The U.S. imprisons a higer
percentage of our population than countries like Russia, China and Iran.
Michael Criswell/Getty
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March 5, 2014 12:00 PM ET
Although the U.S. is one of the richest societies in history, it still lags
behind other developed nations in many important indicators of human development
– key factors like how we educate our children, how we treat our prisoners, how
we take care of the sick and more. In some instances, the U.S.'s performance is
downright abysmal, far below foreign countries that are snidely looked-down-upon
as "third world." Here are six of the most egregious examples that show how far
we still have to go:
1. Criminal Justice
We all know the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed, but few are likely
aware of just how bad it is compared to the rest of the world. The International
Center for Prison Studies
estimates that America imprisons 716 people per 100,000
citizens (of any age). That's significantly
worse than Russia (484 prisoners per 100,000 citizens), China
(121) and Iran (284). The only country that incarcerates a higher percentage of
its population than we do is North Korea. The U.S. is also
the only
developed country that executes prisoners – and our death penalty has a serious
race problem:
42 percent of
those on death row are black, compared to less than 15 percent of the
overall population.
Over two and a half million American children
have a parent behind bars. A whopping 60 percent of those
incarcerated in U.S. prisons are non-violent offenders,
many of
them in prison for drug charges (overwhelmingly African-Americans). Even
while our crime rate has fallen, our incarcerated population
has climbed. As of 2011, an estimated 217,000
American prisoners were raped each year – that's 600 new
victims every day, a truly horrifying number. In 2010, the Department of Justice
released a report about abuse in juvenile detention centers.
The report found that 12.1 percent of all youth held in juvenile detention
reported sexual violence; youth held for between seven and 12 months had a
victimization rate of 14.2 percent.
2. Gun Violence
The U.S.
leads the developed world in firearm-related murders, and the
difference isn't a slight gap – more like a chasm. According to United Nations
data, the U.S. has
20 times more murders than the
developed world average. Our murder rate also dwarfs many developing nations,
like Iraq, which has a murder rate less than half ours. More than half of the
most deadly mass shootings documented in the past 50 years around the world
occurred in the United States, and 73 percent of the killers
in the U.S.
obtained their weapons legally. Another
study finds that the U.S. has one of the highest proportion of
suicides committed with a gun. Gun violence varies across the U.S., but some
cities like New Orleans and Detroit
rival the most violent Latin American countries, where gun
violence is highest in the world.
3. Healthcare
A study last year found that in many American counties,
especially in the deep South, life expectancy is lower than in Algeria,
Nicaragua or Bangladesh. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not
guarantee health care to its citizens; even after the Affordable Care Act,
millions of
poor Americans will remain uninsured because governors, mainly Republicans,
have refused to expand Medicaid, which provides health insurance for low-income
Americans. Although the federal government will pay for the expansion, many
governors cited cost,
even though the expansion would actually save money. America
is unique among developed countries in that tens of thousands of poor Americans
die
because they lack health insurance, even while we spend more
than twice as much of our GDP on healthcare than the average for the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a collection of
rich world countries. The U.S. has
an infant mortality rate that dwarfs comparable nations, as
well as the highest teenage-pregnancy rate in the developed world, largely
because of the politically-motivated unavailability of contraception in many
areas.
4. Education
The U.S. is among
only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid
maternal leave (the other two are Papua New Guinea and Swaziland). This means
many poor American mothers must choose between raising their children and
keeping their jobs. The U.S. education system is plagued with structural racial
biases, like the fact that schools are funded at the local, rather than national
level. That means that schools attended by poor black people get far less
funding than the schools attended by wealthier students. The Department of
Education has confirmed that schools with high concentrations of poor students
have lower levels of funding. It's no wonder America has one
of the highest achievement gaps between high income and low income students,
as
measured by the OECD. Schools today are actually
more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s. Our
higher education system is unique among developed nations in that is funded
almost entirely privately, by debt. Students in the average OECD country
can expect about 70 percent of their college tuition to be
publicly funded; in the United States, only about 40 percent of the cost of
education is publicly-funded. That's one reason the U.S. has the highest tuition
costs of any OECD country.
