Because I've often wondered how, in the words of someone far more articulate than I, "joy can be effervescent in a person whose circumstances look bleak and how joyless a person can be in spite of great blessing. How many times have we seen a person in a wheelchair just beaming, and a wealthy, healthy person just plain miserable?"
After all, as the New York Times claimed, the election of President Obama into the White House, swept "away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive". Really? Then, why are the African Americans suffering more than any other group of people at this time? Remember, many of the white supremacy members said they voted for Obama to send the country into a tailspin...foment a race war. One former member, Tim Zaal, said, "The faster this country falls, the sooner white revolution will arise."
"Could it be that the nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of unity in white voters? I would propose that this threat of black rule may very well be the thing that finally scares some sense back into complacent whites." -- Neo-Nazi, with the pen name, "LastOfMyKind"
For instance, under Mayor Bloomberg, the NYPD’s practice of “stop and frisk” - — practice of officers stopping city residents on the street and searching them- increased to 600,000 stops performed last year. "87% of those stopped last year were black or Hispanic, a number disproportionate to their share of the population. And just 7 percent of the stops resulted in arrests, meaning the vast majority of those stopped committed no crime. The NYPD argues the practice reduces crime, but it has been coming under increasingly intense criticism in recent months".
The working class faces the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. This depression "recession" is not your typical cyclical downturn that will eventually rebound. Over 20% of this country's workforce is either underemployed or completely unemployed. House prices and wages continue to decline. Nearly 14 million Americans are looking for work, and about 6.2 million Americans, 45.1% of the unemployed in this country, have been jobless for more than six months...that's worse than at the time of the Great Depression. What's more, over "1 million of the long-term unemployed have run out of unemployment benefits, leaving them without the money to get new training, buy new clothes, or even get to job interviews.
Nevertheless, the wealthy took their treasonous tax cuts wherever they could reap the highest return without any concern whatsoever about the state of the American economy. Never mind that those tax cuts will cost the average taxpayer much more than the cost of the bailouts.
So, what's the solution? Well, balancing the budget on the backs of working families - slashing trillions of dollars in social spending - of course. It doesn't matter that trillions of dollars have disappeared into thin air, and that proofof the Federal Reserve's unprecedented support to foreign banks during the worst part of the financial crisis is finally released. The international capitalist elite continue to exploit the economic crisis - that they caused - to the fullest extent, using it as a giant club to bash the average taxpayer.
Mass unemployment and the eventual elimination of the social safety net will create such desperation that people will take poverty-wage jobs without benefits. Third world, anyone?
Links:
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) - The EPI pointed out that the labor force participation rate remained at its lowest point of the recession and that the labor force in May was smaller than it was a year ago, by about 500,000 workers, even though the working-age population grew by 1.9 million in that period. In other words, the improvement in the unemployment rate over the last year (from 9.6 - 9.1%) is due to would-be workers deciding to sit out the economic storm”.
We're told that we're in a recovery. We're told that the economy is starting to show signs of improvement. Why? Because, the stock market has shot up and Wall Street profits are through the roof.
Okay, but what percentage of the adult population can live off the stock market and corporate profits? Less than 1%?
What about the millions of Americans who face job loss? Lack of health benefits? Foreclosures? Inability to pay bills? Food stamps? Lack of or zero retirement savings? This used to be a country where you could work your way up the ladder. Now, the ladder has transformed into a very slippery slope. If you're not at the top already, you better make like an octopus, and strap on some suckers because it appears that slope is getting slicker.
It is clear that the American/global ruling class are incapable of setting self-interest aside. So, unless we the people stop playing by their rules, humanity will continue to be subordinated to the dictates of an infinitesimally small group of super wealthy parasites at the very top.
"I couldn't find statistics for local utility shut offs in my area, but I knew we would start to see more and more of this.
Houses everywhere are going vacant. People don't say goodbye, they don't leave a number, they just disappear. With their disappearance we add another vacant house to the street. But families living in housing without utilities is a new sight for me to behold. I spoke recently with a rep from So Cal Edison who, full time contacts residence who have had their electricity turned off due to non payment. She has a negotiator sent in and they work on a reduced payment. It's amazing to me, that now, it is becoming acceptable in California to camp out in your home.
