Connect the dots! La la la la!
NPR is running a media blitz looking at Americans and our ongoing struggle with the Holy Dollar. I think they're making some valid connections here, but sometimes their presentation seems disjointed. I would like to use this forum to have a better dialogue about it.
First off, I have to say that I read a post by my friend Curtis yesterday that soured me on America in a very real way. I have to share what I said there (in under five minutes) which made me recognise that I have a lot of baggage with how this country is structured, run, and how it perpetuates myths about success and failure (usually with the aim to keep the rich richer at the expense of the poor). In case you can't read the post, it is about emigrating to Uruguay and the benefits of doing so. One person asked: "Can I ask: why leave America?" My response was the following:
Can I ask: Why stay in America? We're the most gluttonous and inefficient in our energy use; we're backward-looking policy-wise especially with respect to energy; the political debate has shifted to who is most zealotous in the religious framework or who can get the most money via corporations; the Left is ineffective at getting the everyman message-even with the Dems (not really Leftists) in power, simple things can't get past the Republicans; the Holy Dollar is the only dimension that our lives are measured with-while arguably being one of the most destructive measuring sticks everywhere; we're in a state of decline in the middle class and are trending back to a corporatocratic monarchy of sorts; we've had two major economic/civil shocks to our system and are trying to fend off further ones, paradoxically, with instruments of war all the while running up our deficit and passing the buck to future generations; our healthcare system is obviously in the hands of multinationals who make bets on human lives and almost always win-at the cost of those lives; we're constantly being marginalised as citizens-our votes seem to mean less and less although fewer of us are voting; the media is bought and paid for and is no longer the Fourth Branch-those who can pay for speech (according to the tenets of the Supreme Court) inevitably are heard. Justice is dead here-don't even get me started on the legal system and the cover-your-assism everywhere in the US ("Caution, contents are hot!") due to the litigious nature of everything here. As is the American dream; I'm doing better than 90% of everyone I know and I'm only doing marginally well.
I simply can't fathom a reason to stay... except that it is just hard to move out because no one else wants us and it is a lot of effort. I'm only here out of inertia and because I live in the one place I can stand in this entire country (the liberal bubble dubbed Little Beirut, also known as Portland, OR) where I live as close to a European as possible (I walk to work and ride my bike everywhere: try that Dallas!).
So, NPR's running these stories on 'Living in the middle'. The first states plenty about the American Dream and how it is a lie.
Living in the middle: Falling Behind?:
The notion that the mass of Americans can broadly share in the prosperity of the country has been deeply ingrained in the culture since colonial times.
This is the real meaning of "the land of opportunity." Not everyone could strike it rich, but it was reasonable to aspire to a comfortable standard of living that the next generation could match or exceed.
This is what brought waves of immigrants to these shores. It is the possible dream.
"It's the middle class that represents comfortable holidays, safe homes, cars and having your kids go to college," says Deborah Thorne, a sociologist at Ohio University. "Who wouldn't want to be middle class?"
Over the past 30 years, income inequality has risen - the rich have gotten richer - and middle class income has not grown as rapidly as during the years immediately following World War II.
Still, creature comforts have improved. Things that were considered luxuries a generation ago are now widely available. Not only are houses much bigger on average, but they are more likely to have multiple rooms filled with air conditioning, phones, Internet connections and bigger, gaudier televisions. The larger homes contain smaller families, with fewer children making it easier to indulge.
The fairytale here is that creature comforts equate to the American Dream. I say that is false. The American Dream is something few of us live: it is a life where you have the freedom of choice when it comes to purchasing based on your values, giving to the charities and causes you prefer, being able to be civicly involved, having the time, energy, money, and freedom to travel. The rich have gotten richer at the expense of the poor; the trend for a college education to be come a de facto part of our life in order to basically make minimum wage steals from our economic prosperity. With the rising costs of debt, including college loans and the costs of college, as well as healthcare, our basic costs of living are more and more hampered by debt service. Couple that with the cheap-junk, import culture we have economically, I would say that creature comforts may be the case, but fragmented and broken households (usually as a function of economic stress) mean that the Dream is less and less possible for more people. The rich, all the while, profit from the debt servicing, trump up bubbles to dupe the everyman into throwing down their cash in investment schemes (teamed up with corporate-whore sellouts who convince these rubes that gold is a great investment *cough* Glenn Beck *cough*, etc.) and you have a real manipulation of people and their money.