5. Inequality
By
almost every measure, the U.S. tops out OECD countries in
terms of income inequality, largely because America has the stingiest welfare
state of any developed country. This inequality has deep and profound effects on
American society. For instance, although the U.S. justifies its rampant
inequality on the premise of upward mobility, many parts of the United States
have abysmal levels of social mobility, where children born in the poorest
quintile have a less than 3 percent chance of
reaching the top
quintile. Inequality harms our democracy, because the wealthy exert an
outsized political influence. Sheldon Adelson, for instance,
spent more to influence the 2012 election than the residents
of 12 states combined. Inequality also tears at the social fabric,
with a large body of research showing that inequality correlates with low
levels of social trust. In their book
The Spirit Level, Richard Pickett and Kate Wilkinson
show that a wide variety of social indicators, including health and well-being
are intimately tied to inequality.
6. Infrastructure
The United States infrastructure is slowly crumbling apart and is in
desperate need for repair. One
study
estimates that our infrastructure system needs a $3.6 trillion investment
over the next six years. In New York City, the development of Second Avenue
subway line was first delayed by
the outbreak of World War II; it's still not finished. In
South Dakota, Alaska and Pennsylvania, water
is still
transported via century-old wooden pipes. Some 45 percent of Americans
lack access to
public transit. Large portions of U.S. wastewater capacity are more than
half a century old and in Detroit, some of the sewer lines
date back to the mid-19th century. One in nine U.S. bridges
(or 66,405 bridges) are considered "structurally deficient,"
according to the National Bridge Inventory. All of this means
that the U.S. has fallen rapidly in
international rankings of infrastructure.
America is a great country, and it does many things well. But it has vast
blind spots. The fact that nearly 6 million Americans,
or 2.5 percent of the voting-age population, cannot vote
because they have a felony on record means that politicians can lock up more and
more citizens without fear of losing their seat. Our ideas of meritocracy and
upward mobility blind us to the realities of class and inequality. Our
healthcare system provides good care to some, but it comes at a cost – millions
of people without health insurance. If we don't critically examine these flaws,
how can we ever hope to progress as a society?
President Obama's proven reliability as outsider president extraordinaire
- putting a disarming smiley face on capitalism's depredations - is his
administration's economic significance.
Enough
time has elapsed in Obama's presidency to assess its economic meanings. His
administration's actions and omissions tell a clear story. On one hand, Obama
continued the economic program imposed on all presidents since World War II. On
the other, Obama had the hardest time doing so and is likely the last to do it
in the manner of those other presidents. History provides our context for
assessing Obama's economic significance.
The
US economy's defining moment across the past century was the 1930s eruption of
an organized, self-conscious working class into politics. Massive union
organizing drives by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) allied with
massive popular mobilizations by socialist and communist parties. That
labor-radical coalition forced huge concessions - the New Deal - from business
and the wealthy. They were taxed and regulated to enable major gains for middle-
and lower-income citizens. Those gains included establishing Social Security,
unemployment compensation, minimum wage, and millions of federal jobs.
Labor-radical
explosion from below reversed income and wealth inequalities deepened by
capitalism's development after the Civil War to the 1929 crash. Haunting the
historic changes across the 1930s were plausible intimations (by socialists) and
occasional threats (by communists) of revolution. Labor-radical pressures
generated President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous 1944 proposals for a 100
percent top income tax rate and for a Second Bill of Rights.
When
war ended and FDR died, reactionaries mobilized to roll back the New Deal and
all it represented. Business, the rich and other right-wing social forces
organized a conservative coalition to cut regulations, cut taxes or shift them
to others, and reduce government services (other than military). Economic
history since 1945 charts the reversal of the New Deal domestically alongside
developing a global pax Americana.
The
domestic campaign largely succeeded despite occasional missteps. Government
policies conformed because of (1) financial levers worked by business and the
rich, and (2) voting blocs managed by conservative religious and other
organizations. The money interest focused chiefly on undoing the New Deal.
Social conservatives pushed state favoritism for their institutions and
beliefs.
The
conservative coalition's program destroyed the labor-radical coalition.
Communists were redefined from radical activists into Moscow's agents.
Socialists were rendered indistinguishable from - or dupes of - successfully
demonized communists. Labor unions were harassed, often split, pressured to
purge their leftist allies and members, and hobbled legally.
Beginning
with President Harry Truman, successive presidents played their assigned roles.