People are losing their homes, losing their cars and losing their dignity. How are we going to afford kids clothes and school supplies for the coming year? How can we expect families to pay for all these additional costs when the economy is in the shape it in. I ask myself this everyday."
Links: Tumbling from the middle class into a life with less
Not so long ago, Moore and her husband, Seymour, 46, made more than $200,000 a year, vacationed in Fiji and thought nothing of picking up a $400 dinner tab with friends.
But then Moore left her property management job to set up a cat-sitting business, and her husband lost his job as an IT consultant nine months ago. They now scrape by on his unemployment benefits and her Social Security checks, plus a trickle of money from her nascent business. Total income for 2010: $30,000.
Requests for help paying utility bills surge upward
Light switches, furnaces and water faucets aren't the typical gauges of economic health, but at Pikes Peak United Way's 2-1-1 call center, they tell a tale of people who continue to struggle to pay their bills in a weak economy.
According to a report released Monday by the 2-1-1 Information and Referral Hotline, requests for utility bill assistance in the fiscal year ending June 30 jumped 20 percent from the previous year, outstripping requests for help with food and rent.
"That's by far the biggest spike in looking at data year-to-year," said 2-1-1 Center Manager Jessica Johnson-Simmons. "I would guess it would have something to do with recent utility hikes that have gone into effect, but it's also a case of clients just getting too overwhelmed with their...
Recession leads to uptick in utility shut-offs in N.J.
I feel horrible; I know my kids must feel horrible," said Maria Schultheis, who lives in the house with her husband and twin teenage sons. "I'm humiliated because I never had to live like this."
The town water department shut off the Schultheises' water about a month ago after the family fell behind on payments on a $1,700 overdue bill. John Schultheis -- a computer programmer who has been out of work for three years -- watched in disbelief as town workers turned off the water valve near the curb of his three-bedroom bungalow in a quiet middle-class neighborhood in the Lake Hiawatha section of Parsippany.
As the recession continues, utility companies say a growing number of New Jerseyans are falling behind on their electric, gas and water bills. For many, a flood of emergency funding in state and federal aid programs -- coupled with a state-imposed moratorium on utility shut-offs during the winter months -- has helped keep the lights on and the water flowing over the last few months.
But, with much of the state money gone and the winter moratorium ended, utility officials say more and more families like the Schultheises may be losing their electricity, gas or water service in the coming months.
"I do expect shut-off activity to increase the second part of the year," said Victor Viscomi, PSE and G's director of billing and revenue operations. "Some of the emergency-payment assistance money is drying up."
PSE and G, the state's largest utility, has seen a 10 percent increase in families behind on their payments, compared with this time last year, Viscomi said. Many of those are households that had never had a late payment until now.
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Very recently, it was revealed that the Federal Reserve not only paid out trillions of dollars to Wall Street and the American elite, but they included the international elite as well.
"The financial crisis stretched even farther across the economy than many had realized, as new disclosures show the Federal Reserve rushed trillions of dollars in emergency aid not just to Wall Street but also to motorcycle makers, telecom firms and foreign-owned banks in 2008 and 2009."
Meanwhile, in the rest of the United States, where we the people reside, the prices of basic necessities - food, energy, and healthcare - continues to rise, as about 2 million Americans are set to lose their unemployment in December (despite proof that unemployment insurance pays off in more ways the one) and millions more will start the new year with less income due to cut-backs in state and federal government spending, underemployment, frozen wages, and frozen Social Security cost of living adjustments (COLA) which have not kept up with inflation for years as it is.
So, the transfer of wealth continues, just as, unemployment rates, which have remained stubbornly high, since the economy crashed in 2008, continue. It's fairly safe to say that unemployment is a chronic and deep-rooted problem. Yet, we seldom hear about the detrimental impact that unemployment can have on the economy due to insufficient income going to those who would surely spend it - we the people - thus returning earnings back to the stream of purchasing power necessary to the circular flow of production and income.
