80 Percent Of U.S. Adults Face Near-Poverty, Unemployment

From the AP via the Huffington Post:

The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.

"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.

Click here for the rest.

It's just not working.  At least, it's not working the way everybody tells me it's supposed to work.   I'll just come straight to the point: it's not working because the nation has embraced some notions about economics that just aren't true.  And I'm not going to be shy about naming names, either.  It's the Republicans' fault.  Reaganomics, neoliberalism, classical liberalism, supply side economics, trickle down, whatever you want to name it, this bogus doctrine has sent America to hell in a hand basket.  Deregulation is a massive failure.  Cutting taxes for the rich is a massive failure.  Weakening rather than strengthening unions is a massive failure.  Privatizing and straight-up dismantling important public services, it's all a massive failure.  

We KNOW that it's all failure because we've been doing it since the early eighties, for three decades now: if any of this stuff actually worked, our lot in life would be better, not worse. 

That brings up another very important point.  I lay the lion's share of responsibility at the feet of the Republican Party, but they couldn't have created such a massive pile of dog crap without help from the Democrats.  Because, you see, despite the GOP's over-the-top martyr and persecution complexes, their wild-eyed sense of living always at the Alamo, the Republicans won it all back during the 1990s.  Yeah, that's right, the Republicans won it ALL.  The 90s is when the Democrats effectively accepted the GOP's essential principles about the economy, when the Democrats finally told labor to go to hell, and when the Democrats started courting corporations and Wall Street for desperately needed campaign cash.  The Democrats have aided and abetted every step of the way the dismantling of important business regulations.  The Democrats ended "welfare as we know it."  The Democrats jumped on the tax cut bandwagon.  And on and on.

You want to know why 80% of Americans face poverty and unemployment today, why a middle class existence is nothing more than a pipe dream for most citizens?  Our two monopolistic political parties no longer represent our interests.  Instead, they rule of, by, and for the rich.  All this Reaganomics shit embraced by both parties, they tell us, is supposed to make us a more prosperous nation.  Well, that's a lie.  It doesn't.  It can't.  All Reaganomics can do is take from the poor and give to the rich.  Everything else is a fairy tale, and too many of us continue to believe in fairy tales.  Yes, we're a nation of fools.

And the foolishness begets itself.  Because the Democrats have embraced the attitude that our role is to service the rich, we no longer are allowed a language making discussion of working class issues possible.  Indeed, when "free market" capitalism, unencumbered by any restraint, is considered by the ruling establishment to be the only functional approach to economics, there can be no discussion of capitalism's failures.  That is, in our nation's thoroughly dysfunctional discourse, there is no such thing as failure of capitalism.  But now that capitalism is failing, it's extraordinarily difficult to talk about it--it's like talking about God's failures; God CAN'T fail, so there is no failure. 

I've had a back burner discussion with an old buddy on facebook about labor unions that's been going nowhere for a week.  To him, labor unions are the Devil, and can do no good, ever, under any circumstances.  Seriously, it's like trying to talk a Christian into some low key Satanism.  Totally dead on arrival.  I mean, never mind the forty hour work week, sick days, overtime pay, and whatnot, unions CAN DO NO GOOD.  I may or may not return to that discussion.  I don't know if it's worth it.  We're speaking two different languages.

But mark my words.  There WILL be consequences to all this, and I'm not simply talking about the consequences we're already seeing, the poverty, the infant mortality rate, the desperation and mass anxiety, the erosion of what now passes for communities, and on and on.  If we continue along this track, social unrest will increase.  There will be an uprising.  Multiple uprisings.  Insurrection.  When you drive a people into fear and hopelessness, they eventually get the sense that there's nothing to lose.  We will see some kind of rebellion.  Or we will see the American police state kick into full gear.  Probably both.

And because we no longer have a language of the left in this country, no longer have the ability as a people to conceptualize true democracy and much needed repairs to our capitalist system, it is very likely that such a rebellion will be right-wing, rather than left-wing.  That is, it seems inevitable that the crazies will be in control no matter what happens.  And, oh yeah, global warming.

When I think too much about this stuff, I'm glad I never had children.

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