How do we eliminate the paradox of poverty & privation amid plenty & abundance?

[freedom_commonsense]

There are suggestions that the recent tornadoes in the state may have contributed to the rise in Alabama food stamp claims.

[Geolibertarian]

There are suggestions that the recent tornadoes in the state may have contributed to the rise in Alabama food stamp claims.

Good luck explaining that to blame-the-victim-firsters.

[freedom_commonsense]

Good luck explaining that to blame-the-victim-firsters.

Or people that want to pay zero taxes while foisting costs and consequences onto others:

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=212554.0

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=213839.0

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=190989.msg1277124#msg1277124

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=213676.msg1275745#msg1275745

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=213593.msg1275398#msg1275398


Speaking of welfare, the UK recently cut the housing support payments to 25-34 year olds:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/02/housing-benefit-disabled-people-streets

http://www.crisis.org.uk/pressreleases.php/453/independent-research-benefit-cut-to-lead-to-homeless-rise

[Geolibertarian]

"Are there no prisons...or workhouses...or treadmills?" -- Ebenezer Scrooge

----------------------------

http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberalism-s-newest-product-the-modern-slave-trade/25888

Neoliberalism's Newest Product: The Modern Slave Trade

by Ignacio Ramonet
Global Research
August 3, 2011

PARIS, Jul (IPS) Two centuries after the abolition of slavery we are seeing the reintroduction of an abominable practice: human trafficking. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that 12.3 million people each year are taken captive by networks tied to international crime and used as forced labour in inhuman conditions.

In the case of women, the victims are subjected mostly to sexual exploitation while others are exploited as domestic servants. There is also the case of youths who are taken captive through various scams so their body parts can be sold in the international human organ trade.

These practices are expanding more and more to satisfy the demand for cheap labour in sectors like the hotel and restaurant industries, agriculture, and construction.

The OSCE dedicated two days of its last international conference in Vienna in late June to this subject. Though the phenomenon is international, various specialists asserted that the plague of slave labour is growing rapidly in the EU. Unions and labour groups estimate that in Europe there are hundreds of thousands of workers subjected to the blight of slavery.

In Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and other countries of the EU, foreign migrant workers attracted by the mirage of Europe find themselves trapped in the networks of various mafias and working in conditions like slaves of past ages. An ILO report reveals that south of Naples, for example, 1200 homeless farm labourers work twelve hours per day in greenhouses without contracts and for miserable pay, guarded by private militias and living in what resemble concentration camps.

This "work camp" is not the only one in Europe; thousands and thousands of undocumented immigrants have met similar fates, victims of a modern slave trade flourishing in any number of European countries. According to various unions, this form of forced labour accounts for almost 20 percent of agricultural production.

Responsibility for this expansion of human trafficking lies largely with the current dominant economic model. In effect, the form of neoliberal globalisation than has been imposed over the last three decades through economic shock therapy has devastated the most fragile levels of society and imposed extremely high social costs. It has created a fierce competition between labour and capital. In the name of free trade, the major multinationals manufacture and sell their goods around the world, producing where labour is cheapest and selling where the cost of living is highest. The new capitalism has made competitiveness its primary engine and brought about a commodification of labour and labourers.

Globalisation, which offers remarkable opportunities to a lucky few, imposes on the rest, in Europe, a ruthless and unmediated competition between EU salary workers, small businesses, and small farmers and their badly-paid, exploited counterparts on the other side of the world. The result we now see clearly before us: social dumping on a planetary scale.

For employment the result is disastrous. For example, in France in the last twenty years this phenomenon has caused the elimination of more than two million jobs in the industrial sector alone.

Certain sectors in Europe where there is a chronic shortage of labour tend to use undocumented workers, which in turn fuels the trafficking of more workers by clandestine networks that in many cases force them into slave labour. Numerous reports clearly evidence the "sale" migrant farm workers.

Despite the many tools of international law available to combat these crimes, and despite the proliferation of public statements by government officials condemning them, the public will to put an end to the practice is weak. In reality, the management of industry and construction and major agricultural exporters exert constant pressure on governments to turn a blind eye to the trafficking of undocumented workers.

Industry management has always supported mass immigration because it depresses the price of labour. Reports by the European Commission and BUSINESSEUROPE (an association of European industries and businesses) have called for more immigration for decades.

But today's human traffickers are not the only ones exploiting slave labour: now a form of "legal servitude" is being developed. For example, last February in Italy Fiat served its workers with the following extortionate ultimatum: either agree to work more, for less money, in worse conditions, or the company will shift operations to Eastern Europe. Faced with the prospect of being fired and terrorised by the conditions in Eastern Europe, with its rock bottom wages and no weekends off, 63 percent of the Fiat workers voted for their own exploitation.

In Europe many employers, taking advantage of the crisis and brutal fiscal adjustment policies being imposed, are trying to establish similar forms of "legal servitude".

[Continued...]

----------------------------

I'm reminded of the following:

----------------------------

http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/ajo_slavery.html

SLAVERY

By Arthur J. Ogilvy

THE SLAVER

Suppose I own a sugar estate and 100 slaves, all the land about being held in the same way by people of the same class as myself.

It is a profitable business, but there are many expenses and annoyances attached to it.

I must keep up my supply of slaves either by buying or breeding them.

I must pay an overseer to keep them continually to their work with a lash. I must keep them in a state of brutish ignorance (to the detriment of their efficiency), for fear they should learn their rights and their power, and become dangerous.

I must tend them in sickness and when past work.

And the slaves have all the vices and defects that slavery engenders; they have no self-respect or moral sense; they lie, they steal, they are lazy, shirking work whenever they dare; they do not care what mischief their carelessness occasions me so long as it is not found out; their labor is obtained by force, and given grudgingly; they have no heart in it.

All these things worry me.

FLASH! ....

Suddenly a brilliant idea strikes me. I reflect that there is no unoccupied land in the neighbourhood, so that if my laborers were free they would still have to look to me for work somehow.

So one day I announce to them that they are all free, intimating at the same time I will be ready to employ as many as I may require on such terms as we may mutually and independently agree.

What could be fairer? They are overjoyed, and falling on their knees, bless me as their benefactor. Then they go away and have a jollification, and next day come back to me to arrange the new terms.

THEY BELIEVE ...

Most of them think they would like to have a piece of land and work it for themselves, and be their own masters. All they want is a few tools they have been accustomed to use, and some seed, and these they are ready to buy from me, undertaking to pay me with reasonable interest when the first crop comes in, offering the crop as security. As for their keep, they can easily earn that by working a few weeks on and off on any of the plantations, or by taking a job clearing or fencing, or such like. This will keep them going for the first year, and after that they will be better able to take care of themselves.

HOLD ON, NOW!

"But," softly I observe, "you are going too fast. Your proposals about the tools and seed and your maintenance are all right enough, but the land, you remember, belongs to me. You cannot expect me to give you your liberty and my own land for nothing. That would not be reasonable, would it?" They agree it would not, and begin to propose terms.

A fancies this bit of land, and B that. But it soon appears that I want this bit of land for my next year's clearing, and that for my cows, and another is too close to my house and would interfere with my privacy, and another is thick forest or swamps, and would require too long and costly preparation for me who must have quick returns in order to live, and in short that there is no land suitable that I care to part with.

THE BENEFACTOR

Still I am ready to do what I promised — "to employ as many as I may require, on such terms as we may mutually and independently agree." But as I have now got to pay them wages instead of getting their work for nothing. I cannot of course employ all of them. I can find work for ninety of them, however, and with these I am prepared to discuss terms.

At once a number volunteered their services at such wages as their imagination had been picturing to them. I tell the ninety whose demands are most reasonable to stand on one side. The remaining ten look blank, and seeing that since I won't let them have any of the land, it is a question of hired employment or starvation, they offer to come for a little less than the others. I tell these now to stand aside, and ten others to stand out instead. These look blank now, and offer to work for less still, and so the "mutual and voluntary" settlement of terms proceeds.

But, meanwhile, I have been making a little calculation in my head, and have reckoned up what the cost of keeping a slave, with his food and clothes, and a trifle over to keep him contented, would come to, and I offer that.

They won't hear of it, but as I know they can't help themselves, I say nothing, and presently first one and then another gives in, till I have got my ninety, and still there are ten left out, and very blank indeed they look. Whereupon, the terms being settled, I graciously announce that though I don't really want any more men, still I am willing, in my benevolence, to take the ten, too, on the same terms, which they promptly accept, and again hail me as their benefactor, only not quite so rapturously as before.

WAGE SLAVES? ...

So they all set to at the old work at the old place, and on the old terms, only a little differently administered; that is, that whereas I formerly supplied them with food, clothes, etc., direct from my stores, I now give them a weekly wage representing the value of those articles, which they will henceforth have to buy for themselves.

There is a difference, too, in some other respects, indicating a moral improvement in our relations. I can no longer curse and flog them. But then I don't want to; it's no longer necessary; the threat of dismissal is quite as effective, even more so; and much pleasanter for me.

I can no longer separate husband from wife, parent from child. But then again, I don't want to. There would be no profit in it; leaving them their wives and children has the double advantage of making them more contented with their lot, and giving me greater power over them, for they have now got to keep these wives and children out of their own earnings.

My men are now as eager as ever to come to me to work as they formerly were to run away from work. I have neither to buy or breed them; and if any suddenly leave me, instead of letting loose the bloodhounds, I have merely to hold up a finger or advertise, and I have plenty of others offering to take their place. I am saved the expense and worry of incessant watching and driving. I have no sick to attend, or worn-out pensioners to maintain. If a man falls ill there is nothing but my good nature to prevent my turning him off at once; the whole affair is a purely commercial transaction — so much wages for so much work. The patriarchal relation of slave-owner and slave is gone, and no other has taken its place. When the man is worn out with long service I can turn him out with a clear business conscience, knowing that the State will see that he does not starve.

