Poverty Swallows America

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/06/poverty-swallows-america/

Food pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets.

Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you’ll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it.

In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class. Each report sparks a flurry of news stories and pundit chatter, but never much reflection on what it all means now that we have just enough distance to look back on the first decade of the twenty-first century and see how Americans fared in that turbulent period.

And yet the verdict couldn’t be more clear-cut. For the American middle class, long the pride of this country and the envy of the world, the past 10 years were a bust. A washout. A decade from hell.

More at the link --

[justiceischeap]

1. Maybe some good can come out of this

Like the return of the nuclear family and communities. Things that have been lacking since the me generation of the 80s changed the political climate.

[tabatha]

2. Reagan started the downslide. Not the me generation.

And I have seen many "me" generations with large families.

[justiceischeap]

4. I consider Reagan and his ilk the "me" generation

Where there was a power and money grab for me, me, me.

And I'm not talking about large families but families that depend upon one another. When parents, kids and grandparents all shared a living space.

[raccoon]

7. How many of us would want to live with our in-laws? It may be fun to live with Grandma and Grandpa

when you're a kid...but not so much when you're an adult. I know. My parents lived with one of my grandmothers.

[justiceischeap]

9. I'm not claiming it would be fun but we've lost the nuclear family unit

and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It's bad to be forced to live with family but I think losing that connection isn't too great either.

[Supersedeas]

3. There's a harsh reality to face

[hfojvt]

5. too bad that Counterpunch, in its own small way, helped to make this happen

I used to read Counterpunch almost daily in late 2002. Then, somewhere in 2003, the Democratic primary started for POTUS, and Counterpunch turned, No longer were they punching at the Bush administration. Instead it was article after article about how bad all of the Democratic candidates were. Oh, they were all just a bunch of liars and corporate phonies, from Dean to Kerry.

Meanwhile Alice Walton was donating a million dollars to insure the re-election of George W. Bush. She knew which side she was on. Counterpunch didn't seem to know which side they were on. The Waltons won the elections of 2004, and the American people lost.

[tabatha]

8. Agreed.

[Tsiyu]

6. A few years back, we said "Starve the Beast"

"Stop buying corporate products; use your wallets to send a message."


And the answer was:

"But then people who work for those corps will lose their jobs."






Looks like they lost their jobs anyway.

And the Beast is still Starving us.