There are no opportunities. Conditions are getting worse.

[Panaconda]

Recently I visited my family in my old hometown. They have moved to a different part of town from where we grew up. We grew up in a lower-middle class neighborhood that is now predominantly lower class. I took a drive up through my old neighborhood. It was quite a shock. In a mere ten years the place looks entirely different. The house I used to live in is now boarded up. The streets are beaten and filled with potholes. The people?

Well in the middle of the day all sorts of working age folk were walking around the streets and let me tell you many were looking very rough and destitute. Now I grew up in that "pretty rough" neighborhood" and never felt fear. This time it was different and the sense of desperation was palpable.

There are no opportunities. Conditions are getting worse. The people aren't even considered chattel. They are completely isolated.

They're not even being exploited in sweatshops. They're just being walled in and left to die.

The bottom line is that it now takes fewer workers to feed and house and clothe everybody than there are people needing to be fed and housed and clothed. And until we solve that problem, we will always have an underclass.

Forty years ago, this country was still ready to pay the cost of welfare as a way of keeping the underclass from rioting and burning down the inner cities. But eventually they decided that a beefed up police and prison system was a cheaper way of accomplishing the same thing -- or if not cheaper, at least more effective at scaring the middle class into toeing the line as well.

That neat three-tier system of haves, have-lesses, and have-nothings is now being disrupted by the inability of even the middle class to keep its head above water. But where things will go from here is anybodies guess.

[Brickbat]

1. The destruction of the middle class is the destruction of our nation.

The country is eating itself alive. I'm sorry you had to see your hometown like that.

[Panaconda]

3. I don't even

need or desire to be middle class. But what I saw was something altogether different. Not quite but nearly dystopian. At a stop sign my friend and I were being approached by some fellas and I ran the stop sign and got a move on. I've always felt comfortable in very rough neighborhoods. The whole place seemed ready for an explosion at the same time it seemed to be lost to the world.

[HughBeaumont]

6. The bottom line is you gotta make a living at what you do.

If a person loses that ability, multiplied by tens of millions (which is what's happening now), this whole toothpick sculpture collapses. This is what those on the other side don't seem to get; most of us are in the line of thinking that "Wealthy would be nice. More realistic would encompass being able to make a living at what we do." For the past 30 years, wages have stagnated and not kept up with the cost of living. That's a problem; whether you're talking cities, suburbs, rural areas or projects, this scenario has played out all over the country, turning whole counties into tumbleweeded deserts.

[RKP5637]

2. Excellent posting IMO! I've observed much the same... I've been saying

similar too, "But where things will go from here is anybodies guess." I'm old now and these are the most dangerous times I've ever seen/felt in the US. And the way we are trying to create jobs will NEVER work IMO.

[tularetom]

4. That isn't new in some places

In the farm town where I grew up I was one of the few "middle class" kids. Actually in terms of lifestyle we were probably "working class" but we were so much better off than the majority of folks in town, we probably qualified as middle class in the local hierarchy.

At the top of the pyramid there were the owners of large ranches and a few business owners and attorneys. At the bottom was a large group of farm workers, still largely dust bowl refugees in the early fifties but even then rapidly becoming more and more hispanic. Teachers and small businessmen comprised what passed for a middle class. My dad was a propane distributor so we fell into that group.

I only live about 80 miles away and on the rare occasions when I go there nothing has changed except the farm worker class is almost 100% Hispanic. But the social caste system hasn't changed much in 50 years. Some wealthy land owners, a small and struggling middle class and a ginormous underclass.

[Ron Green]

5. Soak the rich, feed the poor, everybody else tighten our belts.

Gotta happen.

[HereSince1628]

7. Forty years ago, this country was one generation removed from the depression

and a global conflagration caused by three militarily aggressive nations and fear of the anti-capitalist internationalism of a third and fourth.

There was both a back-log of demand, and a sense of expectation in the "greatest generation." A generation that built and benefited from the largess of an imperial status gained but unsustained.

Forty years ago the US enjoyed life in a world largely devoid of rivals, American manufacturing supplied everything to everyone, profit and jobs bubbled over in north america. Europe and east Asia struggled out of the 1950's and a decade of devastating aftermath of war and revolution.

In one of the quickest reversals of intercontinental imperial majesty in world history, the US now lies gasping, exhausted by the greed that sought to exceed 40 years of unrivaled greatness.

We pick among the ruins that greatest generation.

[RKP5637]

12. And IMO the current efforts to date are just trying to prop back up this failed

economic system with trickle down economics. To me at least, it's the same old sh**.

[BlackHoleSon]

15. Gasping

That's the perfect word I think. It isn't slipping away, which is what I felt during the Bush years.
It has slipped, past tense.

[dkf]

8. You are so right.

I don't know where the jobs are coming from. We don't have enough work for our people.

[blindpig]

9. We are on our own.

Only in solidarity can survival be found.

k&r

[The Northerner]

10. I concur K&R

[Starry Messenger]

11. k & r

[starroute]

13. The problem isn't new, but it was papered over for a long time

After World War II, the economy faltered for a while as war production ended and returning veterans swelled the labor force. But by 1950, that problem had been solved in two ways -- the consumer economy and the permanent wartime economy.

The consumer economy has now been killed by globalization, and the permanent wartime economy isn't able to take up the slack, even with the insane rise in "defense" spending. But the real problem is one that was already apparent in 1930 and hasn't ever been solved.

As the OP says, "It now takes fewer workers to feed and house and clothe everybody than there are people needing to be fed and housed and clothed."

But even that isn't the fundamental issue in itself, but a result of the separation of "work" from the process of meeting basic needs. For a hunter-gather, work consists of collecting and processing food and other materials for their own use. But these days most people work at something that is unrelated to their own personal needs in order to make money with which they can buy what they really do need.

As a result, everybody (except the very rich) has to have a job if they're going to live. And that means that when there are fewer jobs than there are people needing jobs, you immediately have a disaster on your hands.

A second issue is that in order to prop up the current system and keep people from noticing the gaping holes in it, "having a job" has been turned into a moral issue. First welfare mothers were demonized, now the unemployed are being cast as "unproductive" parasites, and even senior citizens are starting to be portrayed as unworthy moochers on the labor of those who are still working.

So I see two essential issues that have to be resolved. One is figuring out how to separate the distribution of essential goods and services from their production. And the other is removing the moral stigma of benefiting from the former without contributing to the latter.

[earth mom]

14. K & R. nt

[maryf]

16. Until the vast majority of us realize that

the 1% of the have most don't give two hoots about anybody else, and we all realize we are all in the same boat (and get those poor folks out of steerage now!!), we're not going anywhere. Time to join together...people will trump power and money if we're in solidarity...K&R

[Panaconda]

18. I hope

we can do this. The hope I speak of is not facile but comes from genuine outrage at injustice. It's not the hope of PR campaigns.

[maryf]

19. I do too

and it is so sad that the word hope has been so corrupted of late, I'm trying to use it again to it's full power!! (change too!) Hey, by the way, welcome to DU!

[Count Olaf]

17. K&R

nt