In other words, who is going to buy back the output of the economy if most of the "income" is in the hands of the wealthy? The rich have the option of saving and/or investing their income, and not necessarily in the United States, therefore increasing their wealth at the expense of people who have no choice but to spend their income short-circuits economic flow.
Nevertheless, despite a $13 trillion national debt, the push to give tax breaks to billionaires goes on. Republicans are demanding a two-year extension of all Bush tax cuts.
This means that the historically long duration of unemployment will more than likely have a snowball effect on the employment and earnings recovery of too many Americans, even as the economy appears to be recovering in general.
And, as always, the poor get hit the hardest:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States fell from $51726 in 2008 to $50221 in 2009.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 29 states reported lower median incomes than the U.S. median, while 20 states and the District of Columbia reported higher median incomes than the overall median.
The government’s formula for poverty is only based on the states with the lowest cost of living, therefore, double the federal poverty level is normally required throughout most of the US, to provide a family with basic necessities such as food and housing, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.
Economist Robert Reich, fascinated by the parallels between the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Crash of 2008, looked at the research, and saw two years that stood out as having the greatest concentration of wealth at the very top: 1928 and 2007.
He writes about that and much more in his new book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. In particular, he was impressed with Marriner Eccles, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve between 1934 and 1948, who after much analysis, saw that the growth and concentration of income at the top created the "underlying economic stresses that caused the Great Depression." In particular, the creation and destruction of two bubbles.
Middle Class Debt Bubble: The declining purchasing power of the middle class, who no longer had what they needed to keep the economy going because so much of the wealth and income in America went to the very top, so that the only way the middle class could continue spending was by going deeper and deeper into debt.
Concentrated Wealth Speculative Bubble: The top 1%, had accumulated so much money they started speculating in stock, commodities and real estate.
FDR, with the assistance of Eccles fundamentally restructured the economy. If one thing didn't work, FDR tried another.
In 1935, FDR legalized unions and added protections for collective bargaining. He created Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40 hour work week, with time and a half...in other words, he found ways to spread whatever prosperity there was in order to get the economy moving again.
Between that - the reorganization of the economy under the New Deal - and WWII, which put Americans to work, the post war economy became "The Great Prosperity", as Reich calls it, which lasted for 30 years. By the late 1970s, the concentration of wealth at the top went from 23.5% in 1928 to just 9%. Is it any surprise that the power elite hate the New Deal...hate FDR...hate...
However, not to worry:
The insufferable suffering would soon expire,
as Reverse Robin Hood appeared with bailing wire.
President Reagan, the almighty, we bow to thee;
to the rescue, lift us up, oh great missionary!
The excess wealth transfer will soon commence,
and return us from this horror to a new pretense.
-- a top 1%percenter from 1980
"It became apparent to me, as a capitalist, that if I lent myself to this sort of action and resisted any change designed to benefit all the people, I could be consumed by the poisons of social lag I had helped create. [...] ...men with great economic power had an undue influence in making the rules of the economic game, in shaping the actions of government that enforced those rules, and in conditioning the attitude taken by people as a whole toward those rules. After I had lost faith in my business heroes, I concluded that I and everyone else had an equal right to share in the process by which economic rules are made and changed." -- Marriner S. Eccles
"As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nations economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped. That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system. The time came when there were no more poker chips to be loaned on credit. Unemployment further decreased the consumption of goods, which further increased unemployment, thus closing the circle in a continuing decline of prices.This then, was my reading of what brought on the depression." -- Marriner S. Eccles
Economists expect the "recovery" to remain "firmly on track" over the next two years, although job growth is likely to remain slow...very slow. So, with 15 million people out of work, six million of them out of work for more than half a year, and no idea when or where these "new" jobs will emerge from, where is the recovery? If recovery means regaining a former and better state or condition, then how can we be experiencing a recovery with "millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits"?
Historically, a correlation between increased economic production and job creation could be counted on as fairly reliable. However, with technology advancing at an exponential rate, the increasing trend to outsource work to countries where costs are lower, and the never ending shareholder pressure to boost profits, employers will do their very best to avoid the long-term cost of hiring full-time employees.