Instead of being forced to keep my men in brutish ignorance, I find public schools established at other people's expense to stimulate their intelligence and improve their minds, to my great advantage, and their children compelled to attend these schools. The service I get, too, being now voluntarily rendered (or apparently so) is much improved in quality. In short, the arrangement pays me better in many ways.

REJOICE! I AM CAPITAL AND I EMPLOY PEOPLE!

But I gain in other ways besides pecuniary benefit. I have lost the stigma of being a slave driver, and have, acquired instead the character of a man of energy and enterprise, of justice and benevolence. I am a "large employer of labour," to whom the whole country, and the labourer especially, is greatly indebted, and people say, "See the power of capital! These poor labourers, having no capital, could not use the land if they had it, so this great and far-seeing man wisely refuses to let them have it, and keeps it all for himself, but by providing them with employment his capital saves them from pauperism, and enables him to build up the wealth of the country, and his own fortune together."

Whereas it is not my capital that does any of these things. lt is not my capital but the labourer's toil that builds up my fortune and the wealth of the country.

It is not my employment that keeps him from pauperism, but my monopoly of the land forcing him into my employment that keeps him on the brink of it. It is not want of capital that keeps the labourer from using the land, but my refusing him the use of the land that prevents him from acquiring capital. All the capital he wants to begin with is an axe and a spade, which a week's earnings would buy him, and for his maintenance during the first year, and at any subsequent time, he could work for me or for others, turnabout, with his work on his own land. Henceforth with every year his capital would grow of itself, and his independence with it, and that this is no fancy sketch, anyone can see for himself by taking a trip into the country, where he will find well-to-do farmers who began with nothing but a spade and an axe (so to speak) and worked their way up in the manner described.

ENTER THE LANDLORD ....

But now another thought strikes me. Instead of paying an overseer to work these men for me, I will make him pay me for the privilege of doing it. I will let the land as it stands to him or to another — to whomsoever will give the most for the billet. He shall be called my tenant instead of my overseer, but the things he shall do for me are essentially the same, only done by contract instead of for yearly pay. He, not I, shall find all the capital, take all the risk, and engage and supervise the men, paying me a lump sum, called rent, out of the proceeds of their toil, and make what he can for himself out of the surplus.

The competition is as keen in its way for the land, among people of his class, as it is among the labourers for employment, only that as they are all possessed of some little means (else they could not compete) they are in no danger of immediate want, and can stand out for rather better terms than the labourers, who are forced by necessity to take what terms they can get.

The minimum in each case amounts practically to a "mere living", but the mere living they insist on is one of a rather higher standard than the labourers'; it means a rather more abundant supply and better quality of those little comforts which are next door to necessaries. It means, in short, a living of a kind to which people of that class are accustomed.

For a moderate reduction in my profits, then — a reduction equal to the tenant's narrow margin of profit — I have all the toil and worry of management taken off my hands, and the risk too, for be the season good or bad, the rent is bound to be forthcoming, and I can sell him up to the last rag if he fails of the full amount, no matter for what reason; and my rent takes precedence of all other debts.

All my capital is set free for investment elsewhere, and I am freed from the odium of a slave owner, notwithstanding that the men still toil for my enrichment as when they were slaves, and that I get more out of them than ever.

If I wax rich while they toil from hand to mouth, and in depressed seasons find it hard to get work at all; it is not, to all appearances, my doing, but merely the force of circumstances, the law of nature, the state of the labour market — fine sounding names that hide the ugly reality.

If wages are forced down it is not I that do it; it is that greedy and merciless man the employer (my tenant) who does it. I am a lofty and superior being, dwelling apart and above such sordid considerations. I would never dream of grinding these poor labourers, not I! I have nothing to do with them at all; I only want my rent -- and get it. Like the lilies of the field, I toil not, neither do I spin, and yet (so kind is Providence!) my daily bread (well buttered) comes to me of itself. Nay, people bid against each other for the privilege of finding it for me; and no one seems to realise that the comfortable income that falls to me like the refreshing dew is dew indeed; but it is the dew of sweat wrung from the labourers' toil. It is the fruit of their labour which they ought to have; which they would have if I did not take it from them.

This sketch illustrates the fact that chattel slavery is not the only nor even the worst form of bondage. When the use of the earth — the sole source of our daily bread — is denied unless one pays a fellow creature for permission to use it, people are bereft of economic freedom. The only way to regain that freedom is to collect the rent of land instead of taxes for the public domain.

Once upon a time, labour leaders in the USA, the UK and Australia understood these facts. The labour movements of those countries were filled with people who fought for the principles of 'the single tax' on land at the turn of the twentieth century. But since then, it has been ridiculed, and they have gradually yielded to the forces of privilege and power — captives of the current hegemony — daring no longer to come to grips with this fundamental question, lest they, too, become ridiculed.

And so the world continues to wallow in this particular ignorance — and in its ensuing poverty and debt.

----------------------------

[White Rose Sophie]

Oh my gosh.  This should be standard reading, for all people.

Reminds me of that line in "O Brother, Where Art Thou".

"You ain't no kinda man if you ain't got land'.

Thanks for the enlightenment.  This is so unbelievably true - and yet I never even thought about it before.

[Geolibertarian]

Thanks for the enlightenment.

You're quite welcome. 

This is so unbelievably true - and yet I never even thought about it before.

Nor have most other people -- thanks mostly to (a) compulsory government schooling and (b) neo-classical economics.

Hence the following quote:

"Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness." [Boldface emphasis added]

-- Henry George, Social Problems, p. 242

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/food-stamp-use-rises-to-record-45-8-million.html

Food stamp use rises to record 45.8 million

CNN Money
Friday, August 5, 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Nearly 15% of the U.S. population relied on food stamps in May, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.

The number of Americans using the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — more commonly referred to as food stamps — shot to an all-time high of 45.8 million in May, the USDA reported. That’s up 12% from a year ago, and 34% higher than two years ago.

The program provides monthly benefits to low-income individuals and families, which they can use at stores that accept SNAP benefits.

To qualify for food stamps, an individual’s income can’t exceed $1,174 a month or $14,088 a year — an amount that is 130% of the national poverty level.

Full story here.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/just-58-of-work-age-americans-have-jobs-lowest-since-july-1983.html

Just 58% of work-age Americans have jobs, lowest since July 1983

Bob Willis
Bloomberg
Friday, August 5, 2011

Employers added more jobs than forecast in July, the jobless rate fell and wages climbed, easing concern the U.S. economy is grinding to a halt. Stock futures rallied and Treasuries fell.

Payrolls rose by 117,000 workers after a 46,000 increase in June that was more than originally estimated, Labor Department data showed today in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey called for a July gain of 85,000. The jobless rate dropped to 9.1 percent as more Americans left the labor force, while average hourly earnings climbed 0.4 percent.

Job gains may need to accelerate further to bolster consumer spending, which rose last quarter at the slowest pace in two years. Weaker growth puts more pressure on Federal Reserve policy makers meeting next week to try to steer the world’s largest economy away from another recession at a time when inflation is also accelerating.

The jobless rate declined as 193,000 people left the labor force and the number of unemployed dropped by 156,000. The share of the eligible population holding a job declined to 58.1 percent, the lowest since July 1983.

Full story here.

[TahoeBlue]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/08/05/us-official-says-sp-reconsidering-us-credit-downgrade/
U.S. Loses AAA Credit Rating From S&P
Published August 06, 2011| FoxNews.com

The United States has lost its sterling credit rating.
 
Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Friday lowered the nation's AAA rating for the first time since granting it in 1917 [fedres/WWI] . The move came less than a week after a gridlocked Congress finally agreed to spending cuts that would reduce the debt by more than $2 trillion -- a tumultuous process that contributed to convulsions in financial markets. The promised cuts were not enough to satisfy S&P.
 
The drop in the rating by one notch to AA-plus was telegraphed as a possibility back in April. The three main credit agencies, which also include Moody's Investor Service and Fitch, had warned during the budget fight that if Congress did not cut spending far enough, the country faced a downgrade. Moody's said it was keeping its AAA rating on the nation's debt, but that it might still lower it.
...
One fear in the market has been that a downgrade would scare buyers away from U.S. debt. If that were to happen, the interest rate paid on U.S. bonds, notes and bills would have to rise to attract buyers. And that could lead to higher borrowing rates for consumers, since the rates on mortgages and other loans are pegged to the yield on Treasury securities.
...
A study by JPMorgan Chase found that there has been a slight rise in rates when countries lost an AAA rating. In 1998, S&P lowered ratings for Belgium, Italy and Spain. A week later, their 10-year rates had barely moved

[Geolibertarian]

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

-- Warren Buffet, New York Times, November 26, 2006

---------------------------

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151935

Standard and Poor's: Just More Corrupt Wall Street Insiders Waging Class War on America

By Joshua Holland
AlterNet
August 7, 2011

Standard and Poor's decision to downgrade our public debt [.pdf] tells us absolutely nothing about the probability of the federal government meeting its future obligations. The move really only offers us some compelling evidence of the corruption eating away at the foundations of yet another key Wall Street institution.

