Obama's America (Part 2)

A couple of days ago I wrote a post assigning a considerable portion of the blame for the Baltimore riots to President Obama in part because of his administration's economic policies that have increased wealth inequality and done nothing to help financially stressed working class Americans. Thus I would be remiss if were I to fail to mention the latest way that Obama is determined to make matters even worse and to set himself up to be showered with hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate largesse consultancies, speaking fees and book advances upon his retirement from office. I'm talking, of course, about the Trans-Pacific "Free" Trade Agreement, the opposition to which is being spearheaded by Senators Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, and includes some strange bedfellows:

The Obama administration has been negotiating the TPP deal since the early days of his presidency. Democrats and a bloc of House Republicans lead by Rep. Walter Jones (N.C.) are concerned that the pact -- which has not been finalized -- will exacerbate income inequality and undermine U.S. authority to write its own regulations, while Obama and Republican leaders say the deal will help all Americans by boosting economic growth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other top corporate lobbying groups support the deal, while environmentalists, organized labor and many Tea Party organizations are opposed. Warren and Brown said that corporate support for the deal shouldn't be surprising.

"Executives of the country's biggest corporations and their lobbyists already have had significant opportunities not only to read [the TPP text], but to shape its terms," the letter reads. "The Administration’s 28 trade advisory committees on different aspects of the TPP have a combined 566 members, and 480 of those members, or 85%, are senior corporate executives or industry lobbyists. Many of the advisory committees -- including those on chemicals and pharmaceuticals, textiles and clothing, and services and finance -- are made up entirely of industry representatives."

So here we have the great President Hopey-Changey, who rode into office in part because of a tsunami of disgust with Wall Street and the abuses of corporate America, looking to cement his legacy by pushing through one last big "fuck you" to the tens of millions of middle class, working class and young voters who placed their hopes in him. This, of course, despite twenty-plus years of evidence that "free" trade enriches the top 10% of the population at the expense of everyone else. What more evidence do you need that the man is a fucking sociopathic monster?

Here we also see the most direct evidence yet of why America is being turned into a virtual police state, which is docilely accepted by most of the population to the point where even Baltimore's black female mayor was throwing around the word "thug," without making any attempt to differentiate between the protestors who were expressing their First Amendment rights and the rioters who were looting and burning cars. This is why all of our electronic communications are being monitored and why police forces all over the country are being outfitted with all the surplus military hardware they can handle. Those in charge know their policies are going to cause greater and greater public outrage as economic desperation worsens and more and more people begin to realize that they have no future.

All of this wouldn't be possible had the Democratic Party not sold its own constituents down the river a long time ago. So is America's liberal party going support its two most progressive Senators and stand firm against their own president? Not hardly...as usual they are more worried about the political fallout than all the lives that would be ground up and spit out by the agreement:

Democrats have been wringing their hands about the potential damage the dispute on Capitol Hill could do to the party, particularly as the 2016 elections get into gear -- a concern that is only compounded by the vitriol now being exchanged between two of its most prominent figures. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has largely avoided addressing TPP in the early stages of her campaign.

Yeah, I'll just bet Hillary is trying to avoid saying anything about this issue, given that it was her fucking husband who pushed through NAFTA and GATT and started America down the "free" trade road to hell.


Bonus: "Hell ain't half full"...so there's plenty of room for Obama

Mad Men and the "Death of the American Dream"

During my recent illness I became a huge fan of two vastly different television shows, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, that each in their own way do a fantastic job of showing just how empty the pursuit of the "American Dream" really is. Breaking Bad's Walter White becomes unhinged after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and decides to use his remaining time alive cooking meth in order to build the fortune that eluded him in the straight world and that he felt he deserved. Mad Men paints with a broader brush (though there are key similarities between Walter White and the latter show's Don Draper), but at its heart are a group of characters--ad executives in the 1960s and their supporting office staff--whose lives become ever emptier even as they come to enjoy more and more material success.

The final seven episodes of Mad Men are just now being broadcast, and while watching the premier last Sunday the first thing that struck me was that the characters now find themselves in 1970, the year conventional American oil production peaked. I doubt Matthew Weiner, Mad Men's creator, took that particular factoid into account while setting up the show's conclusion, but given how many electrons have been annoyed in cyberspace by various writers analyzing the show's portrayal of the perils of pursuing material success just for success's sake, the ending taking place the year America's organic "material success" was peaking is quite relevant.

Don Draper--the dirt poor impostor who changed his identity and hustled his way to a partnership in a major Madison Avenue ad agency--has been described by Weiner as having grown up "one generation away from living without plumbing." My father just turned 80 this year, making him only a few years younger than the fictional Don Draper, and he has described to me how his father--a World War I veteran--lost his small trucking business in the early 1930s and then subsequently dragged the family all over the Midwest desperately searching for a way to recapture that tiny bit of the pie he had managed to slice for himself. Eventually he would settle for a factory job back in my hometown, but losing that chance to become a big shot-- even in a small pond--left him emotionally broken for the rest of his life.

One of the ongoing story lines in Mad Men involves Don's relationship with his estranged teenage daughter, Sally, and how he has a hard time trying to figure out why she's so unhappy despite having every comfort he never had growing up. On the show Sally Draper represents the Baby Boomer generation, the first to be raised with television and, not incidentally, to be bombarded with the ads Don and his cohorts so intensively labor developing. Sally may be too young to yet participate in the rat race (or to be the trophy wife of a successful businessman as her shallow and vain mother wants her to be), but her's is the first generation to be brainwashed from the start by media advertising, leaving her unable to recognize that that fancy new designer purse she just bought at Macy's will not make her any happier.

As Mad Men draws to a close, it will no doubt bring some sort of closure to the story arcs of its major characters. But the big picture it has spent seven years of broadcasts painting will in fact be only halfway completed. The second half of the story is unfolding in our current times, at the back end of the lifespan of the fictional Don Draper (assuming he like my father is now living out his golden years in the sort of retirement that became the middle class American ideal but for which only that generation on the whole ever got to enjoy). Draper and my father grew up one generation removed from living without plumbing. As a baby boomer and an elder Gen-X'er, Sally Draper and I were among the first to grow up expecting that a limitless cornucopia of consumer goods would always be available at our fingertips--assuming we were willing to either climb on the big treadmill or marry someone really successful so that we could afford it.

Sally Draper's children, however (I do not have any of my own) and especially her grandchildren are going to be the ones who find out just how big the lies her father told for a living really were. Mad Men has been very good at portraying just how the pursuit of the American Dream can consume a person's soul. What Mad Men will not be showing is what happens when the resources needed to support the kind of lifestyle being sold by Don Draper start running out. Sally Draper's grandchildren are likely going to be the first since Don Draper's parents to discover what it is like to live without plumbing...and they'll be LUCKY if that's as bad as it gets.

That's the show that is playing out in real life every day right now. I doubt if 50 years from now anyone will be putting it on television--or that that most people will have the time to spare from just trying not to starve to watch it if they did.


Bonus: "Even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary"

America's Middle Class Knows it Faces a Grim Retirement

Per yesterday's post, I guess it isn't just the young'uns who know they're screwed. From the L.A. Times:

More than a third of middle-class families aren't saving anything in a 401(k), IRA or other vehicle, the survey found. For those 50 to 59 years old, it's 41%.

"Nearly a third (31%) of all respondents say they will not have enough money to 'survive' on in retirement," the bank says. "This increases to nearly half (48%) of middle-class Americans in their 50s."

Ahh...that younger segment of the Baby Boomer generation. Guess it really is better to die before you get old.

There was another quote from this article that I found particularly horrifying:

There's little new in these findings. They echo the findings of last year's installment in the Wells Fargo series, when more than a third of respondents said they expected to work at least until 80 to have enough to retire on.

