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Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country

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Or, How American Collapse is Made of a New Kind of Poverty

By Umair Haque

Source: Eudaimonia

Consider the following statistics. The average American can’t scrape together $500 for an emergency. A third of Americans can’t afford food, shelter, and healthcare. Healthcare for a family now costs $28k — about half of median income, which is $60k.

By themselves, of course, statistics say little. But together these facts speak volumes. The story they are beginning to tell is this.

America, it seems, is becoming something like the world’s first poor rich country. And that is the elephant in the room we aren’t quite grasping. After all, authoritarianism and extremism don’t arise in prosperous societies — but in troubled ones, which are growing impoverished, like America is today. What do I mean by all that?

Let’s begin with what I don’t mean. I don’t mean absolute poverty. Americans are not living on a few dollars a day, by and large, like people in, for example, Somalia or Bangladesh. America’s median income is still that of a rich country, around $50k, depending on how it’s counted. Nor do I really mean relative poverty — people living below median income. While that’s a growing problem in America, because the middle class is imploding, that is not really the true problem these numbers hint at, either.

America appears to be pioneering a new kind of poverty altogether. One for which we do not yet have a name. It is something like living at the knife’s edge, constantly being on the brink of ruin, one small step away from catastrophe and disaster, ever at the risk of falling through the cracks. It has two components — massive inflation for the basics of life, coupled with crushing, asymmetrical risk. I’ll come to what those mean shortly.

The average American has a relatively high income, that of a person in a nominally rich country. Only his income does not go very far. Most of it is eaten up by attempting to afford the basics of life. We’ve already seen how steep healthcare costs are. But then there is education. There is transport. There is interest and rent. There is media and communications. There is childcare and elderly care. All these things reduce the average American to constantly living right at the edge of ruin — one paycheck away from penury, one emergency away from losing it all.

But this isn’t true for America’s peers. In Europe, Canada, and even Australia, society invests in all these things — and the costs of basic necessities societies don’t provide are regulated. For example, I pay $50 dollars for broadband and TV in London — but $200 for the same thing in New York — yet in London, I get vastly more and better media for my money (even including, yes, American junk like Ancient Aliens). That’s regulation at work. And when basic goods like healthcare or elderly care or education are provided and managed at a social scale, that is when they are cheapest, and often of the best quality, too. Hence, healthcare costs far less in London, Paris, or Geneva — and life expectancy is longer, too.

So if you are earning $50k in America, it is a very different thing than earning $50k in France, Germany, or Sweden — in America, you must pay steeply for the basics of life, for basic necessities. Thus, incomes stretch much further in other countries, which enjoy a vastly higher quality of life, even though people there earn roughly the same amount, because they pay vastly less for basic necessities. Americans are rich, but only nominally — their money doesn’t buy nearly as much as their peers does, where it matters and counts most, for the basics of life.

What happens when societies don’t understand all the above? Well, a strange thing has happened to the American economy. While it’s true that things like TVs and Playstations have gotten cheaper, the costs of the basics of life have skyrocketed. All the things that really elevate people’s quality of life — healthcare, finance, education, transport, housing, and so on — have come to consume such a large share of the average household’s income that they have little left to save, invest, or spend on anything else. And what’s worse, while the basics of life have seen massive inflation, wages and incomes (not to mention savings and benefits and safety nets and opportunities) for most have stagnated. The result is an economy — and a society — that’s collapsing.

Yet all that is the straightforward effect of giving, for example, hedge funds control over drugs, or speculators control over housing, healthcare, and education — they will of course maximize profits, whereas investing in these things socially, or at least regulating them, minimizes real costs, and maximizes accessibility, affordability, and quality.

So the average American, who is left high and dry, must borrow, borrow, borrow, just to maintain a decent quality of life — because handing capitalism control of the basics of life has caused massive, skyrocketing inflation in necessities, while flatlining his income. Healthcare didn’t used to cost half of median income even a decade ago, after all — but now it does. So what happens when, in a decade or two, healthcare costs all of median income? How can an economy — let alone a society — function that way?

Well, what happens if the average American steps over the line? Misses a mortgage payment, gets ill and is unable to pay a few bills on time, can’t pay the costs of healthcare? Then they are punished severely and mercilessly. Their “credit rating” (note how banks and hedge funds don’t have them) is ruined. They can easily find themselves out on the street, without finance, without a second chance, without access to any kind of redress or support . And then they are rejected, shunned, and ostracized. They might not have an address anymore — so who will hire them? They are no longer a part of society — they have fallen through the cracks, and finding one’s way back is often next to impossible. Asymmetrical risk — corporations and lobbies and banks bear no risk at all, precisely because the average American bears them all now.

So Americans aren’t just absolutely or relatively poor, but poor in a new way entirely. First, the basics of life exploded in price, to the point that they are now unaffordable for many, maybe most, households. Second, Americans bear the risks of paying those unaffordable costs to an extreme degree, bearing the risks that institutions should, and so those risks are now ruinously high. A bank or hedge fund or corporation might go bankrupt, and liquidate its assets, and its owners stay rich — but if an American’s credit rating is ruined, loses his job, cannot pay his bills, or even if he declares bankruptcy, he falls through the cracks, hounded, embattled, institutionally black-marked. He finds himself outside society, with little way to get back in. Little wonder then that Americans work so much harder than anywhere else — they are always one step away from losing it all, from genuine ruin, but their peers in truly rich countries aren’t.

Marx probably would have called this immiseration. Neo-Marxist theorists call it precarity. And while there’s truth in both those ideas and perspectives, I think they miss three vital points.

