tijaco

a commentary on a failed nation

America is a failed state. You could easily argue it has been a failed state since around the end of March when coronavirus really started to ramp up and you saw that the Trump White House was going to do nothing constructive about it. Now, there are what looks like millions of people in the streets protesting the death of George Floyd. If it wasn’t a failed state from the pandemic, it is certainly a failed state now.

But in all of the media coverage I have seen of the protests, they all seem to connect it all back to the one issue of racist police brutality. I am not saying that racist police brutality isn’t a problem in America – the stats reflect that it is a massive problem. But the size of these protests points to something a lot bigger than that singular issue. You cannot start such a large fire without a lot of fuel. The killing of George Floyd was the spark, but there is far more fuel to this fire than racial issues in the US.

Their systems are more than broken. They are on their last legs. Inequality in the United States is at record highs. The social security net is horribly weak. No guaranteed healthcare. A university sector that is either prohibitive or puts students in eternal debt traps. There are vast homeless communities around Los Angeles that are essentially slums. All this, in the richest country on Earth. All this before the pandemic.

Through the pandemic came the biggest shift of wealth in United States history, as if there were any more wealth to shift from bottom to top. Trillions of dollars in bailout money for huge corporations, many of whom probably either didn’t need it or shouldn’t have needed it. And what benefits were there for the working class? A $1200 check. Crumbs of crumbs to get them through the biggest financial downturn since the Great Depression. In the months to come, whenever the despotic president decides to declare the pandemic over and the ban on evictions and foreclosures ends, we can expect yet another crisis.

Add on top the fact that many workers are being sent back to work without any protective equipment, without adequate testing and having virtually no choice. If you have to pay the rent and you only get paid when you arrive at your job, what choice do you have? For many, losing their job means losing what little healthcare they have. They are being forced to work during a pandemic so that they still get their healthcare to treat them when they inevitably catch the virus. The end of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and his insistence on playing nice with the Democratic Party has likely disenfranchised even more people. Even the hero that they could rally behind is making his own concessions, with a fear that he might be seen as the next Ralph Nader, aka a principled politician unwilling to compromise on what’s right.

If George Floyd’s killing is the spark, the Black Lives Matter protests the kindling, then perhaps it could trigger a more substantial fire with some more substantial changes. But that is one problem that this movement has, at least for now – there doesn’t seem to be an end goal. Without an end goal, and especially without a clear leader to communicate that end goal, chances are it will register as a blip on the radar of history, even if having to be stamped out by military intervention.

There are a few leaders who could stand out in a way that Malcolm X and Martin Luther King did, and they are beginning to show their faces. Speeches from rapper Killer Mike and from renowned political icon Cornel West have provided the first glimpses of this much-needed leadership.

Cornel West’s interview on CNN painted a picture that is rarely presented on their corporate screens. Making the point that that the Democratic Party has taken the strategy of “black faces in higher places” who have gone on to become “too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to the militarised nation state”, undoubtedly referencing Barack Obama and the lack of change seen under the only African-American president. What Cornel West speaks about is not the singular issue of racist policy practices but to the system as a whole as one which saps the meaning from working class lives.

In January, a world war seemed on the cards. Now, a second US civil war seems more likely. What comes next for the United States in uncertain, but what we are now seeing is the beginning of the end of an empire. The decline seemed obvious through the pandemic, but still progressed at a gradual pace. In the last week, the decline has shifted into overdrive.