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- iHaveNet.com: Economy
by Arianna Huffington
Chronicling the Assault on America's Middle Class and the Solutions
"The latest job numbers are out -- and they're not good."
That's a phrase we've heard a lot lately -- and will likely continue to hear for the foreseeable future. According to the
Clearly, we're not in the middle of a normal recovery. Wall Street may have its casino up and running again, but Main Street shows no signs of bouncing back anytime soon. From foreclosures to unemployment to household debt to bankruptcies, the American middle class is under assault -- and America is in danger of becoming a Third World nation.
Though it is far from what dominates the debate in Washington, every day brings fresh evidence of the new reality that America is entering. And it's not just about dismal unemployment figures and gloomy foreclosure numbers. As The
Though the particulars of our country's transformation are painfully real to the rest of the country, Washington and Wall Street remain blind to our trajectory toward Third World status.
Witness the joint appearance on Fareed Zakaria's
As for Rubin, he "wouldn't do a major second stimulus, because I think &ellips; we run a risk that it could be counterproductive in creating a lot of additional uncertainty and undermining confidence."
Uncertainty? I guess that's true in the sense that the nearly 15 million people without a job are currently quite certain they don't have one; if a new stimulus bill were passed, there will at least be some welcome uncertainty as to whether they would be one of the lucky ones getting hired.
In fact, it's not uncertainty that is stopping business from expanding capacity -- it's a lack of customers. Because the potential customers don't have jobs!
The O'Neill and Rubin Continue-The-Misery Show certainly proves that this is not a left-right issue -- the willful lack of awareness of the reality being experienced by so many Americans is truly bipartisan.
But it's going to take more than a new stimulus to stop our slide into Third World status. While pushing those in charge to do the right thing, we're also going to have to push ourselves.
In "Waiting for Superman," his new documentary on America's failing public school system, Davis Guggenheim (the Oscar-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth") tells how the project began. Every day, while taking his children to their top-flight private school, he would pass several troubled public schools, filled with children not nearly as lucky as his own -- trying his best to not see the tragedy staring him in the face. Finally, after, as he puts it, "every morning betraying the ideals I thought I lived by," he decided to stop not-seeing the problem and do something about it. At the moment, our country is afflicted with an epidemic of not-seeing.
Unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy -- these are all isolating experiences. And that isolation takes its toll. A 2002 study by researchers at
So we all need to do our part. Though we can't let our leaders off the hook -- or fail to speak out when they, and/or their former mentors who got us into this mess continue to put forth policies that will hasten the decline of America's middle class -- we have to take responsibility for our communities as well.
If we don't change course -- and quickly -- Third World America could very well be our future.
Available at Amazon.com:
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Third World America