We don’t see America as a poor country, but we should begin to. Americans live fairly abysmal lives — short, lonely, unhappy, full of work and stress and despair, compared to their peers. That is because they cannot afford better ones — predatory capitalism coupled with total economic mismanagement of social investments has made the basics of life ruinously unaffordable. In this way, it’s effectively a poor country — yes, there’s a tiny number of ultra-rich, but they are outliers now, off the map of the normal. Because it’s not just any kind of poverty, yesterday’s poverty, or even poverty as we are used to thinking about it.

America is pioneering a new kind of poverty. The kind of poverty that’s developed in America isn’t just bizarre and gruesome — it’s novel and unseen. It isn’t something that we understand well, economists, intellectuals, thinkers, because we have no good framework to think about it. It’s not absolute poverty like Somalia, and it’s not just relative poverty, like in gilded banana republics. It’s a uniquely American creation. It’s extreme capitalism meets Social Darwinism by way of rugged self-reliance crossed with puritanical cruelty.

The kind of poverty America’s pioneering today isn’t absolute, or even relative , but something more like perfectly tuned poverty, strategic poverty, basic poverty— nominally well-off people whose money doesn’t go far enough to make them actually live well, constantly living at the edge of ruin, and thus forced to choke down their bitter anger and serve the very systems which oppress and subjugate with more and more indignity and fear and servility by the year.

America’s still an innovator today. Unfortunately, what it’s innovating now is a new kind of poverty. Yet poverty is poverty. What happens in societies where poverty is growing? Authoritarianism rises, as people lose faith in democracy, which can’t seem to offer them working social contracts. Authoritarian soon enough becomes fascism — “this country, this land, its harvest — it is only for the true volk!”, the cry goes up, when there is not enough to go around. And the rest of the dark and grim story of the fall into the abyss you should know well enough by now. It ends in words we do not say.

Still, history, laughing, has told this tale to us many times. And it is telling it to tomorrow, again, in the tale of American collapse.

America is Disneyland

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By Chris Kanthan

Source: Activist Post

Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth! Millions of families visit the theme park every year to enjoy the magical place of rides, spectacular shows and cheerful cartoon figures. Everything is clean, perfect and joyful. Unless … you realize that Cinderella might actually be homeless. That’s right, 10% of Disneyland’s employees are actually homeless, many more are on food stamps, and 75% struggle to make ends meet.

Does this ring familiar? Think of America. Behind the façade of being the greatest country on Earth with the largest GDP and the wealthiest billionaires, there are tens of millions of Americans who are left behind just like Disney’s employees.

This neo-feudalistic model isn’t isolated to Disney or Walmart, it’s systemic. For example, the bus driver at Apple – which has $280 billion in cash – is forced to sleep in a van because he can’t afford the Silicon Valley rent; Facebook’s cafeteria workers live in a garage; and thousands of American Airlines’ employees are forced to depend on food stamps.

America is being eaten alive by corporate greed; and Disneyland has been taken over by Scrooge.

Let’s look at some Disney Inc. statistics.

Total profit per year: $9 billion

Total employees: 200,000

Notice that the profit reflects what’s left after all the expenses, including the salaries, have been paid. So, in a utopian world, the Disney management will do the math ($9 billion / 200,000 = $45,000) and send a check for $45K to every employee, Mickey included. That kind of profit-sharing would really make Disneyland the happiest place on Earth. Does that happen? No way!

Does Cinderella get a check for perhaps $20K, $10K, $5K or even $1K? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Cinderella gets nada, zero, zilch. She should be content with the $12/hour salary and must smile happily for the kids.

In Disneyland, Cinderella never gets to meet her prince.

Disney’s CEO gets paid $46 million a year, which translates to $23,000 an hour. Imagine Disney’s CEO coming to work on Jan 2nd. He wishes a few people “happy new year,” orders coffee, sits on his desk, makes a few phone calls … and he has already made more money than what Ariel would make during the rest of the year.

Of course, the CEO should get paid more, but does he deserve a salary that’s equivalent to 2,000 Disney employees? If the CEO doesn’t show up for work for a day, Disneyland will continue running. If 2,000 employees take a day off, the park would be shut down.

In the 1960s, the CEO-to-worker salary ratio was 25. Today it’s often 600 or more, sometimes even more than 1000 (for example, at Walmart). Much of the executive compensation comes in the form of stock options and bonuses based on stock performance. In a rational and unrigged world, the CEOs would increase their revenues and profits to get bonuses. Not anymore.

Now, the CEOs simply use a no-brainer solution to boost the stock prices – it’s called stock buybacks or share repurchases. This involves a firm using corporate profits (or even borrowed money) to buy its own stocks. BTW, this used to be illegal until the 1980s.

Since 2007, US corporations have spent trillions of dollars on stock buybacks. In 2018 alone, they will spend $800 billion on this financial engineering tool (which has also led to a massive stock market bubble). They won’t use the billions to hire Americans, boost wages or innovate new products. Instead, the CEOs will buy yachts and tell you that Chinese or Mexicans stole your jobs.

Do the low-wage employees of Disneyland get any shares or stock options? A silly question, indeed.

Thus we have a situation where American employers ruthlessly exploit American workers. This isn’t a good model for a country. China and Mexico don’t make us poor; predatory capitalism does.

Paying good wages to hardworking employees is not socialism or communism. Henry Ford understood this when he more than doubled the wages of his workers in 1914.

However, hundred years later, maximizing profit has become a fundamentalist dogma. You can imagine a conversation among the factory-farming executives:

Guy #1: Why the heck are these chickens roaming out in the farms? We would save so much money if we lock them up in cages.