Yikes! That's not "retiring," that's called "dying in the saddle."

I had a discussion recently with my brother-in-law. He hasn't made the best decisions in life. He failed to use his bachelor's degree to get a good paying white collar job despite residing in the high cost of living New York City area. After having four kids he dumped his wife for a fellow divorcee who has a young child of her own, and then they had yet another child before the two of them even got married. Now his oldest are reaching college age and are enlisting in the military partly to escape what has become a depressing family situation, but also for the tuition benefits. BIL was reflecting on the fact that I was able to take early retirement (due in large part to the cancer) because, among other things, my wife and I lived frugally and paid off our house even before I got sick.

"I'll retire on the day I die," he stated to me rather matter-of-factly. Problem is, he works a blue collar job that takes a fair bit of physical effort, so I wonder if he won't begin to physically break down long before it is time for him to shuffle off this mortal coil.

As for me, even if I hadn't gotten sick the idea of working until I'm 80 fills me with horror and dread. It's not that there aren't plenty of things that I could do until I'm that old (especially writing), it's just that none of those I enjoy doing are likely to pay me anything resembling a living wage. I'm very grateful to have been able to leave the rat race at a relatively young age, but in my case it remains to be seen if the hangover effects of my cancer battle will prevent me from doing many of the things I had hoped to do in retirement.

But enough about me. Let's finish the discussion of this article with another interesting tidbit:

All this points ever more strongly to an inescapable solution to Americans' retirement quandary: expanding Social Security. The program is immune from market influences, operates with rock-bottom administrative costs, and forces workers to place saving for retirement front and center.

Those who claim that increasing benefits is unnecessary because America's retirees are secretly rich -- a notion recently bandied about by independent benefits consultant Sylvester Schieber and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute -- may need to get out and meet middle-class workers more. They would learn very quickly that middle-class Americans aren't laboring under the same misconceptions about their retirement prospects.

Forgetting for a moment that the Social Security program has its own long term financing problems, note the sheer fucking arrogance of these two assholes from the American Enterprise Institute. Do YOU know anyone in your social circle who is "secretly rich?" No, I don't either despite having a number of friends and acquaintances who are solidly upper middle class. The fact that these these two billionaire mouthpieces can get away with publicly saying such utter shit and not be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail is a big part of the problem in this country.


Bonus: "All your hope is gone...and it's not that funny, is it?"

The (Almost) $18 Trillion Question: Does it Really Matter?

Happy New (Fiscal) Year!

Yep--the calendar on the wall may still say it's 2014, but to the friendly folks who run YOUR United States Government, Fiscal Year 2015 is already upon us. Break out the party favors and the champagne, we gots lots to celebrate. Or maybe not.

Actually, I figured this would be a good time to resurrect one of my old hobbies, namely checking in with the federal government's own Debt to the Penny website and see how our national indebtedness situation is doing. Hmmm, not so well actually. As of the beginning of the new fiscal year, America now has an imbalance of $17.875 trillion, around $1.1 trillion more than it owed exactly one year ago.

But does it really matter?

While it is true that the past few years the annual federal deficit has fallen by about one-third from where it stood during the depths of the financial crisis, the government is still borrowing more than twice as much every year as it did in ANY year prior to FY-2009. In fact, since 10/1/2008, the national debt has risen by almost $8 trillion, so even with another two years of no increase in the annual deficit we'll still have managed to double the total amount of the national debt in just eight years (or the length of Obama's presidency) and THAT comes after we had already doubled the national debt during Bush's presidency.

But does it really matter?

Another interesting factoid that comes right from Debt to the Penny is who holds our debt. This is divided into two categories. The first is Intragovernmental Holdings, which is defined thusly:

Intragovernmental Holdings are Government Account Series securities held by Government trust funds, revolving funds, and special funds; and Federal Financing Bank securities. A small amount of marketable securities are held by government accounts.

In other words, largely Social Security. The second is so-called Public Debt:

The Debt Held by the Public is all federal debt held by individuals, corporations, state or local governments, Federal Reserve Banks, foreign governments, and other entities outside the United States Government...

The reason I bring up the difference is that there is something quite interesting about the additional $8 trillion we've racked up since 2008--namely, it has nearly all accumulated in that second category. Whereas the two types of federal debt were nearly even six years ago, Public Debt now exceeds Intergovernmental Holdings by approximately $7.7 trillion.

So why is that important? Well, consider for a moment who it is buying all this federal debt. According to National Priorities.org, approximately 46% of all U.S. debt, amounting to about $8.2 trillion or two-thirds of all Public Debt, is held by either the Federal Reserve or "International Investors," i.e. the central banks of other nations.

Collectively, the world's central banks are literally propping up the finances of the USG, and without that support the entire house of cards would instantly come crashing down. Yet the U.S. blithely continues to "borrow" more than a trillion dollars each year, even as it shakes a scolding finger at "deadbeat" nations such as Argentina.

But does it really matter?

I keep asking that question because many have predicted that America was going to strangle itself with debt--that borrowing a trillion plus dollars each year is unsustainable. Heck, I'll admit I've said it myself plenty of times. Never would I have believed four or five years ago that this country could keep borrowing at such a frantic rate and, not coincidentally, manage to keep interest rates at effectively zero without the whole thing blowing up on us long before now.

And yet, somehow it hasn't. Why? Well, if I knew the answer to that one, I'd be a one-percenter's one-percenter and wouldn't just be some obscure blogger sitting on his basement couch, screaming into the wilderness.

So does it matter? I'm going to have to throw up my hands and say, no, I guess it really doesn't.

Until the day finally comes when it does.


Bonus: "Fuck you, pay me"

A Nation of Idiot Savants

I was attending a sporting event with my wife not too long ago. It was a nice day, the sun was shining, a light breeze was blowing and the crowd was amped. We were looking forward to a good time, and one might have been had but for the appearance of a group of the worst sort of omnipresent invasive species: the loud, obnoxious, idiot American sports fan.

Let me paint you a picture. There were four of these dopes--white, middle aged, overweight, slovenly dressed and clutching cans of pisswater lite beer in their chubby digits--and they unfortunately had the four seats right behind us. And they were of the type I have seen all too frequently at ballgames in recent years, meaning that they spent the whole game when not texting or yapping on their cell phones talking loudly as if the whole section around them was breathlessly waiting to hear every pearl of wisdom that fell from their lips.

Though they were drinking, they were not intoxicated, which would have at least been an excuse for acting like such louts. They were also not being belligerent towards other fans, which might have at least given the rest of us the blessing of seeing them get kicked out of the stadium. They were instead just determined to prove to everyone around them what absolute fucking morons they were. Seinfeld may have been the "show about nothing," but Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer sitting around the local diner were a gathering of nobel laureates compared to these four fucktards.

For example, at one point one of the morons, who as he repeated over and over and nauseum, was a Baltimore Orioles fan, started going on and on about he always gets dirty looks from other fans whenever he is in a stadium outside of the state of Maryland and upholds the Baltimore tradition of yelling out "Oh" for "Orioles" during the "Oh" portion of the national anthem. After several minutes of him and the other morons agreeing that buying a ticket means he can do whatever he wants once he's inside the park, he summed things up by saying "After all, I'm from Baltimore, where we WROTE the national anthem in 1776." Bad enough that the dumb fuck insists on persisting with his boorish behavior despite knowing it is not appreciated by other fans, but despite being from Francis Scott Key's hometown he didn't even know that THE FUCKING STAR SPANGLED BANNER WAS WRITTEN IN 1814. And yet this was something he apparently feels PASSIONATELY about.

