Arianna appeared on PBS' "Newshour" with cohost Gwen Ifill Thursday night to discuss the ongoing "crumbling" of the nation's middle class and the threat of a slide toward "Third World America."
"I know it's a jarring phrase, Gwen, but I chose it deliberately because I felt that we needed a warning," Arianna said. "We needed to sort of sound the alarm about the trajectory we're on, about the middle class crumbling. And the middle class is the foundation, not just of our democracy and our prosperity but our political stability."
There is time to restore that stability, Arianna said, but the nation can't wait much longer. "We really have a certain time, a window during which we can course-correct and turn things around," she said. "And I end the book on an optimistic note that we can do that, but only if we bring a sense of urgency to the undertaking."
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The Tealiban is convinced it is liberal ideology that has brought this loss to our country. They are ready to move farther to the right, take rights away from people they find objectionable, change the Constitution to suit their beliefs, drown the gov't that could protect them from the excesses of the wealthy. I fail to understand how they will help the middle class in any possible fashion.
So unless somehow we can convince the minions that it is in their best interests to develop their democratic (Big D)credentials, there is no middle class.
ALL of that for a bottom of the food chain, 'can't-live-on-that-kind-of-wage-job' for a man who once ran his own business....
I have never been so depressed in my life. I am literally weeks away from being on the streets and I'm feeling pretty well done for. When I started my website for the plight of America's jobless, I had great hopes of at least being tapped to write for some publication. Hasn't happened.
Please visit and make a difference.
http://theincomepoop.wordpress.com
Remember the song, can't remember the name. Has the line: 'Wheelers and dealers, signing and sealing, and letting the chips just fall; ... knowing the price of all things--and the value of nothing at all."
Remember that: price is not value. I'm in the same boat. Give what you know is important, needed. Expect no reward.
I'm a writer too, hoping to give. And survive.
Hope you can make it.
As for the middle class, there have always been those who directly served the master class. They were house servants (as opposed to us field hands), professionals, managers and overseers...in short, facilitators for the masters. Today we see these people rewarded for good and faithful service with high salaries and golden retirements, above all with enough wealth to ensure their admission to the class of owners and masters...I have no particular use for the middle class, and do not regret their demise if, in fact, that is in the offing. There will always, I think, be some form of it.
The losers in this game should understand that their own accepted capitalist philosophy demands their "destruction": the owners are simply cutting expensive overhead, getting "lean and mean", doing more with less (and all the other BS slogans you've accepted without question as long as it was happening to the working class). Depends on whose ox is gored, doesn't it?
How the rich have prospered at the expense of the middle class and poor.
http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#now-read-16#ixzz0yihZxPsU
Gwen has become a very boring interviewer. Apparently she has spent too much time at public radio.
You live in a nation that has absolutely no reliable justice system.
Have you had enough yet?
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/09/holdren-uses-free-market-to-get-back-to-stone-age
And why does Obama want energy rates to skyrocket? Is that concern for the poor and the middle class?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4
Yeah, I thought so. The enviro-loonies want to stop industrial development in the US and are perfectly happy with impoverishing us all to achieve their dubious environmental goals.
Well guess what? China and other developing nations are not as stupid. If you're happy with China being the world's superpower then I guess there's no problem.
Joanne Nova has no credentials to write any kind of essay about macroeconomics. Just because she wrote a book does not confer legitimacy or her premise. Anone with more than three functioning brain cells can realize that the current economic model is not viable. An ever-increasing world population coupled with a finite supply of natural resources is unsustainable in it's current configuration of "buy one, use it up, throw it away and buy a new one. What must be done is to "de-construct" that model and substitute a new model that is centered on renewable resources, such as wind, solar and geothermal.
There is only so much fossil fuel available and when that is gone, it's gone forever. In our ever-more-desperate quest for fossil fuels, we are now getting near the bottom of the barrel by mining tar sands, the dirtiest of all fossil technologies. From an energy-generational standpoint, these are the least efficient means of energy generation, requiring more energy input for unit of output.
Your right-wing dialectics reveals your bias. "...why does Obama want energy rates to skyrocket?" is a typical red herring that you right-wingers employ. President Obama wants the true costs of energy to be visible in the marketplace so that the middle class can see how the fossil fuel industry is ripping us off. Subsidies to the Oil companies, the costs of war (blood and treasure) to protect vital oil sources in the middle east; all those are not perceived in the price at the pump. Perhaps if we realized that the true cost of a gallon of gas is closer to $15 than $3.50, we might realize that we have to make changes TODAY, so that there will be energy available TOMRROW.
And, yet, China is very smart about energy. China is investing over $793 billion over the next ten years and at the end of that process, China will not be dependent on oil, having made the necessary investment in renewable resources. Unless we change our approach and get away from fossil fuels, China will indeed by the world's superpower and we will have only our own shortsightedness to blame.
FWIW
So fossil fuel energy should not be subsidized but "clean" energy should be subsidized even though it's not viable?
Your claims that we are nearing "peak oil" are debatable and oil reserves are not all going to dry up overnight so there will be a natural transition to other energy sources as demand and supply dictate.
exmate, MD, MBA
More? Stop whatever economic and political behaviors you do that prop up, legitimize, feed the corporate/military/industrial/financial parasites. Boycott exploitation-driven, serfdom-cultivating mass consumption-based "e-con job-conomies; ignore "too big to fail" government, corporations, institutions, etc. Basically abandon the dominant paradigm's artificial status quo and you'll be able to watch it dwindle into irrelevancy.
In place of that travesty, capable people can set up and manage alternative, sustainable community systems. Community-based health care; community-supported agriculture; community public works; community-based education/mentoring; professional and skilled apprenticeships; small-scale community-based energy production; community constructed housing; communitywide bartering, banking and currency systems [Ithaca, NY's "time-dollars" model?] + the production of myriad other goods and services we need.
What's the model? In part, the relatively self-sustaining political, social and material economies of the (in retrospect) brilliant Western Hemisphere-based Native Tribal cultures; the better-managed Medieval European towns and cities (which were fairly small by "modern" standards) the more successful settlements of colonial US days, and the better examples of small town cultures of the 19th and early 20th century US.
We don't need to invent anything new. We know enough to combine from each of the "source" examples what works, thus improve existing systems in humanity-sustaining, Earth-respecting and rational ways.