EDITOR’S COMMENT: The droning political commercials are designed to scare us into NOT thinking that whoever the candidate is, if they are incumbent, THEY are the problem. This election season promises to be based on emotional response rather than level headed thinking. As Herbert points out in the piece below, we are kidding ourselves and hurting our prospects if we really think we can get out of this and join the family of nations again. We keep doing it and we won’t stop, like a child banging their head against the wall. The only argument I have with Herbert is the implication that the democrats are desiring anything better for us than the republicans. Here’s my theory– if they are in, get them out. It is incumbents that are the problems not Republicans or Democrats. It doesn’t matter what party they belong to, they are and were part of the problem. The Party of “NO” and the party of “CHANGE” can’t seem to get out of their own way. Political strategy is more important than actually saving our country and giving us back the hope we all grew up with that next generation would be better.
Here it is pure and simple: The recovery will never come and we are never going to see those bright days again with our current economic and political structure. It can’t happen. There is no recovery for 99% of Americans and there never will be. The only thing you can do is fight for yourself and those around you because those politicians hundreds or thousands of miles away are owned lock, stock and barrel by the people who want to keep things just as they are. My children and grandchildren face a bleak future because we don’t want to own up to the truth.
The truth is for the last 30 years our country’s economic “progress” has been a big lie and we have been living it. That is why this site is called “livinglies”. Because we all live it every day and it has become our reality and the longer it goes on the more we become accustomed to it. The BIG LIE is accepted as our truth. Median income has dropped steadily and now the only people who could and maybe would pull us out of this ditch we are in — the middle class and the poor crushed into misery — don’t have the money to spend, and neither government nor credit industries have any more money to give them to spend so we can pretend to have an economy.
The truth is the resource for the ultimate stimulus is right there in front of us but we won’t use it because it is politically unacceptable. Just how did it become politically unacceptable to give back money you stole? And why are we even listening to people who would give incentives to companies who ship jobs overseas? Just how do you expect jobs to materialize like magic when there’s nobody left to buy anything and no money to buy it?
We have reached the ultimate point of reckoning and we don’t seem to be doing a very good job of handling it. If we don’t stop sucking the last ounce of blood out of the middle class and poor people, we won’t have a country left to think about, much less an economy. There it is. All you history buffs out there — show me one case in history where the aristocracy was absurdly prosperous while the rest of the people were going downhill and tell me one case where it ended up with good news for everyone!
We’ve passed the point of no return. we can’t turn back. We have to let our anger go and do the only practical things that will work to preserve our country and give hope and prospects to the majority of Americans. There are still trillions of dollars in wealth in residential homes that neither the government nor the private industry will allow anyone to reach, because they are holding the keys in their pocket. And because they are still making money off the misery of the majority, they won’t change a thing.
So here we are living lies that others tell us, maybe some lies we want to hear and believe. But the truth ought to set the power brokers free from controlling our destinies. We ought to stop living these lies and start trumpeting truth, insisting that those who aspire to be our leaders live by the truth and stop trying to scare us into distraction so we won’t change the status quo where that little sliver of people continue their unhealthy pursuit of even more power and money, still sucking on the public corporate welfare trough, still sucking the life out of people in foreclosures that are illegal, immoral and just plain practically wrong for everyone. Give people a chance and you give the country a chance. Deny them justice at your peril. This won’t end up well or even satisfactory for anyone, but like the aristocracies and royalties from history before them, they just can’t conceive how they could be so powerful and so rich and how anything could happen that would change that.
Every time they are horrified by the sudden change of events where their privileges and sometimes their lives or freedom are stripped from them revealing the same mortals we find beneath all exteriors. Judges are slow to move in that direction but the movement is inevitable and cannot be stopped. People are fed up and are getting increasingly willing to do something about it. Let’s hope the judiciary and other branches of government get the message before this society we take for granted turns upside down.
We can keep wishing and hoping for a powerful economic recovery to pull the U.S. out of its doldrums, but I wouldn’t count on it. Ordinary American families no longer have the purchasing power to build a strong recovery and keep it going.
Americans are not being honest with themselves about the structural changes in the economy that have bestowed fabulous wealth on a tiny sliver at the top, while undermining the living standards of the middle class and absolutely crushing the poor. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a viable strategy for reversing this dreadful state of affairs. (There is no evidence the G.O.P. even wants to.)
Robert Reich, in his new book, “Aftershock,” gives us one of the clearest explanations to date of what has happened — how the United States went from what he calls “the Great Prosperity” of 1947 to 1975 to the Great Recession that has hobbled the U.S. economy and darkened the future of younger Americans.
He gives the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve credit for moving quickly in terms of fiscal and monetary policies to prevent the economic crash of 2008 from driving the U.S. into a second great depression. “But,” he writes, “we did not learn the larger lesson of the 1930s: that when the distribution of income gets too far out of whack, the economy needs to be reorganized so the broad middle class has enough buying power to rejuvenate the economy over the longer term.”
The middle class is finally on its knees. Jobs are scarce and good jobs even scarcer. Government and corporate policies have been whacking working Americans every which way for the past three or four decades. While globalization and technological wizardry were wreaking employment havoc, the movers and shakers in government and in the board rooms of the great corporations were embracing privatization and deregulation with the fervor of fanatics. The safety net was shredded, unions were brutally attacked and demonized, employment training and jobs programs were eliminated, higher education costs skyrocketed, and the nation’s infrastructure, a key to long-term industrial and economic health, deteriorated.
It’s a wonder matters aren’t worse.
While all this was happening, working people, including those in the vast middle class, coped as best they could. Women went into the paid work force in droves. Many workers increased their hours or took on second and third jobs. Savings were drained and debt of every imaginable kind — from credit cards to mortgages to student loans — exploded.
With those coping mechanisms now exhausted, it’s painfully obvious that the economy has failed working Americans.
There was plenty of growth, but the economic benefits went overwhelmingly — and unfairly — to those already at the top. Mr. Reich cites the work of analysts who have tracked the increasing share of national income that has gone to the top 1 percent of earners since the 1970s, when their share was 8 percent to 9 percent. In the 1980s, it rose to 10 percent to 14 percent. In the late-’90s, it was 15 percent to 19 percent. In 2005, it passed 21 percent. By 2007, the last year for which complete data are available, the richest 1 percent were taking more than 23 percent of all income.
The richest one-tenth of 1 percent, representing just 13,000 households, took in more than 11 percent of total income in 2007.
That does not leave enough spending power with the rest of the population to sustain a flourishing economy. This is a point emphasized in “Aftershock.” Mr. Reich, a former labor secretary in the Clinton administration, writes: “The wages of the typical American hardly increased in the three decades leading up to the Crash of 2008, considering inflation. In the 2000s, they actually dropped.”
A male worker earning the median wage in 2007 earned less than the median wage, adjusted for inflation, of a male worker 30 years earlier. A typical son, in other words, is earning less than his dad did at the same age.
This is what has happened with ordinary workers as the wealth at the top has soared into the stratosphere.
With so much of the middle class and the rest of working America tapped out, there is not enough consumer demand for the goods and services that the U.S. economy is capable of producing. Without that demand, there are precious few prospects for a robust recovery.
If matters stay the same, with working people perpetually struggling in an environment of ever-increasing economic insecurity and inequality, the very stability of the society will be undermined.
The U.S. economy needs to be rebalanced so that the benefits are shared more widely, more equitably. There are many ways to do this, but what is most important right now is to recognize this central fact, to focus on it and to begin seriously considering the most constructive options.
