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

[worcesteradam]

the debt based economy is a huge issue

by far the biggest challenge is too fix it, because its a giant ponzi scheme that the bankers can implode whenever they want

[worcesteradam]

and cancel all the false debt

it needs to be done slowly and carefully
takes time
government need to go in there and take over all the banks. throw the financiers into the street and then manage the transition.
long difficult work

[Geolibertarian]

http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/2009/06/too-poor-to-make-the-news.html

Too Poor to Make the News

by Barbara Ehrenreich
June 15, 2009

The human side of the recession, in the new media genre that's been called "recession porn," is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee's. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the "great leveler," smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.

But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility - the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view "the economy," as a shared condition, is a fiction.

This spring, I tracked down a couple of the people I had met while working on my 2001 book, "Nickel and Dimed," in which I worked in low-wage jobs like waitressing and housecleaning, and I found them no more gripped by the recession than by "American Idol"; things were pretty much "same old." The woman I called Melissa in the book was still working at Wal-Mart, though in nine years, her wages had risen to $10 an hour from $7. "Caroline," who is increasingly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, now lives with a grown son and subsists on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. We chatted about grandchildren and church, without any mention of exceptional hardship.

As with Denise Smith, whom I recently met through the Virginia Organizing Project and whose bachelor's degree in history qualifies her for seasonal $10-an-hour work at a tourist site, the recession is largely an abstraction. "We were poor," Ms. Smith told me cheerfully, "and we're still poor."

But then, at least if you inhabit a large, multiclass extended family like my own, there comes that e-mail message with the subject line "Need your help," and you realize that bad is often just the stage before worse. The note was from one of my nephews, and it reported that his mother-in-law, Peg, was, like several million other Americans, about to lose her home to foreclosure.

It was the back story that got to me: Peg, who is 55 and lives in rural Missouri, had been working three part-time jobs to support her disabled daughter and two grandchildren, who had moved in with her. Then, last winter, she had a heart attack, missed work and fell behind in her mortgage payments. If I couldn't help, all four would have to move into the cramped apartment in Minneapolis already occupied by my nephew and his wife.

Only after I'd sent the money did I learn that the mortgage was not a subprime one and the home was not a house but a dilapidated single-wide trailer that, as a "used vehicle," commands a 12-percent mortgage interest rate. You could argue, without any shortage of compassion, that "Low-Wage Worker Loses Job, Home" is nobody's idea of news.

In late May I traveled to Los Angeles - where the real unemployment rate, including underemployed people and those who have given up on looking for a job, is estimated at 20 percent - to meet with a half-dozen community organizers. They are members of a profession, derided last summer by Sarah Palin, that helps low-income people renegotiate mortgages, deal with eviction when their landlords are foreclosed and, when necessary, organize to confront landlords and bosses.

The question I put to this rainbow group was: "Has the recession made a significant difference in the low-income communities where you work, or are things pretty much the same?" My informants - from Koreatown, South Central, Maywood, Artesia and the area around Skid Row - took pains to explain that things were already bad before the recession, and in ways that are disconnected from the larger economy. One of them told me, for example, that the boom of the '90s and early 2000s had been "basically devastating" for the urban poor. Rents skyrocketed; public housing disappeared to make way for gentrification.

But yes, the recession has made things palpably worse, largely because of job losses. With no paychecks coming in, people fall behind on their rent and, since there can be as long as a six-year wait for federal housing subsidies, they often have no alternative but to move in with relatives. "People are calling me all the time," said Preeti Sharma of the South Asian Network, "They think I have some sort of magic."

The organizers even expressed a certain impatience with the Nouveau Poor, once I introduced the phrase. If there's a symbol for the recession in Los Angeles, Davin Corona of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy said, it's "the policeman facing foreclosure in the suburbs." The already poor, he said - the undocumented immigrants, the sweatshop workers, the janitors, maids and security guards - had all but "disappeared" from both the news media and public policy discussions.

Disappearing with them is what may be the most distinctive and compelling story of this recession. When I got back home, I started calling up experts, like Sharon Parrott, a policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who told me, "There's rising unemployment among all demographic groups, but vastly more among the so-called unskilled."

How much more? Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, offers data showing that blue-collar unemployment is increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment. The last two recessions - in the early '90s and in 2001 - produced mass white-collar layoffs, and while the current one has seen plenty of downsized real-estate agents and financial analysts, the brunt is being borne by the blue-collar working class, which has been sliding downward since deindustrialization began in the '80s.

When I called food banks and homeless shelters around the country, most staff members and directors seemed poised to offer press-pleasing tales of formerly middle-class families brought low. But some, like Toni Muhammad at Gateway Homeless Services in St. Louis, admitted that mostly they see "the long-term poor," who become even poorer when they lose the kind of low-wage jobs that had been so easy for me to find from 1998 to 2000. As Candy Hill, a vice president of Catholic Charities U.S.A., put it, "All the focus is on the middle class - on Wall Street and Main Street - but it's the people on the back streets who are really suffering."

What are the stations between poverty and destitution? Like the Nouveau Poor, the already poor descend through a series of deprivations, though these are less likely to involve forgone vacations than missed meals and medications. The Times reported earlier this month that one-third of Americans can no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions.

There are other, less life-threatening, ways to try to make ends meet. The Associated Press has reported that more women from all social classes are resorting to stripping, although "gentlemen's clubs," too, have been hard-hit by the recession. The rural poor are turning increasingly to "food auctions," which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.

And for those who like their meat fresh, there's the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wis., a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he's supplementing his diet by "shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled." In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver is doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space - by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers. It's hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities. At the legal level, this includes Peg taking in her daughter and two grandchildren in a trailer with barely room for two, or my nephew and his wife preparing to squeeze all four of them into what is essentially a one-bedroom apartment. But stories of Dickensian living arrangements abound.

In Los Angeles, Prof. Peter Dreier, a housing policy expert at Occidental College, says that "people who've lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent." Thelmy Perez, an organizer with Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, is trying to help an elderly couple who could no longer afford the $600 a month rent on their two-bedroom apartment, so they took in six unrelated subtenants and are now facing eviction. According to a community organizer in my own city, Alexandria, Va., the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by day laborers contains two bedrooms, each housing a family of up to five people, plus an additional person laying claim to the couch.

Overcrowding - rural, suburban and urban - renders the mounting numbers of the poor invisible, especially when the perpetrators have no telltale cars to park on the street. But if this is sometimes a crime against zoning laws, it's not exactly a victimless one. At best, it leads to interrupted sleep and long waits for the bathroom; at worst, to explosions of violence. Catholic Charities is reporting a spike in domestic violence in many parts of the country, which Candy Hill attributes to the combination of unemployment and overcrowding.

And doubling up is seldom a stable solution. According to Toni Muhammad, about 70 percent of the people seeking emergency shelter in St. Louis report they had been living with relatives "but the place was too small." When I asked Peg what it was like to share her trailer with her daughter's family, she said bleakly, "I just stay in my bedroom."

The deprivations of the formerly affluent Nouveau Poor are real enough, but the situation of the already poor suggests that they do not necessarily presage a greener, more harmonious future with a flatter distribution of wealth. There are no data yet on the effects of the recession on measures of inequality, but historically the effect of downturns is to increase, not decrease, class polarization.

The recession of the '80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch - from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

Maybe "the economy," as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won't pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a "dramatic collapse" in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.

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

Note: the above article by Barbara Ehrenreich was written almost a year ago. Imagine how much worse things are going to be this summer?

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.progress.org/2010/fold665.htm

How the Poor Vote themselves into Poverty

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor
The Progress Report
May 17, 2010

The poor we always have with us, because they vote themselves into poverty. It starts out with an aristocracy that owns the land and collects rent from the poor. The aristocracy can either be smart or stupid. If they are stupid, they keep repressing the rebellions of the poor until finally the army switches sides and the royalty gets overthrown by the revolution. That’s what happened with the French and Russian revolutions, and with the Shah of Iran.

However, no revolution has ever ended up helping the poor. A new aristocracy takes over, but this time they are smarter, as for example, they don’t call it "aristocracy." In the USSR, for example, the new aristocracy was the Communist Party "nomenklatura," but they called themselves the party of the workers.

If the aristocracy is smart, they avoid revolution by enlisting the middle class as allies. They sell some of their land to the bourgeoisie. They tax the income of the middle class, but then rebate their tax money with public goods that increase their rent and land value. This financial roundtrip causes a reduction of wealth, the deadweight loss or excess burden of taxation, but the bourgeoisie is happy, as they have enough money left for café latte.

To keep the poor from rebelling, the smart aristocrats hand out welfare. Welfare consists of economic rent handed back to the poor as services. The poor pay rent to the aristocracy for the use of dwelling space, and then the ruling class hands some of it back as schooling, medical services, housing assistance, and food coupons. "Look at how much we are helping you," say the aristocrats. "To keep getting your aid, you need to vote in favor of us rulers." So they do.

The poor pay little or no income tax, but they pay sales and excise taxes. The purpose of taxes on the sale of goods, and taxes on value added during production, is to force the poor to pay taxes. There is an even bigger tax on the poor, the deadweight loss of taxation, the reduction of income and growth caused by taxation, which falls hardest on the poor. The poor get taxed much more than the value of the aid they receive, but the schooling provided by government avoids any hint of this. That is why governments provide "public education" rather than vouchers that would let parents send their children to private schools where they just might learn the hidden economic reality.

But there is a problem with this arrangement. The middle class resists being taxed too much, as they see much of the money being routed to the poor and to wealthy rent seekers. To enlist the voting support of the poor and the middle class, the ruling aristocracy borrows money to spend on more welfare. The poor also support labor unions so that they can strike to get higher wages, and government workers then get unionized also. Labor unions in the private sector end up pricing themselves out of the market, but government workers can get big pensions and higher wages if the government borrows more money. Governments end up with huge budget deficits and unpayable debts.

That’s where we are now. On the vanguard of government debt are California and Greece, which resorted to accounting tricks to keep on borrowing, but that game is now checkmated. Unable to borrow, governments cut the welfare aid to the poor. They also try to cut some of the pensions and wages of workers. Outraged, the poor go into the streets and riot.

A little voice in the corner cries out, "untax labor, tap the rent, stop the subsidies," but that voice is drowned out by the yelling of the protestors who demand their welfare aid. The middle class does not want their rent tapped for public revenue, because they feel insecure in their jobs, and see their land value as their security. They don’t understand that in a pure free market, their untaxed labor and full employment would be better security. They say, "if this were true, we would have learned this in our government schooling."

Economists are trained in graduate school that there are only two factors, land and capital. What about land? That is part of capital. Why not tap the rent? Because it is only a tiny part of national income. Why do you think so? That is what the government reports say. Have you analyzed this? "If that were important, I would have learned this in graduate school."

Now the landed aristocracy is in deep trouble. California can’t borrow much more. Greece can still borrow from the International Monetary Fund and from the wealthier Europan countries, but only for a couple of years. The USA still has good credit, but it is doing nothing to reduce future deficits. The line of least political resistance is a default, softly in the form of a restructuring of the debt, or harshly as repudiation during a financial crisis.

The banks holding these failed bonds will get bailed out. They have to get rescued, because they loan out the money for the real estate purchases that prop up land values. But the debt crunch ends up hurting everybody, the rich, middle class, and the poor, when governments are no longer able to borrow.

We are now coming to an "end of history," of a century of government deficits that got the revenue to placate the poor. After the crunch, a new history will begin, but the price will have been paid as environmental damage, conflict, and the perpetuation of poverty. That’s what Henry George foresaw when he explained how perverse progress creates poverty.

Henry George also foresaw the rise of new barbarians. Who are they? Terrorists who have grievances, but have no clue as to the ultimate source of the injustice. The ultimate cause of the terrorist threat is injustice in land tenure, but they don’t teach that in school either.

[Geolibertarian]

Note: Although the author of the following article is clearly unaware of the fundamental difference between (a) the Austrian School version of "capitalism" and the "free market" which -- thanks to an elite-funded propaganda campaign -- largely dominates economic thought among conservatives and right-leaning libertarians, and (b) the sadly lesser known Georgist version, he nevertheless conveys a keenly accurate assesssment of the monstrous, dehumanizing, 19th century-style working conditions that plague countless millions of landless peasants throughout the Third World, and which the ruling class oligarchs who've hijacked our government are slowly and quietly reestablishing in the U.S. As you read, please bear in mind that these horrific conditions were one of the key defining characteristics of what Austrian Schoolers shamelessly and laughingly define as America's "golden era."

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

http://www.globalresearch.ca/sweatshop-manufacturing-engine-of-poverty/19193

Sweatshop Manufacturing: Engine of Poverty

by Gregory Elich



Global Research
May 16, 2010

On a global scale, the reign of free market ideology has wrought deep changes. Manufacturing jobs in the developed nations are rapidly shrinking while abroad there has been a rise in sweatshop manufacturing, with conditions reminiscent of the worst of the 19th century. The effect has been to widen the gulf between the living conditions of the wealthy and those who labor for them.

Inequality has reached such an astounding level that it requires an act of willful blindness on the part of Western media not to notice it. Over half of the world’s population subsists on less than $2 a day, while the 200 richest individuals own more wealth than 41 percent of the world’s population, or in other words, more than 2.6 billion people. Such an extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the few cannot be construed as a failure of global capitalism. Indeed, it is a mark of its success, for this is what the system is designed to do. Nor can the mass immiseration on which the system rests be dismissed as an unfortunate mistake or an unintended byproduct of the process. Pillage is the very engine that drives the accumulation of riches.

It is abroad where the repercussions of triumphant capital are at their most troubling, especially in underdeveloped nations offering a pristine opportunity for unfettered exploitation. Even as the domestic workforce is being relentlessly driven into insecurity, the profits to be had from the exploitation of labor, markets and resources in the Third World are unsurpassed. Capitalism is a global system, and capital flows where it stands to reap the highest returns. It knows no boundaries.

Naked exploitation of labor is the hallmark of manufacturing jobs exported abroad. Giant corporations such as Wal-Mart constantly press suppliers to lower costs, causing plant managers to wring more production from already over-exploited workers. At a typical plant in Honduras, managers blame Wal-Mart’s continual demands for cheaper clothing for the need to drive their workers so hard. Isabel Reyes labors at this plant for ten hours a day, where she is expected to sew sleeves onto 1,200 shirts during a single shift, an average of one sleeve every 15 seconds. “There is always an acceleration,” she says. “The goals are always increasing, but the pay stays the same.” After eleven years at the plant, her Carpal Tunnel Syndrome has worsened to the point where she cannot lift a pot or hold her baby without first taking anti-inflammatory pills. In compensation for her toil, she earns about $35 a month.

U.S. corporations threaten to move production to countries with cheaper labor if demands for lower prices are not met. To meet that challenge, Honduran manufacturers slashed 20 percent of staff over a three-year period while maintaining the same level of production. Henry Fransen, director of the Honduran Apparel Manufacturers Association, remarked sardonically, “We’re earning less and producing more, following the Wal-Mart philosophy.” The Wal-Mart technique for purchasing fabrics is to approach a few plants in different countries and then pit them against each other. “We’ll be putting our global muscle on them,” gloated the head of the company’s global procurement division. Even in Bangladesh, with its abysmal labor conditions and rock-bottom production costs, Wal-Mart asked factory owners to lower prices by up to 50 percent. With over 10,000 suppliers worldwide, Wal-Mart is a trendsetter in the apparel industry.