The facts that the layperson is now making 25,000$ a year is distressing. And maybe that is a function of an average nationally, but I can't imagine living on that in Portland. Maybe as an urban dweller, my perspective is skewed, but if I refer to all those freedoms I talked about a paragraph ago, a travel trip with a family with two kids on 50,000$ (assuming two breadwinners, of course, after both of you have finally graduated from college) seems downright impossible to me without going into debt.
A second story outlines, in my opinion, exactly why FDR created Social Security (intergenerational payments that bypass the market, and therefore piss off the capitalist class because it is money they can't manipulate and 'grow') and the issues with putting all your chips into the game called capitalism:
Being middle class in America once meant feeling secure. You could count on having a decent home, a regular paycheck and food in the fridge.
Over the past three years, the Great Recession has eroded that sense of security for most middle-class workers....Even those who have hung on to their jobs and made all of their payments have felt the pinch of diminished home values and losses in retirement savings.
The economic dead center [also known as the median] is represented by households earning the median income of $49,777, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau. Of the 117 million households in the U.S. today, half make more than that amount, and half make less. [what they fail to tell you is that if you add up the bottom half and if you add up the top half, they're far from being balanced]
And let's look in the mirror here. I have the American Dream. I live better than probably 80% of Americans. I have a house, a wife, a cat, friends, family, I'm planning trips, I'm mostly out of debt. I'm doing pretty well for myself. But it was a difficult climb to get here and I'm doing it on the coattails of two generations ago: people who survived blinding poverty and made due. I am only successful because I am the only child of an only child, because my grandfather was 60 years older than me and died when I was in my 20s, so I got an inheritance much earlier than everyone else, and my mother has been a financially very lucky. It was via intergenerational payments, like with Social Security (and like the Chinese do for their family) that I have any modicum of success. I owe my success mostly to dumb luck. So, while I'm doing well, I'm still pissed off for the millions who aren't so fucking lucky! For those who try and try and still can't get an education because it is out of reach. To those working shitty jobs that pay maybe twice what their student loan payment is (never mind rent, food, etc.). To those people who had kids young and never caught up. It is all you Americans that my heart, anger, and vote go out to. Because you deserve (as long as you work for it, of course) everything I have. I'm gracious and filled with joy that I have what I have, but I also know that I stand on fragile ground, because this country's system gives me no faith that I will be able to maintain much of anything.
Is it better somewhere else? I hear France has a low income disparity and that they have the best health care system in the world. Maybe I should learn French; we know the cheese is good... But I'd rather not keep looking to the other side of the hill for greener pastures. I just keep doing it, because my faith in the systems we have in place here (broken democracy burdened by arcane procedure, capitalism) lead me to the conclusion that I will die before my time due to bad healthcare systems, that my investments in my retirement will blow up in my face, and that all the prosperity I have now is a short term effect of past luck.
And soon enough, like with most of this country, my luck will run out. And then what?
So, one last thing... if this drives you to drink, this should make you laugh a bit, mostly at yourself for being a rich-ass bourgeois (I almost spelled that right the first time) capitalist prick (like me!):
Some 15 percent of American adults went on a drinking binge in the past month, according to the latest estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the most likely to engaged in extreme drinking are the well-off (household income greater than $75,000 a year) and high school kids.
Besides some silly leaps of faith they make "In the short run drinking like that contributes to accidents and sexual transmission of disease." [apparently, rich, white drinkers all have herpes], I find it interesting that they're equating the well-off with high-school kids. I also find it interesting that I basically sacrificed any semblance of real social success in high school so that I could basically be a well-to-do child now, which I am. I must say, though, that this is a function of income: people who are responsible with their money, rich or poor, understand that drinking is a past-time that is a luxury. And this article further sheds light on the fact that the rich are living well and the poor, who can't afford to drink much (or are religious?) don't get to play with the rich kids. The reason the poor can't binge drink isn't because they don't want to (unless their religion dictates otherwise), it is because 5 drinks at a club will cost you nearly 50$ (in Portland), and a lot of people can't blow that kind of cash in one night unless they're well-to-do.