Today, the US Senate voted to advance a $15-billion package , a mere drop in the bucket, aimed at spurring job creation. A few Republicans, including Scott Brown, broke ranks as legislators voted 62-30 to end debate on the measure, clearing a 60-vote requirement and setting the stage for final approval.
The centerpiece of the bill includes a payroll tax break for employers who hire new workers, unemployed for more than 60 days. It also includes measures aimed at improving access to capital for small businesses, an extension of the current federal subsidy formula for road and bridge repairs carried out by states, and a modest expansion of federally subsidized bonds to help local governments raise funds for infrastructure projects.
Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.
Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.
Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.
Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.
Oh, wait a minute. This must be what they mean, when they tell us we're experiencing a recovery.
Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) -- "The 400 highest-earning U.S. households reported an average of $345 million in income in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, IRS statistics show. The average tax rate for the households fell to the lowest in almost 20 years. The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that the average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefit the wealthy."
Well, it seems the "recovered 400" earn much of their income from capital gains on their investments, many of which have sky-rocketed thanks to we, the taxpayers. Their incomes have grown five times what they were in 1992 and their tax rates (capital gains) have plunged 15 percentage points, to a mere 15%.
So, it is clear who is in "recovery", as if they had anything to recover from. And it is also very clear that the ever increasing population at the bottom of our economic system, with no political power, are experiencing something as bad, if not worse than the Great Depression, with no end in sight. Yet we allow the mainstream media to lie to us and create the impression that the country is experiencing a recovery.
Until we grab the control from the infinitesimally small group of elites, who control our political system, ensuring they, and only they benefit from government policy, nothing will change.
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Over twenty years ago President Reagan told us of how he envisioned "all" Americans living in the "shining city upon a hill," economic rhetoric that President Bush twists his tongue around every chance he gets. The reality is we are not all living in the "shining city upon a hill." Only a very small percentage of Americans reside in this "shining city" while most of us are struggling to make ends meet. This year seems twice as bad as last year for the poor and middle-income America.
The Bush administration evaluates our economy from the perspective of investment. They emphasize the performance of the stock market, deemphasizing the purchasing power of the average worker's paycheck or the financial conditions of those who are working too hard to find out what's going on. These hard-working people are the silent majority and that's the way Bush wants to keep it. God forbid the "silent majority" have the time, or are not so enmeshed in their own financial struggles that they figure out conservative Republican supply-side or trickle- down economics is the very reason they struggle and worry every day if they will have enough to eat tomorrow, next week or next month.
The buying capacity of the same wages Americans earned last year has eroded to the point where people are struggling to keep up with the cost of living. Higher rent, food, gasoline, energy and medical bills are making the lower half of middle-income America live more like the poor, and the poor -- unless they can figure out all the bureaucracy involved in finding poorly funded social services -- are left to fend for themselves the best they can. Some are lucky enough to find a church or other charity group to minister to their needs but others are left to eat and live like wild animals.
Whether it is illness, death, divorce or job loss, too many people today live on the edge, one unfortunate event away from plunging into financial ruin. This shouldn't be in a country as wealthy as ours. We have more than enough resources to make sure every citizen can find ways to meet the most basic of needs -- food, shelter, medical care, and hope, for without hope of improving one's circumstances, life is not worth much.
Psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson Jr seems to think so. He sees depression, not so much as a disease, but something that has evolved as a "way of eliciting support from family and friends."
"sees the mind as a set of evolved mechanisms, or adaptations, that have promoted survival and reproduction. Evolutionary psychopathology — abnormal psychology through an evolutionary lens — looks at what has gone wrong."
Evolutionary psychology questions the recurrence of mental disorders throughout our evolutionary history. What is the reason many of these disorders were not eliminated during the natural selection process?
Matthew C. Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, theorizes that medicating symptoms of mental illness could be blocking the healing process when he says,
"If we're blocking the depressive symptoms — through medication for example — we could be hamstringing the body's defenses."
Evolutionary psychology is very new field. The article in the LA Times summarizes the theoretical debate and some of the therapies that have evolved from the research.
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