The harsh reality is that employment in a sweatshop is akin to imprisonment. The Alejandro Apparel plant in Honduras is representative of sweatshops throughout the Third World, with its barbed-wire fence, locked gates and armed security guards. Situated in the Choloma Free Zone, the firm is exempt from all taxes, import and export duties and tariffs. An average worker at Alejandro Apparel earns a wage of 86 cents per hour and sews 230 T-shirts in a ten and a half hour shift. Thus, a worker earns just four cents per shirt, less than one percent of its retail price. This plant supplies several American corporations, including Nike, Adidas and Hanes. In contrast to the insignificant sum a worker is paid for actually producing a shirt, Nike spends over two dollars to advertise it. Keeping up with harsh production quotas is difficult, and workers take just ten minutes for lunch. Management monitors bathroom use and any worker regarded as taking too long is ordered over a loudspeaker to return to his or her workstation. Employees are forbidden to speak to one another and supervisors routinely scream at and berate workers.

The situation is very much the same at Southeast Textiles, also located in the Choloma Free Zone, except that here before workers can use the restroom they must first ask permission and present a toilet pass stamped by a supervisor. Workers caught drinking water “too often” are called into the office and given a warning, because such a practice can lead to the need for a restroom break. A second infraction brings swift punishment. At both plants, the relentless pace of production and unvarying routine produce repetitive strain injuries in a majority of workers.

Lydda Eli Gonzalez was one of 15 workers fired from Southeast Textiles for attempting to organize a union. Only because she had lost her job did she feel free to describe the working conditions there. Her job consisted of attaching sleeves to Sean John shirts. The quota set for a production line was to sew 2,288 shirts per shift; a goal intentionally set at an impossible level. The best that could be managed during a regular shift was half that amount, so workers were customarily required to work unpaid overtime in order to “compensate” management for the shortfall. “The supervisors stand over us shouting and cursing at us to go faster,” she said. “We are under constant pressure. They call us filthy names, like maldito, donkey, bitch, and worse things. You can’t answer the supervisors or they will fire you. It is very hot in the factory and you are sweating all day. There is also a lot of dust in the air. You breathe it in, and you go into the factory with black hair and come out with hair that is white or red or whatever the color of the shirts we are working on.” Once a worker succeeds in receiving permission to use the restroom she must first suffer the indignity of being searched by a guard before being allowed to proceed. “You can go once in the morning and once in the afternoon,” Gonzalez explained. The work process at the plant is grueling. “You can’t move or stretch, or even look to the side. You just have to focus and work as fast as you can to complete the production goal, always under pressure. Because of this, and because the benches are just wood with no backs, by the end of the day your whole body aches, your back, arms, shoulders, everything, and one feels exhausted.”

At Niagra Textiles in Bangladesh, workers sew garments for Disney and Wal-Mart, earning the princely sum of 11 to 20 cents per hour. Helpers are paid even less than sewers, just 7 to 8 cents an hour. The pay is so abysmal that four workers must share a single shack, and one outhouse and water pump serves sixty people. Meals consist of nothing but rice, only occasionally flavored with a small amount of beans or potatoes. To manage even such a meager diet as this, workers must borrow money each week. The workweek is 14 hours a day, seven days a week. At best, employees are given one day off a month. On top of that schedule, employees are required to work a 19-hour shift once a week, from 8:00 AM until 3:00 AM the following morning. At the end of this extended shift, workers sleep on the floor at the factory. If a worker is caught talking in the factory, he is fined a day’s wages. “It is a bleak life. We have no hope,” confessed one worker. Another complained, “We have no life. We can’t afford to marry; we have no wife, no social life. We live just to work.”

It is the practice of Niagra Textiles to pay its workers two weeks late in order to earn extra interest from the bank. On one occasion, a small group of workers entered the manager’s office, asking when they would be paid. The outraged manager responded by assaulting one of the workers and screaming, “How dare you come into my office!” The manager made a cell phone call for assistance and then he and his assistant beat the workers. Thirty-some minutes later, five gang members arrived and thrashed the workers with sticks and stomped on those who had fallen to the ground. Police arrived during the melee, and gang members helpfully pointed out the workers they were to arrest. Eight employees were taken to jail, where they remained for two weeks before being released on bail and facing charges. Every worker who had inquired about pay was dismissed, including those who had eluded arrest.  

At the Western Dresses factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Robina Akther usually worked from 7:45 in the morning until 10:00 or 11:00 PM, and seven or eight nights a month she was ordered to work until 3:00 AM. “The factory never shuts down,” she reported. “In the first six months I did not have a single day off.” In a typical year, Akther would get less than ten days off. “My job was to sew the flaps on the back pockets of these pants. I had to sew 120 pieces an hour. It was difficult to reach. If you made any mistakes or fell behind on your goal, they beat you. They slapped you and lashed you hard on the face with the pants. This happens very often. They hit you hard.” Workers at the factory are not permitted to talk. “If the supervisors even see you move your lips or make a gesture to a friend, they cut your overtime pay as punishment. We work sitting on hard wooden stools with no backs or arm rests. But if you even stand up to stretch, they cut your overtime pay.”

At a factory in Thailand producing clothing for Reebok, Adidas and Levi’s, amphetamines were added to the large drink containers during busy production periods, enabling employees to work up to 48 hours straight. The practice was so commonplace that many workers became addicted to the drugs and sought them on the black market. Discipline was harsh, and anyone perceived to be working too slowly could expect to be grabbed and shouted at. The fine for a worker caught yawning was more than $11, and in one case, a worker was docked more than $46 for bringing a lemon to work to help her stay awake. The owner often hectored the workers over a loudspeaker, telling them that anyone attempting to organize a union could “say goodbye to your parents.” Since six thuggish bodyguards always accompanied the owner and security guards monitored workers, the threat was taken seriously. Then one day without any warning the owner disappeared, having absconded with the workers’ back wages.

Conditions are no better at sweatshops operating in China, as factory owners there routinely ignore legal protections for workers, and little or no attempt is made to enforce such laws. At Kin Ki Industrial on the outskirts of Shenzhen, the Etch-a-Sketch toy is manufactured. Workers there are paid 24 cents an hour, little more than two-thirds of the legal minimum wage. The workweek consists of 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, exceeding the legal permissible limit on working hours. At Foreway Industrial in Dongguan, toys for American major league sports, Wal-Mart, Disney and Hasbro are produced. The workweek is seven days long. Workers receive one day off every other month and about half of the national holidays. During peak production periods, employees work from 8:00 AM until 2:00 to 4:30 AM. For their efforts, they are paid an average of 16 and a half cents an hour. Wages are frequently paid late, and in one instance when desperate workers organized a strike over late pay, all fifty activists were fired. Workers who wish to quit automatically forfeit one and a half month’s back wages.

At Daxu Cosmetics in Anshan, workers painstakingly assemble false eyelashes by hand. It is tedious and exhausting work that strains the eyes. The starting wage at Daxu is $24 a month, from which $13 is deducted for overcrowded and inadequate lodging. Even during off-hours, workers are locked inside the facility, although they are occasionally permitted to spend time on the grounds of the adjoining mental hospital. Workers are allowed only one shower per week, and the menu for every meal never varies - cabbage and potato porridge. If an employee wants to quit, she must first pay the owner a penalty fee of $58, an impossible sum to save. One woman who in her attempt to escape through a third story window fell and broke both legs and displaced vertebrae, characterized the plant as follows: “What they called a company was really a prison.”  

Such stories are legion, and reveal the mean-spirited heart of the all-consuming drive for profit by global capitalism far more accurately than the gleaming images of affluence that are beamed into our living rooms on the television. We are never shown the downtrodden millions: 852 million undernourished people, including 9 million in industrialized countries. Despite a sharp reduction of hunger in China, the global number of hungry has increased in recent years, a trend that has been particularly pronounced in underdeveloped nations and the republics of the former Soviet Union which are now enjoying the fruits of the free market. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization asks, “If we already know the basic parameters of what needs to be done, why have we allowed hundreds of millions of people to go hungry in a world that produces more than enough food for every woman, man and child? Bluntly stated, the problem is not so much a lack of food as a lack of political will.” There is indeed enough food in the world to sustain every person. The problem of hunger is not one of supply but of an economic system based on inequality and a gross concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.

As long as glorification of the free market holds sway, the political will for addressing this urgent problem will never materialize. The lure of profit will trump people’s needs every time. This is “the system that works.” And so it does - for those at the top. It is often said that capitalism is the most efficient system for producing wealth. It would be more accurate to say that what the system accomplishes is to produce a concentration of wealth. Capitalism does not generate wealth from the thin air. It seizes it. The price for this concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is poverty and misery on an extraordinary scale, yet we rarely if ever hear the cries of those who are trampled underfoot in the stampede for riches.

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[Geolibertarian]

http://www.henrygeorge.org/archive/pancake.htm

Pancakes and Poverty

by Lindy Davies
The Henry George Institute
September 22, 1999

My 2½ year old son and I like making pancakes in the morning. We like eating them too, but making them is really way cool. He supervises the mixing of the batter. "Don't over-mix, Daddy!" he reminds me (all true flapjack chefs know that over-mixed batter makes rubbery cakes). He deposits the first bit of batter in the pan, and recently he has begun to learn flipping. Often while I cook subsequent panfuls, he plays in the kitchen sink, and I have a few moments to sip coffee and think.

His Mom and I do our best to take care of our kid. We reconfigured our lives to make sure we were ready and able to give him our very best attentions. We worry if he doesn't feel like eating. We make sure he hasn't outgrown his shoes. We feel for fevers. We sing, walk, play, tell stories, name things, explain processes; we frequent three libraries. None of this is heroic, of course. We do what parents are expected to do: take the best possible care of their kids. Children are our hopes, our loves -- it's our job to do right by them and they owe us nothing in return. All they have to do is grow, and gain an identity.

We do not think kindly -- do we? -- of those who disregard their children. We cluck judgementally at parents who we consider to be too young, or too irresponsible. We are horrified at parents who abandon, neglect, malign or misuse their children. Let's consider a few examples. What about a parent who habitually leaves lead paint chips and stagnant, scummy water around for a kid to consume? Or perhaps one who lolls in fur coats while the kids have no blankets? Or forces a child to go out and work, while the parent sits at home watching TV? Or perhaps even blames the child for his own poverty?

Yet as a community we have not done so very well by our children. Tens of millions of children die each year due to diseases borne by unsanitary drinking water and lack of sewage facilities. A quarter of the children in the world today lack adequate shelter. And multitudes of kids are forced to fend for themselves, lacking support from parents who are unemployed, or ill, or absent -- ground down by their own poverty until they can no longer function as parents.

It is striking how much attention we pay to our own children, and to the parenting standards of those in our own community, while disasters of such mind-addling proportion are going on around us. Perhaps there isn't too much we can do, in the short term anyway. Like Scarlett O'Hara, we just cannot think of it today, we'll go mad if we do! But it is not healthy to be in too much denial for too long. Kids are kids, and the majority of them in the world today are forced to live in appalling hardship.

Seeing this, we immediately seek refuge in the notion of the parents' irresponsibility. They simply shouldn't be having children if they can't provide for them. All those people in Bangladesh should look around them and see how selfish it is to create another mouth to feed, when so many go hungry. Before those crazy young couples in Mexico City have more kids, they should work hard, save their pesos and buy a few acres in the campo, ¿Si?

But there's one problem with that argument: it's irrelevant. It's never the kid's fault, no matter how "irresponsible" its parents might have been. Does the child not have rights of its own?


               My kid                   Someone else's kid

We have to realize that more money, energy and resources is spent on taking photographs of children in the United States than goes toward feeding them in the world's LDCs. What about the millions upon millions of acres squandered on subsidized meat production? The insane wars over natural resources, fought with the leftover weapons of the cold war, that result in starving refugees?

It was once a sort of hip, existential-despair sort of thing to say, "How could I bring a child into such a hopeless world as this?" I think of that as we flip our pancakes. There's nothing hopeless about the world. The world provides for its children with abundant generosity. The hand-wringing about the Earth's "carrying capacity" is misplaced. The world can never can be overpopulated while so many resources go wasted, while the top ten per cent live in such luxury and feel so free to throw their garbage wherever they wish.

Proliferation of hungry children, and destruction of the natural environment, are not parts of the natural order of things, as Malthus and his later-day enthusiasts would have you believe. That is a formula for despair. Human beings are not a cancer on this planet. The world would not be better off without us. Would the world be a better place without the paintings of Cezanne, the music of the Davis/Coltrane quintet, the polio vaccine, or those two little guys pictured above? No. It is up to us to fashion social institutions that are worthy of us, our children and our best achievements. How do we do that? That, too, is known. Ignorance is no excuse.

[Geolibertarian]

In his November 23, 2008 article, End the Fed, End Wall Street Bankster Rule, End the Derivatives Depression, Webster Tarpley wrote the following:

"Monetarist dogma is a mix of Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft (of the Skull & Bones family), Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and other reactionary Republicans. Monetarism is based on the von Hayek-von Mises Austrian school, which started when a bunch of rent-gouging Viennese landlords wanted to abolish rent control and hired some scribblers to prove that 'the market' was always infallible and government is always the enemy. Von Hayek got his chance under the reactionary old battle axe Margaret Thatcher, who brought back rickets, scurvy and pellagra for British working people. The dumbed-down US version of the same doctrine is Milton Friedman and his Rockefeller-funded Chicago School, which got its big road test under the fascist Pinochet regime in Chile."

In a recent article, economist Michael Hudson expands on Tarpley's scathing assessment of the Austrian School's ideological cousins -- the Chicago School monetarists:

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

http://michael-hudson.com/2010/05/neoliberal-economics-v-theology/

Religious Conversion: from Theology to the Temple of Mammon

by Michael Hudson
michael-hudson.com
May 24, 2010

The Friedman Institute upgrades Theology to condone Neoliberal Greed
What would Jesus Say?

Many academics recently received a petition signed by 111 University of Chicago faculty members, explaining that “without any announcement to its own community, [the University] has commissioned Ann Beha Architects, a Boston firm, to remake the Chicago Theological Seminary building into a home for the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics (MFIRE) and has renewed aggressive fund-raising activity for the controversial Institute.”

It would be hard to find a more fitting metaphor than what the press release characterizes as “conversion of the Seminary building into a temple of neoliberal economics.” Even the acronym MFIRE seems symbolically appropriate. The M might well stand for Money in Prof. Friedman’s MV = PT (Money x Velocity = Price x Transactions). And the FIRE sector comprises finance, insurance and real estate – the “free lunch” sector whose wealth the Chicago monetarists celebrate.

Classical economists characterized the rent and interest accruing to the FIRE sector as “unearned income,” headed by land rent and land-price (“capital”) gains, which John Stuart Mill described as what landlords made “in their sleep.” Milton Friedman, by contrast, insisted that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” – as if the economy were not all about a free lunch and how to get it. And the main way to get it is to dismantle the role of government and sell off the public domain – on credit.

