At work! New non-fiction books
How the rich are fueling the division of America
“It’s Money That Matters in the USA”, sings Randy Newman (78) in his hit song. But the country’s problem is not the poor, but those who always have more.
Whoever wants to get here needs money and makes laws for the rich: Congress in Washington DC.
Daniel ArnetEditor of Sunday Blick magazine
The United States has voted. The midterm elections were held there last Tuesday, the midterm elections in the middle of each four-year presidency. Each of them is a mood test of how the current president is being received. Many therefore use their ballot papers as a reminder. It should now be called discord, at least since Donald Trump (76) poisoned the political climate. It hasn’t been thought of since then, not even last Tuesday.
“My Angry Country” is the title of the book just published by the US journalist Evan Osnos (45). The editor of the renowned magazine “The New Yorker” returns to his homeland in 2013 after ten years as a correspondent from the Middle East and China and does not recognize the country. Osnos wants to get to the bottom of the alienation and undertakes “a journey through the divided states of America”, as the book is entitled in the subtitle.
Chicago, Greenwich (Connecticut) and Clarksburg (West Virginia) are his stations: the metropolis from which his family came, the wealthy suburb of New York where he grew up and the small town where Osnos had his first job as a journalist. Wherever he meets people, he uses them to chart the major shifts in political culture between September 11, 2001 (the New York attacks) and January 6, 2021 (the Capitol storming). A drama of more than 20 years.
“If the history of the United States is one of inexorable balance – between greed and generosity, industry and nature, identity and assimilation,” writes Osnos, “the country was so unbalanced that it lost its center of gravity.” After Trump’s election in 2016, the general focus was on the “left behind”. “But the best explanation for the inequality was that the rich had rushed ahead,” Osnos said.
Billionaires are fleeing government structures with their wealth at lightning speed. “Many wealthy people defend tax avoidance with the argument that they are only doing what is legally permissible,” Osnos writes, adding that “great effort and huge sums have been invested in rewriting the laws for the benefit of the wealthy.” Which brings us back to the midterms, which concern the replacement of the legislative branch with the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Those who want to have electoral chances need more and more money, as Osnos calculates: in mid-term 2014, a candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives needed twice the budget for the electoral campaign than one who ran for elections. 1986 midterm elections. And so more laws emerge for the wealthy and inequality grows. Which in turn has an impact on society, as a Yale study shows: “Inequality makes people less cooperative and hostile.”
Evan Osnos, “My Angry Country – A Journey Through the Divided States of America”, Suhrkamp
