Greatest Nation

If I hear one more time that the United States of America is the “Greatest Democracy and Nation on Earth”, I am going to blow chunks. The statement shows a total ignorance and lack of comprehension as to how any other country in the world operates. I have watched US politics at nauseam and while the Democrats still believe the mantra they are not so sure given all that is going on. Republicans just repeat it over and over again almost trying to will the statement true.

I would not say however that the US is the greatest or freest democracy or nation on earth. It is one of the best, but true democracies across the globe all have an inherent greatness because they are democracies. I will concede that America is probably the greatest country for the wealthy. Low taxes on investment and corporate income allows the wealthy to pay lower tax rates than the middle class. How low you might ask? Amazon reported earnings of nearly $4.3 billion and paid zero in taxes. Jeff Bezos, Amazons founder, has a Net Worth of $140 billion and paid zero federal tax last year. Bezos and Amazon are dependent on Infrastructure such as roads and bridges to move product but paid no taxes towards the maintenance or improvement of those. They paid nothing towards Social Programs, Education, Healthcare, Defense, Justice, or towards anything the US government funds on behalf of its citizens. Instead, Mr. Bezos is spending billions so he can go into space.

The change in 2017 to US estate tax law provided the wealthy the ability to pass their wealth in perpetuity and never pay taxes. When David Koch of the Koch Brothers, passed leaving a $50 billion dollar Estate, there were no estate taxes. In fact the wealth from his estate will never be subject to tax and can be passed down to generation after generation. Under the old rules Koch’s estate would owe $15 billion (30%) of the value, now they pay Zero. Good thing they changed the law I don’t know how his heirs and future generations would have survived if they only had $35 billion. Again it truly is the greatest tax haven, I mean country if you are a corporation or wealthy.

So where else might the United States not be as great as other nations? Healthcare immediately comes to mind. I love the fact that the wealthy and politicians in the US are dictating how healthcare should be when they never worry about the cost of it. Medical bills are one of the top causes of bankruptcy in America and the US is the only industrialized nation that does not provide Healthcare to its citizens. Paying for Healthcare is a financial stress that millions of Americans face every day and it’s not just the financial stress but the quality of health care as well. For example, during Covid and because of a national universal health care system, Canada had a much better coordinated effort to combat the virus. The US has had just over 600,000 deaths and Canada just over 26,000, which translates to Canada’s death rate per capita is less than 40% that of the US.

Racial Justice, the US has more people incarcerated per capita than any other western democracy and a disproportionate amount are Latino and Black. I don’t think having a large prison population is a sign of greatness. America is great at trying to cover up the racism that exists throughout the system. It exists simply and innocuously, in the constant use of adjectives to describe Americans. They are spoken all the time, Black American, White American, Latino, Jewish, Muslim American. It literally sounds like there is a pecking order and your place in society is determined by what adjective is first used to describe you. Then there was Charlottesville, where racism and anti-Semitism were on stage, lit by the Tiki torches of hundreds marching and chanting racially charged slurs against Jews. Do any of these people realize part of the reason they went to war with Nazi Germany was to fight the genocide going on in Europe against Jews? America is the greatest country if you are a white male of privilege, I would not say so if a person is Black, Latino, Muslim, LGBTQ or any minority.

I do not believe the US can claim to be the greatest nation especially when Lynching is still not a federal crime. What? This is something that has been perpetrated against thousands of Black men and women in the South since emancipation in 1865; yet, the US still has not written laws against this. The proposed Law was debated in the Senate last year, but could not get enough support from southern Senators like Rand Paul. What the F#$K? Yet in certain states there are laws to prevent people from buying a sex toy, because it is an affront to decency! So in the US you can Lynch someone, hang them with a noose around their neck from a tree, but you can’t buy a dildo as that is indecent. There is something very very wrong with this kind of logic or lack of.

The greatest nation on earth still does not recognize the concept of equal rights for women. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has still not been ratified by enough individual states and this process started in 1923. The opposition is based on a theory that if passed, the ERA would allow for same-sex marriage, co-ed bathrooms and women being able to serve in combat in the military. The US population is more than 50% women, yet they still are not afforded the full rights and protections as men, so how is this greatness?

Finally I don’t think you can consider yourself the greatest democracy when on January 6, your own citizens tried to stage a coup de tat of the government, attacking the Capitol and resulting in multiple deaths and hundreds of injuries during this insurrection. January 6, showed that many Americans believe that democracy only exists if it is specifically on their terms, everything else is illegitimate. That is not how democracy exists but how autocratic dictatorships and fascist regimes exist.

The fact is, just because you say you’re the greatest nation or democracy does not make it true no matter how many times you say it.