Guy #2: Brilliant idea! Let’s lock up five chickens in a cage. We will save more. More is always better.

Guy #3: I really don’t understand why we feed them expensive salads and healthy stuff. Let’s feed them cheap GMO corn and GMO soy from my friends at Monsanto.

Guy #4: Experts tell me that if we give them caffeine and anti-depressants, the chickens will stay awake longer, eat more, and get fatter.

Guy #5: And when they get sick, load them up with antibiotics and steroids.

Guy #5: These stupid chickens are also so small. Let’s drug them with some growth hormones. I am getting a lot of pressure from the private equity funds about profits per chicken.

Apart from being inhumane and psychopathic, this system forgets or ignores the fact that we have to eat these chickens. Sick chicken = sick people. Call it Karma or “revenge of the chickens.”

Similarly, poor workers = poor country. And you can imagine a similar conversation among corporate executives regarding workers – “cut their wages and benefits”, “make them work overtime”, “hire part-time employees rather than full-time” and so on.

You can’t grow the economy if American workers don’t get paid enough, especially by profitable multi-billion dollar corporations. 2/3rd of our GDP is based on consumer spending. It’s no wonder that in the last ten years, the US economy cumulatively grew only by a dismal 35%. Compare that to China, which grew by an astounding 200% during that same period.

And it’s not a coincidence that China’s average wages have more than doubled in the same period:

The solution for low wages primarily lies in the hands of corporate elites. Labor unions are almost non-existent in the private sector these days; and the government doesn’t have much control over corporate America – in fact, corporations control the U.S. political system. Free market doesn’t have to translate to cancerous greed and extreme exploitation. Free market also means that corporations are free to share their profits with their employees. Finally, free market can and must also incorporate patriotism, responsibility to the society and strategies for sustainable prosperity.

 

Chris Kanthan is the author of a new book, Deconstructing the Syrian War. Chris lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, has traveled to 35 countries, and writes about world affairs, politics, economy and health. His other book is Deconstructing Monsanto. Follow him on Twitter: @GMOChannel

 

 

Human Anxiety in Late-Stage Capitalism

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By Phil Rockstroh

Source: Consortium News

A number of recent press articles, including an over 8,000-word feature piece in The New York Times have asked, to quote the Times’ headline, “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”

Although the question was proffered, the reporters and editors responsible for the articles remain resolutely obtuse to the obvious: The bughouse crazy environment of late-stage capitalist culture evokes classic fight-or-flight responses attendant to episodes of severe anxiety and panic attacks.

The word panic has its derivation in reference to Pan, the Greek god of wilderness and wildness, of the animal body encoded within human beings and its attendant animalistic imperatives. To wit, deracinate an animal from its natural habitat and it will evince, on an instinctual basis, a fight-or-flight response.

If caged, the unfortunate creature will pace the confines of its imprisonment, chew and tear at its fur and flesh, become irritable, enervated, languish and even die from the deprivation of the environment it was born to inhabit. A caged animal, even if the unfortunate creature endures captivity, is not the entity nature conceived; the living being has been reduced to A Thing That Waits For Lunch.

Human beings, animals that we are, respond in a similar fashion. Experiencing anxiety is among the ways our innate animal spirits react to the capitalist cage. Inundate a teenager with the soul-defying criteria of the corporate/consumer state, with its overbearing, pre-careerist pressures, its paucity of communal eros, its demands, overt and implicit, to conform to a shallow, manic, nebulously defined yet oppressive societal order, and insist that those who cannot adapt, much less excel, are “losers” who are fated to become “basement dwellers” in their parents’ homes or, for those who lack the privilege, be cast into homelessness, then the minds of the young or old alike are apt to be inundated with feelings of angst and dread.

Worse, if teenagers are culturally conditioned to believe said feelings and responses are exclusively experienced by weaklings, parasites, and losers then their suffering might fester to the point of emotional paralysis and suicidal inclinations.

No Real Remedies

What does the capitalist state offer as remedy? Obscenely profitable, corporately manufactured and widely prescribed psychoactive medications. Treatment, which, at best, merely masks symptoms and bestows the illusion of recovery.

As R. D. Laing observed: “What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.”

In short, it is insanity to be expected to adapt to socially acceptable insanity. Yet we are pressured to adapt to, thus internalize odious, groupthink concepts and tenets. To cite one such groupthink example: homelessness is natural to the human condition and is a communally acceptable situation.

Closer to fact: The problem of homelessness is the result of a societal-wide perception problem — the phenomenon is the very emblem of the scrambling, twisting, dissociating, and displacing of perception that capitalist propagandists specialize in. Homelessness would be considered a relic of a barbaric past if this very simple principle was applied: Having access to permanent shelter is a human right and not a privilege.

What kind of a vile, vicious people would deny that simple proposition? Those conditioned by a lingering Puritan/Calvinist mindset to believe: Punishment for resisting the usurpation of the fleeting hours of one’s finite life must be severe. If the over-class can no longer get away with, as was once common practice in the Puritan/Calvinist tradition, public floggings to whip the labor force into line, then those who will not or cannot comply will be cast onto the cold, unforgiving concrete of a soulless cityscape.

It comes down to this, societies that are ridden with vast wealth inequity, due to the machinations of a rapacious over-class, create the obscenity known as homelessness. Moreover, the situation is only one of the numerous obscenities inherent to state capitalism. Obscenities that include, events that are dominating the present news cycle, e.g., the predations of a lecherous movie mogul, to the sub-cretinous doings and pronouncements of a Chief of State who is a bloated, bloviating, two-legged toxic waste dump.

