Pessimism about America's Future

Here are a few bits from a thoughtful post by Barry Ritholtz on his The Big Picture blog.

Why are people so angry?

Well, as the Newsweek article points out:

Corporate earnings have soared to an all-time high. Wall Street is gaudy and confident again. But the heyday hasn’t come for millions of Americans. Unemployment hovers near 9 percent, and the only jobs that truly abound, according to Labor Department data, come with name tags, hairnets, and funny hats (rather than high wages, great benefits, and long-term security). The American Dream is about having the means to build a better life for the next generation. But as President Obama acknowledged at a town-hall meeting in May, “a lot of folks aren’t feeling that [possibility] anymore.”

By way of background, America – like most nations around the world – decided to bail out their big banks instead of taking the necessary steps to stabilize their economies (see this, this and this). As such, they all transferred massive debts (from fraudulent and stupid gambling activities) from the balance sheets of the banks to the balance sheets of the country.

The nations have then run their printing presses nonstop in an effort to inflate their way out of their debt crises, even though that effort is doomed to failure from the get-go.

Quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve is obviously causing food prices to skyrocket worldwide (and see this, this and this).

But the fact is that every country in the world that can print money – i.e. which is not locked into a multi-country currency agreement like the Euro – has been printing massive quantities of money. See these charts.

Moreover, the austerity measures which governments worldwide are imposing to try to plug their gaping deficits (created by throwing trillions at their banks) are causing people world-wide to push back.

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Postscript: Violence Is Not the Answer

As I’ve repeatedly noted, I am against violence for a number of reasons, the most important being that people advocating violence have probably not thought through George Orwell’s analysis that:

Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.

While I agree on the urgency of fundamentally changing things so that our nation (and world) aren’t driven over a cliff, I believe that – instead of violence – other methods must be found.

Take that energy of being willing to die to protect your and your family’s freedoms, and put it into demanding change in an effective manner.

Go read the whole post and get the embedded links. It is well worth your time.

Violence isn't the answer. People need to vote their pocketbooks. Throw out the rascals and put people in power who actually care about the bottom 90%, people that want to grow the economy, people that want a better future for their kids. The elites in place right now live in gated communities and plan to flee the minute things get tough. They have no commitment to America.

Sadly the electorate hasn't figured out they've been played for fools for 40 years by right wing politicians who sell the "trickle down economics" and "voodoo economics" and who use "social conservatism" to energize a base to keep right wing nuts in power. But fundamentalist Christianity (aka "social conservatism") is no more of an answer for America than is fundamentalist Muslims are an answer for the Middle East. Instead of selling hate and intolerance, the world needs more charity, love, and kindness. People need to accept variety as the spice of life and not try to cinch everybody up in a hairshirt.

For all those fundamentalists in the US who think there is only "one way" to live, they need to look back to the original 13 colonies. They were the first true "rainbow coalition". Some states were slave states. Some states were founded with a Puritan exclusionist government. Some were founded a havens from persecution. One, New York, was Dutch and not even English at first. These socially divergent colonies coalesced to achieve a greater good through unity. They weren't fundamentalists trying to force everybody to read from the same book.

I get into a tizzy when I read about the idiot right in the US. They have perverted the past, like Sarah Palin with her version of Paul Revere. They have no respect for the truth. They are the ones who have enabled the looting of America by big corporations and the greedy top 1% who keep demanding yet another "tax cut" because the next one will surely boot up the country because everybody knows that wealth "trickles down". Yeah, right.