As Charles Baudelaire quipped, the devil wins at the point where the world believes that he does not exist. Paraphrasing this we may say that free lunch rentiers achieve economic victory at the point where government regulators and economists believe that their returns do not exist – and hence, do not need to be taxed, regulated or otherwise subdued.

By “free market,” the Chicago Boys mean giving free rein to the financial sector – as opposed to the classical economists’ idea of freeing markets from rent [read: rack-renting] and interest [read: spurious interest]. Whereas traditional religion sought to lay down precepts for regulation, the Friedman Institute will promote deregulation.

Physically replacing the theology school with a “temple of neoliberal economics” is ironic inasmuch as one tenet that all the major religions held in common at one point or other was opposition to the charging of interest. Judaism called for Clean Slates (Leviticus 25), and Christianity banned interest outright, citing the laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy.

The Chicago Boys thus have inverted traditional theology.

Yet the teaching of economics as an academic discipline began as moral philosophy courses in the 18th and 19th centuries. The leading universities of most countries were founded to train students for the ministry. The moral philosophy course evolved into political economy, dealing largely with economic reform and taxation of the unearned income accruing to vested interests as a result of legal privilege. The discipline was stripped down into “economics” largely to exclude political analysis, and the distinctions between productive and unproductive investment, earned and unearned income, value and price.

The classical economists saw rent and interest as a carry-over from Europe’s feudal conquest of the land and the privatization of money and finance into an institutionally based debt and monopoly overhead. The classical economists sought to tax away such “unearned income,” to regulate natural monopolies or shift them into the public domain.

Needless to say, this history of economic thought will not be taught at the Friedman Center.

The first thing that the Chicago Boys did in Chile when they were given power after the 1973 military coup was to close down every economics department in the country – and indeed, every social science department outside of the Catholic University where they held sway. They realized that “free markets” for capital required total control of the educational curriculum, and of cultural media generally.

What free marketers realize is that without an Inquisition authority, you cannot have a “stable” free market – that is, a market free for the financial predators who presumably are targeted as the major potential donors to the U/C’s Friedman Center.

Chicago School monetarists have achieved censorial power on the editorial boards of the major refereed economics journals, publication in which has become a precondition for career advancement for academic economists. The result has been to limit the scope of economics to “free market” celebration of rational choice theory and a narrow-minded “law and economics” ideology opposed to the ideas of moral justice and economic regulation that formed the basis of so much Western religion.

I had a foretaste of this inquisitorial spirit when I attended the U/C Laboratory School. I remember the large banner strung over the blackboard in Mr. Edgett’s social science classroom in 1953: “Give them all what the Rosenbergs got.” After the Freedom of Information Act opened up FBI files, my fellow classmates got quite a kick out of reading the reports filed on them and their political views by U/C professors and those of its associated Shimer College.

Who would have anticipated that economics would end up more right wing and authoritarian, more explicitly opposed to the very idea of human rights and distributive justice than theology? Or that the latter discipline itself would be so inverted?

The classical economists were reformers, after all, seeking to free markets from unearned income – the “free lunch” of land rent by Europe’s hereditary aristocracies, and from monopoly rents administered by the royal trading corporations created by European governments to pay off their war debts. But the Chicago monetarists seek to deregulate monopolies and usury laws, favoring rentiers rather than the “real” economy of labor and capital.

Their focus is on financial and property claims on income and on assets pledged as collateral: bank loans, stocks and bonds, for which they urge tax cuts. And to increase the market for leveraged buyouts, the Chicago Boys advocate privatizing the public domain, starting in Chile after 1973.

So what is inverted is not only the classical idea of free markets, but the economic core of early religion. Today, the Chicago Boys deem those most in need of salvation to be high finance, real estate and monopolies in their fighting to reverse the past seven centuries of classical economic reform since the Churchmen debated how to define a Just Price (socially necessary costs of production) for banks to charge back in the 13th century.

It seems largely about fund-raising, but isn’t that true of most religion nowadays?

The University of Chicago was financed by John D. Rockefeller, prompting Upton Sinclair to call it “The University of Standard Oil” in The Goose Step. When I attended in the 1950s, Lawrence Kimpton had replaced Robert Hutchins as chancellor, and in 1961 became general manager of planning (and subsequently, director) for Standard Oil of Indiana. His most famous act (apart from supervising the Manhattan atom bomb project) was to suppress The Chicago Review issue that contained excerpts from William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch. Significantly, the reason he gave was that publication might discourage financial grants being given to the university.

Mr. Rockefeller at least duly gave his tithe to “those in need.” In a contrasting spirit, Herman Kahn’s wife, Jane, told me that once at a party, Milton Friedman replied to her suggestion of better public welfare and medical care, “Mrs. Kahn, why do you want to subsidize the production of orphans and sick people?” This is not exactly the classical religious spirit.

The problem with the Friedman Institute is that its economic doctrine rose to notoriety in the Pinochet period, the high tide of the Chicago Boys in Chile. Privatization of public enterprise, “freeing” markets from usury laws and promoting deregulation is the antithesis of nearly all religions, whose guiding purpose after all was to socialize their members and create a moral state.

Friedmanite monetarism has been characterized as a post-modern ideology which, like religion, has its own sacred cows and idols – and an Inquisition. In place of tithing of unbelievers as in Islam, we have the tax shift off the religion of finance capital onto labor standing outside its gates.

As the press release reports: “wide protest … has centered on the Institute’s strong ideological bias toward free market fundamentalism in the Friedman tradition. In this way and others, its nature runs contrary to the University’s tradition of free inquiry and unfettered debate.”

Well, I’m not sure about how recent that tradition of unfettered debate was, but the announcement concludes with a note that “FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Robert Kendrick, Professor of Music (rkendric@uchicago.edu, 773-702-8500) or Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of History of Religions (blincoln@uchicago.edu, 773-702-5083).”

The problem with the Friedman Institute [as mentioned before] is that its economic doctrine rose to notoriety in the Pinochet period, the high tide of the Chicago Boys in Chile.

I therefore suggest that it should be called the Pinochet Center of New Economic Theology.

The privatization of public enterprise (“freeing” markets from usury laws and promoting deregulation) is the antithesis of nearly all religions – whose guiding purpose after all was to socialize their members and create a moral state. Thus it really deserves to be called a New Theology.

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

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/dying-detroit-the-impacts-of-globalization-social-decay-and-destruction-of-an-entire-urban-area/19856

"Dying Detroit": The Impacts of Globalization. Social Decay and Destruction of an Entire Urban Area

by Li Onesto



Global Research
June 23, 2010

A YouTube video titled "Dying Detroit" takes you on a tour of "neighborhoods literally falling apart"—through streets that look like "a hurricane has recently swept through, destroying nearly everything on its path." Thousands of houses have been abandoned—in many areas 50-60% of the houses are in foreclosure. Some blocks have only a few homes left standing. A thousand people a month are leaving what has been called " America ’s fastest dying city."

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02x8EHXPfB0 (Dying Detroit)

There used to be almost 2 million people in Detroit. Today the city’s population is just under a million and 85% Black. Many thousands are living the city’s slow death:

- 1 in every 3 people live below the federal poverty level. Almost half of the children live in poverty. (2004 figures)

- The unemployment rate among Black people, especially the youth, is over 30%—city officials say it is actually closer to 50%.

- There is NO public hospital for the uninsured and, due to budget cuts, public health departments have largely eliminated programs providing direct health care services.

- 29 schools were closed the summer of 2009. An additional 32 schools—almost 20% of the city’s schools—were closed the summer of 2010. Detroit ’s dropout rate of 68% is the highest in the country (along with Indianapolis and Cleveland ). The illiteracy rate is close to 50%.

- Michigan state spends more on prisons than it does on higher education and has the second highest incarceration rate in the country.

For many decades after World War 2, big auto plants and other factories that once hired tens of thousands of workers moved to the suburbs and overseas. And more recently, over the last 15 years, U.S. imperialism has forged a globally integrated cheap-labor manufacturing economy, with huge labor reserves from China , India , and other parts of the Third World.

These larger workings of global capitalism/imperialism have deeply impacted Detroit, leading to further de-industrialization, loss of jobs and many people moving out of the city. In 1992 the big Chrysler plant moved, and overnight 4,500 people were left unemployed. More recently, when the sub-prime bubble burst, a wave of foreclosures displaced an estimated 5,000 people. Today, Detroit has at least 80,000 empty houses.

The federal and city government has responded to all this by basically throwing the city and the people to the dogs. And meanwhile all kinds of schemes are being proposed to find new ways to exploit the people and "rebuild" the city in a way that will be profitable.

The twisted and cruel logic of current federal and city policy in Detroit is that since fewer people now live in the city, everything must be "downsized"—which means cutting back on health care, education, city services, etc., and abandoning whole neighborhoods where people still live. And in line with this, DTE Electric has been heartlessly cutting off power for non-payment to tens of thousands of people in poor neighborhoods even in cold weather—making it even more difficult and dangerous to remain in these areas.

The Obama administration has an "urban policy" to deal with "shrinking cities" which the Mayor of Detroit, David Bing, is following. Bing is using a $40 million federal award for "renewal work" to carry out a plan which amounts to expelling poor people from "desolate" neighborhoods and promising to relocate them to more "stable" areas. According to the Detroit News, "Brookings Institution, local foundation leaders, several national funding groups and the White House offered financial support of up to $100 million a year for downsizing the city." The vice president of the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, Bruce Katz, said, "There is a nothing-left-to-lose quality in Detroit, much like there was in New Orleans after Katrina."

Mayor Bing has said he will use studies to determine who the "winners and losers" will be and put it this way: "If we can incentivize some of the folks that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation. If they stay where they are I absolutely cannot give them all the services that they require." The city is reportedly planning to use eminent domain laws to physically remove people who resist and then seize their homes and bulldoze them. The city’s argument is that a single house in an abandoned neighborhood is "blighting" the city because it requires fire and other services to the detriment of the larger community.

Bing explains: "There is just too much land and too many expenses for us to continue to manage the city as we have in the past... You can’t support every neighborhood. You can’t support every community across this city. Those communities that are stable, we can’t allow them to go down the tubes. That’s not a good business decision from my standpoint."

Think about it: The city and the people are dying an accelerating death and the Mayor justifies massive cutbacks and the abandonment of whole communities by saying these are "good business decisions."

Good business decisions is what has led to tens of thousands of people in Detroit losing their jobs. Good business decisions is what’s behind the killing cutbacks in healthcare and education.Good business decisions is what is killing the city and the people of Detroit .

This is a system that develops and brings together vast productive forces, including masses of working people. It organizes and utilizes great resources that have great potential to benefit society and people. But when these things and people cannot be profitably used by the capitalist system—factories are shuttered and left to rot, people are tossed aside and left with no way to feed their families. Cities are devastated and left to decay.

Just think about the fact that the "dying city" of Detroit is overwhelmingly Black. The USA arose on the foundation of the genocidal theft of Native American (Indian) lands, and the enslavement of African people. Since that time, the oppression of Black people has been essential to the functioning of this system, changing as that system has changed, but always deeply woven into the very fabric of society. For generations, Black people in Detroit have faced vicious discrimination in all spheres of life—and this continues in old and new ways.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a place like Detroit will be left to completely die. But as long as capitalism [read: corporate fascism] is running the show, any "re-invention" or "revival" of the city will be because new ways have been found to extract profit from the people and the city.

The productive forces in society—natural resources, technology, the creativity and knowledge of the people—are all held back and constrained, by the private and exploitative nature of capitalism. They are fettered by the need of [spurious] capital to constantly produce [read: extract] for profit—not to meet the needs of the people.

This basic rule of capitalism—that the whole point of production is to make profit—means that people are treated as things to be used or tossed aside. It means the system considers thousands of Black people, especially the youth, as just so much surplus that can’t be profitably employed. It means the system, through its armed enforcers, must come down with even more repression against this socially combustible and potentially rebellious section of society. And it means poisonous ideological assaults that justify such attacks and blame the people for the oppressive situation the system has put them in.

Detroit is a painful and clear example of how we need a whole new way, a whole new system, a whole new society. And we need revolution to bring this into being.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/collapse-in-living-standards-in-america-more-poverty-by-any-measure/20124

Collapse in Living Standards in America: More Poverty By Any Measure

15 million unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities

by Christine Vestal



Global Research, July 14, 2010
Stateline - 2010-07-08

More than 15 million Americans are unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities, and 38 million people are receiving food stamps, more than at any time in the program’s almost 50-year history.

Evidence of rising economic hardship is ample. There’s one commonly used standard for measuring it: the U.S. Census Bureau’s poverty rate. It guides much of federal and state spending aimed at helping those unable to make a decent living.

But a number of states have become convinced that the federal figures actually understate poverty, and have begun using different criteria in operating state-based social programs. At the same time, conservative economists are warning that a change in the formula to a threshold that counts more people as poor could lead to an unacceptable increase in the cost of federal and state social service programs.

When Census publishes new numbers for 2009 in September, experts predict they’ll show a steep rise in the poverty rate. One independent researcher estimates the data will show the biggest year-to-year increase in recorded history.

According to Richard Bavier, a former analyst for the federal Office of Management and Budget, already available data about employment rates, wages, and food stamp enrollment suggest that an additional 5.7 million people were officially poor in 2009. That would bring the total number of people with incomes below the federal poverty threshold to more than 45 million. The poverty rate, Bavier expects, will hit 15 percent — up from 13.2 percent in 2008, when the Great Recession first started to take its toll.

Still, the U.S. Census Bureau’s new numbers will offer only a partial picture of how the nation’s sputtering economy is affecting the poorest Americans — a problem state officials and the Obama administration want to address.

Overestimating food costs

The current formula for setting the federal poverty line — unchanged since 1963 — takes the cost of food for an individual or family and multiplies the number by three, under the assumption that people spend one-third of their incomes putting meals on the table. While the formula may have been a good way to estimate a subsistence cost of living in the early 1960s, experts say food now represents only one-eighth of a typical household budget, with expenses such as housing and child care putting increasing pressure on struggling families.

In addition, the official measure fails to account for regional differences in the cost of housing, it doesn’t include medical expenses or transportation, and at $22,000 for a family of four, the poverty line is considered by many to be simply too low.

Equally worrisome for policy makers is the Census Bureau’s failure to consider in-kind federal and state aid in calculating income. The existing formula counts only pre-tax cash income, leaving out such benefits as food stamps, housing vouchers and child-care subsidies, as well as federal and state tax credits for the working poor.

As a result, the nation’s official poverty count is unaffected by the billions spent on safety-net programs. Yet it remains by far the most frequently used measurement of how well governments are taking care of their most vulnerable citizens.

Conservatives have consistently argued that if safety-net programs were taken into account, the poverty rate would be much lower. At the same time, advocates for the poor have argued that poverty counts would be much higher if the cost of housing, child care and other expenses were factored in.

Nearly two decades ago, Congress asked the National Academies of Science (NAS) to revisit the official poverty measure and come up with recommendations for a new measure that would satisfy critics on both ends of the spectrum.

This past March, the Obama administration said it would use the NAS 1995 guidelines to update the federal government’s poverty calculation and promised to unveil the first new “supplemental poverty measure” in September of 2011.

