Silicon Valley and Wall Street are destroying America

The COVID-19 pandemic has really exposed some of the serious weaknesses and failures of the US in a manner that we have never seen before. It shows how, for the past thirty or so years, emphases have consistently been placed on the wrong things in that country,especially the celebration of virtual prosperity – for example […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has really exposed some of the serious weaknesses and failures of the US in a manner that we have never seen before.

It shows how, for the past thirty or so years, emphases have consistently been placed on the wrong things in that country,especially the celebration of virtual prosperity – for example as it exists in Silicon Valley and Wall Street – at the expense of a focus on what really matters the most to a country with real people. You consistently hear that America is the most prosperous country in the world, yet the number of homeless people is higher than in any other   country.

We   have   already   known   before   now   that   most Americans   have   less than   four   hundred   dollars  in   their   savings accounts. In the past few days, in cities across the US, you could see cars lined up in dual lanes for miles, waiting for free food. It is very shameful indeed.

Before   COVID-19,   no   one   would   have   thought   that   the   US wouldn’t be able to provide basic hospital amenities like masks and respirators to patients. Who would have expected that nurses would have to use garbage bags to improvise for their gowns? Oxygen supplies   have   dried   up   in   many   hospitals   treating   coronavirus patients.

Thus, patients with impaired lung functions, who although may not need ventilators but require supplemental oxygen, are out of luck. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) are in short supply everywhere and there are even guidelines for rationing care. Who would have expected that the State of New York would be begging   China   to   donate   ventilators?

This   kind   of   apparently shameless act is what you expect from third world countries. Such as the recent arrival of a Chinese medical team in Nigeria, who were flown in to train Nigerians on managing COVID-19 patients.(In Nigeria only 10 COVID-19 deaths have been reported, whereas it is generally believed by many that hundreds of thousands of people might have died of the disease in China.)

The State of New York is looking to China for ventilators because that is where   they   are   manufactured   –  as the   US   has   invariably chosen   to   specialize   in   the   white-collar   matters   of   Intellectual Property (IP) ownership and Silicon Valley technology, which for the most part don’t help anybody under the present life-or-death situation. In my humble opinion, as an aside, it does not seem that capitalism is   working   very   well   right   now.

The   Republicans   in   America always ask for small government. However, the stimulus package –in  trillions  of   US  dollars   –   just   passed  by  them,   shows   a stack contradiction to what they preach. In fact, a popular TV figure in the US recently alludes to the fact that when the economy “goes south” in the US, wealthy people there suddenly espouse socialist values, asking for handouts from the government to bail out their businesses!

Where do Silicon Valley and Wall Street come in? Well, these are the darlings of the US economy, that are consistently rated much more than their intrinsic worth.  Just take a company like Facebook. A software package that does not require more than a student with an associate degree to develop is capitalized at $ 440 billion.

Can you  imagine what  $440  billion  can  do for  Midwest  America  in terms   of   factory   jobs,   or   for metropolitan   America   in   terms   of general infrastructure which are crumbling down? Or in terms of hospital supplies? Of course, there is nothing wrong with developing smartphones. We need them up to a point, but they are not life or death supplies. We also need computers – they help us do our work more quickly and more efficiently. The Internet technology, especially email, is also quite useful. The problem though is that their importance is overrated in relations to what humans really need. In 2008, the financial crisis wiped out 19.2 trillion (Silicon Valley and   Wall  Street)   dollars   in   US   alone  and   destroyed   34   million white-collar jobs globally. This is money that shouldn’t have been in Wall Street in the first place but one that should have been spent on industries in the Midwest of the USA. Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of Alibaba group alludes to these American problems in a recent interview with the CNBC network. He   alludes   to   America’s   “great”   strategy   to   outsource manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico, and service jobs to India. That was because America decided it wanted to control Intellectual Property   (IP)   and   technology,   while   outsourcing   lowpaying(manufacturing) jobs to China and Mexico, at the expense of the blue-collar workers in the US Midwest. Because of this strategy, China has now dominated the world of manufacturing. Moreover,the expectation by America that China would just build for the US, without   concerning   itself   with   the   actual   knowhow   and   the   IP issues has turned out to be a big rude awakening to America. New York State is going to China to beg for ventilators, because that is where ventilators are manufactured. America is more concerned about the stock in trade ventilators! The value of a ventilator could skyrocket in a day if an influential person in the US makes a speech about the equipment, creating  vapor  wealth  on  ventilators  on  Wall Street,   even  when there are no physical ventilators in America to save the lives of dying Americans.