That same moron then went on to describe how just this year he had finished his goal of visiting every major league ballpark around the country and his buddies were describing their own progress in doing the same. Not that any of them really seemed to have much of a clue what was going on down on the field, or even fucking CARE for that matter--spending what would have to be tens of thousands of dollars attending Major League Baseball games appeared to be just something to occupy their time that they could then brag about with their friends.

As we were leaving the stadium that day, my wife and I were reflecting on how the experience was diminished by the presence of the louts behind us, and I said that what amazed me was that someone that fucking stupid could somehow make enough money to be able to afford to fly around the country attending professional sporting events. And that's when it hit me...that guy and his three buddies must each have some particular talent or skill that makes them highly marketable in a certain job field (I have no idea what, for despite all of their inane blather during the couple of hours we had to endure their presence none of them ever mentioned what they did for a living).

Multiply those four assholes by tens of millions and a picture starts to emerge of just how America has gotten into its current predicament. We've become a nation made up largely of idiots savants, people who are good enough at one particular thing to make a decent living but have no fucking clue about virtually anything else. It certainly goes a long way to explain, for example, how our most recent presidential election campaign has managed to devolve into the utterly banal and trivial spectacle that it has without the citizenry rising up in arms about it. My four buddies never once talked about politics that afternoon (thank Christ) but I guarantee you that you could search far and wide and have a difficult time finding four less informed potential voters.

Thinking about it some more, calling America a nation of idiot savants is actually an insult to real idiot savants who would never pretend that they understand or have any competence in anything beyond their narrow range of superior talent. Americans, on the other hand, because they were blessed with a particular ability, but more importantly were lucky enough to have been born atop the largest pile of natural resources ever bestowed upon an individual nation, in their hubris have come to believe that they possess superior knowledge and opinions about EVERYTHING, even often while simultaneously proclaiming their pride in their own fucking ignorance. That's how, to use a particularly regrettable example, Jenny McCarthy could come to believe that she alone knows more about what causes autism than the entire medical establishment because she's got big tits and horny American men are willing to pay her big bucks to see her take her fucking clothes off.

This whole country would be so much better off if more people would recognize that they are not as smart as they think they are and if they would at least try to do their basic duty as citizens and become informed as to what's really going on in the world. Oh, who am I kidding? There is a classic line in the World War One novel, A Long Long Way, by Sebastian Barry that perfectly sums up the real problem: "The curse of the world is people thinking thoughts which are only thoughts that have been given to them." The oligarchs in America have made it so damn easy for the ignorant fools not to ever have to think an original thought. People like my four buddies will keep bumbling along through their comfortable lives, until one day they wake up in shock and awe, wondering how suddenly it all got taken away from them and who could possibly be responsible without ever once looking in the fucking mirror.


Bonus: "I think I'm dumb...or maybe just happy"

They Should Have Died Before They Got Old

image: "Old man wasteland...it's only old man wastelaaaaaaaand!"

The Rolling Stones are seriously contemplating going out on tour again next year to celebrate their 50th anniversary as a band. I’ll pause for a moment and let the sheer horror of that last sentence sink in. Yes, you heard it right. A bunch of wrinkled up septuagenarians whose lead singer is going to squeeze his tired old bones into skin tight pants and try to prance around like he still has the sex appeal he lost back during the Reagan administration, are going to take the stage once more to bleat out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” “Start Me Up,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Sympathy for the Devil” and a bunch of other once-risqué tunes that if the audience wasn’t freebasing on simplistic nostalgia ought to induce little more than uncontrollable giggling spasms. I mean, if your grandpa started mumbling the sexually charged lyrics to an old Stones song, you’d be sure to keep a close eye on him whenever the grandkids are around.

In fairness to Mick, Keith and Charlie, they are far from being the only rockers who have failed to recognize that they are now decades past their sell by dates and need to just go the fuck away already. Pete Townshend, for example, really should have taken his own advice and followed band mate Keith Moon’s example of dying before he could get old and become a creepy surfer of child pornography websites. Did you happen catch The Who’s pathetic Super Bowl halftime appearance a few years ago? The camera had to cut away from lead singer Roger Daltrey right before the famous scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” so it wouldn’t be so painfully obvious that one of the greatest frontmen in rock and roll history was lip synching so he wouldn’t hurt himself from the effort.

Speaking of which, if you are a rock legend and you find yourself agreeing to play the Superbowl half time show, please do us all a favor and find someone to do to you what The Chief did to Jack Nicolson’s character at the end of One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. There should be an automatic condition attached to induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which stipulates a lifetime ban for any musician who plays the Superbowl. Leave that superficial spectacle celebrating America’s endless addiction to mindless consumption to talentless cretins like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.

In fact, I would be willing to go even further and impose a Logan’s Run rule for all rock stars. You can have all of the fame, fortune, booze, drugs and groupies that you can possibly consume, but on your 40th birthday you have to turn yourself into the authorities for proper disposal before you get the chance to go out and debase your talents on a money grubbing nostalgia tour or have to start playing state fairs in order to make the rent. The same rule would also apply if you ever allow your waistline to expand beyond 40 inches. Honestly, no one but the most pathetic, no life member of the fan club wants to see your fat ass waddling around on stage in black Spandex.

There are just so many ways for aging rock stars to debase their legacy. In the past year alone, Sir Paul McCartney, once half of the greatest songwriting team in rock history, apparently lost his muse to the point where he was reduced to releasing a virtually unlistenable album of old big band standards. Strawberry fields are NOT forever, apparently. On this side of the Atlantic, former Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed made a desperate pitch to remain relevant by teaming up with heavy metal troubadours Metallica—and merely managed to prove that both acts really ought to just go fishing or something. And then there was the frightening spectacle of Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler doing time in the literal sense as an American Idol judge. C’mon, Steven, did all of the many millions you earned during your long career really end up going right up your nose? Apparently so.

In a way, the sad fate of so many old rock stars kind of mirrors that of America as a country. It must be admitted that we were pretty hot shit right after World War Two, with our undamaged “arsenal of freedom,” our rapidly expanding suburbs and our exploding middle class. As a nation we were young, we were HOT and everybody wanted to BE us. Well, except for those crazy old commies, and they didn’t really count anyway. Flash forward six decades, and now we are the wheezing, overweight Ozzy Osborne, still attempting to scream into the microphone while failing to recognize that we’ve become a big, fat joke with our hollowed out economy, rapidly deteriorating infrastructure and a middle class that is being slowly impoverished by the greed of our predatory elites.

These days, America is on its very own pathetic nostalgia tour, still trying to throw our now flabby weight around the world stage as if any discerning observer can’t tell that as a nation we are desperately out of breath and merely lip synching our lines. Yet the average American still sits like the fans at a Rolling Stones show applauding every note like it is still 1969 and Mick can still bang half-a-dozen groupies in his dressing room without popping copious amounts of Viagra tablets as if they were Mother’s Little Helpers. Someday, this show is going to end and the lights of reality are going to come on, and the Americans in the audience are going to stare in bewilderment at the revelation that the once great nation of their hopes and dreams has actually become a dried out, decrepit old carcass just going through the motions.


Bonus: A classic song from the one guy who has been the exception the old rock stars suck rule

Being Poor is Killing Off White Americans--Really

For those of you who think that the population "die off" that is expected to occur as the long era of fossil-fueled economic growth gives way to scarcity and permanent economic contraction lies many years in the future, I've got a surprise for you. It's already happening:

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.

“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study.

Notably absent from the above analysis is that being poor in a hyper-materialistic society in which social services are substandard at best and public transportation depending on where you live is inadequate to non-existent, really sucks balls. Throw in the callus attitude so many Americans have towards the less fortunate and it is a wonder that they manage to live for as long as they do. But hey, the hard core Randians should be happy to hear this as it means that there are going to be fewer "parasites" around sucking down their precious "hard earned" tax dollars.

