After 4 1/2 years of 'recovery', Is this as good as it gets?
US economy may be stuck in slow lane for long run
By JOSH BOAK, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the 4½ years since the Great Recession ended, millions of Americans who have gone without jobs or raises have found themselves wondering something about the economic recovery:
Is this as good as it gets?
It increasingly looks that way.
Two straight weak job reports have raised doubts about economists' predictions of breakout growth in 2014. The global economy is showing signs of slowing — again. Manufacturing has slumped. Fewer people are signing contracts to buy homes. Global stock markets have sunk as anxiety has gripped developing nations.
Some long-term trends are equally dispiriting.
The Congressional Budget Office foresees growth picking up through 2016, only to weaken starting in 2017. By the CBO's reckoning, the economy will soon slam into a demographic wall: The vast baby boom generation will retire. Their exodus will shrink the share of Americans who are working, which will hamper the economy's ability to accelerate.
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Douglass and Tubman understood implicitly that the first step is changing a person's thought. The great religious figures, Jesus, Buddha were all trying to accomplish the same. Tolstoy, Gandhi, MLK all knew it starts with an idea, that a person cannot loose his chains if he does not know he is a slave.
I keep kicking the idea around that we need a new definition of the "American Dream." But since the whole world over, the 99% is yearning for salvation from austerity and dehumanization, perhaps we need a new definition--a new goal if you will--of what a human should aspire to. I think it is there, in the writings of Native Americans and how their communities were structured. In philosophies before Capitalism that urged people to use their lives to gain virtue and wisdom, to serve the community, to serve the earth. That a human is not judged by her bank account, a contest only the oligarchs can win. It sounds a bit new-agey when I write it like that, but the idea that we're all supposed to fight like starved animals for scraps of consumerism in order to find fleeting moments of shiny happiness is failing us all. I remember when they first started the whole lifestyles of the rich and famous, I thought, won't that make people angry? But instead, it was a long-term plan to get us to buy into a cheap imitation of it, so that we would run ourselves to death on the wheel in order to get our tiny, chrome-plated sliver of their platinum lives.
It will take a huge change in the fabric of our thought to rebuild. It can be done. I am reading a remarkable book called "The Slave Ship" by Marcus Rediker and he says that a diagram of slaves packed into the hold of a ship for the Middle Passage so horrified Europeans that it sparked the abolition movement. People didn't know and therefore didn't care what was being done to create their goods from the New World. This one image helped them to understand and to see that these were people, human bodies, packed so tightly that a huge percentage died on the journey.
I hope that someday there is an awakening. I fear we are so distracted by our consumer junk and glitzy propaganda, that we might not awaken in time. Orwell described it perfectly.
