Those that got -- get more and those that don't -- wont.
Welcome to America's nouveau poor. You might as well sit a spell because the American lifestyle that you've ordered is out of stock...
A work by an anonymous graffiti artist.
Is this America in 2012? I looks like something right out of the George Orwell - 1984 novel or…...................
Something from the former USSR where state stores where always out of stock! That's unless of course your part of the 1% that is!!
Here the British Guardian newspaper during the midterm elections said that the so-called American middle class lifestyle for most people was fake and that was financed by three decades of a debt bubble which has now gone bust. The credit ride of working class folks living a middle class lifestyle is dead and gone. Is this article stating bluntly that it's over? The only remaining question is, will it ever come back? I mean, how long can people ride a wave of endless debt before the ride is over, all while pretending to be middle class? Is that what this British Guardian newspaper article is saying? Well, to that end I offer the quote below and a link to the full article. Please read it and decide for yourself what it says.
(Guardian.co.uk) America's new poor: the end of the middle-class dream
America's middle class is disappearing. A lifestyle sustained for 30 years by rising debt is dissolving as the credit dries up. And the question beyond the crisis is: can it ever come back?
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The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages – and bridging the gap with credit.
And it's over.
In a free-market society the real middle class is always a minority: if your street has a gate and a security camera at the end of it then you are middle class. A real middle-class kid can afford a college education, not a web-based degree. The real middle-class family does not skip meals or find its automobiles trapped in the repair shop because of unpaid bills.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
We've all heard about falling for the American dream. In my view, the picture below depicts somebody falling off the American dream and for anyone who has ever had a nightmare about falling, this will resonate. The picture below depicts one of the fallen in America's class war wherein we are reminded that unlike in Europe, when you fall in America, there's no social safety net to catch you.
Mon Feb 14, 2011 at 06:05 PM CET
Nine Pictures Of The Extreme Income/Wealth Gap+ by davej
How Much Is A Billion?
Some Wall Street types (and others) make over a billion dollars a year –
each year. How much is a billion dollars? How can you visualize an amount
of money so high? Here is one way to think about it: The median income in
the US is around $29,000, meaning half of us make less and half make more.
If you make $29,000 a year, and don’t spend a single penny of it, it will
take you 34,482 years to save a billion dollars. . . . (Please come back
and read the rest of this after you have recovered.)
What Do People Do With SO Much?
Nine Pictures Of The Extreme Income/Wealth Gap
http://www.dailykos.com/...
And this was posted by Lupin.
(New York Times - January 14th 2012)
It’s absurd to dismiss Europe. After all, Norway is richer per capita than the United States. Moreover, according to figures from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, per-capita G.N.P. in France was 64 percent of the American figure in 1960. That rose to 73 percent by 2010. Zut alors! The socialists gained on us!
Meanwhile, they did it without breaking a sweat. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that employed Americans averaged 1,741 hours at work in 2010. In France, the figure was 1,439 hours.
If Europe was as anticapitalist as Americans assume, its companies would be collapsing. But there are 172 European corporations among the Fortune Global 500, compared with just 133 from the United States.
Europe gets some important things right. It has addressed energy issues and climate change far more seriously than America has. It now has more economic mobility than the United States, partly because of strong public education systems. America used to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world; now France and Britain are both ahead of us.
Back in 1960, French life expectancy was just a few months longer than in the United States, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. By 2009, the French were living almost three years longer than we were.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Quote form nyceve's diary:
And if your soul can bear any more, I'll leave you with this.
We know that 45,000 Americans die every year, simply because they don't not have health insurance, and because in the United States healthcare is a privilege not a right.
I've always wondered what happens to a sick American, say someone with a cancer diagnosis, who needs care, but is uninsured.
Here's your answer.
This is the United States of America.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
As an American expat living in the European Union, everyone I see all day, everyday has cradle to grave medical insurance as a human right, to which I note the European Union has a larger population than does the U.S., where they spend about 9% of GNP and cover 100% of the population whereas in America they spend about 16% of GNP and don't cover 59 million people.
To win in America all we have to do is to care about each other & stick together!
If we are looking for change we must look to the Occupy movement to provide that peaceful nonviolent approach to change in helping to elect better progressive politicians to public office. The Occupy movement and the American unions are the last great hope of the American working class dream!!
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