Also of note from the article, a little vindication for author Dmitri Orlov:

The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London.

And as if comparisons to the collapse of the Soviet Union were not bad enough:

The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States in international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. In 2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.

America: we're number 41 and nobody gives a damn...USA! USA! USA!


Bonus: "Born down in a dead man's town"

A Preview of America's Future as Desired by the Oligarchs

image: street scene, Phnom Penh, Cambodia -- the future is now

On Saturday, Dave Cohen of Decline of the Empire blog posted about a new book called The Betrayal of the American Dream, in which authors Donald Bartlett and James Steele discuss the ongoing destruction of the American middle class. As Cohen rightly points out, what most Americans, raised in a maddeningly insular society in the midst of the post-World War Two economic boom, do not understand is that their very existence as non-elites enjoying any genuine prosperity is an historical anomaly. The fact that the predatory sociopaths who really run the country are in the process of taking back what they feel was "stolen" from them by the New Deal and Great Society programs is not nearly as astonishing as is the ease and speed by which the dumbed down and media benumbed citizenry is allowing them to do it.

So where is it all heading? Well, assuming that enough energy supplies remain to be exploited to allow the elites to maintain control, which given the all out exploitation of the world's remaining energy reserves that is currently going on seems likely to continue for many years yet, I think I know the answer to that question. In my own post from Saturday, I briefly mentioned that I have been reading the book Cambodia's Curse by journalist Joel Brinkley, a recently published history of that unfortunate country. Brinkley spent a couple of years travelling around Cambodia interviewing everyone from top officials to dirt poor farmers and the portrait he draws is both arresting and frightening in its implications. Whereas Brinkley is attempting to tell Cambodia's sad story to the outside world, I chose to see what he has written as a warning of what our own future potentially holds for us.

Because you see, modern Cambodia is actually Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's wet dream. Imagine a nation where the government's only real role in the lives of the citizenry is to provide for the national defense and to build roads and bridges in order to enable commerce. Imagine a country where other than a few select elite government officials like Paul Ryan, every civil servant is paid at most a few dollars a day with no health or retirement benefits whatsoever. Imagine a nation where every natural resource, including vast tracts of lush hardwood forests, is stripped down and illegally sold abroad to line the pockets of its kleptocrat rulers. Imagine, too, a country where workers have zero rights vis-a-vis their employers, who pay them as little as they can possibly get away with. If Ayn Rand were still alive, she would probably be having spontaneous orgasms just thinking about it while conveniently ignoring the fact that Cambodian dictator Prime Minister Hun Sen used to be a dirty rotten communist, though one could argue that Pol Pot was the ultimate real world John Galt.

So how much fun is it to be an ordinary citizen in such a country? Oh loads, as long as you don't mind giving your children a wad of Riel every morning so that they can bribe their teacher so he will agree to actually teach them that day even though he might only have a third grade education himself. Oh, and if your precious snowflake is particularly dense, you can give the teacher another bribe to ensure that she passes her final exams. This method of "education" then continues right on up the line and even into the universities and medical schools, with those who do have the means paying bribes to ensure they eventually earn their diplomas.

Speaking of medical schools, when you get sick or injured and have to go to the hospital, you'll need to pay a bribe to that doctor who bribed his way through school in order to get him to treat you at all. If you don't pay him, you'll be given long expired medications if any at all, and left in a bug infested ward on a straw mat to recover or not more or less on your own.

You could try to complain to the police about the doctor's request for a bribe, but unless you bribe them they won't investigate, and unless you bribe the prosector he won't bring a case and unless you bribe the judge you won't get a ruling in your favor anyway. And then on your way home from court, you might be stopped at a random police roadblock and have to pay another bribe so they will overlook the fact that your left tail light is out or your driving license is expired. Oh, so you say you want to renew that driving license? If so, you'll have to bribe the local government official who is in charge of issuing licenses--doesn't matter if you actually know how to drive or not.

Let's then say you become sick and tired of all this corruption and want to launch a public campaign against it. Great. Just be mindful that when you try to have a public rally to support your cause, some disguised government thug may throw a grenade in the midst of it and then the police will blame you for trying to score political points against the regime by killing and maiming your own supporters.

Yep, Cambodia is true worker's paradise. It's the type of place where your boss, a military officer, can order you to go by motorbike and pick up a rare endangered animal so that it can be illegally transported to China to be eaten. Just don't let that animal accidentally escape, or you'll have to face the wrath of your boss, who might just be so enraged that he will douse you with gasoline and set you on fire, and when you die your wife and child will be left destitute. Surely, you think, that if an employer tried such a thing the press would find out and make a big stink about it, right? Well, they would, except that the newspaper reporter went to the army officer and requested a bribe so that the story would never be published.

This is just a little taste of what it is like to live in a country that has been stripped of most of its resources and where the unaccountable elites feel no obligation to provide any kind of safety net for its citizens. This is exactly the kind of society our own predatory oligarchs are slowly establishing here in America. If you don't believe it, ask yourself how if providing for the less fortunate is an unalterable established political consensus several American public officeholders have within this last year publicly compared the food stamp program to "feeding wild animals?" Even five years ago, such utterances would have been unthinkable in the public arena. That's just one small example of how the public rhetoric, to eventually be followed by public policy, is evolving--or rather devolving--in America these days. Not incidentally, impoverishing the working and middle classes has the added benefit of stretching out the availability of the planet's increasingly scarce resources. That, as any Harvard educated MBA would tell you, is a classic example of a win-win.

The Betrayal of The American Dream is very good way of portraying what is happening in this country, though it really only tells half of the story. The sad fact is that the betrayal would not be happening without the active complicity of so many average Americans. Starting in earnest around 1980, a vast majority of this country's citizenry chose to shut off their brains and turn the "thinking" about America's future over to frauds and charlatans, starting with Ronald Reagan, who promised easy answers while initiating the betrayal. Thirty years later we are now collectively reaping our very just rewards for our failure to recognize who the real enemies are.


Bonus: "I have only committed this mistake...of believing in you, the Americans"

There Are No Superheroes, Just a Decadent and Depraved Culture

Mass shootings have become so common in America in recent years that most of the time they no longer even generate screaming national headlines—instead often fading into the media background noise along with all of the other horrible shit happening these days. If you are an aspiring mass shooter, you’ve got to come up with something truly creative to really get noticed. Show us something we haven’t seen before, you know, like attacking a crowded theater during the midnight premiere of the latest $200 million mindless comic book movie.

Today’s mass shooting tragedy in Aurora, Colorado—incidentally located not too far from the scene of the horrific 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School—was spectacular enough to get our collective attention. Once again, grisly images of bloodied bodies, including children, being littered across a typical suburban landscape have been seared upon our collective conscience, momentarily shaking us out of our media-induced stupor, if only long enough to merely condemn the killer as an asocial monster. And once again, as soon as the initial shock has faded we will collectively go right back to sleep without asking any of the larger questions about just why it is that so many of our fellow citizens “suddenly” turn rabid and try to kill as many others possible.

No doubt that in the aftermath of the shootings, before the blood and gore has even been scrubbed from the crime scene and the bodies of the dead buried in their graves, we will hear the same tired old bromides from both sides of the political spectrum. Liberals will insinuate that we need more gun control, though few Democratic office holders will say so too openly out of fear of offending the gun lobby. Many conservatives, meanwhile, will trot out the even more ridiculous line that the shootings just show that everyone should be packing heat and ready to defend themselves, even though most people are so incompetent that if all of the patrons in that theater had opened fire at once they would likely ALL have ended up dead in the resulting melee.

