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Author Topic:   Hidden in Plain Sight
Node
Knowflake

Posts: 476
From: Nov. 11 2005
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 09:59 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Node     Edit/Delete Message
The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight. — Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

~*sound bites from some recent reading*~:

When you research our tax system you see an unprecedented level of waste and fraud rampant throughout most expenditures. Our tax system is a national disaster of epic proportions. It is literally an organized criminal operation that continues to rob us in broad daylight, with zero accountability.
Politicians and mainstream “news” outlets will not tell you this, but most every serious economist knows that due to so much theft and debt created in the tax system, the only way to fix things, other than stopping the theft and seizing the trillions that have been stolen, will be for the government to cut important social funding and drastically raise our taxes. Other than the record national debt, many states are running record deficits and barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services. Our nation’s biggest state economies, like California and New York, are the ones in most trouble.

To merely say that things will not be improving economically is to be a delusional optimist. The truth that you will not hear: we have been hit by an economic deathblow and the United States lay in ruins.
It’s not just this criminal tax system; the theft is now built into all our costs of living.

Trillions more in our spending on food and fuel has been stolen due to fraudulent stock transactions and overcharging.

Just ten years ago, in 2000, American families paid 7% of our income on food and fuel. We now pay 20%.

This drastic increase is primarily driven by fraudulent market manipulation that drives up stock prices. Congress uncovered this in 2006, as part of the Enron investigation they found that companies manipulated the oil market to create major spikes in stock values, and then they didn’t do anything about it - nothing to see here, just move on.
As mentioned before, we have the most expensive health care system in the world and we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries, and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world. On average, US citizens are now paying a record high 8% of their income on medical care.
Part of the reason why foreclosure rates are so high is because the percentage of income Americans pay on their housing has risen to 34%.
So for these basic necessities - taxes, food, fuel, shelter and medical bills - we have already lost 92% of our limited income. Then factor in ever-increasing interest rates on credit cards, student loans, rising prices for cable, internet, phone, bank fees, etc., etc., etc. We are being robbed and gouged in all costs of living, in every aspect of our life. No wonder bankruptcies are skyrocketing and the amount of people suffering from psychological depression has reached an epidemic level.
The American worker is screwed over every step of the way, and it all starts with the explosion in the cost of a college education.

This is one of the Economic Elite’s most devastating weapons. To have any chance of succeeding in this economy, it is commonly believed that you must attend the best college possible. With the rising costs involved, today’s students are graduating with record levels of debt from student loans. At the same time, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates has risen higher than the national average, and those that do find work are making significantly less than they expected to make. This combination of extreme debt and reduced pay has crippled an entire generation right from the start and has put them in a vicious cycle of spiraling debt that they will struggle with for the rest of their lives. The most recent college graduates are now known as a “lost generation.”


The American dream has turned into a nightmare. The economic system is a sophisticated prison cell; the indentured servant is now an indebted wage slave; whips and chains have evolved into debts.

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by sword. The other is by debt.” — John Adams

Concealing National Wealth

“Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage… Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand.”– John Dewey
When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard working Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the US population.
The US public doesn’t have any understanding of how much wealth has been generated and concentrated into the hands of the Economic Elite over the past 40 years; there is no historical frame of reference.
......
posted in part from:

David DeGraw, Alternet via ICH
February 17, 2010

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Node
Knowflake

Posts: 476
From: Nov. 11 2005
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 10:11 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Node     Edit/Delete Message
same author:

......The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I’ll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun “to normalize the unthinkable.” You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.

America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.

We also currently have over 50 million U.S. citizens without health care. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60 percent of them, and over 75 percent of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have health care insurance. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.

In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. “Personal debt has risen from 65 percent of income in 1980 to 125 percent today.” Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25 percent of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: “The percentage of ‘underwater’ loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes.” Every day 10,000 U.S. homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children…

One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world — the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed that “a new prison opens every week somewhere in America.”

Mass Unemployment

The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn’t count people who are “involuntary part-time workers,” meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn’t count “discouraged workers,” meaning long-term unemployed people who have lost hope and don’t consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were “officially” labeled discouraged workers. So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off…

On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a “modeling error” in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, “estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January.”

When you factor in all these uncounted workers — “involuntary part-time” and “discouraged workers” — the unemployment rate rises from 9.7 percent to over 20 percent. In total, we now have over 30 million U.S. citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited “employment-participation” rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64 percent.

Even based on the “official” unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6 percent that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.

Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits they have been living on are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.

Most economists believe the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?

Working More for Less

The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5 percent, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2 percent. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78 percent of them had “better-than-expected profits” with earnings 17 percent above expectations, “the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6 percent while the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. With the unemployment rate now at 10 percent, median income has been falling at a 5 percent rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all-time low.

There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.

A Crime Against Humanity

The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they “normalize the unthinkable” and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count.