Trump, No Aberration 

How is it then, liberals fail to grasp the fact that the Trump presidency is not an aberration; rather, his ascension to power should be regarded as being among the high probability variables of late-stage capitalism and empire building? The psychopathic, tangerine-tinged clown Trump is the embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a development that is concomitant to over-expanded empires. Thus he will continue to flounce deeper into the quagmire of crash-engendering, economic legerdemain and perpetual war.

Empires are death cults, and death cults, on a subliminal basis, long for their own demise. Paradoxically, the collective mindset of imperium, even as it thrusts across the expanse of the world, renders itself insular, cut off from culturally enhancing novelty, as all the while, the homeland descends into a psychical swamp of churning madness.

A draining of the swamp of the collective mind cannot come to pass, for the swamp and citizenry are one. Withal, the likes of leaders such as Trump rise from and are made manifest by the morass of the culture itself. In a swamp, the gospel of rebirth and redemption is heard in the song of humus. New life rises from its compost.

In the presence of Trump’s debased mind and tombified carcass, one is privy to arias of rot. While Hillary Clinton’s monotonous tempo was the dirge of a taxidermist — cold, desiccated of heart, and devoid of life’s numinous spark — Trump’s voice carries the depraved cacophony of a Célinean fool’s parade … its trajectory trudging towards the end of empire.

As liberals new BFFL (Best Friend for Life) George W. Bush might ask, “Is our liberals learning.”

In a word, no. For example, the collective psyche of U.S. culture as been enflamed by the revelations that actresses were coerced into sexual encounters with a movie mogul whose power in the industry was only matched, even enhanced, by his sadistic nature. The staff of his company assisted, was complicit in, or remained silent about his lechery, as did the whole of the movie industry and the entertainment press. All as NFL athletes are being threatened with expulsion from the League if they kneel during the national anthem.

The Great Unspoken 

Yet the great unspoken remains: The enabling of and submission to the degradation, exploitation and tyranny, and the lack of resistance thereof share a common and singular factor: The careerism of all concerned. The cultural milieu concomitant to capitalism is at the rotten root and noxious blossoming of the situation.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 cinematic barnburner “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” should be required viewing for those unaware or in denial of the acuity of the film’s theme i.e., becoming enmeshed within the psychical landscape of dominance, degradation, and submission inherent to and inseparable from capitalist/consumer culture will cause one to become party to societal sanctioned prostitution. When life is negotiated within a collective value system that devalues and deadens the individual’s inner life thus warps every human transaction, anomie descends, the worst among a people ascend to positions of power.

“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.” — William S. Burroughs, from Ghost of Chance

When friends visited me in New York, where I lived for decades, I would take them on walking tours through the city. We would cross the Westside Highway and stroll the pedestrian walk along the Hudson River, or cross the East River by walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The effect of these excursions on people was often profound … the combined elements of the elemental beauty of the rivers and vastness of the city’s architecture and scope, clamor, and the dense interweaving of traditional ethnic customs and ad hoc social codes of New Yorkers often would heighten the visitors’ senses and open them to larger, more intricate awareness of themselves and extant reality … the freeways of the contemporary mind (conditioned to be constantly engaged in manic motion, with one’s mind either frenzied by an obsession with performing (ultimately futile) maneuvers directed to saving time — or stalled at a frustration inducing standstill) were replaced by the exigencies of life at street level, i.e., novel situations that had to be apprehended and negotiated.

The possibilities of life seemed greater. The crimped eros of insular suburban thought became loosened before the city’s intricacies and expansiveness. Although: Not all, or even a scant few, New Yorkers can maintain the state of being. Few of us can live by Rilke’s resolve to “make every moment holy.” Life, in the city, becomes grotesquely distorted … High rents, inflicted by hyper-gentrification, in combination with the deification of success and its cult of careerism overwhelm one’s psyche … There is so far to fall.

Angst (the word originally can be traced to the ancient Greek deity Ananke, the immovable by prayer and offering bitch Goddess of Necessity and the root word of anxiety) clamps down one’s sense of awareness. Ananke dominates the lives of the non-privileged citizenry while Narcissus, Trump’s, the Clintons’, et.al. and their financial and cultural elitists’ patron God rules the day. The pantheon of possibility has been decimated, a cultural cleansing has been perpetrated, by the egoist caprice of the beneficiaries of the late capitalist dictatorship of money.

Hence, we arrive at the primal wisdom tacitly conveyed by anxiety-borne states of fight or flight. Due to the reality that capitalism, on both an individual and collective basis, drives individuals into madness, all as the system destroys forest and field, ocean and sea and the soul-scape of all who live under its rapacious dominion, our plight comes down to this: We either struggle and strive, by and any and all means, to end the system — or it will end us.

The New Economy: Unemployment and the Return of the American Hobo

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By Sheldon Greaves

Source: Cogito!

A few years ago I read somewhere about a trend in the “gig economy” in which people who had been reduced to living in their cars or RVs roamed the country by the thousands; homeless, nomadic workers driving from one temporary job to another. It painted a tragic picture; underpaid, overworked, often lacking health insurance, men and women, many of whom ought to be enjoying retirement but were working in warehouses filling orders for Amazon (“Camperforce”) or stocking shelves in a big-box store.