I’m sorry to disappoint the members of my former political tribe, but easy access to guns really isn’t the problem. Owing to its frontier heritage, America has always been a gun culture, and yet the epidemic of mass shootings is a relatively recent phenomenon. What’s changed is not the available weaponry but a the emergence of a decadent and depraved culture that has left countless millions of people alienated and disaffected with little hope that their shitty lives will ever get any better.

After World War Two, thanks greatly to the rise of television, America became the perfect consumer society just as it was also building soulless artificial suburban communities farther and farther from central cities. Whereas previously most people never strayed more than handful of miles from the place of their birth, meaning that they were always surrounded by a strong support network of friends and family members, suddenly in the pursuit of ever higher paying jobs in order to be able to afford the “good life” being sold to them on their television screens it became the norm to move hundreds or even thousands of miles away to places where they did not know anybody.

Instead of living in a modest homestead with maybe three generations under the same roof, they now occupy oversized McMansions on leafy cul-de-sacs where they barely even know the names of any of their neighbors. Burdened by ever higher levels of debt as they try to keep up with the Joneses despite stagnating salaries, they work ever longer hours with ever less vacation time to try to keep from falling off of a gigantic economic treadmill that seems to move a little bit faster every year.

Rather than having one parent stay home to raise the children, both have to work to afford their expensive lifestyles, meaning that the children get dumped off to day care, often before they are even old enough to walk. When the kids are old enough, instead of being sent to a small local schoolhouse they instead find themselves shipped every morning to gigantic education warehouses where the more socially awkward among them are relentlessly bullied by their peers. And when the kids do finally get to college they find themselves being buried under a gigantic mount of student loan debt before they even have a chance to get started in life. Oh, and just for shits and giggles (and Hollywood's profit margin) we'll make it so much of our popular culture consists of mindlessly hyperviolent movies, video games and teevee shows like The Dark Knight Rises, and get people so amped up to see them that they will stupidly rush out like lemmings to wait in long lines at the ridiculous hour of midnight to see the latest spectacle that will be available in their homes on Netflix within six months.

And now, in this age of permanent economic contraction, having completely bought in to an “American way of life” that has been sold to them relentlessly ever since they were little children, people are staring slackjawed as all of it is slowly being taken away from them by a greedy and predatory elite who have always felt that the rise of the middle class was only made possible in the first place by stealing what was rightfully theirs. At this point, the wonder is not that there are those who go off in a mindless rage and begin randomly killing everyone around them, but that it doesn’t actually happen more often.


Bonus: "Keep everyone afraid, and then they'll consume"

NPR: American Dream Faces Harsh New Reality

When even National Propaganda Radio begins to notice that the American Dream is on its last legs, its probably time to sit up and take notice. The following is a story that appeared on NPR's website this past week:

The American Dream is a crucial thread in this country's tapestry, woven through politics, music and culture.

Though the phrase has different meanings to different people, it suggests an underlying belief that hard work pays off and that the next generation will have a better life than the previous generation.

But three years after the worst recession in almost a century, the American Dream now feels in jeopardy to many.

The town of Lorain, Ohio, used to embody this dream. It was a place where you could get a good job, raise a family and comfortably retire.

"Now you can see what it is. Nothing," says John Beribak. "The shipyards are gone, the Ford plant is gone, the steel plant is gone." His voice cracks as he describes the town he's lived in his whole life.

"I mean, I grew up across the street from the steel plant when there was 15,000 people working there," he says. "My dad worked there. I worked there when I got out of the Air Force. It's just sad."

Uniquely American

The American Dream is an implicit contract that says if you play by the rules, you'll move ahead. It's a faith that is almost unique to this country, says Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center.

"When Germans or French are asked the same questions about whether it's within all of our power to get ahead, or whether our success is really determined by forces outside our control, most German and French respondents say, 'No, success is really beyond our control,' " Dimock says.

In the wake of the recession, that sentiment is now growing in this country.

"I think the American Dream for the average man doesn't exist any more," retiree Linden Strandberg says on a recent visit to the Smithsonian American History museum in Washington, D.C.

The Strandberg family story has been repeated millions of times in the last century. His parents immigrated from Sweden in the 1920s for economic opportunity. Linden grew up and worked at the phone company in Chicago for 35 years.

"I wasn't smart enough to go to college, so I wanted to get a steady job with decent pay," he says. "With my overtime I was able to buy a house, take trips to Europe and visit relatives there. I don't think a young person — woman or man — coming out of high school now could ever achieve that."

This sense that the contract is threatened intrigued political scientist John Kenneth White of Catholic University. "We have a lack of confidence by many Americans in the future of the country," says White, who edited a collection of essays called The American Dream in the 21st Century.

This crisis of confidence is not just because the economy is bad. In fact, the American Dream flowered at a time when the economy was at its worst.

"If you go back to the Great Depression where the American Dream originated as a concept, strikingly enough, there was still hope and optimism about the future," White says.

A Long History Of Optimism

In 1931, author James Adam wrote a book with the working title The American Dream. Ultimately it was retitled The Epic of America. Historians say that text marked the American Dream's emergence into the spotlight.

Yet the underlying themes had been bubbling up through the American psyche for much longer. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald opened his iconic novel The Great Gatsby with these lines:

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

The American motifs of growth and optimism even stretch back as far as the Constitutional Convention.

"The chair in which Washington sat had a sun, and the question was asked, is it rising or setting?" White says. "And the framers answered that question by saying it's a rising sun."

At that time, the American Dream was not available to everyone in the country. Black people were kept as slaves. Women were not allowed to vote or own property.

The story of the 20th century is one of the American Dream gradually being extended to more of the population.

Composer Aaron Copland, a gay Jewish son of immigrants, captured the expansive optimism of the American Dream in 1942, in his "Fanfare for the Common Man."

Six years later, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson expressed her faith that blacks will "Move on Up a Little Higher." The single became an overnight sensation — the best-selling gospel record to date.

In 2009, President Obama looked back across those decades as he took the oath of office. He described his inauguration as a fulfillment of the American Dream, where "a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."

While Obama embodies the American Dream in a powerful and specific way, this is a theme that every president and would-be president adopts in some fashion.

On the campaign trail, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney talks about how his father grew up poor. "Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of a state where he once sold paint from the trunk of his car," he says.

"Only in America" is a universal phrase in domestic politics. The challenge for politicians today is to convince Americans that the phrase still applies — that hard work and dedication still guarantee success.

Skepticism Grows

That faith is faltering, especially among the poor, says pollster Dimock. "Lower income whites and lower income African-Americans are more skeptical about the American Dream. Higher income blacks are pretty optimistic about the American Dream, as are higher income whites."

As cynical as this may seem, the numbers suggest that the people most likely to believe in the American Dream today are those who've already attained it.

"There's a certain truth to that," Dimock says. "There are people struggling. And what you're seeing especially right now are people who feel like they played the game the right way, like they did what they were supposed to do, and the rules they thought they could play by and be OK have changed on them somehow."

Economic statistics validate those feelings. According to the Census Bureau, an average man working full time made 10 percent less money last year than he did a decade ago.

The question for this country is, can the dream be restored? And if it can't, what does that mean for our identity as Americans? Or, as the poet Langston Hughes put it, "What happens to a dream deferred?"

The answers to those last two questions the NPR reporter asks are of course, no, and we're fucked. That ought to be plainly obvious to anyone who is really paying attention to what is going on in this country. At this point it really is only hopeless optimism combined with the endless media propaganda and the atomization of our society that is thus far keeping the lid on as far as the eruption of mass social unrest. As this article indicates, that optimism is slowly fading for a whole lot of people.