“The new supplemental poverty measure will provide an alternative lens to understand poverty and measure the effects of anti-poverty policies,” Under Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank said. “Moreover, it will be dynamic and will benefit from improvements over time based on new data and new methodologies.”

Under the NAS recommendations, Commerce Department expenditure data for food, clothing, shelter and other household expenses would be used to set a poverty threshold for a reference family of four — two adults and two children. Then a family or individual’s resources would be compared to that line by including income and in-kind benefits, with taxes and other non-discretionary expenses, such as medical expenses and child care, excluded.

Because many expect the new calculation will result in a higher poverty count, the March announcement met with fiery criticism from some conservatives who charged the federal government could ill afford to increase its safety-net spending.

State experiments

But state and local policy makers applauded the move because they said it would give them the tools they need to assess the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs.

In New York City, for example, where an NAS-type poverty measure was adopted three years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the new data would allow the city to pinpoint who needs assistance most and which of the city’s social services have been most effective at improving its residents’ standard of living.

Using an updated measurement, New York City found that children — the recipients of a broad range of social welfare programs — were less poor than originally thought, while elders, who were struggling with previously unaccounted for medical expenses, were poorer.

As states become increasingly challenged by shrinking revenues and rising numbers of people in need, more than a dozen have set up commissions to help low-income families and many have set poverty reduction goals.

Among them, Minnesota and Connecticut have used NAS-like formulas to assess the effectiveness of current and proposed anti-poverty measures.

With technical assistance from the public policy research group The Urban Institute, both states used the results to support aggressive anti-poverty campaigns. Minnesota has a Legislative Commission to End Poverty in Minnesota by 2020, and Connecticut created a Child Poverty and Prevention Council with the goal of cutting child poverty in half by 2014.

Connecticut found only a slight increase in the number of people living in poverty when using the updated calculation — 21,000 people in 2006, compared to 20,000 using the existing Census measure.

But it got very different results when determining which public assistance programs did the most to reduce poverty. Under previous assumptions, child care subsidies and adult education and job training were seen as the most highly effective at moving people out of poverty over time. But the new formula showed that increasing enrollment in programs such as food stamps, energy assistance and subsidized housing was a more effective way to reduce child poverty in the near term. As a result, the state redoubled its outreach efforts to sign up as many low-income families as possible for these federally-funded programs.

In Minnesota, where the results were similar, a bipartisan legislative committee recommended the state refine its definition of poverty, build public awareness, and carefully monitor the impact of all major legislation on existing anti-poverty programs.

Both states joined 12 others earlier this year in calling on the federal government to adopt an NAS-like formula that would “consider the increased financial burden of housing, child care, and health care on the modern American family while recognizing the benefit of critical work supports such as tax credits, food stamps, and other non-cash subsidies.”

The administration’s supplemental poverty measure remains controversial, and some leaders on both ends of the political spectrum are urging Congress and the administration not to adopt the new formula for purposes of allocating federal funding or determining individual eligibility anytime soon.

If used to parse federal grants among states, it could radically change the amount of money each state receives. It stands to reason, for example, that a family of four trying to make it on $22,000 would have an easier time in rural Alabama than they would in suburban Massachusetts. And should the new measure be used to set individual eligibility for safety net programs, some are fearful that current recipients would be disqualified if all of their federal and state benefits were counted.

For the Obama administration, the Census Bureau’s current measure is problematic because it will fail to show the benefits of at least $100 billion in 2009 stimulus money spent for low-income families. Even so, as those direct subsidies and other job-creating federal funds are phased out, advocates expect the poverty rate will shoot up again next year, when the data is in for 2010.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-u-s-economy-is-a-dead-horse-and-the-american-people-are-starting-to-get-really-pissed-off-and-frustrated.html

The U.S. Economy Is A Dead Horse And The American People Are Starting To Get Really Pissed Off And Frustrated

The Economic Collapse
July 15, 2010

The economic frustration of the American people is reaching a fever pitch.  Millions of Americans can’t seem to get a good job no matter what they do.  Millions of others are working as hard as they can but find that they keep coming up short at the end of the month.  Record numbers of Americans are still going bankrupt.  Record numbers of Americans are still losing their homes.  Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is a dead horse at this point.  It just doesn’t have any more to give.  At this point the U.S. economy is like an aging rock star that requires larger and larger doses of drugs each night just to be able to perform.  The U.S. economy is addicted to “drugs” such as debt and government stimulus, and years ago those things really supercharged the U.S. economic system, but at this point they aren’t provoking much of a response at all.  In fact, the things that once “stimulated” the economy are now slowly killing it.  But the vast majority of the American people do not understand this.  All they know is that the economy is broken and they want someone to “fix” it.

For most Americans, all we have ever known is tremendous prosperity.  All our lives we have been taught that America is the richest and most prosperous nation on the planet, and that while there will always be times of “recession”, things will always bounce back and be better than ever before.

But this time things aren’t bouncing back.

And Americans are starting to become extremely frustrated.   

A couple of quotes that appeared in a recent article in The New York Daily News really embodied the growing frustration that so many are feeling at this point….

“My husband and I are fortunate to be able to move in with my 81-year-old mother-in-law. But how sad is that? I apply for jobs and nothing happens,” writes Gayle Hanson. “Who wants to hire a 59-year-old woman? My answer is nobody. I have years of experience, excellent references. And nothing to show for it.”

“I am soon to be 57 and considered too old, too expensive, etc. I can’t get an employer to hire me at any salary,” writes Mike Stiller. “I am BOILING MAD.”

But Gayle Hanson and Mike Stiller are far from alone.

Millions upon millions of Americans are “boiling mad” about the economy at this point.

The truth is that the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007. Many of those jobs have been shipped off to countries like China and India where labor is much cheaper and they are never coming back.

There just are not enough jobs for everyone in America at this point. The number of “chronically unemployed” has been rising at a frightening pace. In fact, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen to an all-time high.

If you have never been unemployed and unable to find a job, then you just don’t know how soul crushing it can be. This is especially true when you have a family to support.

Right now, there are 9.2 million Americans that are unemployed but are not even receiving an unemployment insurance check. It is easy to tell those unemployed workers that they should “get a job”, but as the chart below shows, the gap between the number of unemployed workers and the number of job openings has increased dramatically over the last couple of years….



But in this economy, even many of those who do have jobs are still struggling mightily. According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

And Americans are still losing their homes in record numbers. Banks repossessed an average of 4,000 south Florida properties a month in the first half of 2010, which was up 83 percent from the first half of 2009.

Meanwhile, demand for homes is dropping through the floor. The Mortgage Bankers Association announced on Wednesday that demand for loans to purchase U.S. homes sunk to a 13 year low last week, and refinancing demand also plummeted despite near record-low mortgage rates.

So considering all of these statistics, is it any wonder why so many Americans are so pessimistic?

According to a recent poll conducted by Bloomberg, 71% of Americans say that it still feels like the economy is in a recession.

But the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

Things are going to get much worse.

[Continued...]

[freedom_commonsense]

Not much better here. In fact, a casual sweep of government statistics from the ONS suggests 10 applicants for every vacancy in this region. That doesn't count existing employees trying to change jobs.

Personally, at the labour agencies, I've seen as many as 2000 applicants for one job (at one of the bailed out banks  ) with 100-200 being the norm even for poorly paid temporary work.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/economic-pain.html

Economic Pain

The Economic Collapse
July 20, 2010

For decades, most Americans have enjoyed an extremely high standard of living.  In fact, most of us have been “enjoying the high life” and “living the dream” for so long that we have assumed that it is just always going to be that way.  But now a rapidly growing percentage of Americans is getting the chance to experience some very serious economic pain.  Today, over 40 million Americans are on food stamps and over 20 million U.S. children are living in poverty.  Tens of millions of Americans are unemployed, and personal bankruptcies and foreclosures continue to set all-time records.  For many people, all of this economic turmoil was completely unexpected.  Millions of people now can’t sleep at night because they are constantly stressed about finances.  More couples than ever are being torn about by arguments over money.  Unprecedented numbers of Americans have experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs upon the realization that they are going to lose the homes that they have been raising their families in.  Money may not buy happiness, but as tens of millions of Americans are finding out, the lack of it can bring a whole lot of pain.

Now, the truth is that there have always been a small percentage of Americans that have struggled to get by, but today we are seeing more Americans who are “down on their luck” than at any other time in recent memory. According to one shocking new survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

It seems like almost everyone has a family member or a close friend who is looking for a job. The truth is that there are not enough jobs for everyone, and there certainly are not nearly enough good jobs.

A recent Pew Research survey found that 55 percent of the U.S. labor force has experienced either unemployment, a pay decrease, a reduction in hours or an involuntary move to part-time work since the recession began.

55 percent?

That is incredible.

That means that over half of all American workers have been unemployed or have been forced to take a reduction in pay since the recession started.

Things are getting really tough out there.

Millions of Americans are wondering why their husbands or wives suddenly can’t find jobs.

In fact, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen to an all-time high. The declining economy has created a new class of chronically unemployed Americans who would love to work but can’t seem to find anyone to hire them.

Millions of Americans have been forced to turn to part-time work. In fact, one recent survey found that approximately 8.6 million American workers are working part time because they can’t get full-time jobs.

In this economic environment, there is significant competition for even the lowest paying jobs.

You never know – this holiday season the friendly gentleman greeting you down at the local Wal-Mart may actually have several advanced degrees but just cannot find anyone else who will hire him.

As the economic situation continues to deteriorate, record numbers of Americans are going bankrupt and are losing their homes. In fact, banks repossessed a record number of U.S. homes during the second quarter of 2010.

So it is really no wonder why so many Americans are feeling so negative about the economy.

According to one new survey, U.S. consumer sentiment weakened in early July to its lowest in 11 months. In addition, one recent poll found that 76 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is still in a recession.

But sometimes what gets lost in all the numbers are the individual stories of the very real pain that so many Americans are going through. Today, I thought that I would share just a few of the stories of economic pain that my readers have been sharing with me.

A reader of my column on The American Dream blog named Kate recently graduated from college but now finds that she can’t even get a retail job….

I just graduated college in May… Moved to a new state and am now living with my boyfriend who should not and cannot continue to have to pay everything because i just plain can’t get a job.

I’m over qualified for retail survivor jobs… so I lie on my application. But then retail stores just plain don’t hire full time. So even if I could get a job as a cashier someplace… I’d only work enough hours to maybe pay for my car payment/ car insurance/ gas…. and my half of rent/electric and such is out of the question… not to mention charged to the limit credit cards from being unemployed and student loans that will hit in just a matter of months.

Any other jobs either don’t exist or they just ALL want 5 years professional experience…. which is impossible for someone who just graduated and has been working part time retail jobs since high school.

AND internships are unpaid or only for college students so thats out of the question....

But the fact of the matter is that jobs don’t care about education in the least bit if you don’t have the real professional work experience to back it up.

A reader of this column named David ended up taking a very low paying job overseas because he simply couldn’t find anything here in the United States….

I have been looking for a job since June 2009. I am a prior Army officer who knows four foreign languages and has lived around the world. I have sent out over 100 resumes over the past year. Finally, I got a job offer to teach English in Russia for $720 per month. Yes, $720 per month. Luckily my housing is paid for. So, I took my tax return and left for Russia to teach English. The American economy is broken and it will get worse. We are in the early stages of a total meltdown in America. Yes, if you are an American, you better prepare yourself for the worst is still to come.

But even those who do have jobs are facing some very difficult circumstances as one of my readers named Ana recently described….

I am a cop’s wife. My husband currently works for a Sheriff’s office who is extremely understaffed and the county wastes money like there is no tomorrow. They threaten the Sheriff with more layoffs if they don’t write more tickets on the highway. My husband has often had to patrol the entire county by himself for a full 12 hour shift. It is a bad situation for everyone.

The truth is that there are millions of stories like the ones above. Economic pain is everywhere, and the American people are becoming increasingly frustrated. Most Americans don’t understand why the economy is suddenly in the toilet – all most of them know is that things are broken and they desperately want someone to fix things.

A lot of this frustration is coming out as anger towards the government. People are waking up and are starting to realize that the American ruling class has been doing an incredibly bad job of running things. The American people are hungry for a real change. In fact, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 23% of voters nationwide believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.

But will we start to see some real changes in the years ahead?

Unfortunately, that is quite doubtful. The reality is that the American ruling class has a stranglehold on both political parties, and they are not going to release their grip easily.

Meanwhile, our leaders continue to perpetuate the same failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place. But unless some fundamental changes are made soon, the economic pain that Americans are experiencing is going to continue to get even worse.

So do you have a story of economic pain to share? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below….

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/15-economic-statistics-that-just-keep-getting-worse.html

15 Economic Statistics That Just Keep Getting Worse

The Economic Collapse
Aug 11, 2010

A little over a week ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner penned an article for the New York Times entitled “Welcome To The Recovery” in which he touted the great strides that the U.S. economy was making. But with unemployment still dangerously high and with foreclosures and personal bankruptcies continuing to set all-time records, should we really be talking about a “recovery”? The truth is that the numbers don’t lie, and statistic after statistic shows that the economic fundamentals continue to get progressively worse. The U.S. government can continue to try to pump up with economy with more debt, but the reality is that there is not going to be a legitimate “recovery” until consumer spending rebounds. Consumer spending makes up the vast majority of U.S. GDP. But without good jobs, consumers are not going to be able to spend money. Unfortunately, our jobs base continues to be erode as millions upon millions of middle class jobs are shipped over to China, India and dozens of third world nations by the global predator corporations that now dominate the world economy.

The U.S. government cannot create real wealth out of thin air. It can borrow even more money and flood the economy with even more [debt-based] paper currency, but the short-term “buzz” that creates does absolutely nothing to solve our long-term economic problems.

It is the private sector that actually creates wealth. But unfortunately, over the last several decades we have allowed that wealth to become highly concentrated. Now the giant global predator corporations have decided that American workers aren’t really that desirable after all. They are slowly taking away their factories and their offices and they are moving them to where people are willing to work for one-tenth the pay.

So where does that leave middle class American “consumers”?

Well, it leaves us in a world of hurt.

The following are 15 key economic statistics that just keep getting worse and which reveal the horrific economic plight in which we now find ourselves….

1 – The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has set a new all-time record for 18 months in a row. But there is every indication that things are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the number of Americans on food stamps will increase to 43 million in 2011.

2 – The U.S. economy lost 131,000 more jobs during the month of July. But the truth is that the U.S. economy has been bleeding jobs for a long time. According to one analysis, the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007. Meanwhile, immigrants (both legal and illegal) continue to pour into this nation in unprecedented numbers.

3 – Americans who are out of work are finding it incredibly difficult to get back into the workforce. In the United States today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to an all-time record of 35.2 weeks.

4 – The U.S. government keeps trying to pump up the economy with debt, and in the process things are getting wildly out of control. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.

5 – The interest on all of this debt is becoming increasingly oppressive. As of July 1st, the U.S. government had spent $355 billion so far in 2010 on interest payments to the holders of the national debt. The total for 2010 should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion. According to Erskine Bowles, one of the heads of Barack Obama’s national debt commission, the U.S. government will be spending $2 trillion just on interest on the national debt by 2020. Keep in mind that the entire U.S. government budget is less than $4 trillion for the entire year of 2010.

