheaper blue-collar labor and lax production standards. If the North won’t work for peanuts, the South will. The American corporation wants the advantages inherent in producing in a poor and populace place, while American foreign policy has other aims. It recognizes that the menace of the Muslim is a long-term problem and perhaps has decided that it must put a limit to its extent of global dependence.

For America, going global needs only a one-way ticket, come what may.