I should say that it offers us additional evidence. According to a Senate investigation concluded earlier this year — a probe that was greeted with a collective "ho-hum" by the corporate media — S&P and Moody's, another leading agency, “issued the AAA ratings that made ... mortgage backed securities ... seem like safe investments, helped build an active market for those securities, and then, beginning in July 2007, downgraded the vast majority of those AAA ratings to junk status.” And when they did, it “precipitated the collapse of the [mortgage-backed securities] markets and, perhaps more than any other single event, triggered the financial crisis. (PDF)”

According to the Senate investigation, in the years leading up to crash, “warnings about the massive problems in the mortgage industry” — including internal warnings from their own analysts — had been ignored because of the “the inherent conflict of interest arising from the system used to pay for credit ratings” — the big “rating agencies were paid by the Wall Street firms” that were making a fortune selling that glossed-up garbage to credulous investors.

The almost surreal irony here is that it was the economic crisis that the ratings agencies facilitated which led to a massive drop in tax revenues, and it was that, more than any other single factor, which caused the large deficits the federal government has been running in recent years. In other words, the agencies themselves played a pivotal role in driving up the national debt. Yet, rather than doing the honorable thing and throwing themselves out of their high-rise windows in the wake of the crash, S&P's management had the nerve to start playing politics with that very same debt.

At the height of the debate over raising the debt ceiling, the elite ratings agency issued a remarkable warning: The firm said that it would downgrade U.S. treasuries even if the limit were raised. The only way the government could avoid such a move, the agency warned, was for Congress to rubber-stamp the ostensibly “balanced,” $4 trillion debt-reduction package — one that included largely unspecified “entitlement reforms” — that Barack Obama had offered the GOP (S&P insisted that it didn't favor any specific policy approach, but it did specify a “balanced approach” worth $4 trillion shortly after Obama floated the proposal).

Congress eventually raised the limit in exchange for a lesser figure of up to $2.7 trillion worth of deficit reduction, and late Friday, after the markets were safely closed and the world's traders had headed home for the weekend, S&P shot its hostage.

[Continued...]

---------------------------

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-world-s-money-is-draining-away-where-s-it-going/26004

The World's Money Is Draining Away ... Where's It Going?

by Washington's Blog



Global Research
August 12, 2011



Spiegel asks:

"Is The World Going Bankrupt?"

That is an odd question.

If some people are losing money, others must be gaining money, right?

But where is all the money going?



Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil hints at the answer in a post entitled "Is There Enough Money on Earth to Save the Banks?"

Two years ago the central planners convinced investors that the biggest surviving financial institutions would be able to earn their way back to health, in part through low interest rates and taxpayer support. The pressing question soon may be whether there is enough money on the planet to save the system as we know it, and if so, how much longer it will be before a crisis comes along that finally swamps the ability of governments to contain it.

One-hit wonders such as Fed-induced stock-market rallies can induce euphoria momentarily. They don’t fix the big problem.

As I've previously noted, the giant banks are drawing the American and world economy down into a black hole. If we don't break up the giant banks now, they'll be bailed out again and again, and virtually all independent economists and financial experts say that will drag the world economy down with them.

Indeed, many economists and financial experts say that we'll have a never-ending depression or perpetual zombification unless the banks and bondholders are forced to write down their debt.

But the question remains: if all of the world's money (of the Western world, anyway) is draining out, where's it going to?



Economists note:

A substantial portion of the profits of the largest banks is essentially a redistribution from taxpayers to the banks, rather than the outcome of market transactions.

Indeed, all of the monetary and economic policy of the last 3 years has helped the wealthiest and penalized everyone else. See this, this and this.

A "jobless recovery" is basically a redistribution of wealth from the little guy to the big boys.

The Bush tax cuts and failure to enforce corporate taxes also redistribute wealth to the top 1%. See this and this.

Economist Steve Keen says:

"This is the biggest transfer of wealth in history", as the giant banks have handed their toxic debts from fraudulent activities to the countries and their people.

Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz said in 2009 that Geithner's toxic asset plan "amounts to robbery of the American people".

And economist Dean Baker said in 2009 that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives".

The money of individuals, businesses, cities, states and entire nations are disappearing into the abyss ...



... and ending up in the pockets of the top .1% richest people.

[Geolibertarian]

One of the key reasons why ruling-class parasites are having such a ridiculously easy time economically ass-raping the masses is that We the People have yet to unite politically against them.

And one of the key reasons a critical mass of us have yet to unite is that far too many of our fellow citizens are too busy looking down their snooty little noses at whoever happens to be further down the economic ladder than they are at the moment.

For instance, how many times have you heard some blame-the-victim-firster wax self-righteous about what "lazy deadbeats" welfare recipients are -- as if to say that, contrary to reality, there are not far fewer job openings than there are people in need of employment?

Until enough of us stop looking for excuses to blame the victims of economic terrorism instead of the terrorists themselves, it will be business as usual for the parasitic ruling elite, and will consequently be just a matter of time before practically all of us are in a bitter, demoralizing struggle for mere survival, not just the bottom 40%.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/thousands-camp-out-for-job-fair-as-jobless-rate-rises.html

Thousands Camp Out for Job Fair as Jobless Rate Rises

JULIE NA
ABC News
August 19, 2011

Thousands of unemployed waited overnight, camping out in their business suits and office heels and braving the tormenting heat in Atlanta to stand in line for a job fair Thursday. Authorities treated 20 people for heat exhaustion as they struggled to keep the line moving and get people moved inside.

The incredible turnout at the job fair comes on the heels of the state labor commissioner’s announcement that Georgia’s jobless rate rose.

The state unemployment rate increased to 10.1 percent in July from the 9.9 percent in June. The unemployment rate for African-Americans stands at 15.9 percent, far above the national rate of 9.1 percent.

July marks the 48th consecutive month that Georgia has exceeded the national unemployment rate.

Full story here.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/bad-news.html

Bad News

The Economic Collapse
Aug 19, 2011

The bad news about the economy just keeps rolling in.  If this is an economic recovery, what in the world is the next “recession” going to look like?  Today there was another huge truckload of bad economic news.  The stock market had another 400 point “correction”, applications for unemployment benefits are up again, inflation is higher than expected, home sales have dropped again and Europe is coming apart at the seams.  The financial markets have been in such a state of chaos recently that days like today don’t even seem “unusual” anymore.  But we should all be alarmed at what is happening.  We haven’t seen anything quite like this since the darkest days of 2008 and 2009.  If more bad news keeps pouring in, we may soon have a very real panic on our hands.

[Continued...]

[TahoeBlue]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/bad-news.html

Bad News The Economic Collapse Aug 19, 2011

The bad news about the economy just keeps rolling in.  If this is an economic recovery, what in the world is the next “recession” going to look like?  Today there was another huge truckload of bad economic news.  ...
[Continued...]

Just wait for next week's "news"....

Economic Calendar - next week
Date Time (ET) Statistic For Actual Briefing Forecast Market Expects Prior Revised From
Aug 23 10:00 AM New Home Sales Jul - 300K 310K 312K -
Aug 24 7:00 AM MBA Mortgage Index 08/20 - NA NA +4.1% -
Aug 24 8:30 AM Durable Orders Jul - 2.5% 2.0% -1.9% -2.1%
Aug 24 8:30 AM Durable Orders -ex Transporation Jul - -0.6% -0.4% 0.4% 0.1%
Aug 24 10:00 AM FHFA Housing Price Index Jun - NA NA 0.4% -
Aug 24 10:30 AM Crude Inventories 08/20 - NA NA 4.233M -
Aug 25 8:30 AM Initial Claims 08/20 - 400K 400K 408K -
Aug 25 8:30 AM Continuing Claims 08/13 - 3700K 3700K 3702K -
Aug 26 8:30 AM GDP - Second Estimate  Q2 - 1.0% 1.1% 1.3% -     -----> 1 percent!!!!
Aug 26 8:30 AM GDP Deflator - Second Estimate Q2 - 2.4% 2.3% 2.3% -
Aug 26 9:55 AM Michigan Sentiment - Final Aug - 55.2 55.4 54.9

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/21-signs-that-the-new-reality-for-many-baby-boomers-will-be-to-work-as-wage-slaves-until-they-drop-dead.html

New Reality For Many Baby Boomers Will Be To Work As Wage Slaves Until They Drop Dead

The Economic Collapse
Aug 22, 2011



All over America tonight, millions of elderly Americans are wondering if their money is going to run out before it is time for them to die.  Those that are now past retirement age are not going to be rioting in the streets, but that doesn’t mean that large numbers of them are not deeply suffering.  There are millions of elderly Americans that are leading lives of “quiet desperation” as they try to get by on meager fixed incomes.  Many are surviving on Ramen noodles, oatmeal, peanut butter or whatever other cheap food they can find in the stores.  There are some that are so short on cash that they will not turn on the heat in their homes until things get really desperate.  As health care costs soar, millions of elderly Americans find themselves deep in debt and facing huge medical bills that they cannot possibly pay.  A lot of older Americans would go back to work if they could, but jobs are scarce and very few companies seem to even want to consider hiring them.  Right now caring for all of the Americans that have already retired is turning out to be an overwhelming challenge, and things are about to get a whole lot worse.  On January 1st, 2011 the very first Baby Boomers turned 65.  A massive tsunami of retirees is coming, and America is not ready for it.

Sadly, most retirees have not adequately prepared for retirement.  For many, the recent economic downturn absolutely devastated their retirement plans.  Many were counting on the equity in their homes, but the recent housing crash crushed those dreams.  Others had their 401ks shredded by the stock market.

Meanwhile, corporate pension plans all across America are vastly underfunded.  Many state and local government pension programs are absolute disasters.  The federal government has already begun to pay out significantly more in Social Security benefits than they are taking in, and the years ahead are projected to be downright apocalyptic for the Social Security program.