6 – If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion.

7 – Social Security will pay out more in benefits in 2010 than it receives in payroll taxes. This was not supposed to happen until at least 2015. In the years ahead, these new “Social Security deficits” are projected to be absolutely catastrophic.

8 – There are simply far too many retirees and not nearly enough workers to support them. Back in 1950 each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.

9 – Wealth continues to become highly concentrated at the top. Since 1973, the average CEO’s salary has increased from 26 times the median income to over 300 times the median income.

10 – According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

11 – The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10% of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one mortgage payment during the January to March time period. That was a new all-time record and represented an increase from 9.1 percent a year ago.

12 – A recent survey of last year’s college graduates found that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up substantially from 63 percent in 2006.

13 – During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.

14 – The total number of U.S. bank failures passed the 100 mark in July of this year. In 2009, the total number of U.S. bank failures did not pass the century barrier until October.

15 – The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value. An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $112.35 today. An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $440.33 today.

Any rational observer (and clearly U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner does not qualify) can see that the foundations of the U.S. economy are coming apart. The rapidly accumulating mountain of debt that has fueled our “prosperity” is impossible to repay and is going to progressively choke the life out of our economic system. The good jobs that we have allowed to be shipped out of our country are never coming back. Every single day, more wealth flows out of this country than flows into it.

Anyone who claims that things are getting “better” is either ignorant, completely deluded or is purposely lying.

The U.S. economy is not getting “better”.

The U.S. economy is dying.

You should adjust your plans accordingly.

[Geolibertarian]

The U.S. economy is not getting “better”.

The U.S. economy is dying.

You should adjust your plans accordingly.

As individuals, it is of course a no-brainer that each of us should "adjust" his or her respective "plans" in accordance with the banker-engineered economic collapse that is currently underway.

But as a citizenry, first we must

*  break out of the television/cell phone-induced state of “parallel play” we've long been in; and

*  break free from our conditioned state of “learned helplessness” by simply realizing that there are FAR more of “us” than there are of “them,” and that the real power thus lies not with the relative handful of filthy-rich, power-obsessed plutocrats attempting to enslave us all, but with We the People.



Then we must unite across both party and ideological lines for the purpose of pressuring our elected representatives into implementing urgently-needed and long-overdue public policy reforms, such as those called for in my initial post to this thread and the additional ones called for here.

It's either that or spend the rest of our “lives” as deeply-impoverished and militarily-repressed slaves to a group of criminal, parasitic, psychopathic robber barons.

Which option do you prefer?

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/jobless-claims-jump-to-5-month-high.html

Jobless claims jump to 5-month high

CNN
Aug 12, 2010

The number of first-time filers for unemployment insurance rose to the highest level since late February last week, according to a weekly government report released Thursday.

There were 484,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Aug. 7, up 2,000 from an upwardly revised 482,000 the previous week, according to the Labor Department’s weekly report.

That’s the highest number since the week ended Feb. 20, when 486,000 people filed for first-time benefits.

Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected new claims to fall to 465,000.

Initial claims have been stuck in the the mid- to upper- 400,000s since November.

Full article here

[DireWolf]

Ever since the beginnings of man, there has always has been and will ever be the paradox of which you speak unless you find a way to eliminate those attributes that propagate within man leading to the desire for control and that of greed.

I submit that there may be a handful of individuals whose intents are always of a benign nature ( I am not one ) but in a world of billions their influence is small. Man's inherent nature is is malevolent, the proof is what you see in the greater scope of world politics and business.   

[Geolibertarian]

Ever since the beginnings of man, there has always has been and will ever be the paradox of which you speak unless you find a way to eliminate those attributes that propagate within man leading to the desire for control and that of greed.

I submit that there may be a handful of individuals whose intents are always of a benign nature ( I am not one ) but in a world of billions their influence is small. Man's inherent nature is is malevolent, the proof is what you see in the greater scope of world politics and business.

Then what course of action do you propose?

Should the masses just roll over and let ruling-class parasites economically ass-rape them?

If not, then what?

Or are you concerned only with helping to keep people trapped in their conditioned state of "learned helplessness," that way they never even try to change things for the better?

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/18-signs-that-america-is-rotting-right-in-front-of-our-eyes.html

18 Signs That America Is Rotting Right In Front Of Our Eyes

The Economic Collapse
Aug 17, 2010

Sometimes it isn’t necessary to quote facts and figures about government debt, unemployment and the trade deficit in order to convey how badly America is decaying.  The truth is that millions of Americans can watch America rotting right in front of their eyes by stepping out on their front porches.  

Record numbers of homes have been foreclosed on and in some of the most run down cities as many as a third of all houses have been abandoned.  Unemployment remains at depressingly high levels and the number of Americans on food stamps continues to set new records month after month.  Due to severe budget cuts, class sizes are exploding and school programs are being eliminated.  In some areas of the U.S. schools are even going to four day weeks.  With little to no funding available, bridges are crumbling and street lights are being turned off in many communities.  In some areas, asphalt roads are actually being ground up and turned back into gravel roads because they are less expensive to maintain.  There aren’t even as many police available to patrol America’s decaying cities because budget problems have forced local communities across the U.S. to lay off tens of thousands of officers.

Once upon a time, the American people worked feverishly to construct beautiful, shining communities from coast to coast.  But now we get to watch those communities literally crumble and decay in slow motion.  Nothing lasts forever, but for those of us who truly love America it is an incredibly sad thing to witness what is now happening to the great nation that our forefathers built.

The following are 18 signs that America is rotting right in front of our eyes….

1 – Due to extreme budget cuts, school systems across the United States are requiring their students to bring more supplies with them than ever this year. In Moody, Alabama elementary school students are being told to bring paper towels, garbage bags and liquid soap with them to school. At Pauoa Elementary School in Honolulu, Hawaii all students are being required to show up with a four-pack of toilet paper.

2 – According to the American Association of School Administrators, 48 percent of all U.S. school districts are reporting budget cuts of 10 percent or less for the upcoming school year, and 30 percent of all U.S. school districts are reporting cuts of 11 to 25 percent.

3 – In Chicago, drastic budget cuts could result in an average class size of 37 students.

4 – The governor of Hawaii has completely shut down that state’s schools on Fridays - moving teachers and students to a four day week.

5 – According to the Federal Highway Administration, approximately a third of America’s major roadways are already in substandard condition.

6 – All over the United States, asphalt roads are being ground up and are being replaced with gravel because it is cheaper to maintain. The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have now turned some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.

7 – According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 25 percent of America’s nearly 600,000 bridges need significant repairs or are burdened with more traffic than they were designed to carry.

8 – In a desperate attempt to save money, the city of Colorado Springs turned off a third of its streetlights and put its police helicopters up for auction.

9 – The state of Arizona has eliminated funding for full-day kindergarten and has shut down a number of state parks.

10 – Over the past year, approximately 100 of New York’s state parks and historic sites have had to cut services and reduce hours.

11 - In Georgia, the county of Clayton recently eliminated its entire public bus system in order to save 8 million dollars.

12 – Elsewhere in Georgia, 30,000 people recently turned out to pick up only 13,000 applications for government-subsidized housing. A near-riot ensued and 62 people were left injured. The amazing thing is that all of this commotion was just to get on a waiting list. There are no aid vouchers even available at this time.

13- In the city of Philadelphia, rolling fire station “brown outs” recently cost a 12 year old autistic boy named Frank Marasco his life.

14- Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts says that due to severe budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department will simply not be able to respond to any longer. The crimes that the Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism.

15- The sheriff’s department in Ashtabula County, Ohio has been slashed from 112 to 49 deputies, and there is now just one vehicle remaining to patrol all 720 square miles of the county.

16 – Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Policemen’s union recently canvassed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.

17 – Not that the criminals are doing that much better. Things have gotten so bad in Camden, New Jersey that not even the drug dealers are spending their money anymore.

18 – Almost everyone knows someone who has been severely impacted by this economic downturn. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey has found that 81 percent of American adults know someone who is out of work and looking for a job.

So can’t the states just step up and start spending more money and fix these things?

Well, no. The truth is that the states are absolutely broke. Quite a few of the states are actually on the verge of default, and there is no getting around the fact that budget cuts that are much more severe are going to be required in the years ahead.

So can’t the U.S. government step in and bail out the states?

Well, yes, but as we have detailed previously, the U.S. government is literally drowning in a sea of red ink. The U.S. government is already spending an amount of money equivalent to approximately 25.4 percent of GDP this year.

How much more money can the U.S. government possibly spend?

To get an idea of just how bad things are already, the IMF says that in order to fix the U.S. government budget deficit, taxes need to be doubled on every single U.S. citizen.

Are you ready to pay double the taxes?

No matter how you slice it, the U.S. is in a massive amount of financial trouble and the American people are starting to realize this fact. In fact, one new poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. economy will get worse before it gets better.

But unfortunately things are not going to get “better” – at least in the long-term. The decay and the rot that have already set in are only going to get worse.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/this-economy-is-ripping-the-dignity-of-millions-of-unemployed-americans-to-shreds.html

This Economy Is Ripping The Dignity Of Millions Of Unemployed Americans To Shreds

The Economic Collapse
Aug 24, 2010

If you can still put a roof over your head and food on the table for your family, you should consider yourself to be very fortunate.  There are millions of Americans out there right now that are really, really suffering.  The cold, hard reality of it is that there aren’t even close to enough jobs out there for everyone right now.  It is almost as if we are all caught in a really bizarre game of musical chairs where the losers get stripped of their tickets to the middle class.  What this horrible economy is doing to the dignity of millions of middle class Americans is incredibly saddening.  There are a lot of very highly educated and very hard working Americans who cannot seem to get jobs no matter what they do and now find themselves doing whatever they can just to survive.  It can be really hard to keep your dignity when you played by all the rules and you worked as hard as you could all your life and now you find yourself a half step away from being homeless.  Those of us who are still doing okay should never look down on those who are struggling in this economy, because the truth is that any of us could be next.  

If you really want to read some horror stories about what long-term unemployment is doing to some people in America, you should go spend an hour or two over at Unemployed-Friends some time. It is a great forum with a lot of great resources for the unemployed, but it also contains dozens and dozens and dozens of heartbreaking stories from middle class Americans who have had their lives shattered by this economic downturn.

The following is a typical story on Unemployed-Friends. It is from a 48 year old Air Force veteran who has lost everything and is now sleeping in his vehicle. It turns out that Scott48’s job was shipped off to India and now he has been out of work for over two years….

“I am a 48 year old USAF Vet. I got my house in 1996 with the help of the VA. In 2009 the company I worked for went out of buisness (gone to India) I then became a 99er. I notified Wells Fargo that I lost my job and they said they would work with me, the next mortgage statement I got they conveniently increased my mortgage! With what I got from UE was enough for the house but I had to cut out the luxury of food, gas, utillities, insurance, entertainment and alcohol. That was it for me, so the forecloser ball was in motion. I had to give my dog to my cousin so he would get fed, I took everything I owened to the auction (execpt tools, clothes, pictures, tech manuals and my Saxophone) and sold it. I went to a half-way house the VA recomended for a week and it was joke, so my cousin said I could stay with her. After 4 months she diecided that I wasnt looking hard enough and kicked me out, and Ive applied for everything except selling myself. This summer I was staying in an abandoned house due to forecloser and the real estate company has now put it on the market, and I am now on the street sleeping in my vehicle or a friend here and there. Keeping clean is going to be a challenge cuz the Flying J truck stops charge $10 for a shower, rip-off. What a country!”

The truth is that this economy is driving many Americans to the brink of desperation. Even recent college graduates are becoming desperate enough to actually consider suicide. The following story is from an Unemployed-Friends user known as 08pacollegegrad….

“I could just take any job like working at fast food places, but I hear people who try can’t even get hired there. I went to Wendy’s for lunch the other day and I thought of picking up an application…but the slot where they keep the applications was completely empty. That should say it all. Plus, I feel like if I take just any job…I will be set back further and never be able to gain experience in my chosen fields.

I follow up on job applications, but employers ignore me for the most part when I try to contact them. I sent five follow up e-mails last week and got no responses. I contacted an employer expressing my interest in working for them, but all they gave me is the link to their online application system that I have never gotten a job from.

I am thinking of applying for more internships (I have already done two), but I don’t want employers to think why I am applying for an internship when I should have had a full fledged job by now.

I have almost killed myself over my situaion and am taking anti-depressants right now. I see a psychiatrist every 4-6 weeks, but I still have days where I feel so empty. I am sick of sitting at home searching for jobs and praying for a response that never comes.”

Many Americans spend day after day after day looking for a job that never comes. The sense of hopelessness that can build after doing this for a few years is almost indescribable. The following is another incredibly sad story from an Unemployed-Friends user known as feuxdejoie….

“I lost my job in June 2008, my husband was working but sentenced to prison for 4 years, for DUI, no accidents or injuries. I had been using my unemployment to pay bills but my last check came June 12, 2010. I’m alone and scared. The city that I live in has the highest unemployment in the State, Illinois. Our children are grown and I sit alone all day searching for jobs. My husband can only call once a month because of the outrageous rates for telephone calls. I’m at the end of my rope and don’t know where to turn if they don’t pass a tier V for unemployment or open up some jobs.

I turned 50 in April and had worked all of my life, starting at age 14 with a work permit! My employer stated to me that they needed someone bilingual and terminated me even after I told them that I would take classes to learn. I signed up for college and began classes in January then unemployment told me that I wasn’t elgible for unemployment while attending school.”

There are millions of Americans who believe that their lives are over because they can’t get decent jobs. When you lose your job, your home, your car, your health insurance and then finally your unemployment insurance runs out, it is easy to lose all hope as an Unemployed-Friends user named Ember has done….

“so i feel pretty much hopeless. been unemployed since July 2008. in over two years i haven’t even been called for an interview. tired of looking and applying for jobs outside of my field that require experience i don’t have. it’s all for naught. i have two bachelor of science degrees. my BS degrees, cuz that’s what they’re worth. since losing my job i’ve gotten divorced. lost my house. lost my health insurance. totalled my car and sustained chronic back pain. and moved in with my mom. and did i mention, when all this started i was a new mom, just back from maternity leave? so (now) i’m raising a toddler on my own, with no income. my unemployment insurance ran out a few weeks ago. i don’t even know what to do now. i just want to disappear. i’m tired of trying. i’m tired of being a burden on everyone. if i didn’t have the responsibility to take care of my child i wouldn’t be around anymore.”

This final example is from an Unemployed-Friends user identified as Faith1028. Be warned that this one will shake you to your core if you have any sensitivity at all. As you read this, keep in mind that this kind of thing is literally happening to millions of Americans these days….

“HI, y’all! This is my story. I’m from Chicago.

I lost my job 11.06.09 – I did my best to remain positive & confident that I would get a job by the end of November.

December 2009 – Still no job. I’m getting food stamps (LINK card) & Unemployment Benefits. Not much money at all, but I’m surviving. Thanks to all this stress, my stomach has been burning and/or been painful daily for all December. I puked my guts out on the 26th.