First off, I have to say that I read a post by my friend Curtis yesterday that soured me on America in a very real way. I have to share what I said there (in under five minutes) which made me recognise that I have a lot of baggage with how this country is structured, run, and how it perpetuates myths about success and failure (usually with the aim to keep the rich richer at the expense of the poor). In case you can't read the post, it is about emigrating to Uruguay and the benefits of doing so. One person asked: "Can I ask: why leave America?" My response was the following:
Can I ask: Why stay in America? We're the most gluttonous and inefficient in our energy use; we're backward-looking policy-wise especially with respect to energy; the political debate has shifted to who is most zealotous in the religious framework or who can get the most money via corporations; the Left is ineffective at getting the everyman message-even with the Dems (not really Leftists) in power, simple things can't get past the Republicans; the Holy Dollar is the only dimension that our lives are measured with-while arguably being one of the most destructive measuring sticks everywhere; we're in a state of decline in the middle class and are trending back to a corporatocratic monarchy of sorts; we've had two major economic/civil shocks to our system and are trying to fend off further ones, paradoxically, with instruments of war all the while running up our deficit and passing the buck to future generations; our healthcare system is obviously in the hands of multinationals who make bets on human lives and almost always win-at the cost of those lives; we're constantly being marginalised as citizens-our votes seem to mean less and less although fewer of us are voting; the media is bought and paid for and is no longer the Fourth Branch-those who can pay for speech (according to the tenets of the Supreme Court) inevitably are heard. Justice is dead here-don't even get me started on the legal system and the cover-your-assism everywhere in the US ("Caution, contents are hot!") due to the litigious nature of everything here. As is the American dream; I'm doing better than 90% of everyone I know and I'm only doing marginally well.
I simply can't fathom a reason to stay... except that it is just hard to move out because no one else wants us and it is a lot of effort. I'm only here out of inertia and because I live in the one place I can stand in this entire country (the liberal bubble dubbed Little Beirut, also known as Portland, OR) where I live as close to a European as possible (I walk to work and ride my bike everywhere: try that Dallas!).
So, NPR's running these stories on 'Living in the middle'. The first states plenty about the American Dream and how it is a lie.
Living in the middle: Falling Behind?:
The notion that the mass of Americans can broadly share in the prosperity of the country has been deeply ingrained in the culture since colonial times.
This is the real meaning of "the land of opportunity." Not everyone could strike it rich, but it was reasonable to aspire to a comfortable standard of living that the next generation could match or exceed.
This is what brought waves of immigrants to these shores. It is the possible dream.
"It's the middle class that represents comfortable holidays, safe homes, cars and having your kids go to college," says Deborah Thorne, a sociologist at Ohio University. "Who wouldn't want to be middle class?"
Over the past 30 years, income inequality has risen - the rich have gotten richer - and middle class income has not grown as rapidly as during the years immediately following World War II.
Still, creature comforts have improved. Things that were considered luxuries a generation ago are now widely available. Not only are houses much bigger on average, but they are more likely to have multiple rooms filled with air conditioning, phones, Internet connections and bigger, gaudier televisions. The larger homes contain smaller families, with fewer children making it easier to indulge.
The fairytale here is that creature comforts equate to the American Dream. I say that is false. The American Dream is something few of us live: it is a life where you have the freedom of choice when it comes to purchasing based on your values, giving to the charities and causes you prefer, being able to be civicly involved, having the time, energy, money, and freedom to travel. The rich have gotten richer at the expense of the poor; the trend for a college education to be come a de facto part of our life in order to basically make minimum wage steals from our economic prosperity. With the rising costs of debt, including college loans and the costs of college, as well as healthcare, our basic costs of living are more and more hampered by debt service. Couple that with the cheap-junk, import culture we have economically, I would say that creature comforts may be the case, but fragmented and broken households (usually as a function of economic stress) mean that the Dream is less and less possible for more people. The rich, all the while, profit from the debt servicing, trump up bubbles to dupe the everyman into throwing down their cash in investment schemes (teamed up with corporate-whore sellouts who convince these rubes that gold is a great investment *cough* Glenn Beck *cough*, etc.) and you have a real manipulation of people and their money.
The facts that the layperson is now making 25,000$ a year is distressing. And maybe that is a function of an average nationally, but I can't imagine living on that in Portland. Maybe as an urban dweller, my perspective is skewed, but if I refer to all those freedoms I talked about a paragraph ago, a travel trip with a family with two kids on 50,000$ (assuming two breadwinners, of course, after both of you have finally graduated from college) seems downright impossible to me without going into debt.