So needless to say, things do not look good for the Baby Boomers that are now approaching retirement age.

The following are 21 signs that the new reality for many Baby Boomers will be to work as wage slaves until they drop dead….

[Continued...]

[zacherydtaylor]

Part of the problem is the fact that the corporations are creating waste that is designed to increase profit without benefiting the consumer or the worker as clearly indicated in thisPlanned Obsolescence string; by intentionally making products that fall apart so that the consumer needs to buy them over and over again the corporations can increase their profit while the workers and consumers have to work more to replace the products that have been falling apart. They often claim that this benefits the worker by creating jobs but they're not jobs that improve the quality of life; they also claim that it benefits the consumer by making things cheaper but the savings isn't passed onto them and they still have to pay more to replace shoddy merchandise. 

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.progress.org/2011/fold731.htm

The Cause of World-Wide Turmoil: Economic Deprivation

by Fred E. Foldvary
The Progress Report
22 August 2011

There is a global revolt against authority. The riots and looting in England have puzzled people who thought the kingdom was tranquil. The Arab spring surprised the world. Previously there were riots by the immigrants in France. Is there a common element?

Although there are different circumstances and histories among these events, the common element is economic deprivation. In Europe, the Middle East, and the USA, there is high unemployment, employment insecurity, and economic hardship. The absence of democracy and liberty has played a role in the Arab uprising, as the sheer brutality of the response by some of the regimes has fueled even more mass protest. But poverty is linked to a lack of economic freedom, which also links to liberty in general, and the absence of democracy makes it difficult for the people to change the policies that keep them poor.

In many of the Arab countries, the people suffer from high unemployment and low incomes, while they see wealth concentrated among the ruling elite. France has failed to assimilate many of the immigrants, and many of the youths are unemployed. In the United Kingdom, there are neighborhoods in London and elsewhere where unemployment is high and incomes are low. Thus even in Great Britain where they do have democracy and a relatively high degree of freedom, the violent protests and riots indicate that something is very rotten in that state. The protests in Greece occurred in response to economic deprivation both due to the austerity measures and because of the on-going economic stagnation.

When the protests turn violent, some thieves will take advantage of the disorder to loot and destroy property. Folks who otherwise would not steal see thieves getting away with it, and so they become criminals also to get their share of the loot. But if everyone had economic opportunity and a good standard of living, they would not have much incentive to steal, and as employed workers with good jobs, they would have much to lose if caught.

Why is there economic deprivation? There are two possible economic causes of poverty. Either it is nature’s fault, due to a lack of sufficient natural resources, or else it is the fault of human institutions. The answer was provided by Henry George in his book Social Problems in 1883: "There is in nature no reason for poverty." Even with today’s world population, there are enough natural resources for all persons to have a decent life. If we examine poverty in any economy, the cause is only a lack of resources under unusual conditions such as the drought in eastern Africa. But even then, a wealthy economy can deal with droughts without starvation; witness the result in drought-plagued Texas versus Somalia, for example.

The natural economic condition of human beings is prosperity. The cause of economic wealth is the desire of individuals to have a good life. Economic wealth is not money, but goods and services, and that includes leisure, which is consumed as time, and which is purchased by not getting the goods that one would have obtained with more labor (exerted at the expense of more leisure).

Since the cause of economic deprivation is in human institutions, which institutions cause poverty? There is only one institution with the power to destroy wealth and prevent folks from generating wealth. That institution is the one with the ultimate monopoly on legalized force: government. Governments impose restrictions and taxes that either prevent the production of wealth, or impose added costs that reduce wealth. Subsidies also destroy wealth, since the social cost of providing subsidies is usually greater than the social benefits.

The way to prevent economic deprivation is by eliminating restrictions on peaceful and honest human action, and by not imposing added costs on human action. The fiscal policy that avoids deprivation consists of three sources: voluntary user fees, public revenues from ground rent, and pollution charges that compensate society for damages. The public collection of land rent, also referred to as land value taxation, imposes no cost on the economy because land has no cost of production. Land does not flee, hide, or shrink when its rent is tapped. Using the ground rent (also called geo-rent) for public revenue even provides a benefit to the economy beyond the revenue, by putting land to its most productive use, thereby preventing the lowering of wages that occurs when land owners move to less productive margins due to the malspeculative holdings of idle lands.

If governments enact an efficiency tax shift, replacing current taxes with fees, rents, and damage compensations, then people would be free to produce, invest, and prosper. Rapid growth would eliminate poverty, unemployment, and economic insecurity. The rise in wages, untaxed, would enable workers to provide for their own needs rather than depend on fickle government welfare. If that sounds utopian, it is. Prosperity for all is not an economic utopia, but a political utopia. We have economic deprivation only because of bad governance.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/even-goldman-sachs-secretly-believes-that-an-economic-collapse-is-coming.html

Even Goldman Sachs Secretly Believes That An Economic Collapse Is Coming

The Economic Collapse
Friday, September 2, 2011

Goldman Sachs is doing it again.  Goldman is telling the public that everything is going to be just fine, but meanwhile they are advising their top clients to bet on a huge financial collapse.  On August 16th, a 54 page report authored by Goldman strategist Alan Brazil was distributed to institutional clients.  The general public was not intended to see this report.  Fortunately, some folks over at the Wall Street Journal got their hands on a copy and they have filled us in on some of the details.

It turns out that Goldman Sachs secretly believes that an economic collapse is coming, and they have some very interesting ideas about how to make money in the turbulent financial environment that we will soon be entering.  In the report, Brazil says that the U.S. debt problem cannot be solved with more debt, that the European sovereign debt crisis is going to get even worse and that there are large numbers of financial institutions in Europe that are on the verge of collapse.  If this is what people at the highest levels of the financial world are talking about, perhaps we should all start paying attention.
 
There is a tremendous amount of fear in the global financial community right now.  As I wrote about the other day, the financial world is about to hit the panic button.  Things could start falling apart at any time.  Most of these big banks will not admit how bad things are publicly, but privately there is a whole lot of freaking out going on.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/black-unemployment-highest-in-27-years.html

Black unemployment: Highest in 27 years

Annalyn Censky
CNNMoney
Saturday, September 3, 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market.
 
Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported.
 
“This month’s numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities have a much more challenging time getting jobs,” said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
 
Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.

Full story here.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-state-and-local-budget-crisis/26420

The State and Local Budget Crisis

by Michael Hudson



Global Research
September 6, 2011

The cost of the 2011 cutbacks in federal spending will fall most directly on consumers and retirees by scaling back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and social spending programs. The population also will suffer indirectly, by lower federal revenue sharing with U.S. states and cities. The following chart from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA, Table 3.3) shows how federal financial aid has helped cities shift the tax burden off real estate, although the main shift has been off property taxes onto income – and onto consumption (sales) taxes.

State and local revenue, 1930-2007.



Untaxing real estate has served mortgage bankers by freeing more rental income (the land’s site value) to be paid as interest. Property taxes have not absorbed anywhere near the rise in debt-leveraged housing and commercial prices. However, this has not lowered the cost of housing for most people. New buyers must pay a price that capitalizes the property’s rental value. Less and less of this payment has taken the form of local property taxes. More and more has been paid to mortgage lenders as interest. So cutting property taxes has simply left more revenue to be capitalized into higher debt-financed prices.

While homeowners saw their carrying charges rise, they nonetheless felt more affluent as real estate prices rose – inflated on easier and easier credit terms. Prices rose faster than mortgage debt as long as (1) interest rates were declining; (2) loan maturities were stretched out (ultimately reaching the point of zero amortization rather than the old-fashioned 30-year self-amortizing mortgages); (3) down payments were shrinking toward zero (rather than requiring 20 percent equity as used to be the case) and indeed as “liars’ loans” led prices to be bid up recklessly; and finally (4) cities refrained from raising property taxes as fast as market prices were rising. This left more revenue to be capitalized into higher prices, providing capital gains that home owners were encouraged to treat like “money in the bank” – by taking out home equity loans. This rising mortgage debt was increasingly important in enabling people to maintain their living standards, especially as they had to pay more for housing. So what appeared to be affluence and rising net worth from the value of one’s home on the asset side of the balance sheet found its counterpart in debt on the liabilities side.

From the local fiscal vantage point, these debt-leveraged price gains represented uncollected user fees for the site value provided by public infrastructure and rising prosperity. The bankers ended up with the rising flow of rental value, not the cities. This obliged tax collectors to look to other sources of revenue. So homeowners paid out what they seemed to be saving in modest property taxes in the form of rising sales taxes and income taxes.

By 2008 these financial system’s easing of credit terms had reached its limit. No more room for credit inflation remained, so speculators began to withdraw from the market. (They accounted for about one-sixth of demand for housing.) When the credit spigot was turned off, prices plunged – leaving the debts in place. (So taking out a home-equity mortgage was not really like drawing down money from a piggy bank after all. Years of future income had to be diverted to spend for past shortfalls.)

Now that federal aid is falling – along with revenue from sales and income taxes – local budgets are falling into deficit. But for many cities and states, their constitutions and regulations prevent them from running deficits. So they face a number of hard choices.

It is hard to raise property taxes back toward earlier rates, because the rental income already has been pledged to the mortgage bankers. To tax heavily indebted property would lead to more foreclosures and abandonment. And the Obama Administration’s hope that banks somehow will use the Federal Reserve’s tsunami of cheap (0.25%) reserves and credit to re-inflate a new real estate bubble is in vain, because bankers have little interest in lending to property that is still sinking in market price. It is easier to speculate on interest-rate arbitrage with the BRICS and get a foreign-exchange premium as well, or simply to play the market. Banks report winnings in the derivatives trade day after day, with nary a loss – an indication of how poorly their hapless customers and other outsiders must be doing! So the path of least resistance for most cities and states is to cut back spending on public services, and above all on pension plan contributions.