January 2010 – My stomach is still hurting every day. I had to close out my savings account. I haven’t told my slumlord or my fellow tenants that I lost my job; I go on pretending I’m still going to work everyday. Unfortunately on the 26th, I got my eviction notice. I called the office to ask why. The response was “I don’t know.” I became hysterical. I’ve no job, no money, no family/friends to help. (I have many *relatives*, but no *family*.) I truly believed my only alternative was suicide. I wanted to say good-bye to my brother (my only sibling), but we haven’t spoken to each other for over 4 years; I no longer have his address/phone number. I found him on Facebook. I didn’t bring up my situation because I felt he wouldn’t care. We exchanged a few messages and that was it. I haven’t heard from him since. Good riddance.

February 2010 – Someone found a family that I can stay with for only $250/month! My own room! They turned out to be aquaintances of mine. Vegetarian, too! At least I have a place to stay. I’d rather live alone, but, hey, I’m desperate! — And I’m not too crazy about the bedbugs. OW!

June/July 2010 – Thanks to daily/nightly use of citrine crystals since 30 May, I have no more stomach problems!

Thanks to weekly use of a natural (green!) pesticide from PlusNaturalEnzymes.com, I no longer have a problem with bedbugs! However…

Mid-June, my Unemployment Benefits ran out. Of course, I’m still looking for a job! What am I supposed to do – put a gun to someone’s head and force them to hire me? As of this date, I have $12 left to my name; $0 in my chequeing account. I recently reapplied for and am now receiving food stamps. Before I got my food stamps back, I’ve eaten whatever (Vegetarian!) food I can get, even stuff I’m allergic to. As a result, I’ve become sick: cold-like symptoms, pain in lower intestines…and a rash over my arms, legs, & neck. Oh, does it itch! At least my food allergies are not life-threatening.

Needless to say, my depression has gotten worse.

I am really trying hard to remain positive — and alive.

But why? Is it really all worth it?

I haven’t paid July’s rent, and the people I’m staying with are getting very *impatient*; I fear I’ll be evicted again! The money is coming! It’s not my bloody fault!

Someone on Twitter sent me a link to this site. I know I’m not the only one suffering; some folks have already committed suicide. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to be homeless, either. I am so bloody scared.

Just give me money that my tax dollars paid for!

–Or better yet: GIVE ME A BLASTED JOB!!”

The really sad thing is that there are countless other stories just like these being posted all over the Internet all the time.

People are hurting.

People are losing hope.

So how did we get here?

Well, it turns out that the “haves” have figured out that they really don’t need the “have nots” after all. Incredible advances in technology have increasingly enabled employers to replace humans with machines and computers. In addition, as we have detailed previously, millions upon millions of middle class American jobs are being shipped off to China and to dozens of third world nations where workers are more than happy to work for less than a tenth of what an American worker would make.

All of those jobs that have been lost to technology and that have been sent overseas are not going to come back. The hordes of long-term unemployed that we are seeing now is just the beginning. It is going to get a lot worse.

So the next time you hear a hard luck story from an unemployed American, don’t look down on that person.

You might be next.

[DireWolf]

Then what course of action do you propose?

Should the masses just roll over and let ruling-class parasites economically ass-rape them?

If not, then what?

Or are you concerned only with helping to keep people trapped in their conditioned state of "learned helplessness," that way they never even try to change things for the better?

I was just pointing out the reality as it is.
 
Most of the masses don't even know they are being "ass raped".
 
As to my proposal as what to do? : We keep trying to defeat this tyranny, wake up the zombies, and hopefully get enough men and women in places of influence as to effect a cultural mind change that would lead to the end of greed and suffering, it has been and will be a struggle worth the effort and sacrifices made.

I have learned to not see through rose colored glasses,(not implying that you do, for you posts and analysis of subjects has been very enlightening) it has helped me to evaluate the best course of action.

[citizenx]

The point is:  what do we do once we get the globalists out of their position of power.  It is a valid point, and if I am not mistaken it has everything to do with what Geolib is writing and posting about.  What are the alternatives to the present system the elite have set up for us?  It is germane.

I think it is an important thread/conversation.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/30-statistics-that-prove-the-elite-are-getting-richer-the-poor-are-getting-poorer-and-the-middle-class-is-being-destroyed.html

30 Statistics That Prove The Elite Are Getting Richer, The Poor Are Getting Poorer And The Middle Class Is Being Destroyed

Economic Collapse Blog
Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Not everyone has been doing badly during the economic turmoil of the last few years. In fact, there are some Americans that are doing really, really well. While the vast majority of us struggle, there is one small segment of society that is seemingly doing better than ever. This was reflected in a recent article on CNBC in which it was noted that companies that cater to average Americans are doing rather poorly right now while companies that market luxury goods and services are generally performing exceptionally well. So why aren’t all American consumers jumping on the spending bandwagon? Well, it seems that there are a large number of Americans who either can’t spend a lot of money right now or who are very hesitant to. A stunningly high number of Americans are still unemployed, and for many other Americans, there is a very real fear that hard economic times will return soon. On the other hand, there is a significant percentage of Americans who are blowing money on luxury goods and services as if the economy has fully turned around and it is time to let the good times roll. So exactly what in the world is going on here?

Well, in 2010 life is very, very different depending on whether you are a “have” or a “have not”. The recent article on CNBC referenced above described it this way….

Consumer spending in the U.S. has turned into a tale of two cities in 2010, with an entire segment of consumers splurging confidently on the finer things in life, while another segment, concerned about unemployment and with little or no discretionary income, spends only on bare necessities.

So why is this happening?

It is happening because the rich are getting richer and they have plenty of money to buy stuff and the poor are getting poorer and have less money to spend than ever.

In case you haven’t been paying attention over the past couple of decades, what we have in America today is a system that is designed to funnel as much wealth into the hands of the elite as possible.

This isn’t capitalism that we have in America in 2010. Instead, what we have created is a system where the laws are set up so that the power elite and their big, dominant corporations always win.

Why do you think so many of America’s largest corporations pay so little in taxes?

Why do you think so many of them are showered with government subsidies, tax breaks and bailouts?

It’s not about competition anymore.

It’s about rigging the game in your favor.

The power elite and the giant corporations they control spend millions and millions on lobbying and campaign contributions and they expect a big return on that investment.

Let’s take a look at one example. Many people think that Barack Obama and the Democrats are supposed to be anti-business, right?

Well then why are some of Barack Obama’s biggest donors the very same corporations that are receiving giant bailouts, making record profits and paying their employees billions in bonuses?

Goldman Sachs was Barack Obama’s second biggest donor. Microsoft was number four. Citigroup was number six. JPMorgan Chase was number seven. Time Warner was number eight.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Every single year, the U.S. Congress passes law after law after law that makes it easier for big corporations to dominate and makes it easier for the rich to get even richer.

America’s economy is not about competition anymore.

It is about eliminating competition.

And unfortunately for middle class Americans, the giant predator corporations that now dominate our economy are realizing that they don’t really need nearly as many American workers anymore.

Instead, they are slowly but surely shipping our jobs off to the other side of the world where workers are willing to work for about a tenth as much.

And yet we still run out to the “big box” stores and fill up our carts with a bunch of plastic crap made on the other side of the world by these giant corporations.

Meanwhile, those giant corporations are taking the profits they make out of our communities and they are taking our jobs and are shipping them overseas.

So in the final analysis, is it any wonder why the income inequality gap is growing?

Without small businesses having a legitimate chance to compete and without good jobs for American workers, the middle class in America is going to continue to get chewed up and spit out.

The following are 30 statistics that prove that the elite are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is being destroyed in 2010….

The Rich Are Getting Richer

1 - As of 2007, the top 1 percent of all Americans was taking home 24 percent of the national income. This was a level that had not been seen since the days of the Great Depression.

2 – Incomes have been growing in the United States, but those at the very top of the pyramid have been gobbling up almost all of the income growth. According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

3 – Even official government figures bear out the fact that the rich are getting richer. An analysis of income-tax data by the Congressional Budget Office a few years ago found that the top 1% of all American households own nearly twice as much of the corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

4- Most Americans have suffered during the last few years, but not the boys and girls down on Wall Street. New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli says that Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

5 – Even as the number of Americans living in poverty skyrockets, the number of millionaires just keeps growing. In fact, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million during 2009.

6 – The amount of money some of these Wall Street hotshots are making is incredible. Back in 2005, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned a total of 9 billion dollars. That would be bad enough, but even in these hard economic times the rich just keep getting richer. One year after the recent financial collapse the top 25 hedge fund managers earned a total of approximately $25 billion. That breaks down to an average of $1 billion each. The truth is that the United States has been experiencing uneven prosperity for quite some time and things just seem to get worse with each passing year.



The Poor Are Getting Poorer

7 – Government anti-poverty programs are exploding in size in response to the recent economic difficulties. USA Today is reporting that a record one in six Americans are now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

8 – Over 50 million Americans are on now Medicaid. That figure is up more than 17 percent since the beginning of the recession.

9 – The number of Americans in the food stamp program rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May. That number is up almost 50 percent since the beginning of the recession.

10 – The number of Americans who cannot afford even the basic necessities is absolutely staggering. A whopping 50 million Americans could not afford to buy enough food in order to stay healthy at some point over the last year.

11 – Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States is doing very poorly. The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

12 – The saddest part of this is what we are doing to our children. According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.

13 – But the American people cannot provide for their families if they don’t have jobs. Today there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. In 2010, it takes the average unemployed American worker over 8 months to find a job.

14 – Approximately 10 million Americans are currently receiving unemployment insurance, which is a number that is nearly four times higher than what it was at back in 2007.

15 – The truth is that we are creating a permanent underclass of Americans that cannot get jobs. The number of Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits has increased over 60 percent in just the past year.

16 – Increasingly, the wealth of the United States is being held in fewer and fewer hands. One study found that as of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

17 – It is not a good time to be living in “the bottom half” in America. The size of “the pie” being divided up among those at the low end of the wage scale is becoming really, really small. In fact, the bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

The Middle Class Is Being Destroyed

18 – Even those Americans that still do have decent jobs are seeing their wealth fade rapidly. For example, U.S. families have $6 trillion less in housing wealth than they did just three years ago.

19 – Home ownership used to be a sign that one had arrived in the middle class, but in 2010 an increasing number of Americans are finding out that they simply can’t afford their homes anymore. One out of every seven mortgages were either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

20 – The reality is that incomes have just not kept up with housing costs. This has put an incredible amount of pressure on the middle class. Just how much pressure? Well, only the top 5 percent of all U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

21 – The debt binge middle class Americans have been on over the past couple of decades has drained many of them completely dry, and now more Americans than ever have bad credit scores. Over 25 percent of Americans now have a credit score below 599, which means that they are a very bad credit risk.

22 – A rapidly rising number of Americans are actually choosing bankruptcy as a way out of their financial problems. Nationwide, bankruptcy filings rose 20 percent in the 12 month period ending this past June 30th.

23 – The middle class manufacturing jobs that once defined so many American cities are rapidly disappearing. Despite the fact that the U.S. population has dramatically increased, less Americans are employed in manufacturing today than in 1950.

24 – These days it seems like almost everyone is looking for a good job, but very few people are finding them. According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

25 – Even many of those Americans that still have decent jobs have been hit hard by this economic downturn. A recent Pew Research survey found that 55 percent of the U.S. labor force has experienced either unemployment, a pay decrease, a reduction in hours or an involuntary move to part-time work since the recession began.

26 – The number of jobs that are evaporating is absolutely stunning. According to one analysis, the United States has lost a total of 10.5 million jobs since 2007.

27 – So where are the jobs going? It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. China’s trade surplus (much of it with the United States) climbed 140 percent in June compared to a year earlier.

28 – The truth is that “globalism” and “free trade” have put middle class American workers in direct competition with the cheapest labor in the world. This is what middle class American workers must now compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

29 – Due to these difficult economic conditions, the middle class is being squeezed as never before. According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

30 – So what kind of future do our young people have in front of them? Unfortunately, things don’t look pretty. Many fresh college graduates can’t even get a job that will allow them to be independent. One recent survey of last year’s college graduates discovered that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up significantly from 63 percent in 2006.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/can-a-family-of-four-survive-on-a-middle-class-income-in-america-today.html

Can A Family Of Four Survive On A Middle Class Income In America Today?

Economic Collapse Blog
Thursday, September 2, 2010

When I was growing up, $50,000 sounded like a gigantic mountain of money to me.  And it was actually a very significant amount of money in those days.  But in 2010 it just does not go that far.  Today, the median household income in the United States for a year is approximately $50,000.  About half of all American households make more than that, and about half of all American households make less than that.  So if your family brings in $50,000 this year that would put you about right in the middle.  So can a family of four survive on $50,000 in America today?  The answer might surprise you.  Twenty years ago a middle class American family of four would have been doing quite well on $50,000 per year.  But things have changed.

You see, despite government efforts to manipulate the official inflation numbers, the price of everything just keeps going up.  The price of food slowly but surely keeps moving up each year.  The price of gas is far higher than it was 10 or 20 years ago.  Taxes just keep going up.  Utility bills just keep going up.  Each year middle class American families have found themselves increasingly squeezed as their expenses have risen much more rapidly than their incomes.

So just how far will $50,000 go for a middle class American family of four today?  Well, $50,000 breaks down to about $4,000 a month.  So how far will $4,000 a month stretch for a family of four in today’s economy?….

First of all, the family of four needs some place to live.  Even though house prices have come down a bit recently, they are still quite expensive compared to a decade ago.  Let’s assume that our family of four has found a great deal and is only spending $1000 a month on rent or on a mortgage payment.  In many of the larger U.S. cities this is a completely unrealistic number, but let’s go with it for now.

Next, our family of four has to pay for power and water for their home.  This amount can vary dramatically depending on the climate, but let’s assume that the average utility bill is somewhere around $300 a month.

Our family is also going to need phone and Internet service.  Cell phone bills for a family of four can balloon to ridiculous proportions, but let’s assume that our family of four is extremely budget conscious and has found a package where they can get basic phone service, Internet and cable for $100 a month.  Most middle class American families spend far more than that.

Both parents are also going to need cars to get to work.  Let’s assume that both cars were purchased used, so the car payments will only total about $400 a month.  If the vehicles were purchased new this number could potentially be much higher.

If our family has two cars that means that they will also be paying for automobile insurance. Let’s assume that they both have exemplary driving records and so they are only spending about $100 a month on car insurance.

Our hypothetical family of four is also going to need health insurance. In the past, families could choose to go without health insurance (at least for a while), but now thanks to Barack Obama all American families will essentially be forced to purchase health insurance. Health insurance premiums are absolutely skyrocketing, but let’s assume that our family has somehow been able to find an amazing deal where they only pay $500 a month for health insurance.

Our hypothetical family is also going to have to eat. Let’s assume that our family clips coupons and cuts corners any way that it can and only spends about $50 for each member of the family on food and toiletries each week. That works out to a total of $800 a month for the entire family.

Lastly, the parents are also going to need to buy gas to get to and from work each week. Let’s assume that they don’t live too far from work and only need to fill up both cars about once per week. That would give them a gasoline bill of about $50 a week or $200 a month. Of course if either of them lived a good distance from work or if a lot of extra driving was required for other reasons this expense could be far, far higher.