Bonus: From my You Tube channel, a backhanded musical tribute to the American Dream

The Exurbs Are Slowly Dying

"The project of the American suburbs is the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." - James Kunstler

Well, Jim, you have to be feeling pretty good about the recent vindication you received from an article that appeared last Friday in USA Today:

Almost three years after the official end of a recession that kept people from moving and devastated new suburban subdivisions, people continue to avoid counties on the farthest edge of metropolitan areas, according to Census estimates out today.

The financial and foreclosure crisis forced more people to rent. Soaring gas prices made long commutes less appealing. And high unemployment drew more people to big job centers. As the nation crawls out of the downturn, cities and older suburbs are leading the way.

Population growth in fringe counties nearly screeched to a halt in the year that ended July 1, 2011. By comparison, counties at the core of metro areas are growing faster than the nation as a whole.

"There's a pall being cast on the outer edges," says John McIlwain, senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute, a non-profit development group that promotes sustainability. "The foreclosures, the vacancies, the uncompleted roads. It's uncomfortable out there. The glitz is off."

The fucking glitz? Pardon me for being so crude, but I live in a metropolitan area that is ringed by a huge band of exurbs that has been exploding over the past couple of decades. It is fucking UGLY, a vast wasteland of bulldozed fields and woodlands, tract homes, strip malls, megachurches, ribbons of new asphalt and horrendous traffic. What compels people to move to such godawful soulless places just so they have a bigger back yard is absolutely baffling to me.

There is perhaps no other phenomena the so clearly demonstrates just how far we have our collective heads shoved up our asses in this country than the exurbs. Think about it. America's rapid drive towards car-centric suburbification after World War Two was short-sighted enough, but at least then we had the excuse than we had never before experienced an oil shock. Then in the 1970s, we received two major shots across the bow in the form of the 1973 and 1979 Middle East oil supply disruptions. Those should have served as a warning that a automobile-dependent transportation infrastructure was ultimately not sustainable. So what did Spoiled Rotten Nation do in response? As soon as oil prices began to fall, we doubled down on our stupidity by building ever farther flung and even more car dependent communities as well as starting to buy gas hogging minivans and SUVs.

The building of exurbia, in fact, went into overdrive during the housing bubble years this past decade leading right up to the next major round of oil shocks. Instead of putting the brakes on sprawl as we were so clearly warned that we should do, we petulantly stepped on the accelerator and ran headlong right into the brick wall of peak oil and permanently high gasoline prices.

Nevertheless, this being a mainstream media article, it fudges on sounding any kind of warning about our real predicament:

"This could be the end of the exurb as a place where people aspire to go when they're starting their families," says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. "So many people have been burned by this. … First-time home buyers, immigrants and minorities took a real big hit."

During the '70s gas shortage and the '80s savings and loan industry crisis, some predicted the end of suburban sprawl. It didn't happen then, but current trends could change the nation's growth patterns permanently.

Aging Baby Boomers, who have begun to retire, and Millennials, who are mostly in their teens and 20s, are more inclined to live in urban areas, McIlwain says.

"I'm not sure we're going to see outward sprawl even if the urge to sprawl continues," he says. "Counties are getting to the point that they don't have the money to maintain the roads, water, sewer. … This is a century of urbanization."

First of all, Mr. McIlwain, the Millennials are not drawn to the cities because of any particular change in the American mindset. They are being drawn there becuase they are graduating from college with massive student loan debts into the worst jobs market since World War Two and thus they cannot AFFORD to buy a fucking house. Secondly, this isn't going to be the "century of urbanization." It is instead going to be the century of decentralization and economic collapse. When the day finally comes that the just-in-time delivery support systems for the urban areas cease functioning, both the exurbs AND the central metro areas are going to become very bad places to be for anybody.


Bonus: "How come...I can't tell...the free world from a living hell?"

Generation FAIL: Baby Boomers Suffering In The Great Recession

I'm actually not one who puts very much stock into generational stereotypes. It seems to me that arbitrarily grouping a set of people born over a two decade period who come from the full spectrum of backgrounds and experiences to make generalized statements about their attitudes and behaviors is not terribly valuable. When considering the Baby Boomers, for example, the formative experiences of someone born right after World War Two who spent their college age years either fighting in Vietnam, protesting it or getting deferments going to business school, and someone born the year after Kennedy was shot who didn't come of age until Reagan's first term were about as different as digging the Beatles versus Duran Duran. Not to mention that a suburban kid raised in a big house on a leafy cul-de-sac was always going to have very little in common with a black or Hispanic kid raised in an inner city high rise housing project, even if they happened to be born in the exact same year.

I wrote the disclaimer above because the article I'm excerpting below from the Toledo Blade leans heavily on such generational stereotypes. Despite that flaw, it is still quite enlightening:

For most of their lives, baby boomers knew an America ascendant, a nation that incited their occasional fury but rarely let them down.

Fueled by new ideals and rock and roll, they created a counterculture, protested the Vietnam War, and marched for civil rights.

Through it all, the boomers radiated optimism, and why not? After swelling the college ranks, they moved up with each new degree and contact, becoming the yuppies who laid the foundation of the business world.

Then came the Great Recession, a calamity emerging as another defining moment for a fabled generation.

The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression hurt young and old, but it saved its harshest slights for the children of the baby boom, the demographic bulge of Americans born from 1946 to 1964.

Seemingly overnight, members of a generation once called forever young have been made to feel overpaid, overexperienced, and overaged. Baby boomers suffered layoffs and setbacks at record rates in recent years.

Many will never fully recover, having lost too much too late in life.

That collective sigh gathering in Ohio and other graying states comes from a vaunted generation suddenly fearful and bewildered.

Unemployment spiked for all age groups in the recession, and it remains highest for young workers. But displaced baby boomers face their own special purgatory. Once they are unemployed, older workers are out of work longer. And the older they are, the harder it is to get back to hard-earned careers.

Many a Woodstock alumnus has slipped into the era's most dreaded classification: long-term unemployed.

A recent national survey found that job seekers 55 and older had been out of work a numbing 56 weeks, which is 20 weeks longer than the average furlough for younger job seekers. More than half of older job-seekers were considered long-term unemployed, having been out of work six months or more.

Throw in plummeting home values, diminished 401(k) plans, and threats to Medicare and Social Security, and it's no wonder many baby boomers now look warily toward retirement and question what happened to their world.

"We find ourselves at the vortex of a perfect storm," said Frederick Lynch, a sociologist who forecasts a contentious future for boomers in his book One Nation under AARP: The Fight Over Medicare, Social Security and America's Future.

Anticipating steady labor and a comfortable retirement, Mr. Lynch said, his generation met globalization, outsourcing, game-changing technology, and a preference for younger workers.

As they face layoffs and rejection, some older workers blame age discrimination. Others cite simple economics. Experienced workers tend to make higher salaries and put stress on the company health-care plan, making them fatter targets for downsizing employers.

Older workers are also, according to the stereotype, slower to embrace new technology and new ways of doing things. That can make landing a job far tougher for an unemployed 50-year-old, especially with younger generations swelling the crowd.

Dallas Davis, an unemployed sheet-metal worker in Cincinnati, took computer classes while looking for work and touted his new skills at job interviews. "But the job market is so different now," Mr. Davis, 53, said. "Instead of being one of five people, you're one of 100, or one of thousands going for the job."

For many of the nation's 78 million boomers, retirement planning has been replaced by crisis planning. Those without jobs are scrambling to find one. Those with jobs are hanging on tight.

"I think we're going through this huge fundamental change," Mr. Lynch said. "We thought we would have our parents' lives. Then came this earthquake that many people still don't see."