The ultimate sacrifice (and the aim of financial predators) is to sell off public land and buildings, roads and other transportation services, sewer systems and other basic infrastructure. In this aim, the investment bankers are being aided and abetted by the credit ratings industry, threatening to downgrade cities that do not sell off their public domain. In this respect the financial end-game of privatization is similar in the United States to pressures by the European Central Bank to force the indebted PIIGS economies to engage in privatization sell-offs, Third World and post-Soviet style.

Just as in Europe, when revenues are squeezed and something must give – either debt service, payment to pensioners or current payments to labor – the financial sector is seeking to take all the available surplus for itself. This puts creditors in the forefront of today’s class war against labor.

On the eve of the September 2008 financial crash, cities such as Birmingham, Alabama and Chicago already were looking for ways to cope with the fiscal squeeze imposed by political pressures from the major local campaign contributors – the real estate and banking sectors – to cut property taxes. One seeming path of little resistance was to gamble in the Wall Street financial casino, hoping to make easy gains rather than making landlords, wage earners or consumers pay higher taxes.

Landlords and bankers encouraged this speculation as an alternative to taxing property. Landlords wanted to pay less in property taxes, and banks knew that whatever rental value buyers could save in the form of lower taxes would end up being used to bid up prices to capitalize into debt service for mortgages to buy properties up for sale.

Here is the dilemma that states and cities now face: So much urban property is sinking into negative equity territory that a rise in property taxes will lead to even more foreclosures and abandonments, and hence even lower fiscal returns. To avoid this, cities are seeing Chapter 9 bankruptcy as the main route to free themselves, especially from problems that stem from an unwarranted trust in bankers to help them out of the earlier fiscal squeeze by putting them into losing financial gambles. Orange County in California successfully sued Merrill Lynch to recover damages, and Birmingham also was awarded recovery payments from JP Morgan Chase.

Birmingham and Chicago as microcosms of the national debt squeeze

Now that financial fraud has been decriminalized for all practical purposes, most financial victims are obliged to sue for reimbursement in civil court without much help from prosecutors. Birmingham, Alabama is a case in point. After a predatory financing arrangement to upgrade its sewers in 2008 forced its Jefferson County into bankruptcy, the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) negotiated $75 million in fines and reimbursement of fees to be paid by JP Morgan Chase as lead lender and negotiator for the complex interest-rate swaps they had advised the country to take, ostensibly to protect its economic interest. The banks also forfeited nearly ten times this sum ($647 million) in termination fees. But the court-appointed receiver grabbed the $75 million settlement for payment on the debts the country still owed.

As usual, the banks had paid the fine and made reimbursement without admitting any wrongdoing. To the financial sector, deception and fraud is part of the game, after all, not a tactic that can be prosecuted as criminal. They paid their fines without admitting any wrongdoing, and without even admitting the S.E.C. charges. They merely paid up and kept silent – while the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service were still in the time-taking process of ruling on legal claims brought by Jefferson County. The case prompted bankers and bondholders to bring pressure on the state of Alabama to take responsibility (that is, take on the debt liability) all on behalf of statewide taxpayers, and to demand that all lawsuits brought for financial fraud to be dropped.[1] “Responsibility” is supposed to be only for debtors, not for the financial sector itself. This is how the banks have managed to rewrite the laws, after all.

Jefferson County is now debating whether to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy to free itself from debts that can be paid only at the cost of disrupting economic continuity and living standards. The city’s debt quandary is a microcosm for the U.S. economy as a whole. Its lowest-income residents are burdened with financialized charges for sewer-system debt payments so far beyond their ability to pay that they face the same fate as Latvians, Irish and Greeks: As the local economy shrinks, they must move in order to find jobs – in places less debt-burdened and hence lower-cost. The “free market” choice is to emigrate to flee the debts imposed on their economies and on themselves personally.

Well-to-do Birmingham families have yards large enough to have their own septic tanks as an alternative to paying for access to sewers, but lower-income families living in small houses or apartment buildings lack this option. One county commissioner asked: “Why should the poor have to pay for the ill-gotten gain of some of these banks who poisoned the well in the very first place?”[2] Other commissioners demanded that bondholders “bear the entire cost of a $20 million fund that is being created to help low-income residents pay their sewer bills.”[3]

But the government usually provides relief only for creditors – above all, relief from criminal prosecution for their business plan that involved making loans beyond the debtors’ ability to pay. Some states have fraudulent conveyance laws to prevent this, as well as to prevent banks from misrepresenting the quality of their loans to outside investors. There are laws to punish appraisers who give false appraisals, and mortgage brokers who fill in false income reports to qualify for loans. But the S.E.C. has seen its staff and budget slashed and deregulators appointed to oversee its affairs. It has no authority to prosecute, only to make recommendations to the Justice Department, where Attorney General Eric Holder has followed the Obama Administration’s support of Wall Street, feeling no obligation to live up to the promises to make that a change from the Bush Administration’s similar lax behavior.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/when-the-rich-get-richer-it-doesnt-raise-all-boats-it-sinks-the-standard-of-living-for-everyone-else.html

When the Rich Get Richer, It DOESN’T Raise All Boats … It SINKS The Standard of Living For Everyone Else

Washington’s Blog
Sunday, September 4, 2011

I’ve repeatedly noted that rampant inequality destabilizes the economy as a whole, and actually causes depressions … but that government policy is increasing inequality.

I’ve also pointed out that no one – liberal or conservative – likes runaway inequality.

Now, Jeffrey P. Thompson (Assistant Research Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Elias Leight (Assistant Analyst Tax Analysis Division of the Congressional Budget Office) have demonstrated that when the wealthiest Americans get richer, everyone else becomes poorer.

For example, they demonstrate that when the wealthiest Americans get 10% richer, middle income Americans get 2% poorer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGFVU9lSXY (Research Shows Rich Getting Richer Makes Poor Poorer)

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-future-for-most-americans-pathetic-jobs-bad-debts-and-a-crappy-economy.html

The Future For Most Americans: Pathetic Jobs, Bad Debts And A Crappy Economy

The American Dream
Sept 7, 2011

Sorry to break this to you, but the future for most Americans is going to be pretty crappy.  Unless you are independently wealthy, the chances are good that you will have a low paying job, that you will be drowning in a sea of bad debts and that you will have to go on government assistance at some point.  Most American families are completely dependent on their jobs for income, and right now good jobs are disappearing at a frightening pace.  Over the last couple of decades, millions of high paying manufacturing jobs have been shipped out of the country and they are being replaced by low paying service jobs.  Small business creation is being absolutely crushed by the federal government, and millions of illegal immigrants have been allowed in to the country and they are now competing for the limited number of jobs that are still available.  The vast majority of the money and the vast majority of the power in this country are now in the hands of either the big corporations or the government.  Together, the big corporations and the government are absolutely crushing everyone else.  If you are not part of the “privileged class”, there is a good chance that your job is serving them.  Perhaps you are bringing them lunch or cutting their hair or stocking shelves for them. Once upon a time, America was “the land of opportunity”, but now that has all changed.  Tomorrow morning, millions of Americans will get up and go to pathetic, low paying jobs and millions of others will wonder why they can’t find anyone to hire them.  Sadly, if nothing is done to reverse the long-term trends that are destroying our economy, the number of “working poor” is going to continue to increase.

Our founding fathers never intended for this to happen.  Our founding fathers intended to set up a capitalist system in which the power of the central government and the power of corporations was greatly limited.  The idea was that individuals and small businesses should be given the chance to grow and thrive in a free market system.

But that is not what we have today.  Instead of capitalism, what we have today is much more aptly described as “corporatism”.  There are very few areas of the economy where the corporations and the government do not totally dominate.

For a while things worked fairly well because the big corporations were providing millions and millions of good jobs for American workers.  But now the big corporations have figured out that they don’t really need expensive American workers and they are shipping millions of our jobs out of the country.

But the mainstream media keeps insisting that everything is going to be okay if we all just have a positive attitude.

I had to laugh when I read the following line in an article posted on USA Today recently….

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/u-s-poverty-rate-reaches-15-1-percent.html

U.S. poverty rate reaches 15.1 percent

Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post
Sept 13, 2011

The nation’s poverty rate spiked to 15.1 percent in 2010, the highest level since 1993, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday, providing vivid new evidence about the nation’s inability to escape the lingering effects of the recession.

About 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty last year, marking an increase of 2.6 million over 2009 and the fourth consecutive annual increase in poverty.

The total number of people living below the poverty line— which in 2010 was set at an income of $22,314 for a family of four — is now at the highest level in the 52 years the statistic has been collected.

The continued rise in poverty was just the latest manifestation of a troubled economy that has left 14 million Americans out of work and caused unemployment to hover above 9 percent for 25 of the past 27 months.

Full article here

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/poverty-in-america-a-special-report.html

Poverty In America: A Special Report

The Economic Collapse
Wednesday, September 14, 2011

America is getting poorer.  The U.S. government has just released a bunch of new statistics about poverty in America, and once again this year the news is not good.  According to a special report from the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.2 million Americans are now living in poverty.