A second story outlines, in my opinion, exactly why FDR created Social Security (intergenerational payments that bypass the market, and therefore piss off the capitalist class because it is money they can't manipulate and 'grow') and the issues with putting all your chips into the game called capitalism:
Being middle class in America once meant feeling secure. You could count on having a decent home, a regular paycheck and food in the fridge.
Over the past three years, the Great Recession has eroded that sense of security for most middle-class workers....Even those who have hung on to their jobs and made all of their payments have felt the pinch of diminished home values and losses in retirement savings.
The economic dead center [also known as the median] is represented by households earning the median income of $49,777, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau. Of the 117 million households in the U.S. today, half make more than that amount, and half make less. [what they fail to tell you is that if you add up the bottom half and if you add up the top half, they're far from being balanced]
In 2009, median household income decreased in 34 states and increased in only one: North Dakota.
Nearly 4 million people fell out of the middle class last year and now live below the federal poverty line. More than 14 percent of the population is under that line, set at about $11,000 annual income for one person or $22,000 for a family of four [that's not poor, that's destitute].- In 2009, enrollment in Medicaid, the medical insurance program for low-income Americans, exceeded 48 million, or a record 15.7 percent of the U.S. population.
- As of June, more than 41 million people were collecting food stamps. That was up by 6.4 million, or 18 percent, from the previous year.
And let's look in the mirror here. I have the American Dream. I live better than probably 80% of Americans. I have a house, a wife, a cat, friends, family, I'm planning trips, I'm mostly out of debt. I'm doing pretty well for myself. But it was a difficult climb to get here and I'm doing it on the coattails of two generations ago: people who survived blinding poverty and made due. I am only successful because I am the only child of an only child, because my grandfather was 60 years older than me and died when I was in my 20s, so I got an inheritance much earlier than everyone else, and my mother has been a financially very lucky. It was via intergenerational payments, like with Social Security (and like the Chinese do for their family) that I have any modicum of success. I owe my success mostly to dumb luck. So, while I'm doing well, I'm still pissed off for the millions who aren't so fucking lucky! For those who try and try and still can't get an education because it is out of reach. To those working shitty jobs that pay maybe twice what their student loan payment is (never mind rent, food, etc.). To those people who had kids young and never caught up. It is all you Americans that my heart, anger, and vote go out to. Because you deserve (as long as you work for it, of course) everything I have. I'm gracious and filled with joy that I have what I have, but I also know that I stand on fragile ground, because this country's system gives me no faith that I will be able to maintain much of anything.
Is it better somewhere else? I hear France has a low income disparity and that they have the best health care system in the world. Maybe I should learn French; we know the cheese is good... But I'd rather not keep looking to the other side of the hill for greener pastures. I just keep doing it, because my faith in the systems we have in place here (broken democracy burdened by arcane procedure, capitalism) lead me to the conclusion that I will die before my time due to bad healthcare systems, that my investments in my retirement will blow up in my face, and that all the prosperity I have now is a short term effect of past luck.
And soon enough, like with most of this country, my luck will run out. And then what?
So, one last thing... if this drives you to drink, this should make you laugh a bit, mostly at yourself for being a rich-ass bourgeois (I almost spelled that right the first time) capitalist prick (like me!):
Some 15 percent of American adults went on a drinking binge in the past month, according to the latest estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the most likely to engaged in extreme drinking are the well-off (household income greater than $75,000 a year) and high school kids.
Besides some silly leaps of faith they make "In the short run drinking like that contributes to accidents and sexual transmission of disease." [apparently, rich, white drinkers all have herpes], I find it interesting that they're equating the well-off with high-school kids. I also find it interesting that I basically sacrificed any semblance of real social success in high school so that I could basically be a well-to-do child now, which I am. I must say, though, that this is a function of income: people who are responsible with their money, rich or poor, understand that drinking is a past-time that is a luxury. And this article further sheds light on the fact that the rich are living well and the poor, who can't afford to drink much (or are religious?) don't get to play with the rich kids. The reason the poor can't binge drink isn't because they don't want to (unless their religion dictates otherwise), it is because 5 drinks at a club will cost you nearly 50$ (in Portland), and a lot of people can't blow that kind of cash in one night unless they're well-to-do.