To assist in rolling back the New Deal, they would reduce taxes and regulations
on business and the rich while tilting government supports more toward them.
They often actively pursued anti-communist, anti-socialist and anti-union
campaigns. Sometimes (more before 1980, less thereafter) they interrupted the
conservative program by accommodating some resistance to the rollback, some
demands for progressive regulations, etc. Most Republicans enthusiastically
pushed the program. Many Democrats did so hesitantly while advocating (and
sometimes delivering) accommodations of mass demands. Truman's administration
subsidized and shored up capitalism, worried that troops returning from war
would be unemployed and slide with the economy back into depression. Truman
prioritized anti-communism and punched down unions via the Taft-Hartley Act.
Republican Eisenhower, the kindly grandpa, softened its veneer but sustained the
program.
By
1960, relentless retreat from New Deal commitments had built pressures for
something "really different." Americans began to grasp and resent that their
"middle class" status was fading. Because equally relentless anti-communism had
made criticism of business (let alone capitalism) dangerous, anger focused on
government and taxes. Seeing opportunity, the conservative coalition redoubled
attacks on the state: tax-and-spend enemies of the "middle-class" wasted money
on undeserving welfare recipients who refused work. Buried were the facts that
taxes had been shifted since 1945 from corporations and the richest individuals
onto lower and especially middle-income Americans.
Such
anti-government winds led presidential aspirants increasingly to posture as
"outsiders" who would correct Washington's misbehaviors. John F. Kennedy was
younger than previous presidential types and Catholic, someone different who at
least verbally respected New Deal ideals. Outsider statuses were claimed by
Jimmy Carter as farmer and Southerner, Ronald Reagan as actor and Californian,
Bill Clinton as Arkansan and George Bush 2 as a Texas cowboy.
As
these presidents advanced the conservative coalition agenda, mass resentment
accumulated. Widening income and wealth inequalities generated their usual
political and cultural consequences. In 2007-08, their usual economic
consequence, a major crisis, arrived. Massive unemployment, home foreclosures,
and so on - combined with the long-standing New Deal rollback - required a
president with extra outsider dimensions.
Barrack
Obama fit better than Hillary Clinton. Could he reliably further the
conservative coalition's basic agenda while also symbolizing some link to the
New Deal ethos (his vague "community organizer" past)? More importantly, by
symbolizing a kind of social arrival/acceptance of African-Americans generally,
might he neutralize likely popular oppositions to the next steps in rolling back
the New Deal? Capitalism's crisis since 2007 could have been blamed on the
conservative coalition and the system itself. The economically worst-victimized
- especially African-Americans - might well have revitalized a new labor-radical
coalition, absorbing the mass energies visible in the Occupy movements.
The
new, young, different African-American president deflected, deterred and at
least delayed all that. Obama's proven reliability as outsider president
extraordinaire is his administration's economic significance.
Yet
continuing crisis makes ever more Americans shed lingering illusions and hopes
for better economic futures. So-called "recovery" affects only a small minority.
Most people and many businesses face deteriorating jobs and lives. As the most
outside of outsider presidents, Obama presided over the awakening of millions to
economic declines they find oppressive and unjust. They are not buying the
outsider president strategy any more. The outsider mask has lost further
political usefulness for the conservative coalition.
That
coalition likely will turn next to types like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and their
Koch-type backers. They believe they have the resources, political connections,
and accumulated public relations to win – openly and explicitly - against the
New Deal's remaining supporters and beneficiaries. The conservative coalition
wants to reconstitute the broad contours of the pre-1929 domestic US economy
while sustaining the global pax Americana (given US-based corporations' growing
dependence on foreign workers and markets).
Obama's
economic significance lies in his being the latest and most outsider of postwar
presidents serving the conservative agenda and likely the last. Overusing the
outsider gambit leads to popular disillusionment, disbelief and disinterest in
outsider claims. Much the same happened to the anti-communism crusades.
The
crisis since 2007 exposes capitalism's instability and injustices. It revives
interest in the New Deal's labor-radical coalition and its policy alternatives.
Previously effective ways of stifling criticism of capitalism no longer work.
The criticisms and critics are finding ways to organize effectively. Meanwhile,
the conservative coalition has removed its mask. Sharpening social conflicts
loom.