The number of those living in poverty in America has grown by 2.6 million in just the last 12 months, and that is the largest increase that we have ever seen since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.  Not only that, median household income has also fallen once again.  In case you are keeping track, that makes three years in a row.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States dropped 2.3% in 2010 after accounting for inflation.  Overall, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8% once you account for inflation since December 2007.  So should we be excited that our incomes are going down and that a record number of Americans slipped into poverty last year?  Should we be thrilled that the economic pie is shrinking and that our debt levels are exploding?  All of those that claimed that the U.S. economy was recovering and that everything was going to be just fine have some explaining to do.

Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty.  Today, 15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty.  The last time the poverty level was this high was back in 1993.

However, it is important to keep in mind that the government definition of poverty rises based on the rate of inflation.  If inflation was still calculated the way that it was 30 or 40 years ago, the poverty line would be much, much higher and millions more Americans would be considered to be living in poverty.

So why is poverty in America exploding?  Who is getting hurt the most?  How is America being changed by this?  What is the future going to look like if we remain on the current path?

Let’s take a closer look at poverty in America….

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/over-56-million-americans-live-in-poverty-how-the-census-bureau-ignores-the-suffering-of-10-million-impoverished-americans/26552

Over 56 Million Americans Live in Poverty: How the Census Bureau Ignores the Suffering of 10 Million Impoverished Americans

by David DeGraw
Global Research, September 14, 2011
AmpedStatus.org  



Here we go again. The government and corporate media are pumping out more propaganda on vital economic statistics to mask the severity of our economic crisis. Deceptive unemployment, GDP, inflation and poverty measures are easily exposed with some research and a closer look at the data. The latest deception comes from the Census Bureau in their annual poverty report, which is now uncritically being “reported” on throughout the corporate media and echoing throughout online news outlets as well.

The new Census data reveals that a stunning 46.2 million [.pdf] Americans, 15.1% of the population, lived in poverty in 2010. This is an increase of 2.6 million people since 2009. While these are staggering statistics that represent the highest number of American people to ever live in poverty, and a dramatic year-over-year increase, it significantly undercounts the total.

The Census Bureau poverty rate is a highly flawed measurement that uses outdated methodology. The Census measures poverty based on costs of living metrics established in 1955 — 56 years ago. They ignore many key factors, such as the increased costs of medical care, child care, education, transportation, and many other basic expenses. They also don’t factor geographically-based costs of living. For example, try finding a place to live in New York that costs the same as a place in Florida. A much more accurate measurement of poverty, which factors in these vital cost of living variables, comes from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Unlike the Census poverty measure, which gets significant coverage throughout the corporate media, the NAS measurement gets little, if any, mainstream media coverage.

To see how the Census Bureau drastically undercounts poverty totals, let’s look at the past few years of data. In 2008, the Census reported that 39.8 million Americans lived in poverty. However, based on NAS calculations, 47.4 million Americans lived in poverty that year. In 2008, the Census undercounted by 7.6 million people. For the year of 2009, the Census reported that 43.6 million Americans lived in poverty. In my analysis, extrapolating data from 2008 NAS measurement, I estimated that the number of Americans living in poverty in 2009 was at least 52 million. After making this estimate, the NAS measurement was released, backing up my claim by revealing that 52.8 million Americans lived in poverty. In 2009, the Census undercounted by 9.2 million people.

The 2010 NAS poverty totals are yet to be released, so let’s extrapolate data from the new Census statistics in comparison to past NAS data, in the same way we accurately estimated the NAS 2009 poverty totals, to estimate the total number of Americans living in poverty in 2010:



As a general statistical trend, for every one person the Census counts as being in poverty, using NAS calculations 1.2 people are in poverty. In other words, the trend has been for every 10 people the Census reports as living in poverty, NAS reports there are 12. This would mean that 55.4 million people lived in poverty in 2010.

However, with costs of living sharply increasing, the discrepancy between the Census and NAS totals has also been increasing. Over the past two years, for every one additional person the Census counts as falling into poverty, 1.42 people fall into poverty as calculated by NAS methodology. This would mean that 56.5 million people lived in poverty in 2010.

Therefore, after extrapolating the data, we can estimate that at least 56 million Americans, roughly 18.5% of the population, lived in poverty in 2010 according to NAS methodology, approximately 10 million more than the Census Bureau is reporting.

So when you hear the government and media tell you that 46 million Americans lived in poverty in 2010, while that is horrifying enough, you should know that even that shocking statistic is putting a major positive spin on this economic disaster that is still far from over.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/dumpster-diving.html

Dumpster Diving?

The Economic Collapse
Sept 15, 2011



Have you ever thought about getting your food out of a trash can?  Don’t laugh.  Dumpster diving has become a hot new trend in America.  In fact, dumpster divers even have a trendy new name.  They call themselves “freegans”, and as the economy crumbles their numbers are multiplying.  Many freegans consider dumpster diving to be a great way to save money on groceries.  Others do it because they want to live more simply.  Freegans that are concerned about the environment view dumpster diving as a great way to “recycle” and other politically-minded freegans consider dumpster diving to be a form of political protest.  But whatever you want to call it, the reality is that thousands upon thousands of Americans will break out their boots, rubber gloves and flashlights and will be jumping into dumpsters looking for food once again tonight.

So is this actually legal?

In some areas, dumpster diving is considered to be legal.  In other areas, dumpster divers are technically breaking trespassing laws.  Although in most areas the police have so many other problems that they aren’t really concerned about cracking down on dumpster divers.

One of the biggest issues facing dumpster divers is safety.  Crawling around in back alleys and side streets in the middle of the night is not exactly the safest thing to do.  But the lure of large amounts of free food is enough to keep some people coming back over and over again.

During the recent economic downturn, the popularity of dumpster diving has exploded.  Today, there are dumpster diving meetup groups, dumpster diving Facebook groups, and even entire organizations such as Food Not Bombs that openly encourage their members to go dumpster diving.

If your family was going hungry, would you go dumpster diving?

You might be surprised at who is doing it.  Dumpster diving is not just for the homeless and the unemployed anymore.  A lot of people that have decent jobs have picked up on the trend.

Just check out the following example from a recent MSNBC article….

[Continued...]

[Constitutionary]

How many of these nuckle-heads contnue to vote for the 2 Globalist Parties despite all their "hardships".

Americans are so economically and fractionally-reserve ignorant, the banksters continue to have their way.

[egypt]

I'd like to know "who" in Congress voted on spending the Social Security money.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/30-signs-that-the-u-s-economy-is-about-to-go-into-the-toilet.html

30 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is About To Go Into The Toilet

The Economic Collapse
Sept 20, 2011



If you think the U.S. economy is bad now, just wait for a few months.  Things are about to become absolutely nightmarish.  None of the long-term economic trends that are hollowing out our economy have been addressed and more bad economic news seems to come out virtually every single day.  Now there is constant talk of the “next recession” in the mainstream media.  But did the last recession ever truly end?  The number of good jobs continues to decline, more stores are closing, incomes continue to go down, credit card debt and student loan debt are soaring, the housing market resembles a corpse, the number of Americans living in poverty continues to rise and government debt is at unprecedented levels.  We are losing blood fast, and almost all of our leaders are either too corrupt or too incompetent to be able to do anything about it.  The U.S. economy really and truly is about to go into the toilet, and if something is not done very quickly we are going to experience a complete and total economic disaster in this nation.

Americans have been promised over and over that this economic downturn is just “temporary” and that things will return to normal soon.  During this upcoming election cycle, the Democrats will swear that they have all the answers and that if we just elect them everything will be okay.  The Republicans will also swear that they have all the answers and that if we just elect them everything will be okay.

Well, both sides are lying.  The economic plans of both major political parties are a joke.  Neither of them can restore economic prosperity to this nation.

Our politicians could delay the coming economic collapse by borrowing gigantic piles of money and pumping all of that cash into the economy.  But stealing from our children and our grandchildren is not exactly sound economic policy.

Yes, the U.S. economy is in bad shape right now, but things are about to get even worse.  The long-term problems that are destroying our economy have not been fixed, and the leaks in our ship are going to continue to grow.

The following are 30 signs that the U.S. economy is about to go into the toilet….

[Continued...]

[TahoeBlue]

There won't be empty shelves because there won't be any stores:

#9 We are starting to see another huge wave of store closings and layoffs.  For example, the parent company of
Payless stores has announced that it will be permanently closing 475 stores.  
Borders is in the process of closing every single one of its 399 stores.  Also,
Bank of America has just announced that it will be closing about 600 branches, and that could result in the loss of about 30,000 good jobs.

[freedom_commonsense]

Of course, austerity is bad for business. People with less money to spend = less sales = less stores = less jobs. On goes the vicious spiral.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/welcome-to-the-suburban-depression.html

Welcome to the Suburban Depression

John Carney
CNBC
Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The prolonged economic slump we’ve been in since before the financial crisis really is different than recent recession experiences, especially when it comes to those who now live in poverty.

The official U.S. poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5 percent. Following the calamities of 2008 it climbed upward and kept climbing. By 2009, the rate was 14.3 percent. In 2010 it went to 15.1 percent, according to U.S. Census data reviewed by Pro Publica.

There has not been so large a portion of Americans in poverty since 1993. But this time the growth in poverty is different, hitting whites and suburbia harder than it did during the early 1990s slump. African Americans, by contrast, appear to be doing better.

The poverty rate for whites was 13 percent.

Full story here.

