Issue #1431      14 October 2009

Culture & Life

The land of opportunity – NOT

Rob Gowland

Not long ago, the Party branch to which I belong screened an American documentary film that used the reminiscences of former slaves (recorded in the 1930s) to tell the real story of slavery in the USA. The film, from cable channel HBO, was called Unchained Memories: Readings From The Slave Narratives.

If you ever get the chance, have a look at it: it’s a fine piece of work, with the reminiscences of the elderly ex-slaves read by leading African-American actors, including Oprah Winfrey.

It is fashionable among sections of the Left to sneer at Oprah, because she has achieved fame and celebrity status and her popular talk show tends to be very superficial. But that is hardly Oprah’s fault: if it wasn’t superficial no US network would touch it.

Capitalism runs network TV and capitalism does not want the masses to concern themselves with the ills of capitalist society. But those ills have become so glaringly obvious that they are forcing their way into the spotlight despite the wishes of the big corporations.

Last week, Oprah devoted a segment on her show to the upsurge in homelessness in the USA caused by the economic recession. For most of her viewers, I am sure the feature that stood out was the sheer extent of the problem.

Tent cities have sprung up on vacant land on the outskirts of most (if not all) US cities. And not just a few: there are dozens of these settlements around every city in the South and Midwest. The inhabitants are families and individuals who have had their homes, their cars and even their furniture seized by banks and other finance companies for unpaid debts.

Now, with almost no belongings and with the official shelters full to overflowing, these casualties of capitalism’s crisis are living under scraps of canvas. Their settlements are illegal, but there are so many of them, and their plight is so real and urgent, that many US cities have changed their rules to make the tent settlements legal.

The young woman reporting on this situation for Oprah’s program interviewed a number of people in several of these tent settlements. They all told variants of the same story: their jobs disappeared in the “economic downturn”, they were unable to sustain their credit card debt or their rent, and heartless institutions seized everything they had.

These were workers (in blue- and white-collar jobs) or middle class people. They had thought, as they were meant to, that (providing they worked hard) capitalist America would provide them with a living, a home and a future.

They had discovered they were wrong; and they were in shock.

Also in shock was Oprah’s audience (if not Oprah herself). She kept turning to the camera and, indicating the images on the screen in the studio, she would exclaim: “Do you see this?”

The resemblance to the shantytowns of African or South American slums was obvious to anyone. But Oprah made sure her audience got the point: “This isn’t in some third-world country. This is right here in the USA, right now!”

More people probably had their consciousness raised on this question by Oprah’s “superficial” but widely seen program than any number of specialised PBS documentaries on the same subject could do.

But don’t get me wrong: awareness of the social impacts of the economic plight of the USA is not restricted to Oprah Winfrey. Anne Davies, Washington correspondent of the Business Day supplement of The Sydney Morning Herald on September 21 this year also reported on joblessness and homelessness in the USA (beside a photo of “a tent city in California”).

Ms Davies noted that “even in the affluent US capital, a city that’s been relatively insulated from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the beggars are visible. They sleep on the street just a block from the White House and at big intersections they wait for fellow Americans to come to a standstill and spare a dollar or two.

“Many carry signs telling their story: laid off, returned Iraq vet, lost the house and the job, got sick and no health care.

“A year after the US financial markets went into a tailspin, the US economy is showing tentative signs of a weak recovery but jobless numbers are continuing to rise, though not at the terrifying rate of six months ago, when 600,000 people a month were joining the unemployment lines….

“The jobless rate rose to 9.7 percent in August and is expected to peak above ten per cent in the months ahead. It’s already there in at least 15 states and some economists predict it could be five years before the US economy generates enough jobs to overcome those lost and to employ the new workers entering the labour force….

“The number of home foreclosures … [is] still running at levels that are 18 percent above a year ago. In Nevada, the state with the highest foreclosure rate, one in every 62 houses is in foreclosure….

“The huge falls in house prices – in some markets it is as much as 50 percent – means that many Americans (perhaps as many as one quarter of those with mortgages) owe more on their homes than they are worth.”

To call this situation an economic crisis seem inadequate. “Economic catastrophe” would seem more appropriate.

One thing is certain: the US people are likely to see more tent cities as the capitalist “American Dream” turns sour.

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