The Big Squeeze: How Americans Are Being Crushed by Financial Insecurity and Doubt

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AlterNet / By David Rosen

The Big Squeeze: How Americans Are Being Crushed by Financial Insecurity and Doubt
Americans are living lives of lowered expectation and intensified financial uncertainty.

May 19, 2011 |


The Great Recession officially started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. It was the gravest financial crisis the nation has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Sadly, most Americans have yet to recover.

It fostered what many call the “new normal,” the unspoken sense that America is stuck if not in decline. This new sensibility bears profound consequences; foremost is the recognition that Americans are living lives of lowered expectation and intensified financial uncertainty.

The “American Century” is over. The great historical phase of America’s domestic prosperity and global hegemony is withering. In the decades following the Second World War, American capitalism fashioned the postmodern, and increasingly globalized, world order. In the process, it abandoned America and the American people.

We first witnessed the transfer of jobs overseas, rationalized as “throwaway” or low-skilled jobs. Then came the growing dependency of foreign borrowing, rationalized by the U.S.’s ostensible credit worthiness. Now, America’s great corporations, like GE and GM, are earning more overseas than at home, accompanied by generous domestic tax breaks. More disturbing, the U.S. military-industrial-political establishment repeatedly embarks on doomed “great war” campaigns that rob the nation of its young, its wealth and its ideals. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/151016/the_big_squeeze%3A_how_americans_are_being_crushed_by_financial_insecurity_and_doubt/