[Constitutionary]

I swear it is like leaning left & right which is good for steering a sled down a hill but now it seems like America is leaning left and right when the plane is in a nose dive, in essence the shifting of weight does nothing.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/depressed-as-a-nation-80-percent-of-americans-believe-that-we-are-in-a-recession-right-now.html

Depressed As A Nation? 80 Percent Of Americans Believe That We Are In A Recession Right Now

The Economic Collapse
Sept 22, 2011

According to a brand new Gallup poll, 80 percent of Americans believe that we are in a recession right now. Of course the government insists that the recession ended quite some time ago, but apparently the message is not sinking in. Not only that, most Americans also do not believe that things are going to get better any time soon. According to the Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans believe that the economy will be the same as it is right now or will be even worse one year from now. Two years ago, only 35 percent of Americans felt that way. Talk about pessimism! So are we depressed as a nation? Have too many people been reading the Economic Collapse Blog? How do we account for such strange numbers?

Certainly there are some areas of the country that are still doing quite well. If you live in an area that is closely tied to the federal government (Washington D.C.), the big Wall Street banks (New York) or corporate America (Silicon Valley, etc.), then you can go out on the weekends and find packed restaurants and mall parking lots that are overflowing.

But most of the rest of the country is really hurting.

Tonight, there are millions upon millions of Americans that won’t sleep well at all because they are trying to figure out how to get back on their feet. It can be really tough to keep going when you have been searching for work for years and still nobody will hire you. If you have a family, it is easy to feel like a failure when you have to look your spouse and your children in the eyes day after day knowing that they are depending on you.

If you have never been through it, then you should not mock those that are depressed because they cannot find work. Losing a good job and not being able to find another one can be an absolutely soul-crushing experience.

So why do 80 percent of Americans believe that we are in a recession right now?

Well, it is because that is what it feels like for most people.

For example, a reader identified as Carol recently shared the following with us….

For example, a reader identified as Carol recently shared the following with us….

My unemployment ends the end of December, yes, I will be one of the 99′ers, one that did not sit at home and eat potato chips, drink soda and watch TV. I have no health insurance, I support myself and cannot afford it. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis last fall. Not to mention, degenerative disc disease, and osteoporosis. But I have continued to pursue work and regain employment, despite my health. I have no other choice but to fight and PRAY!

It amazes me at the stupidity of the general population, who still have their heads in the sand. The majority have no idea what is actually going on in our country on the political or economic side.

What would you do if you found out you were sick, you had no job, no health insurance and you were rapidly running out of money?

Please pray for those that are out of work. You never know when it will be you that needs some assistance.

For those that still believe that the economy is doing “great”, let’s review some of the cold, hard facts….

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-style-deficit-reduction-a-bipartisan-plan-to-destroy-america-s-middle-class/26717

Obama-Style Deficit Reduction: A bipartisan Plan to destroy America's Middle Class

by Stephen Lendman



Global Research
September 22, 2011

On September 8, Obama's "American Jobs Act" address to Congress was a thinly veiled campaign speech. More on it below.

On September 19 came Act Two to enlist support for "Living Within Our Means and Investing in Our Future" [.pdf] by cutting $4 trillion over 10 years (for starters with more to come) from Medicare, Medicaid, public pensions, veterans' benefits, unemployment insurance, the US Postal Service, and other social benefits.

It's part of a bipartisan plan to destroy America's middle class, good-paying jobs and benefits, the dream of homeownership for millions, and a nation once fit to live in but no longer.

Economist and regular Progressive Radio New Hour contributor Jack Rasmus commented on the minimum $4 trillion deficit reduction plan, saying:

It's "not only the consensus deficit target but also the amount by which taxes have been cut for the rich and corporations."

Moreover, it equals the amount banks and other large corporations "have been hoarding in cash since the bailouts," instead of using it for economic growth and job creation.

In addition, out-of-control war spending and bailouts applied productively would make austerity cuts unnecessary.

"Who's going to pay the next $4 trillion (and more trillions after that)....is the central issue," according to ruling elites.

"It's not jobs (not created), foreclosures, broke states and cities, students indentured for life, or seniors struggling to stay alive."

At a time stimulus is needed to revive productive growth, infighting focuses on what more to cut, hitting working households, the poor, retirees and disabled hardest.

Notably, 25 million Americans wanting jobs have none. Nothing is being done to create them.

Instead, proposals focus on tax cuts for the rich, corporate handouts, and austerity to pay for them.

Welcome to America.

Obama's America.

Land of permanent war, disproportionate wealth extremes, and spiraling debt.

With growing millions unemployed and impoverished.

With 11 million homes foreclosed and another 20 million under water.

Where 44 million seniors will soon pay double for Medicare and get no cost of living Social Security increases.

Where millions of poor children will lose Medicaid.

Where millions of students are debt entrapped for life.

Welcome to a land where most one day will be better off by leaving because no homeland opportunities exist.

Ask millions of downsized middle class Americans heading for working poor status.

Ask political Washington why members sworn to serve instead betray.

Expect no answer because you'll get none.

Refuse to take anymore and resist, including about Obama's shameless new wealth transfer scheme to corporate favorites and super-rich elites called "stimulus."

On September 8, a New York Times editorial headlined, "The Jobs Speech," saying:

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/nearly-1-in-4-young-children-now-live-in-poverty-in-u-s.html

Nearly 1 in 4 young children now live in poverty in U.S.

Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story
Sept 23, 2011

The number of children living in poverty in the United States increased by 2.6 million since the recession began in 2007, bringing the total to an estimated 15.7 million poor children in 2010, according to researchers from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

The researchers estimate that nearly 1 in 4 children under the age of 6 now live in poverty.

Big cities and rural areas have the highest rates of poverty among young children. Thirty-one percent of children under age 6 in America’s cities and 30 percent of young children in rural areas are poor.

In contrast, 19 percent of young children living in the suburbs are poor.

“It is important to understand young child poverty specifically, as children who are poor before age 6 have been shown to experience educational deficits, and health problems, with effects that span the life course,” the researchers said.

Full article here

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/with-record-number-of-americans-falling-into-poverty-senator-rand-paul-says-the-poor-are-getting-rich/26689

With Record Number Of Americans Falling Into Poverty, Senator Rand Paul Says The Poor Are Getting Rich

by Tanya Somanader



Global Research, September 20, 2011
thinkprogress.org  

Census data revealed today that a record 46.2 million Americans were living in poverty in 2010. But in an aptly-timed hearing entitled “Is Poverty A Death Sentence,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) flat out rejected the idea that poverty in the U.S is worrisome. As the Ranking Member of the Senate Health subcommittee, Paul offered a dissertation-length statement on how the correlation between poverty and death is only found in the Third World and to claim such a connection within the U.S. is nothing more than “socialism” and “tyranny.”

Stating that “poor children today are healthier than middle-class adults a generation ago,” he even blamed the poor for their own health problems, suggesting “behavioral factors” like a higher incidence of smoking, obesity, or weak family support structures as the only correlation between poverty and health.

Citing the deficit as a primary priority, Paul questioned whether federal low-income programs are “creating unnecessary and unhealthy dependence on government.” He unequivocally declared that “poverty is not a state of permanence” and that “the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer even faster.”

PAUL: We also need to understand that poverty is not a state of permanence. When you look at people in the bottom 5th of the economic ladder — those at the bottom — only 5 percent are there after 16 years. People move up, the American dream does exist…The rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting richer even faster.

Watch it: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/13/318259/with-record-number-of-americans-falling-into-poverty-rand-paul-says-the-poor-are-getting-rich/

Summing up his thesis, Paul said, “Rather than bemoan or belabor something [poverty] that is really truly something that is overwhelmingly being treated in our country, we should maybe give more credit to the American system, the American dream, and give credit to what capitalism has done to eradicate poverty in this country.”

First of all, the notion that the poor are getting richer faster than the rich requires an impressive level of ignorance. Currently, income inequality in the United States is greater than that of Pakistan and Ethiopia and higher than at any other time since the Great Depression. Indeed, thanks to exceedingly low tax rates, the rich are getting richer, with the richest one percent earning nearly 25 percent of the total income [.pdf] in the country.

Meanwhile, nearly one in three middle-class Americans is slipping down the income ladder as an adult. And with stagnant wages and the purchasing power of the minimum wage at a 51-year low, it’s hard to see how suddenly “the poor are getting richer faster.”

What’s more, Paul’s overwhelming deluge of pseudo-evidence to downplay the connection between poverty and poor health cannot shake incontrovertible facts. As the American Journal of Public Health found, deaths resulting from poverty, income inequality, and low social support each totaled more than homicide deaths in 2000.

Paul’s claim that Americans now have a greater life expectancy still doesn’t change the fact that low-income individuals can expect to live a shorter life due to poverty. Indeed, a report released at the hearing noted that “this is the first time in our history that children born in certain parts of the United States can expect to live shorter lives than their parents’ generation.”

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/09/conservatives-worry-that-runaway-inequality-will-destroy-economy-and-society.html

Conservatives and Liberals Agree: Unparalleled Levels of Inequality Is Killing Our Economy and Society

by Washington's Blog
September 24, 2011

Conservatives Worry That Runaway Inequality Will Destroy The Economy and Society

Leading economists agree that rampant inequality leads to unstable economies and depressions, and makes the middle and lower classes poorer.

While the stereotype is that liberals care about inequality and conservatives don’t, that is actually a myth.

As Canada’s conservative National Post – Canada’s 9th biggest newspaper – noted Wednesday:

According to the voice of Canada’s business establishment: “High inequality can diminish economic growth if it means that the country is not fully using the skills and capabilities of all its citizens or if it undermines social cohesion, leading to increased social tensions.

***

A mounting body of research shows that, left unchecked, a growing income gap affects the rich, the poor and everyone in between.

***

No matter your political leanings, most people understand that endless concentration of income, wealth and power is bad for the economy. After all, businesses rely on rising purchasing power of the many, not the few, to deliver growth and profits.