So far our family has spent $3400 out of a total of $4000 for the month. Not bad, eh?

Wrong.

We haven’t taken federal, state and local taxes out of the paycheck yet. Depending on where our family lives, this will be at least $1000 a month.

So now we are $400 in the hole.

But to this point we have assumed that our family does not have any credit card debt or student loan debt at all. If they do, those payments will have to be made as well.

In addition, the budget above includes no money for clothing, no money for dining out, no money for additional entertainment, no money for medications, no money for pets, no money for hobbies, no money for life insurance, no money for vacations, no money for car repairs and maintenance, no money for child care, no money for birthday or holiday gifts and no money for retirement.

On top of all that, if our family of four has a catastrophic health expense that their health insurance won’t pay for (and health insurance companies try to weasel out of as many claims as they can), then our family of four is not just broke – they are totally bankrupt.

Are you starting to get the picture?

It is getting really, really hard out there for middle class American families these days.

And unfortunately, many American families now have at least one parent that is not working. In some areas of the nation it just seems like there are virtually no jobs available. For example, at 14.3%, the state of Nevada now has the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Michigan (which had been number one) is not very far behind.

But even those Americans who are able to find work are finding themselves increasingly squeezed. For many Americans, a new job means much lower pay. Millions of highly educated people who once worked in professional positions now find themselves working in retail positions or in the food service industry. Many are hoping that the economy will “turn around” soon and that they will be able to go back to higher paying jobs, but the truth is that the U.S. economy is simply not producing enough good jobs for everyone any longer.

So where did all the good jobs go? Well, millions of them have been shipped off to China, India and dozens of other nations around the globe. Today the United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that China spends on goods from the United States. A Chinese factory worker makes about a tenth of what an American factory worker makes. And China continues to keep their currency artificially low so that jobs will continue to flow into China and so that we will continue to run a massive trade imbalance with them.

In a previous article, “Winners And Losers“, I went into much greater detail about how globalism is destroying middle class jobs. We are rapidly moving toward an America where there will be a small group of “haves” and a very large group of “have nots”.

The middle class in America is going to continue to shrink and shrink and shrink in the years ahead. Not only are both parents going to have to work to pay the bills, but both parents in many families will be forced to take two or three jobs each just to make it each month.

So what do you think? Do you think that a family of four can make it on a middle class income in America today? Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts….

[Rebelitarian]

Get rid of the Federal-Reserve and have states run the banks

[freedom_commonsense]

That article nails it. It's even worse in the UK thanks to higher income taxes and property costs...

[Geolibertarian]

"You know what they want? They want obedient workers; obedient workers -- people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly sh*ttier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now, they're comin' for your Social Security money. They want your f**kin' retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street." -- George Carlin

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-ruling-class-prepares-attack-on-social-security/20970

US Ruling Class Prepares Attack on Social Security

by Tom Eley
Global Research
September 9, 2010

Prominent figures in the US ruling elite have recently made a series of statements that forewarn of massive cuts in social spending, up to and including Social Security, the bedrock federal insurance entitlement for elderly and disabled workers.

These comments reveal that, whatever the precise outcome of the midterm elections on November 7, they will set the stage for a bipartisan assault, in the name of “fiscal responsibility,” on what remains of the social reforms of the last century.

The knives are already being sharpened for a long-awaited attack on Social Security. In a rude and provocative e-mail to the president of the Older Women’s League dated August 23, former Republican Senator Alan Simpson—appointed by President Obama as co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform—revealed his deep hatred of both Social Security and the working people who depend upon it.

Social Security “has reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits! [sic],” Simpson said. He blasted its recipients—retirees, those maimed and sickened by their work, and dependent survivors of dead workers—who, he said “milk it to the last degree.”

In an earlier outburst—in June, Simpson was caught on tape berating an independent journalist— he revealed the ruthless logic behind the ruling class drive for cuts: Workers, whom Simpson dubbed “the lesser people,” live too long. When Social Security was created “they never dreamed that the life expectancy would go from 57 years of age to 78 or 75 or whatever,” Simpson said. “Who would dream that? No one. They just died.”

Simpson’s commission, established earlier this year by an Obama executive order to rein in budget deficits, is reportedly considering several measures, including raising the retirement age, perhaps to as high as 70, and cutting benefits as well as cost-of-living increases. It is expected to announce its recommendations in December—not accidentally, one month after the November elections.

There is unanimity in the ruling class in favor of the attack on Social Security. Co-chairing the Fiscal Responsibility commission is Erskine Bowles, formerly a White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton, and another long-time advocate of Social Security “reform.” And signaling the trade union bureaucracy’s active collaboration, Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), also sits on the commission.

“I agree with many Commissioners who have said that all entitlement programs should be on the table,” Stern has declared. “We should include as part of our agenda ideas for strengthening the private parts of the retirement security system, reviewing both the adequacy and the solvency of the Social Security system, and the possibility of universal add-on retirement accounts.”

Deepening the fiscal attack on the working class in the US, Europe and internationally was also the primary topic for discussion at the Ambrosetti Forum held last week on the shores of Italy’s elite Lake Como. Attended by political figures such as Spain’s José María Aznar, Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Henry Kissinger from the US and Israeli President Shimon Peres, as well as numerous European Union functionaries, top bankers, businessmen and academicians, the forum provides a sounding board for policies that few politicians would dare identify themselves with in public.

In one session, Hans-Werner Sinn of the University of Munich declared that Americans will “just have to go down in their living standards after years in which their living standards soared in part based on foreign credit which is no longer there.” And Jacob Frenkel, chairman of JP Morgan Chase International “urged the United States to rein in entitlements as part of a ‘political deal’ that recognizes reality,” according to an Associated Press account of the conference. JP Morgan has received tens of billions in loans, debt buy-downs, and direct cash infusions from the federal government.

The attack on entitlements and social spending is the second phase in a broad offensive against the living conditions of the entire working class, following quickly on the heels of the unprecedented attack on jobs and wages spearheaded by the Obama administration’s forced reorganization of the auto industry.

Workers are being conditioned to accept what is referred to as “the new normal” typified by low wages and benefits and the total absence of any form of social protection. Or, in the blunter words of Fiat head Sergio Marchionne, US workers must accept a “culture of poverty,” abandoning what he contemptuously referred to as a “culture of entitlement.”

The class character of the calls for “sacrifice” and “responsibility” is increasingly naked. Even as Washington prepares for drastic cuts to Social Security and all manner of social spending, Congress appears likely to extend or make permanent the Bush-era tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, which have cost the federal government trillions of dollars.

Peter Orszag, until July 30 Obama’s director of the Office of Management and the Budget, in a Tuesday column for the New York Times called for a two-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the richest income earners. In the very same article, Orszag called for Social Security “reform,” a 5 percent cut to discretionary social spending, a 6 percent value added sales tax, and higher taxes on “middle-class and lower-class families,” which he called “troubling” but “unavoidable.”

The sharp move toward austerity and the attack being prepared on Social Security stand as a testament to the bankruptcy of American democracy. The upcoming election and the official debate that surrounds it—including Obama’s latest in a series of purely symbolic jobs proposals—only aim to disorient the population.

The basic thrust of US policy has already been determined. The ruling class is determined to shift the full burden of the financial and economic crisis onto the working class. In this context, the widely anticipated gains for Republicans in the election are already being presented as evidence that the demand for attacks on social spending originate in the population itself.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/15-shocking-poverty-statistics-that-are-skyrocketing-as-the-american-middle-class-continues-to-be-slowly-wiped-out

15 Shocking Poverty Statistics That Are Skyrocketing As The American Middle Class Continues To Be Slowly Wiped Out



The "America" that so many of us have taken for granted for so many decades is literally disintegrating right in front of our eyes. Most Americans are still operating under the delusion that the United States will always be "the wealthiest nation" in the world and that our economy will always produce large numbers of high paying jobs and that the U.S. will always have a very large middle class. But that is not what is happening. The very foundations of the U.S. economy have rotted away and we now find ourselves on the verge of an economic collapse. Already, millions upon millions of Americans are slipping out of the middle class and into the devastating grip of poverty. Statistic after statistic proves that the middle class in the United States is shrinking month after month after month. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are starting to wake up and are beginning to realize that we have very serious problems on our hands, but they have no idea what is causing our economic distress and they are unaware that most of our politicians have absolutely no idea how to fix the economic disaster that we have created.

On the mainstream news, the American people are treated to endless footage of leaders from both political parties proclaiming that the primary reason that we are in the midst of such an economic mess is because of what the other political party has done.

Republicans proclaim that we are experiencing all of this economic chaos because of the Democrats.

Democrats proclaim that we are experiencing all of this economic chaos because of the Republicans.

Even many readers of this column (who are generally more educated and more informed than most average Americans) leave comment after comment blaming either the Democrats or the Republicans for our current economic mess.

But do you really want to know who is to blame for our economic problems?

Both of them.

This economic nightmare has taken literally decades to develop, and both Democrats and Republicans have contributed greatly to this disaster.

Both parties have absolutely refused to stand up to the Federal Reserve and the horrific economic policies that they have been shoving down our throats for decades.

Both parties have stood idly by as the U.S. trade deficit has absolutely exploded in size and the United States has become significantly poorer month after month after month.

Both parties have refused to do anything as month after month after month large numbers of factories and good paying jobs leave the United States.

Both parties have shoved the spending accelerator to the floor when they have been in power and now we have the largest national debt in the history of the world.

Both parties have done essentially nothing as the health care industry, which was once the envy of the world, has degenerated into a cesspool of corruption and greed and now seems designed to do little more than to provide pharmaceutical companies and health insurance crooks with obscene profits.

If factories keep leaving the United States and jobs keep leaving the United States and the federal government keeps going into more debt and state governments keep going into more debt and local governments keep going into more debt, then things are going to keep getting worse.

It does not take a genius to figure that out.

The United States is continually getting poorer and is continually going into more debt.

Can anyone out there explain how that is a formula for economic prosperity?

Seriously.

Can anyone explain how that would work?

Please leave a comment and explain that to all of us if you can.

The truth is that as wealth continues to leave the United States and as the U.S. gets even deeper into debt, more Americans are going to become poor.

It really is that simple.

The following are 15 shocking poverty statistics that are skyrocketing as the American middle class continues to be slowly wiped out....

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/income-poverty-one-in-three-americans-lacks-the-income-needed-to-make-ends-meet/21093

Income Poverty: One in Three Americans Lacks the Income Needed to “Make Ends Meet”
Young Adults Among Hardest Hit

by Shawn Fremstad



Global Research, September 18, 2010
Center for Economic and Policy Research - 2010-09-16

Today the Census Bureau released a report on trends in income, including median income, income inequality and income poverty, and health insurance coverage between 2008 and 2009. As expected given the increase in unemployment—which grew from 7.4 percent in December 2008 to 10 percent in December 2009—the report shows a substantial deterioration in Americans’ economic security between 2008 and 2009.

The Census figures show that in 2009 one out of every three Americans had incomes that fell below the amount (roughly $45,000 for a family of four) that most Americans and various budget estimates show is needed to “make ends meet” at a basic level. Also, of particular note, the report shows substantial increases in the poverty rate and the rate of people without health insurance, as well as declines in median income for various demographic groups.

Income Poverty and “Making Ends Meet”

In 2009, some 43.6 million people had incomes below the federal poverty line. The income-poverty rate increased both overall—from 13.2 percent in 2008 to 14.3 percent in 2009—and for all racial and ethnic groups, except Asians (for whom the increase was not statistically significant). The number of persons living below the poverty line has now increased for three consecutive years. The largest percentage increases in poverty were experienced by families headed by a single man (3.1 percent) and children under age 6 (2.6 percent).

There is broad recognition that the current poverty line ($21,756 for a family of four in 2009) falls far below the amount of income needed to “make ends meet” at a basic level.1 When established in the early 1960s, the poverty line was equal to nearly 50 percent of median income. Because it has only been adjusted for inflation since then, and not for increases in mainstream living standards, the poverty line has fallen to just under 30 percent of median income. As a result, to be counted as officially “poor,” you have to be much poorer today, compared to a typical family, than you would have in the 1960s.

Both public opinion research conducted by Gallup and other pollsters, and basic budget analyses conducted by the Department of Commerce and various non-governmental research organizations, suggest that the minimum amount needed to “make ends meet” at a basic level is around $45,000 to $50,000 for a family of four. While the Census report does not report data for such a standard, it does provide data on the number of people with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a roughly equivalent income level. These figures show that one out of every three Americans in 2009 had income below 200 percent of the poverty line, and that the percentage of such people increased by 1.1 percentage points between 2008 and 2009, and by nearly 4 percentage points since its lowest recorded level (29.3 percent) in 2000.2



Young Adults Especially Hard Hit

Young adults and adults in their 30s and early 40s were particularly hard hit. For example, householders age 24 and younger saw their median incomes drop by 4.4 percent, a decline second only to that of non-citizens (4.5 percent). Young adults age 25 to 34—who already had among the highest uninsurance rates, with more than one in four uninsured in 2008—experienced the largest increase in the share of people without health insurance (2.6 percent).

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/20-signs-that-the-economic-collapse-has-already-begun-for-one-out-of-every-seven-americans.html

20 Signs That The Economic Collapse Has Already Begun For One Out Of Every Seven Americans

The Economic Collapse
Sept 18, 2010

For most Americans, the economic collapse is something that is happening to someone else.  Most of us have become so isolated from each other and so self-involved that unless something is directly affecting us or a close family member than we really don’t feel it.  But even though most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbors at this point, it is quickly becoming undeniable that a fundamental shift is taking place in society.  Perhaps you noticed it when two or three foreclosure signs went up on your street.  Or perhaps it got your attention when that nice fellow down the street lost his job, and he and his family seemingly just disappeared from the neighborhood one day.  The Census Bureau made front page headlines all over the nation this week when they announced that one out of every seven Americans was living in poverty in 2009.  Every single day more Americans are getting sucked out of the middle class and into soul-crushing poverty.   

Unfortunately, most Americans don’t really care because it has not affected them yet.

But this year, millions more Americans will discover that the music has stopped playing and they are left without a seat at the table.

Meanwhile, neither political party has a workable solution.  They just like to point fingers and blame each other.

The Democrats blame Bush for all the poverty and advocate expanding programs for the poor.  Not that there is anything wrong with a safety net.  But the “safety net” was never meant to hold 50 million people on Medicaid and 40 million people on food stamps.  The number of Americans on food stamps has more than doubled since 2007.  So do we just double it again as things get even worse?

The truth is that welfare programs are only short-term solutions.  Unfortunately, the Democrats do not understand this.  What Americans really need are good jobs.

The Republicans are so boneheaded that they don’t even like to talk about poverty because they think it is a “liberal issue”.  Some conservative commentators have even been so brutally cold as to mock the “99ers” (those who have been unemployed so long that even their extended federal benefits have run out).

Instead of showing some compassion and being the party of the American worker (as they should be), the Republicans are often very uncompassionate and they allow the Democrats to be “the party of the poor” by default.

Both political parties need a big wakeup call.  There is a tsunami of poverty sweeping the United States, and somebody better wake up and do something about it.  More handouts will help people get by in the short-term, but there is no way that the federal government can financially support tens of millions more poor Americans.