It sharply reminded me of the Great Depression, another time when mobile workers moved from place to place across the country in search of work. Thinking about this I realized that what we were seeing was the return of the migrant worker apart from the seasonal farm worker, i.e., the Hobo. Also called Tramps, Bums and other less charitable names, these men were the displaced detritus of the Great Depression who wandered the country looking for any jobs that would help them survive and, if there was any left over, to send home to their families. It was a dangerous life; travelling by hopping freight trains or hitchhiking on the highways wasn’t the safest way to get around. Many hobos were maimed or killed in accidents travelling this way, or were victims of violence. Loren Eisley’s wonderful memoir All the Strange Hours recalls his days as a young hobo with all of the dangers and troubles that went with being a hobo. They also faced hostility from towns naturally suspicious of outsiders, especially if there wasn’t any work even for the locals.

But the hobos also became a part of American folklore. The music of Woody Guthrie, who spent quite a bit of time on freight trains himself, helped to make the plight of these unemployed workers known to the rest of the country. Government programs found ways to harness this pool of labor and skill, pouring it into vast projects, many of which continue to contribute to national economy today.

There was, however, another side to hobo life. It became a sort of counter-culture, a rebellion of sorts against a social order that had unfairly cast aside decent, hard-working people for the sake of profit. Hobo life in some cases became a form of dropout culture, mainly, I suspect, as a way of embracing what apparently could not be avoided. An old professor of mine, who spent some of his youth as a tramp, recalled how some of his tramping companions actually knew more about science and literature than his college professors, but preferred tramping as a better way to enjoy God’s creations. Dropouts indeed.

I have been fascinated by American dropout culture as a response to moments when society becomes economically, intellectually, morally, and spiritually intolerable and so, like a few Biblical figures, one leaves, going out of bondage, but into the wilderness for whatever it may bring one. Historically, I’ve noticed that from Roanoke to the 1960’s and 70’s, the dropouts generally seemed to have a point, even if it wasn’t clear at the time. Sometimes the dropouts used their unique viewpoint to inform changes for the better, or became part of grander projects as happened with the government work projects of the New Deal.

So it is with some bemusement that I have noticed an interesting trend when it comes to the mobile temp workers, hobos with RVs or living out of their cars. Over the last seven or so years a small body of literature has emerged celebrating the homeless, wandering worker. Getting out of debt is a common reason for ditching less settled living, and as a rejection of consumerism (Ironic, given how many of these mobile temp jobs are serving precisely that consumer economy). The whole thing has a Small is Beautiful/Voluntary Simplicity vibe to it. Three of the six or so book titles of the last few years even reference “living in a van down by the river” in homage to a classic SNL skit.

So which is it? Is the new hobo a national tragedy in slow-motion, or rebellion against consumer culture, a new manifestation of the All-American dropout? I think it’s too early to tell. This may be nothing more or less than trying to make the best of a bad situation. I hope it’s more than that.

Famed American author and philosopher Eric Hoffer, himself a long-time migrant worker, had some remarkable insights into the responsibility of a nation to do right by such men and women. In his essay, “The Role of the Undesirables”, based on his own experience in government work camps in the early 1930’s. He draws some interesting and telling comparisons between the “human junk pile” that made up the bulk of his fellow workers and the early American pioneers–themselves undesirables from Europe–who built the nation. He points out that these pioneers craved change, much like the RV hobos of today. Hoffer writes: “…the quality and destiny of a nation are determined to a considerable extent by the nature and potentialities of its inferior elements.” He further argues that the quality of a nation is likewise manifest by how those at the bottom rise to the top. And that, I submit, is the problem. Is there an endgame to the RV hobo life that involves a chance to settle back down, to enjoy some of the fruits of one’s labor in security and dignity? Certainly a life on the road can be exciting. I find the idea compelling myself. But the other kind of mobility–upward mobility–has all but ceased to exist in this country. I cannot yet say whether these economic rebels of the road are truly making a new way of living, or accepting the unacceptable.

It’s time to call the housing crisis what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory

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By Laurie Macfarlane

Source: OpenDemocracy.net

One of the basic claims of capitalism is that people are rewarded in line with their effort and productivity. Another is that the economy is not a zero sum game. The beauty of a capitalist economy, we are told, is that people who work hard can get rich without making others poorer.

But how does this stack up in modern Britain, the birthplace of capitalism and many of its early theorists? Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released new data tracking how wealth has evolved over time. On paper, the UK has indeed become much wealthier in recent decades. Net wealth has more than tripled since 1995, increasing by over £7 trillion. This is equivalent to an average increase of nearly £100,000 per person. Impressive stuff. But where has all this wealth come from, and who has it benefitted?

Just over £5 trillion, or three quarters of the total increase, is accounted for by increase in the value of dwellings – another name for the UK housing stock. The Office for National Statistics explains that this is “largely due to increases in house prices rather than a change in the volume of dwellings.” This alone is not particularly surprising. We are forever told about the importance of ‘getting a foot on the property ladder’. The housing market has long been viewed as a perennial source of wealth.

But the price of a property is made up of two distinct components: the price of the building itself, and the price of the land that the structure is built upon. This year the ONS has separated out these two components for the first time, and the results are quite astounding.

In just two decades the market value of land has quadrupled, increasing recorded wealth by over £4 trillion. The driving force behind rising house prices — and the UK’s growing wealth — has been rapidly escalating land prices.

For those who own property, this has provided enormous benefits. According to the Resolution Foundation, homeowners born in the 1940s and 1950s gained an unearned windfall of £80,000 between 1993 and 2014 alone. In the early 2000s, house price growth was so great that 17% of working-age adults earned more from their house than from their job.