The article continues on with a number of interviews with different hard up Boomers who have been slammed by the economic crash, but you get the idea.

Putting aside the silly generational stereotypes, there is one important observation that needs to be made about those Americans who were born between 1946 and 1964. These are people who had the amazing good fortune to be raised and come of age within the greatest period of economic expansion ever seen in human history. Yes, some were born into abject poverty, but during this period climbing up the ladder out of destitution was also less difficult than at any other historical time and place.

My point is that even the youngest Boomers had approximately a quarter-century of working adulthood during this time of unparalleled plenty. The fact that so many of them have become destitute so quickly now that the debt fueled bubble has popped for good speaks huge volumes about the average person's ability to prepare, plan and, yes, save for the future.

Please realize, however, that I'm not singling out the Boomers as if they are at all inferior in character and judgement to those who came either before them or after them. I'm sure that given another 20 years of such prosperity my peeps, Generation X, wouldn't be any better off on average were the crisis to hit as we are getting ready to retire. Though most Boomers will never recognize the fact, they won the generational lottery, and the prize was that they got to live most of their lives during a time of fantastic cheap oil fueled abundance the likes of which the world has never seen nor will ever see again. That so many of them squandered that great gift...well, chalk it up to human nature, I guess.


Bonus: Yes, Boomers, now it really is the beginning of a New Age, just not the one most of you were expecting as you reach your golden years

More Seniors Using Reverse Mortgages to Raise Cash, And At A Younger Age

Yet another sign of the economic distress being felt in the real world beyond the manipulated stock markets was seen in this story that appeared on Friday on CNBC:

Finding themselves financially strapped, more seniors at an earlier age are trying to get reverse mortgages on their homes in order to survive, according to a new report.

The study says the percentage of people aged 62 to 64 applying for reverse mortgages has increased 15 percent since 1999.

The reason for the dramatic upswing among 'younger' seniors is simple, the report concludes: They need the money.

"The average age for taking out reverse mortgages has been around 71," explains Sandy Timmerman, director of the MetLife Market Institute who conducted the survey with the National Council on Aging.

"But with job losses, higher debt and living costs, more and more of the 'younger' seniors are looking at reverse mortgages as a way to pay their bills and keep their homes," Timmerman adds. "It shows the devastation some seniors have gone through since the financial downturn."

Reverse mortgages—which allow homeowners to borrow against the value of their homes—have been around since the early 1960's, but have grown in popularity. TV commercials with celebrities like Henry Winkler, Robert Wagner and Fred Thompson promoting reverse mortgages, are rampant during weekends and late night viewing hours.

But whether it's the ads, the financial necessity, or both—reverse mortgages have become attractive to more seniors. In 2010 alone, more than 80,000 Americans over 62 years old finalized a reverse mortgage. That's up from 25,000 in 1995.

'It's not surprising that more seniors are doing this at an earlier age," says Karl Byrd, CFP, vice president at Security Ballew Wealth Management. "We live in a time when people are not planning for their retirement or can even get out of debt. Some seniors can't even buy groceries right now."

I love that little "blame the victim" statement right there from Vice President Karl Byrd of Security Ballew Wealth Management. Have some people foolishly failed to save for retirement despite the fact that they could have easily afforded to do so? Undoubtedly. Are there plenty of others who saw their nest eggs kicked in the balls by the housing and stock market crashes perpetrated by parasitic Wall Street scum? Without a doubt.

The article continues on to describe the pain many seniors are feeling that is forcing them into reverse mortgages:

Another warning signal—reverse loans can use up all or most of the equity and leave seniors with fewer assets as they grow older. And the loans are geared toward older seniors. The older someone is, the more credit is available. That's why most reverse mortgages have been taken out by people in their 70's. That is until now.

"Weaker economic conditions are pushing 'younger seniors' to go for any amount of money they can get at an earlier age," says Timmerman.

"The people we surveyed in the younger age range applying for the loans were clear about their needs for financial help," Timmerman says. "They didn't seem like they could wait."

At a time when more seniors in the U.S. are facing poverty—some 15.9 percent are considered poor— it's not surprising to see the move to reverse mortgages, says Mark Goldman.

"I saw a an older woman at the drug store the other day, asking her pharmacist to please cut the costs of her medicine," Goldman adds. "When you see seniors facing rising health care costs, and as they lose jobs and see 401(k) returns shrink, it's going to be tough not to look at a reverse loan."

And of course, those who do will have very little, if any, wealth to pass on tho their younger heirs who may themselves be struggling with massive student loan debts, underwater mortgages or job losses. As a result, more and more middle class American families will gradually see their wealth permanently evaporate as the downward spiral resulting from the death of or cheap oil-based economy slowly strangles the tattered remnants of the American Dream.


Bonus: Go back to selling your political snake oil, Fred, you cretinous, Ronald Reagan wannabee

Housing Crash Porn: America Is Becoming A Nation Of Renters

Remember all of that inane blather from President George Bush the Lesser back during the height of the housing bubble years about the "ownership society?" It was essentially U.S. government policy back then that everyone who could fog a mirror should be given a mortgage to buy their own house. Like pretty much every policy Bush touted, the "ownership society" crashed and burned and now lies in a smoking ruin as home sales remain mired near their post crash lows.

So what are all of those people who aren't buying houses doing these days? Well, if they aren't young adults still living at home with their parents, they are actually renting. Here is Slate with the details:

If you've been apartment hunting in the last few months in the U.S., you've probably noticed that many apartments seem overpriced. And with good reason: America is currently experiencing something of an apartment shortage.

According to Slate, "We’re now facing a perfect storm of demand, thanks to a growing population of empty nesters with busted 401(k)s looking to downsize and the huge backlog of twentysomethings who still need their first place."

More and more, Americans are shying away from the housing market, which has been volatile in recent years thanks to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Rather than risk investing in a home that might lose its value, many Americans feel more secure living in an apartment setting.

Okay, here is where I have to interrupt for a moment, because I would really like to know what basis the author of this piece has for asserting that the reason so many more Americans are renting rather than buying is because they "feel more secure living in an apartment setting." There is no reason to believe that people who can still afford to buy a house won't do so, since home ownership still, despite the housing crash, represents the very cornerstone of the ever more tatttered American Dream. It is far more likely that people cannot AFFORD to buy, especially given the tightened post-crash lending standards.

But, please continue:

The collapse in house-building since 2006 has been massive. Meanwhile, the population has kept on growing. The only reason we have enough space for everyone to live in is that so many broke young people are living with their parents. According to a recent Goldman Sachs analytic note, during the past four years, America has added 2.7 million “shadow” households—young people living with parents or siblings who under normal conditions we’d expect to be heading their own households.
The cause of this decline in household formation isn’t mysterious: It’s the joblessness, stupid. But now that the economy’s back to creating jobs, people are going to want to get places of their own.

That’s going to mean even more demand for rental apartments at a time when vacancy rates are at their lowest level since the dot-com era. During ’90s and aughts, we consistently built fewer buildings with five units or more than were normal in the ’70s and ’80s. The country has been on a decades-long drought of large-apartment-building construction. We’re now facing a perfect storm of demand, thanks to a growing population of empty nesters with busted 401(k)s looking to downsize and the huge backlog of twentysomethings who still need their first place.

That sentence I bolded at the end of the first paragraph is a good indicator of what is really happening during this so-called "recovery." Yes, jobs are being created, but they are mostly lower paying positions without good benefits. If that were not true, the people who have been hired would no doubt be out there looking to buy rather than rent. It's a cruel irony that those same folks are being squeezed by a shortage of apartments when there are so many vacant houses out there.


