In itself this graph tells two stories:
The percentages ("Hey it's not as bad as the late fifties!")
The Numbers ("Nope it's worse, especially now that we also calculate medical expenses etc")
If we measure from the 1950s, never have there been so many people in the US living in poverty. Mind you, I have based my two poorly rendered graphs on data from the National Poverty Center.
There is no shame in being poor. However, it is terribly impractical both for living a good life and for being competitive as a nation. Have a look and see what poverty does for health. Now look at what it does for education.
Boy, am I making a big fuss about this?
Well, yes. Health and Education are key pillars for a nation to maintain its competitiveness in the Global Economy.
Other pillars are well-functioning Private and Public Institutions, Infrastructure, Market Size (Domestic/International) and others. I am not doing a lecture here, but I would like to make the point that for a country to be competitive, it must have its basics in order.
And these seem out of whack currently, more so for the US than for Europe though Europe is learning quickly how to destroy its health and education infrastructure.
Let's look at this from another angle: the middle class is disappearing.
Having a middle class is important. Some may think it is so bourgeois, but that's just it! Having a middle class is 'increasingly looked upon as a precondition of stability in the social structures, as a means of softening social inequalities, as a way of retaining the status quo, as an instrument of achieving confidence in the future'.
I didn't have to think here but this is what you get: social stability, less aggravation over wealth inequality since middle class is a means to upwards mobility, a more relaxed way of being meaning that you can hang loose, and confidence in the future.
All this seems to have been taken away. Not given away, taken away.
So we now see the reason that the Occupy movement is not very defined as it points out an incredibly complex set of parameters that have brought us to where we are now.
Now the question is: how to move to a better place? I guess that one thing to do is to move away from hack-block austerity. And listen to Einstein:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
This has been tried again and again: trickle down economics, and it hasn't worked for a variety of reasons. In my view mostly because it was ideological in nature and did not take into account factors like companies not investing nationally but off-shoring internationally, increasing government corruption, the negative impact of social and income inequality on national competitiveness, and so on and so on.
This doesn't mean that government can do all the work like FDR once proposed. Right now, the government just does not have the money. But things will need to be fixed, and fast.
The trouble with social unrest is that even when people try to be non-violent, the message they bring may cause other people to feel threatened and respond with violence. This may trigger real revolt or cause the nation to strike. Worst case: the country becomes a dictatorship.
People need to get started at disentangling the web that has been woven over years. All the strands need to be taken apart, government needs to do what it was designed to do, banks and corporations need to start working at recreating the country, which means that shareholder value for the coming ten years does not need to soar (I believe this is an important one), and economies need to realize that there is a time for growth and a time for relaxation: as I pointed out, there is a fine line between too much and too little regulation and valid representatives of the people must set the boundaries for businesses and banks to operate to help restore this world. This also means that everybody does what needs to happen at this moment to make sure we don't end up like this.
And this means that all sides need to give up a sacred little thing: that pointing finger.
Sure, Marx was right and Das Kapital as shown us the root of all evil. Have we read it?
Sure, Adams was right and his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the sexiest thing next to Pamela Anderson. Is it as up to date?
Occupy protesters are hippies! They use drugs! They do...
Police brutality! Bankers are nazis! They do...
The finger (pointing and occasionally middle) needs to go if we want to find a way out of this. We have the challenge of a lifetime:
- To save our sanity
- To save our selves
- To save our planet
- To save our children
- To save our souls
Time to get to work dudes and dudettes
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