Last week The Times reported that during the past three months alone, baby boomers converted £850 million of housing wealth into cash using equity release products – the highest number since records began. A third used the money to buy cars, while more than a quarter used it to fund holidays. Others are choosing to buy more property: the Chartered Institute of Housing has described how the buy-to-let market is being fuelled by older households using their housing wealth to buy more property, renting it out to those who are unable to get a foot on the property ladder. And it is here that we find the dark side of the housing boom.

As house prices have continued to increase and the gap between house prices and earnings has grown larger, the cost of homeownership has become increasingly prohibitive. Whereas in the mid-1990s low and middle income households could afford a first time buyer deposit after saving for around 3 years, today it takes the same households 20 years to save for a deposit. Many have increasingly found themselves with little choice but to rent privately. For those stuck in the private rental market, the proportion of income spent on housing costs has risen from around 10% in 1980 to 36% today. Unlike homeowners, there is no asset wealth to draw on to fund new cars or holidays.

In Britain, we have yet to confront the truth about the trillions of pounds of wealth amassed through the housing market in recent decades: this wealth has come straight out of the pockets of those who don’t own property.

When the value of a house goes up, the total productive capacity of the economy is unchanged because nothing new has been produced: it merely constitutes an increase in the value of the land underneath. We have known since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo that land is not a source of wealth but of economic rent — a means of extracting wealth from others. Or as Joseph Stiglitz puts it “getting a larger share of the pie rather than increasing the size of the pie”. The truth is that much of the wealth accumulated in recent decades has been gained at the expense of those who will see more of their incomes eaten up by higher rents and larger mortgage payments. This wealth hasn’t been ‘created’ – it has been stolen from future generations.

House prices are now on average nearly eight times that of incomes, more than double the figure of 20 years ago. It’s unlikely that house prices will be able to outpace incomes at the same rate for the next 20 years. The past few decades have spawned a one-off transfer of wealth that is unlikely to be repeated. While the main beneficiaries of this have been the older generations, eventually this will be passed on to the next generation via inheritance or transfer. Already the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ has become the ninth biggest mortgage lender. The ultimate result is not just a growing intergenerational divide, but an entrenched class divide between those who own property (or have a claim to it), and those who do not.

Misleading accounting and irresponsible economics have provided cover for this heist. The government’s national accounts record house price growth as new wealth, ignoring the cost it imposes on others in society – particularly young people and those yet to be born. Economists still hail house price inflation as a sign of economic strength.

The result is a world which is rather different to that described in economics textbooks. Most of today’s ‘wealth’ isn’t the result of entrepreneurialism and hard work – it has been accumulated by being idle and unproductive. Far from the positive sum game capitalism is supposed to be, we have a system where most wealth is gained at the expense of others. As John Stuart Mill wrote back in 1848:

“If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from?  It doesn’t materialise out of thin air. It doesn’t come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others’ labours, which they don’t receive.”

Britain’s housing crisis is complicated mess. Fixing it requires a long-term plan and a bold new approach to policy. But in the meantime let’s start calling it what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory.

It Is Bettter to Light One Candle than to Curse the Darkness

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By Harvey Lothian

Source: Dissident Voice

The world is in bad shape. Every reasonably intelligent, aware, objective person in the world knows, if only intuitively, that something is very, very wrong. There should not be this many armed conflicts, this much anger, this much violence, this much unemployment and underemployment, this much debt, this much homelessness, hunger, poverty, this ever widening gap between the income and wealth of the super rich and everyone else, and this much distrust in government and politicians. The future does not look good; a financial crisis and a socioeconomic collapse are just around the corner. Another World War or innumerable smaller wars seem almost certain.

Things are dark everywhere in the world, except in the offices and homes of the wealthy and highly connected people of the world. They control the world. There are no genuine democracies in the world, only oligarchies and dictatorships. The wealthy classes have never had it better. Never in recorded history has this class had higher income and wealth compared to the average working family. Oxfam reported that the richest 50% of the people own over 99% of the world’s wealth, the richest 1% of the world’s population hold over 50% of the world’s wealth, and the richest 62 people in the world has as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population, about 3.6 billion people.

Rich people’s insatiable greed has brought the world to this lamentable state. Make no mistake about it, the greed of the wealthy classes and their flunkies are responsible for the wretched state of the world today. We, the masses of the world, believed their lies because we are decent trusting people. We did not believe anyone would tell us such monstrous lies. The wealthy classes did, then they had us go to war against other innocent trusting people around the world while they looted the assets of our countries and stole our future. They have left us nothing but our confusion as to why our lives are going down the drain when we believed and tried our best to be patriotic citizens of our country. Our confusion is rapidly turning to anger as we learn more details about how the wealthy classes and leaders have deceived us, betrayed us, and ruined our lives. They have used us in the most despicable of ways; they used our trust, and naivety to rob and violate us to our very core, by destroying our lives and our hope and dreams for a better future for ourselves and our children.

To put this insanity in clear perspective, consider the following. Reliable U.N. agencies estimate that 32,000 children die around the world every day from hunger and hunger related diseases. They die because their parents do not have enough money to feed them a nourishing diet. Billions of people around the world live on one to three dollars a day, so we can safely say that if these 32,000 children’s parents earned $3 a day these children would not die. A tiny $96,000 a day given to these children’s parents, in wages for work performed, would save these children from what is apparently a painful death. That is $35,040,000 per year to save 32,000 innocent children, or, $1,095 per year to save one child. According to Forbes magazine there are 1,810 billionaires in the world worth a total of $6.5 trillion. Why do 32,000 children die every day from hunger and hunger related diseases, 224,000 every week, 11,648,000 every year when there is enough food to feed them and enough money to buy that food? Because we live in a totally insane world where accumulating wealth is more important to some that feeding hungry children.

