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Edited on Wed Jan-27-10 03:18 PM by Tom Rinaldo
An untenable economic future is the problem, and while ongoing massive deficits could lead us to that state someday they do not currently pose our gravest economic threat. That threat is a recovery from the Great Recession in which most Americans never really recover. That threat is an ever increasing pool of job applicants and an ever shrinking pool of good paying jobs to apply for. That threat is the collapse of the American Middle Class, that abiding source of hope and stability in a world where most people are less fortunate than us. For a decade or more Americans have watched this moment approaching us like a slow train rolling, but now the gate crossing lights are all flashing red.
It used to be that belonging to the middle class in America meant being economically comfortable in an upwardly mobile society, where the flat out poor struggled to enter the working class, and the working class aspired to join the middle class. There was always a strong element of myth to that picture, but at least some truth also, enough to keep the myth alive and most people believing in a real chance for a brighter future, no matter how dark the present tense.
We were taught to have faith in American ingenuity and the genius of our competitive free market system, which had bestowed greatness on America, and riches to our people. Americas leading brand name products were highly valued around the world, and typically made in America. For the most part Americas companies were American then, and their well being was linked in great part to the well being of a strong American middle class, who were ready and able to consume the products that they made in America. How long ago that all seems now.
When America suffered the Great Depression we were blanketed by a dark cloud that covered the globe, and Americans suffered along with the people of many other nations. But while America suffered that Great Depression the potential was always evident that better days could and even should lie before us. We were a still young and rising nation with abundant oil reserves and a technological lead over the rest of the planet, especially in the wake of World War II which was almost exclusively fought on other nation’s soil, leaving all of our natural competitors in shambles.
We don't live in a world that looks like that any longer. Asia is rising, India is rising, and parts of South America are starting to stir also. Europe as well has regained much of its lost traction. But most of all, America is not the same as it was a half century ago. Increasingly the great American companies of yesteryear are no longer owned and/or controlled by Americans, and their products are increasingly foreign made. Far more meaningful than that though is this; the American middle class is rapidly ceasing to be the consumer market of choice for the corporations that we once thought of as American. They don't need our skills to make their products, they don't need our land to base their operations in, and they increasingly don't need us to be their primary customers either. They no longer need for us to prosper.
Nor do they much longer need for their earnings to help maintain the health and social fabric of the society that they long called home. The ownership elite can live on any continent now, many nations are available for them to inhabit. They can go wherever they are made most welcome and there find shelter from the slow break down of the fabric of American society. They can always venture out in search of greener fields, but most Americans can not. They are global while we are local, increasingly just another market to invest in or not, depending on the relative rate of their return on those investments. The corporate class holds the cards and those cards are trumping the American middle class.
Big business used to say that a rising tide lifts all boats, but their ships are no longer anchored in American waters. The tide they speak of may not be our own. Government was in part a human invention to counter the avarice of organized gangs wielding enough power to overwhelm any individual standing alone. National governments however are now on a slow slide toward impotency in the face of the giant international economic networks that are today’s large corporations. Instead of being corporate regulators, governments instead are becoming corporate facilitators.
Deficits aren’t the problem in America today; they should better be viewed as a symptom of a national state of denial that has allowed the real threat to America to rapidly advance, virtually unimpeded.
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