***

No one knows the tipping point, but lock enough people out of the promise of gains and at some point, instead of stability and growth, you get social unrest.

***

History has shown us, time and again: When too much is controlled by too few, something has to give. Continuously rising inequality is unsustainable.

Everyone has a stake in fixing this. And the fix has no political colour.

(The Post is correct about the potential for social unrest.)

Moreover, IMF economists have demonstrated that inequality increases a nation’s debt. Because conservatives are passionate about reducing debt, reducing inequality is a conservative value.

And as I noted in February:

-------------

Renowned behavioral economist Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Michael I. Norton (Harvard Business School) recently demonstrated [.pdf] that everyone – including conservatives – thinks there should be more equality.

Their study found:

"Respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution. Most important from a policy perspective, we observed a surprising level of consensus: all demographic groups—even those not usually associated with wealth redistribution such as Republicans and the wealthy—desired a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo."

Ariely comments:

Taken as a whole, the results suggest to us that there is much more agreement than disagreement about wealth inequality. Across differences in wealth, income, education, political affiliation and fiscal conservatism, the vast majority of people (89%) preferred distributions of wealth significantly more equal than the current wealth spread in the United States. In fact, only 12 people out of 849 favored the US distribution. The media portrays huge policy divisions about redistribution and inequality – no doubt differences in ideology exist, but we think there may be more of a consensus on what’s fair than people realize.

How could the media portrayal regarding this issue be so wrong?

Well, for one thing, as a study the Pew Research Center found, the corporate media tends to take Wall Street’s view on economics. Indeed, the media is largely set up to spout propaganda which supports the view of the powers-that-be. The financial sector has been by far the biggest beneficiary of government policies over the past 10 years or so. So the media tends to defer to Wall Street’s own arguments against equality.

***

Everyone agrees that a system which uses the power of the state to reward the fraud and gambling of the largest banks and biggest corporations through socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else is not free market capitalism, and is downright anti-American.

As I noted last November:

Conservatives tend to view big government with suspicion, and think that government should be held accountable and reined in.

Liberals tend to view big corporations with suspicion, and think that they should be held accountable and reined in.

Irreconcilable difference?

Not really.

Specifically, a Rassmussen poll conducted in February found:

70% (of all voters) believe that the government and big business typically work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

(and see this).

Remember that the government helped and encouraged the giant banks to get even bigger, and then has hidden their insolvency and shielded them from the free market, and helped them grow even during the severe downturn.

In return, the big banks and giant corporations have literally bought and paid for the politicians.

Conservatives might call it “socialism” and liberals might call it “fascism” – they are the same thing economically.

But all Americans – conservatives and liberals alike – can agree that it is not capitalism, and it is not American.

As I pointed out in December:

Conservatives hate big unfettered government and liberals hate big unchecked corporations, so both hate legislation which encourages the federal government to reward big corporations at the expense of small businesses.

As an example, both liberals and conservatives are angry that the feds are propping up the giant banks – while letting small banks fail by the hundreds – even though that is horrible for the economy and Main Street.

The Dodd-Frank financial legislation … enshrines big government propping up the big banks … more ore less permanently.

Many liberals and conservatives look at the government’s approach to the financial crisis as socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for the little guy. No wonder both liberals and conservatives hate it.

And it’s not just the big banks. Americans are angry that the federal government under both Bush and Obama have handed giant defense contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton no-bid contracts. They are mad that – instead of cracking down on BP – the government has acted like BP’s p.r. spokesman-in-chief and sugar daddy.

They are peeved that companies like Monsanto are able to sell genetically modified foods without any disclosure, and that small farmers are getting sued when Monsanto crops drift onto their fields.

They are mad that Obama promised “change” – i.e. standing up to Wall Street and the other powers-that-be – but is just delivering more of the same.

They are furious that there is no separation between government and a handful of favored giant corporations. In other words, Americans are angry that we’ve gone from capitalism to oligarchy.

So if both liberals and conservatives hate something, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a compromise. It may mean that they feel disenfranchised from a government that is of the powerful and for the powerful.

In other words, while many conservatives are against raising taxes on the wealthy, they are overwhelmingly for stopping the use of the power of the state to increase inequality. See this, this and this.

This is an area of agreement between people of good faith on the left and on the right. As Robert Shiller said in 2009:

[Continued...]

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[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-mad-as-hell-generation-20-reasons-why-millions-of-americans-under-the-age-of-30-are-giving-up-on-the-u-s-economy.html

20 Reasons Why Millions Of Americans Under The Age Of 30 Are Giving Up On The U.S. Economy

The Mad As Hell Generation

The American Dream
Sept 27, 2011



Millions upon millions of young Americans have completely lost faith in the U.S. economy and are mad as hell that their economic futures have been destroyed.  The recent economic downturn has hit those under the age of 30 the hardest.  Today, there are hordes of young people that should be entering their most productive years that are sitting home with nothing to do.  Many of them have worked incredibly hard throughout high school and college.  Many of them have stayed out of trouble and have done everything that “the system” asked them to do.
 
But once they got finished with school, the promised “rewards” simply were not there.  Instead, millions of young Americans are faced with crushing student loan debt loads in an economy where they can’t find good jobs.  When you are in your twenties, it can be absolutely soul-crushing to send out hundreds (or even thousands) of resumes and not get a single interview.  Most of us grew up believing that we would “be something” when we got older, and millions of young Americans are having those dreams brutally crushed right now.  Americans under the age of 30 voted for Barack Obama in droves back in 2008 because they believed that he would make things better.  Instead, Barack Obama has made things even worse.  Significant numbers of young Americans are starting to wake up and realize that neither political party is providing any real answers, and they are starting to get mad as hell about it.
 
Americans under the age of 30 don’t want to hear that they are not going to be able to do better than their parents.  They don’t want to hear that they are going to have to “pay the price” because of the mistakes of previous generations.  They don’t want to hear that the “good jobs” that have been held out as a “carrot” for them all these years have disappeared and are not coming back.
 
Millions of young Americans want what was promised to them.  They want good jobs that will enable them to enjoy the “American Dream”.  They want things to go back to the way that things used to work in America.
 
If you spend much time around those in their twenties, you know that many of them have a look of hopelessness in their eyes.  Large numbers of them have moved back in with their parents.  Large numbers of them are flipping burgers or working retail jobs part-time because that is all they can find.  There are even a growing number of them that have given up entirely and have completely checked out.
 
So are we in the process of creating a “lost generation”?
 
The following are 20 reasons why millions of Americans under the age of 30 are giving up on the U.S. economy….

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

-- Warren Buffet, New York Times, November 26, 2006

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-class-war-in-america-the-rich-get-richer/26821

The Class War in America: The Rich Get Richer...

by Joel S. Hirschhorn



Global Research
September 28, 2011

Much is being said by Republicans about a class war being waged by President Obama and Democrats. In their fantasy world this class war is attacking so called job creators. All this talk is pure nonsense, absolutely false and misleading, intentional political garbage designed to intentionally mislead gullible Americans to believe the lies. Here is the truth: There has, indeed, been a class war waged in the US ; it has been going on for a good thirty years. And this real war has been won.

There are official data over time called the Gini index or coefficient between zero and one that is a statistical measure of economic inequality. When it is zero national income is evenly distributed among all citizens, and when it is one all the income goes to one person. Obviously the Gini figure will be somewhere between zero and one. Some nations have very low values and others very high ones. In the high category is the US . But more important is that the index has changed over time, rising from about 1980 to current times, after it had remained fairly stable over several decades. That significant rise from about .37 to .45 shows unequivocally that the rich got richer as most of the population in the middle class and below lost ground.

To truly appreciate what has happened you must seriously examine some data. For example, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That is very slow growth, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II when inequality actually decreased. More importantly, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. Absorb that number for a few moments. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million. Those numbers describe the true class war in which the rich and powerful were the clear winner.

Presently, according to new estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class who are likely pay twice that amount or even more. The class war winners are clear.

Need more convincing? Consider data from the Tax Foundation. Between 1987 and 2008, the share of income controlled by the top 1 percent grew to 20 percent from 12 percent. That equates to a total share growth of 67 percent. During the same period, their share of taxes went to 28 percent from 24 percent, indicating a share growth of 17 percent. Follow that? The top 1 percent share of income grew nearly five times faster than their share of taxes: 67 percent versus 17 percent. Pretty darn good deal. So forget all that malarkey from Republicans that the rich pay so much of the nation’s taxes unfairly. The class war winners are reaping the rewards of a two-party plutocracy that they own.

Here is another dose of class war reality. The top 1 percent share of total pre-tax income rose from about 10 percent in 1980 to 21 percent in 2008, a nice doubling that helps explain the rise in economic inequality. It really pays to win the class war.

The idea that raising taxes on the rich in these dismal economic times in any way represents some injustice is such baloney that one should wonder how any American can possibly eat this Republican garbage. Similarly, the nonsense about job creators somehow not creating new jobs because of higher taxes flies in the face of reality, because very low taxes have not caused them to create significant new jobs. Nor did higher taxes for some decades for decades after World War II stop high rates of new job creation.

The rich class own most of the wealth of the nation after winning the class war for some thirty years. They accomplished this victory by using money to buy and corrupt the political system. The most perplexing aspect of all this is why most Americans have not risen up in revolt against the political system that has so screwed them. Those on the right keep supporting Republican candidates that lie to them and actively work against the economic interests of all but the rich. Those on the left fall victim to the lies of Obama and other Democrats that promise much but deliver next to nothing to bring economic justice to most Americans. Democrats have also contributed to the killing of the middle class.

[Continued...]

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