There is no way out of the insane economic house of cards the rich have built except total collapse. The rich made that inevitable when they relentlessly incurred ever increasing amounts of federal debt, in our name, as they continually sent our well paying jobs to low wage countries making it impossible for us to reduce that debt through our taxes. They got super rich, we lost our good jobs and had enormous amounts of new debt piled on to us. This is not sustainable, the house of cards must eventually collapse. Or, our insane leaders will try to turn the world into one huge war zone.

We, the decent, sane people of the world now have an important decision to make; we can continue to curse the darkness the insane wealthy people of the world have created with their insane endless pursuit of more wealth, or, we can begin lighting candles by seeking and employing methods of solidly uniting us so we can defeat our common enemy and move us to a better way of living together. If we do not have a clear picture in our minds of how we want to live together in peace and harmony chaos will occur when the socio economic system collapses. We have to know where we are going, or we are lost.

Where do we want to go? The answer is obvious; we are all human beings, we all sprang from the same source, we are all brothers and sisters and all have exactly the same innate needs for food, water, shelter, warmth, sleep, social order, safety, security, stability, employment, a sense of belonging and love, and the opportunity to develop to our fullest potential. Simply put. we want and need to live in a world where countries are at peace with each other while we live in peace and harmony with each other in our country and we have the opportunity to lead decent normal lives while developing to our fullest potential.

The only way out of the horrendous mess of the collapsing house cards the greedy people have erected is if a vast majority of people around the world solidly unite as brothers and sisters under the motto, “All for one, one for all.” After the collapse occurs no one must be left without the necessities of life. Brothers and sisters take care of each other.

No kind of violence can be tolerated after the house of cards collapses. Violence breeds violence and solves no important long term problems. Brothers and sisters are not violent with each other.

Can we, the people of the world, do this? Can we solidly unite, watch out for each other, protect each other and help those in need? The alternative is too awful to think about. So, we must try. If we try we may succeed. It would be a wonderful world if we cared about others as much as we cared about ourselves; if we were all brothers and sisters. It is time to start lighting candles and stop cursing the darkness. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Or, at least try to do it.

 

Harvey Lothian is a 79-year-old and living on the Sunshine Coast of BC, Canada. His passions since a teenager have been history, politics, economics, sociology, social psychology, learning, traveling and reading. In recent years he has come to understand what Plato meant when he said all dogs have the soul of a philosopher.

Deep State, shallow politics, dumb economics

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By Frank Scott

Source: Intrepid Report

In 1965, the USA had 780,000 people in prison, jail, on parole or on probation.

By 2010, that population had grown by more than nine times, to 7 million and the prison business was booming as never before, creating profits, jobs and unparalleled human misery.

In 1954, the integration of public schools was seen as a great victory for civil rights and Americans now designated as “people of color”*. Today more than 50% of the prison population is designated as “people of color” and the disintegration of the entire public school system continues for all Americans designated as people.

In 2015, there were 536 billionaires in the U.S.A. In a nation of more than 325 million people, that represents less than 2 millionths of one percent of the population. For the textually challenged, that looks like this:.000002%

Wow.

How hard those truly brilliant people must have worked to achieve those riches. And one of them was Donald Trump!

Imagine how many cases they had to plead in court, classes to teach in school, buses to drive, meals to prepare, floors to wash, crops to pick, mail to deliver and deals to make? Well, actually, they mostly made deals using their great wisdom and brilliance at investing wisely. You and I could do as well if we worked as hard and were as smart and industrious as they are, including Donald Trump!

And if we were paid a thousand dollars an hour for our hard work, and we worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, maybe if we stashed all that cash and didn’t spend any of it we might have a billion dollars.

Nope.

In fact, if you worked twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year and did that for ten years, at one thousand dollars an hour, never stopped, never took any time off and never spent any of the money and just stashed it, you still wouldn’t have a billion dollars.

Is this a great democracy or what?

In that same year of 2015, America’s GDP for pets, which was $38.5 billion in 2006, had grown to $60.3 billion. Twelve companies insured 1.4 million pets owned by 79.6 million American families (65% of households) with premiums amounting to 660.5 million dollars.

163.8 million dogs and cats are comfortably housed in a political economy that has half a million of its people homeless and more than 20% of its children living in poverty. This is certainly reason enough for us to demand that Russia, North Korea, Syria and other nations adopt our democratically civilized way of living or suffer the consequences of our superior wrath. Right?

As of March1, 2017, our national debt was close to $20 trillion, which is more than our GDP, which is truly a gross domestic product. We the people of this great democracy pay more than $440 billion a year in interest on that debt.

Who do we pay it to?

Where’d they get the money to loan us?

Who prints and backs this money supply?

If you have any money among your plastic, look at one of the bills of any denomination and note that the power behind the cash is not the dead presidents or Rockefeller, Carnegie, Zuckerburg, Soros, Bezos, Visa or MasterCard but something called “The United States of America.”

That is not a private bank or a billionaire. That’s you. That’s us.

Remember, we, the public, print the money, in our name, and somehow it gets to a private source which loans it to us and charges us interest for the privilege. Would you like to buy a bridge?

Our personal debt, incurred to keep the economy going with our consuming and owed to the same market gods, was over $18 trillion. Almost as high as our public debt. Somehow, we owe it to the same people who loaned us our own money for public expenses. Wow.

Are they really smart?

Or are we really stupid?