Bonus: Even during the height of the hippie years, owning your home was a dream worth singing a song about

U.S. Job Quality Crashes During The "Recovery"

I've asserted here at TDS a few times that the quality of the jobs being created during our great and glorious economic "recovery" on average pay less and provide fewer benefits that the jobs that were destroyed during the 2008-2009 timeframe. Now comes the confirmation in a story published this week by Market Watch:

U.S. employment is still down almost 6 million jobs since the Great Recession began, and industry growth has been uneven during the recovery.

A July report from the National Employment Law Project, a New York–based advocacy group, found that while employment losses during the recession were concentrated in midwage occupations, gains during the early part of the recovery were greatest in lower-wage occupations. During the early recovery, there was relatively large employment growth in lower-wage jobs such as retail salespeople and office clerks, compared with losses in higher-wage occupations such as police officers, first-line supervisors, and managers of construction trades and extraction workers.

With almost 13 million unemployed workers, competition is intense, and some workers with new jobs are taking cuts in pay and responsibilities. Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, studied employment in the Great Recession, and found that job losers who found new positions earned on average 17.5% less in the new job.

Not one to nitpick there, Professor Farber, but "job losers" is a rather unfortunate term to use when describing these people.

But wait, lower wages aren't the only problem:

Good jobs are associated with good benefits, said Austin Nichols, an economist at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“There’s a widening gap between the haves and the have-nots,” Nichols said.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, those covered by health insurance declined to 83% in 2009 from 86% in 1999. Over that time period, those with employment-based coverage fell to 56% from 64%...

Given the staggeringly high price of health insurance these days, it is pretty much a given that the 8% of the workforce that has lost its employer provided health care has a lot less money to spend on other things if they are paying the full amount themselves. Or maybe they are not paying at all, which means they are just one serious health problem away from bankruptcy and destitution.

Nevertheless, hope still springs eternal, especially if you are a Harvard economist who doesn't actually have to work for a living:

The economy is just starting its jobs recovery, and it will take years for the full impact of the current administration’s policies to manifest in the labor market in areas such as health care and infrastructure, said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University. While Republicans deride President Barack Obama’s record, the economy would be worse without federal stimulus, Katz contended.

“We probably have several million more jobs today than we would have had,” Katz said. “Given the direction that things were going, I think the administration’s policies played an important role in preventing something that looked like the Great Depression. No matter how bad things are now it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”

See, all it took was for the country to borrow over $5 trillion it didn't have in just over three years to bring us all the way back to where we are slowly creating shitty jobs with no benefits. Of course, the author of this piece didn't bother to ask the esteemed Professor Katz what will happen when the day comes that the federal government can no longer afford to engage is such wild reckless deficit spending. Being a Harvard economist automatically shields you from ever being asked to come down out of your ivory tower and actually observe how things are in the real world.

So this is where we stand today: an anemic economic recovery purchased with trillions of dollars borrowed from the future that will never be repaid, with skyrocketing gasoline and food prices putting ever more pressure on the poor souls who even if they have been lucky enough to find another job are making far less money than they used to. The Great Muddle continues on, as clueless economists like Lawrence Katz cheerlead for the rearranging of the deck chairs on The Titanic.


Bonus: This fucking job

Will the Culture War Soon Turn Hot?

Perhaps the most galling trend to yet take hold of the obscene clown show that America’s national politics has become is the sudden widespread assault against women’s reproductive rights. Abortion has been always been a hot button issue going back to the days of Rowe vs. Wade, of course, reflecting the religious right’s frustration at being unable to overturn the ruling despite the country’s rightward political shift over the past four decades. But until recently, most Republican politicians with national ambitions were smart enough to be content with merely pandering on the issue, knowing that actually repealing abortion rights and returning the country to the days when scared young women routinely died in illegal back alley clinics was a political loser.

The recent crumbling of the restraint on the part of the Republican Party, however, has been shocking in its breadth and scope. No longer content with just the occasional demagoguery on the issue, Republican controlled legislative bodies around the country have launched an all out assault in various ways, politics apparently be damned. What’s worse is that they have also felt emboldened to go beyond just attacking abortion to even going after birth control. It’s as if the party which a generation ago was still almost universally represented by white males has decided that now that it has plenty of prominent women in its highest ranks, those women and all others should go back to the days of being perpetually barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

This insanity taking hold of the Republican Party was dramatically illustrated yet again during the most recent presidential debate. Here is Talking Points Memo with the details:

On Wednesday, contraception became the latest topic to raise the ire of conservative debate goers.

During a CNN-sponsored Republican presidential debate in Arizona, the crowd booed wildly at the mention of birth control.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to attack the moderators as he had done in almost every other debate in this campaign cycle.

“Not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide,” Gingrich complained.

CNN moderator John King neglected to note that several organization have debunked the claim that President Barack Obama ever supported a so-called “infanticide” provision in an Illinois measure that would have required doctors to administer medical treatment to fetuses that survived an abortion.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney called the Obama administration’s decision to have all health plans cover contraception for women an “attack on religious conscience.”

“I don’t think we’ve seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we’ve seen under Barack Obama,” the candidate explained.

For his part, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum defended his earlier remarks about “the dangers of contraception.”

“The crowd booed wildly at the mention of birth control.” Just like when, in earlier debates, they cheered at the idea of letting a comatose man without health insurance die, or cheered at the idea of U.S. soldiers pissing on the bodies of dead Afghans, or cheered Rick Perry’s reckless execution record in Texas, or cheered the removal of restrictions on child labor, or cheered the idea of Americans waterboarding prisoners.

By now a pattern is emerging that should make any thinking person’s blood run cold. As the real economic conditions in this country have slowly deteriorated, the mood on the far right of the political spectrum has been gradually turning darker and meaner.

Many mainstream pundits would no doubt say that the bad temper of the right wing is similar now to how it was during Bill Clinton’s first term in office, which saw the rise of the militia movements around the country. They would no doubt add that all it took was one shocking event (the Oklahoma City bombing) and a rapidly improving economy from 1995 forward through the rest of the decade to largely defuse that anger. There have been periodic bouts of right wing demagoguery throughout our history, they would additionally assert, but in the end American politics always corrects itself and sanity eventually returns to our public discourse.

As a student of history, I completely agree with that as an interpretation of history. Even Joseph McCarthy was eventually dethroned and discredited for taking his attacks too far after politically terrorizing Washington for the first half of the 1950s.

But, and here is the rub: it isn’t 1956 anymore, or even 1996. The difference between the bout of extreme right wing anger we see today and those of previous generations is that there will be no economic recovery to create the conditions that will allow a restoration of that supposed sanity to our national politics. The beginning of the long era of permanent economic contraction means that the root cause of this explosion in right wing fury, severe economic distress, is just going to be exacerbated from this point on as people continue to lose their jobs and gasoline prices soar to previously unknown heights.

Those who dismiss the idea that true fascism could ever take hold in the United States point out that our representative democracy has far deeper roots than say, Weimar Germany, in which democracy was artificially imposed on an authoritarian culture in the wake of a massive military defeat. This is, of course, yet another accurate assessment of history. The problem with putting too much stock in history, however, is that sometimes it does NOT adhere to the old cliche and repeat itself, but instead begins to write its own new narrative, such as when the Bolsheviks seized control of Imperial Russia.

The end of economic growth in not just the United States but the entire world is a crisis unprecedented in human history. There will be no eventual return to normalcy this time. How exactly it will all play out is anyone’s guess, but this writer’s guess is that one thing we may well see in the near future is America’s long running culture war begin to turn hot, erupting into widespread violence which will then threaten to engulf us all.


Bonus: This little ditty from the dawn of the culture wars describes the forming battle lines remarkably well. Too bad it was recorded by a guy who eventually switched sides