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katatonic
Knowflake

Posts: 3092
From:
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 02:08 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for katatonic     Edit/Delete Message
not a pretty picture. but i am more and more finding that i don't hold "them" responsible in the way i used to.

many of us have dug our own graves and it didn't take much thinking to prevent our individual crises. for instance

i know several very smart, competent, well paid people who have been borrowing on their houses since they bought them. now they look askance at me, who has never bought a house, when i wonder out loud why you would buy a house to put yourself in PERMANENT DEBT, ie rather than paying it down it is MORE COMMON THAN NOT these days that property is used as collateral to get CASH - with no acknowledgment that this means THE BANK OWNS YOUR HOUSE NOT YOU...

meanwhile i also know several people who paid off their houses. they still pay property taxes, which is bad enough, but despite losing in the market and at the bank they are enjoying a secure and undegraded level of life the first group can't understand. how can you be earning $75K as a single person and be broke? your payments, dumbkof, are bleeding you dry.

same with credit cards. the people who PAY OFF THEIR MONTHLY balance are in fine shape, those who pay the minimum or a little more are bleeding.

what i'm saying is GREED is not a trait of the rich exclusively, or of corporate interest. the little guy is just as guilty of allowing his acquisitiveness to lead him out on a limb as the big guys are of enticing him there...

and who says you have to go to harvard or smith to get a good job? that is a sales pitch that has been swallowed whole by the middle class. ask steve jobs or the google guys or any number of successful business people, artists, inventors, how important college was...

we can cry all we want but we have GIVEN them our money. there are multiple programs out there for people who want help from the govt or from legislation which makes it possible to crawl out from under the debt, in fact just erase a large part of it.

for my part i have not been in a safeway for 40 years. i drive a car that gets 40 to the gallon (the way i drive it anyway!) and i do not give my money to extortionists whatever "sheepskin" they may put on...

we could turn this around in a minute but it means giving up a lot of things we have grown accustomed to, not buying chinese lead-filled toys etc, and generally BEING AWARE of where you are putting your money...

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Yin
Knowflake

Posts: 1154
From:
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 02:25 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Yin     Edit/Delete Message
quote:
what i'm saying is GREED is not a trait of the rich exclusively, or of corporate interest. the little guy is just as guilty of allowing his acquisitiveness to lead him out on a limb as the big guys are of enticing him there...

It's hard to break away from the consumerist mindset especially if your environment doesn't allow for it.
How much is too much? - too difficult to answer that for all and God forbid you try - you may be labeled a socialist, a totalitarian or some other nonsense.

For me too much is to have any credit card debt, to buy a new car, or to owe your life's earnings to banks and hospitals.

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AcousticGod
Knowflake

Posts: 2279
From: acousticgod@sbcglobal.net
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 02:43 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for AcousticGod     Edit/Delete Message
I'm quite happy to have less debt than probably over 90% of people I know. It's one of the high points of being me.

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katatonic
Knowflake

Posts: 3092
From:
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 03:26 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for katatonic     Edit/Delete Message
when i first came back to the us after 21 years abroad (most of my adult life) i couldn't get a credit card to save my life! so my bank sweetly suggested a "secured" credit card. i fell for it for awhile. till i realized that, having put my money into the account, if i paid the monthly minimum (25) i would be giving the bank $300 a year for the privilege of borrowing MY OWN MONEY.

that was the LAST credit card i held! but i do find that people who use cc's the way diners and amex started out...paying the full balance at the end of each month...get a lot of good out of them.

how much is too much is actually a pretty easy question for me...too much is what puts you in hock for the privilege of owning something that, were your house to burn down, you would easily do without! i had a house burn down once. pretty much EVERYTHING lost was replaceable...my mother's photo collection, some unique art, and a really valuable piano were all i missed after living there for 5 years. though certain items were not replaceable we found suitable substitutes...

but living on the margin is a stress-producing, empty race to consume; this is futile and ultimately self-destructive to me.

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ghanima81
Moderator

Posts: 203
From: Maine
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 03:58 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for ghanima81     Edit/Delete Message
Agreed, kat. I get massively frustrated when people just cry about their situation instead of looking into ways of helping themselves out. There are SO MANY government programs (and other programs) that are there to help single mothers, single fathers, displaced families, students, orphans, ill or disabled people, etc. (what I'm getting at is everyone that may need help) that nobody knows about. They are not hard to find! I don't think it's too much to ask for people to be proactive in their own lives. I imagine that it's a lot easier to prevent debt collectors from beating down your door than to deal with them down the road and ignore the situation until it's too late.

I don't have credit cards or much debt thanks to my dad always saying it would only bite me in the a$$. I have a student loan, that's it. No debit card, no checking account, I outright own my car. That's about it. Living simply sure is just that: simple.

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katatonic
Knowflake

Posts: 3092
From:
Registered: Apr 2009

posted February 22, 2010 04:51 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for katatonic     Edit/Delete Message
yin, i am wondering how the environment could "not allow for it"? or what you meant by that...

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