How long is it going to be before the “safety net” simply collapses under the weight of all this poverty?

The path we are on is not sustainable.

The economy is falling apart, and somebody better wake up and do something before even more Americans find themselves drowning in poverty.

The following are 20 signs that the economic collapse has already begun for one out of every seven Americans….

[Continued...]

[Jackson Holly]

This is the problem:



The warlords are sucking us dry:

[citizenx]

That's a lot of X.

Hey, where did the pie chart come from?  (I can believe it.)

[Geolibertarian]

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/19-facts-about-the-deindustrialization-of-america-that-will-blow-your-mind

19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Blow Your Mind

The Economic Collapse
September 24, 2010



The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe.  All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing.  It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.  It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes.  It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II.  But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America.  Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone.  Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period.  The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little.  Do you know what our biggest export is today?  Waste paper.  Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us.  The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now  just a shadow of what it once was.  Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined.  Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world.  If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?

Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things.  So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation?  We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable.  Every single month America does into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.

So what happens when the debt bubble pops?

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country.  But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.

For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to them.  Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.   

The following are 19 facts about the deindustrialization of America that will blow your mind....

[Continued...]

[Jackson Holly]

That's a lot of X.

Hey, where did the pie chart come from?  (I can believe it.)

http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&biw=899&bih=592&tbs=
isch%3A1&sa=1&q=2010+United+States+budget+pie+chart&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

There are a number of them ... they differ only minutely.

The fact is MOST of our fed taxes go to the PENTAGON.

If we refused to support such an overblown NWO enforcement

enterprise, then MOST of our taxes could be curtailed.

[Geolibertarian]

The fact is MOST of our fed taxes go to the PENTAGON. If we refused to support such an overblown NWO enforcement enterprise, then MOST of our taxes could be curtailed.

Good luck explaining that to a flag-waving warmonger at a Republican-hijacked "Tea Party" rally.

"America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based."

-- Paul Craig Roberts, http://www.infowars.com/good-bye-truth-has-fallen-and-taken-liberty-with-it-2/

[Rebelitarian]

The problem lies with America owning its own banks once again.

The Bilderbergs, their puppet politicians and the Federal-Reserve have worked in unison since the 1960s to de-industrialize America.

Until we elect Ron Paul on either the Libertarian or Constitution Party ticket and eliminate the Federal-Reserve then re-industrialization is going to be impossible with a xenocratic bank/government.

I know this personally cuz I knew of guys who got $90,000 a year to outsource jobs in New York while my friend's and my prototype industrial project got the shaft in an economically depressed area that you would think would kill for economic oppportunities to come along.

Elect a libertarian-constitutionalist or it will be all over.

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/social-inequality-in-america-2009-income-gap-in-the-us-highest-on-record/21235

Social Inequality in America: 2009 income gap in the US highest on record

by David Walsh



Global Research
September 29, 2010

Figures released Tuesday by the US Census Bureau reveal sharply worsening conditions for tens of millions of Americans under the impact of the economic crisis and the accumulation of vast wealth by a relative handful.

Some of the figures, for particular states and regions, are simply staggering. Michigan residents experienced a 6.2 percent decrease in median income in the course of one year, from 2008 to 2009, while Illinois has suffered a 24 percent increase in poverty in the past decade. More than 36 percent of Detroit’s population officially lives in poverty.

Overall, the 2009 American Community Survey reveals that median household income fell in the US nearly 3 percent between 2008 and 2009, from $51,726 to $50,221. This was the second consecutive year in which household incomes dropped. Median income declined in 34 states, and increased only in sparsely populated North Dakota.

“Thirty-one states saw increases in both the number and percentage of people in poverty between 2008 and 2009,” reported the Census Bureau in a press release. “No state had a statistically significant decline in either the number in poverty or the poverty rate.”

National median income is down 4 percent from its peak when the recession officially began in December 2007. Last year alone, noted the Washington Post, accounted for $1,500 of that average loss.

The Associated Press, based on an analysis of the Census Bureau numbers, reports that the income gap between the rich and the poor “grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession.” The US also has the greatest income disparity among the advanced capitalist countries.

The proportion of Americans living in extreme poverty, defined as half the derisory official poverty line, or $10,977 for a family of four, rose from 5.7 percent in 2008 to 6.3 percent last year, an 11 percent increase in the number of people living in dire circumstances in one year. The 2009 figure was the highest level since the US government began tracking the very poor in 1975. To the everlasting shame of the American political establishment, the District of Columbia, home to the US government, has the highest proportion of residents living in extreme poverty of any state or district, 10.7 percent.

The top 20 percent of the population, those making more than $100,000 a year, took in nearly 50 percent of all income generated in the US in 2009, while the 44 million people living below the poverty line received only 3.4 percent. “That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968” (AP).

The top 5 percent of the US population in terms of income, those making $180,000 or more, added slightly to their annual incomes last year.

The most revealing statistics, however, relate to the wealthiest 1 percent, 1/10 of 1 percent and 1/100 of 1 percent of the population—no news about their gains in 2009 has been reported yet.

New York, Connecticut, Texas and the District of Columbia, along with the territory of Puerto Rico, had the largest gaps between rich and poor. Similar income gaps, reported AP, existed in major cities such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta. Some 22 percent of Mississippians live in poverty, the highest proportion of any state’s population, and only five states (Alaska, Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey) had fewer than one in 10 residents living in poverty in 2009.

Other social phenomena reported by the Census Bureau are associated with job losses and declining incomes:

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/plundering-the-middle-class-%e2%80%93-35-percent-of-american-households-live-on-35000-or-less-each-year-bailouts-a-success-for-the-wealthiest-5-percent-of-americans.html

Plundering the middle class – 35 percent of American households live on $35,000 or less each year. Bailouts a success for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans

My Budget 360
Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The middle class is being slowly dismantled piece by piece. New Census data released this week highlights a continuing trend that is pushing more average Americans into a perpetual struggle to stay financially afloat. New data shows that the median household income is $50,221 in 2009 which is down from $52,029 in 2008. This drop of 3.6 percent comes at a time when many U.S. households are struggling to make payments on mortgages and more importantly, find jobs. The only group that grew their household income was for those making $180,000 or more (top 5 percent). This growing inequality gap demonstrates that this recession is actually widening the chasm between the working and upper-classes of our society. I went ahead and took the data from the new Census report and created the following income distribution chart:



35% of U.S. households live on $35,000 or less. The hope of making it into the middle class for this group is getting tougher and more financially challenging. Those making more than $100,000 fall under the top 20 percent category. But the real income disparity shows up clearly once you go over the $200,000 range. The top 20 percent of Americans made close to 50 percent of all income while those below the poverty line made up 3.4 percent. This ratio of 14.5 to 1 is the highest on record keeping history. In 2008 the ratio was at 13.6 and back in 1968 it was 7.69:



Source: Census

“(AP) A different measure, the international Gini index, found U.S. income inequality at its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income in 1967. The U.S. also has the greatest disparity among Western industrialized nations.

At the top, the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, who earn more than $180,000, added slightly to their annual incomes last year, census data show. Families at the $50,000 median level slipped lower.

“Income inequality is rising, and if we took into account tax data, it would be even more,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in poverty. “More than other countries, we have a very unequal income distribution where compensation goes to the top in a winner-takes-all economy.”

-- http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iCuYeWPyl7zqXPWi1Ck9mmYyAr7wD9IGP99G1?docId=D9IGP99G1

How is it possible that during a time when the vast majority of Americans are moving backwards financially, only a small segment actually progressed forward? It would be one thing if the real economy were improving but it is not. What is happening is the bailout funds have worked but for a very tiny portion of the population. Most people depend on a job to pay for bills and manage their daily budgets, not stock market wealth. The bigger problem is you have insufficient risk management systems built into the current financial system. As we saw with the AIG bailout, it was merely a way to rectify the bad bets of Goldman Sachs. How did this improve the real economy? It didn’t. How did handing out money to the investment banks provide added jobs? They have no statistics to show for the trillions of dollars handed out to Wall Street in terms of helping out Main Street. What we do have is 43 million Americans in poverty and the middle class shrinking.

So what can be done? The answer is obvious but the politics will make this a battle for the middle class in America.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-proof-is-in-the-numbers-america-is-getting-poorer.html

The Proof Is In The Numbers: America Is Getting Poorer

The Economic Collapse
Sept 30, 2010

How in the world can anyone claim that things are getting better? Sometimes the numbers are so clear that they simply cannot be denied. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States fell from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009. That was the second yearly decline in median household income in a row. In other words, America is getting poorer. Just let that statistic above sink in for a little bit. In 2009, American families had roughly $1,500 less coming in than the year before. Not that the cost of living has gone down either. Have you been to the supermarket lately? Things are getting ridiculous out there. In fact, middle class American families are being squeezed as never before. More mothers and fathers are scrambling to find second and third jobs just to pay the mortgage and to keep the lights on and to put food on the table. This is not a time of prosperity in America. We are in a state of serious decline and it is time to wake up and admit it.

When you stop and analyze the new Census data, something jumps out at you right away. You quickly realize that these income declines are not limited to just a few regions of the country – they are literally happening from coast to coast.

The U.S. economy is in deep, deep trouble and the proof is in the numbers. The following are 12 statistics that reveal just how far the standard of living in America is declining….

1 – According to the Census Bureau, median household income dropped in 34 U.S. states in 2009, and the only state where median household income actually increased was in North Dakota.

2 – The Census Bureau data also revealed that of the 52 largest metro areas in America, only the city of San Antonio did not see a decline in median household income in 2009.

3 – 35 percent of all U.S. households now live on $35,000 or less.

4 – According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line is the highest it has been in 15 years.

5 – The number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program passed the 41 million mark for the first time ever in June.

6 – The number of Americans in the food stamp program increased a staggering 55 percent from December 2007 to June 2010.

7 – One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

8 – Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many that were receiving it back in 2007.

9 – In 2009, U.S. consumer spending experienced the biggest decline since 1942.

10 – As millions of young Americans struggled just to survive, marriages fell to a record low in 2009. Today, only 52% of Americans 18 years or older are married.

11 – The only group that saw their household income increase in 2009 was those making $180,000 or more.

12 – According to the Huffington Post, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew in 2009 to its largest margin ever….

The top-earning 20 percent of Americans – those making more than $100,000 each year – received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent made by the bottom 20 percent of earners, those who fell below the poverty line, according to the new figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.

Not that it is a bad thing to make money.

Contrary to what our socialist friends may think, it is actually a very good thing to work hard and make money.

The point is that the game is rigged and the bottom 80 percent of us are being left behind.

The middle class is being systematically destroyed. At the rate we are going, we will eventually have a very small group of ultra-wealthy Americans and a gigantic mountain of very poor Americans that are barely able to survive.

[Continued...]

[Geolibertarian]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-proof-is-in-the-numbers-america-is-getting-poorer.html

Not that it is a bad thing to make money.

Contrary to what our socialist friends may think, it is actually a very good thing to work hard and make money.

Correct.

However, contrary to what our Austrian School friends may think, it is not a good thing to blur the fundamental distinction between (a) earning money through hard work and (b) appropriating money through privilege (see this, this and this).

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

"I do not wish to be misunderstood as falling into the trap of the socialists and communists who condemn all privately owned business, all factories, all machinery and organizations for producing wealth. There is nothing wrong with private corporations owning the means of producing wealth. Georgists believe in private enterprise, and in its virtues and incentives to produce at maximum efficiency. It is the insidious linking together of special privilege, the unjust outright private ownership of natural or public resources, monopolies, franchises, that produce unfair domination and autocracy.

"The means of producing wealth differ at the root: some is thieved from the people and some is honestly earned. [Henry] George differentiated; [Karl] Marx did not. The consequences of our failure to discern lie at the heart of our trouble."

-- Agnes George de Mille, http://www.progress.org/books/george.htm

"Marx's biggest error was to suppose that society could be improved by grand design: that the solution was to impose a new order, rather than to abolish privileges embedded in the existing order. His scheme actually rescued the aristocracy he had condemned, as it required an aristocracy to run it, and it pitted labor against capital, when, in fact, true capital is nothing more than the fruits of labor, and is a natural ally of labor against privilege....

"The errors of anti-Marxists derive mostly from overreaction -- from denying whatever Marx asserted, replacing Marxist half-truths with equally false anti-Marxist half-truths. Often, in so doing, they fall into the trap of accepting underlying Marxist assumptions....

"While Marx treated land as capital to attack it, anti-Marxists treat land as capital to defend it. This not only accepts the Marxist redefinition of capital, but causes anti-Marxists to say absurd things about land that make sense only with regard to true capital.

"Buying into the Marxist equation of wealth and privilege, anti-Marxists defend privilege as if it were wealth. They do this with regard not only to land, but to banking, incorporation, franchises, the overextension of patents, etc. While there are sometimes glimmers of theoretical distinctions, there is a near constant defense of those parties whose wealth comes almost entirely from capitalized privilege, and only minimally from true capital. Such errors defy logic, are inconsistent with classical liberalism, and are intuitively rejected by the unindoctinated."

-- Dan Sullivan, http://geolib.com/sullivan.dan/commonrights.html#marxist

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

[agentbluescreen]

So How Did the Bush Tax Cuts Work Out for the Economy?
David Cay Johnston | Sep. 24, 2010 08:02 PM EDT

[excerpt]

The hard, empirical facts:

The tax cuts did not spur investment. Job growth in the George W. Bush years was one-seventh that of the Clinton years. Nixon and Ford did better than Bush on jobs. Wages fell during the last administration. Average incomes fell. The number of Americans in poverty, as officially measured, hit a 16-year high last year of 43.6 million, though a National Academy of Sciences study says that the real poverty figure is closer to 51 million. Food banks are swamped. Foreclosure signs are everywhere. Americans and their governments are drowning in debt. And at the nexus of tax and healthcare, Republican ideas perpetuate a cruel and immoral system that rations healthcare -- while consuming every sixth dollar in the economy and making businesses, especially small businesses, less efficient and less profitable.

This is economic madness. It is policy divorced from empirical evidence. It is insanity because the policies are illusory and delusional. The evidence is in, and it shows beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts failed to achieve the promised goals.

So why in the world is anyone giving any credence to the insistence by Republican leaders that tax cuts, more tax cuts, and deeper tax cuts are the remedy to our economic woes? Why are they not laughingstocks? It is one thing for Fox News to treat these policies as successful, but what of the rest of what Sarah Palin calls with some justification the "lamestream media," who treat these policies as worthy ideas?

The Republican leadership is like the doctors who believed bleeding cured the sick. When physicians bled George Washington, he got worse, so they increased the treatment until they bled him to death. Our government, the basis of our freedoms, is spewing red ink, and the Republican solution is to spill ever more.

Those who ignore evidence and pledge blind faith in policy based on ideological fantasy are little different from the clerics who made Galileo Galilei confess that the sun revolves around the earth. The Capitol Hill and media Republicans differ only in not threatening death to those who deny their dogma.

Read the article here


I couldn't have worded it any better myself. Anyone who thinks noble RepublicRATS will "save them" is dreaming in 4D.

Politics in America need an INDEPENDENCE revolution that trounces Leibermann