Many Americans are treated as lower than scum for being working class and “uneducated.” Why are so many Americans so “uneducated”? Could it have anything to do with the fact that at some point they went through grammar and high schools taught by (drum roll) college-educated people**? And winding up with presidents like a truly brilliant rich guy with degrees from Yale and Harvard (wow!) who starts wars in the Middle East that have gone on longer than any in our history, with the consent of 534 out of 535 democratically (?) elected college graduates in congress?

Whether the organized crime lobby (Wall Street, banks, billionaires) supports guns for individuals, Israelis or the Military Industrial Complex, it remains in control of the political economics of American government. NRAIPAC and its ilk own, rent and control the White House, Congress and Corporate media. That was the case before Trump and still is the case now.

We need resistance to that system of minority control itself, and not simply the servants it hires, leases, rents or outright owns. As long as we allow a gallon of milk to cost more than a gallon of gasoline, as long as we tolerate an economics that will sustain a disease as long as profits for its treatment are greater than profits for its cure***, we not only face long range climate disaster but a much shorter range political economic calamity.

Global capitalism threatens immediate and growing poverty, war, human misery and planetary destruction no matter which political pinhead, pimp or ho lives in the subsidized residency we call the white house. As long as we allow the richest and smallest minority in our history to put only their servants up for our votes, calling this a democracy reduces us to the best-dressed peasants on the Titanic. We need to end the fundamentalist religion of private profit marketing that is becoming a greater menace by the minute and begin democratic action in a social revolution that expresses majority public interest, desire and need. Fast.

 

Notes

*All members of the human race are “of color” save for a small group called albinos. Some of us have darker or lighter skin but skin tone is of no more racial significance than brown hair, green eyes or long legs. Innocents, the ignorant and morons who still believe otherwise are science deniers at best, and anti-human at worst, no matter their skin tone.

**Those with a stake in maintaining their incomes & consumption are unlikely to participate in efforts to bring about radical change”—Michael D. Yates

***Check cancer, for starters; a multi-multi billion-dollar industry

The real Hunger Games: the Capitalist recipe to maximise profits while ‘having fun’

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By Sky Wanderer

Source: Investment Watch

Introduce a political economy upon the arbitrary axiom that Capitalism is the one and only economic system for mankind, and introduce a narcissistic moral philosophy that you as a Capitalist represent unsurpassable objective moral virtues.

You as a Capitalist hire politicians to implement policy as per your moral and economic philosophy and redefine ‘democracy’ as the political system to sustain Capitalism. Then from such position of self-established authority, abolish unions and all labour-representation, thus force your employees into a race-to-the-bottom contest to compete for jobs by accepting lower and lower wages.

Give decent jobs and benefits to only those who belong to your noble circles. For everyone else reintroduce slavery in the form of “workfare”. The goal is that you pay the lowest wages for jobs done by the fittest slaves, who will survive the contest. If you wish, you can call the contest “real Hunger Games”.

To speed up the process, extend the race-to-the-bottom into global scope so that you will have access to the cheapest and fittest labour everywhere on the planet. Never mind that your slaves will have to live out of a suitcase and every time when you lay them off and labour demand calls them elsewhere, they will have to relocate to yet another continent.

To further accelerate the process, make good use of your 3rd-world colonies, your Mideast colonising wars and your secretly sponsored mercenaries (ISIS). Via your “leftist” assistants, organise a massive refugee crisis to import the cheapest possible workforce via your war-refugees and economic migrants. These migrants are the fittest contestants who – glad just to escape your bombs – will worship you as their saviours and will work for you for literally zero payment. The migrants will not only boost your profits to sky-high levels but will rapidly pull down the overall wages of your domestic employees.

Meanwhile keep increasing the prices so your slaves can’t pay for food, energy, heat and shelter from their next-to-zero incomes. If some of them attempt to survive by taking bank-loans to acquire shelter, education and meet other basic needs, but they can’t repay the loans from their low incomes, you can just evict them from their homes via your banks.

When you made them homeless this way, make sure their ugly presence won’t spoil the beauty of your city. Install pretty anti-homeless spikes, so when they crush onto the pavement they will die, and you can just collect their bodies. To project your capitalist moral virtues into eternity, incorporate the beauty of your anti-homeless spikes into the modern concept of art and beauty.

Introduce private banking to enable yourself to creating new money when you wish. This way you can easily indebt the entire society, soon you can even purchase the whole planet.

Meanwhile dismantle public healthcare, so those of your slaves who are still alive but get sick, will die without treatment. Eliminate (privatise) all affordable public services, destroy the public sphere, abolish all public spaces and welfare benefits. To have a dandy excuse for such policy, make sure to keep the country in ever increasing debt by taking countless £ billions of government loans, and transfer the responsibility of these odious debts onto your slaves. Refer to these debts as the reason for the crisis, then refer to the crisis as the reason for these debts, then refer to the debts and the crisis as the reason for austerity and spending cuts. Then you can increase the public debt again and continue the same loop ad infinitum.

Make sure your very own mainstream media and academia would never reveal the truth that the never-ending crisis and mass-unemployment are due to your private banking and debt- and profit-mongering dysfunctional capitalist system, and keep the real disastrous indicators of the state of economy in secret.

Instead of admitting the truth, use the divide et impera strategy to make your victims blame themselves and one another. To increase the fun, produce reality shows where the still active part of your slaves will blame the disabled and the unemployed, meanwhile make the local poor blame the immigrant poor for the overall misery that you inflicted. Then establish offices where the local poor dressed as fancy clerks will evict the immigrant poor, meanwhile watch how all of them are begging for their lives until they give up and commit suicide.

Enjoy!