So much for being the land of opportunity. Time to change the PR campaign, Washington.
Gary Younge in The Guardian:
During a discussion at… the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of… Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks.… “You’ve got it exactly wrong,” he said.“There’s danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, ‘My life is… a little harder than it used to be.’ At a certain place you’ve got to say to the people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'”
But banks, he insisted, need our help. It turns out that moral hazard – the notion that those who know the costs of their failure will be borne by others will become increasingly reckless – only really applies to the working poor.
“You should thank God” for bank bailouts, Munger told his audience. “Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the… individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.”
In the five years since the financial crisis took hold, people have been sucking it in by the lungful and discovering how pitiful a coping strategy that is.… In Michigan, the state where Munger spoke, black male life expectancy is lower than male life expectancy in… Uzbekistan; in Detroit, the closest big city,… black infant mortality… is on a par with… Syria… (before the war).
As such, the crisis accelerated an already heinous trend of growing inequalities. Over a period of 18 years, America’s white working class – particularly women –… have started dying… younger. “Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare,”… wrote Monica Potts in the American Prospect… last month. But this… was a war on the poor. “Lack of access to education, medical care, good… wages and healthy food isn’t just… leaving the… worst-off Americans behind. It’s killing them.”
This particular crisis, however, has also accentuated the contradictions between the claims long made for neoliberalism and the system’s ability to deliver on them. The “culture” of capitalism, to which Munger referred, did not die but thrived precisely because it was not forced to adapt, while working people – who kept it afloat through their taxes and now through cuts in public spending – struggle to survive. Given the broad framing of economic struggles in the west exacerbated by the crisis, this reality is neither new nor specific to the US. “Over the past 30 years the workers’ take from the pie has shrunk across the globe,” explains… an editorial in the latest Economist. “The scale and breadth of this squeeze are striking ”¦ When growth is sluggish ”¦ workers are getting a smaller morsel of a smaller slice of a slow-growing pie.”