Read this summary of a new book and cry for our nation!

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080502_jeff_madrick_on_high_wire/

Jeff Madrick on ‘High Wire,’ Peter Gosselin’s Look at the Economic Meltdown

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It would be a pity if Peter Gosselin’s new book, “High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families,” gets lost in the current turmoil over subprime mortgages and deepening recession. He has done the most convincing job I’ve seen in capturing the failures of America to deal with a changing, complex and far less generous economy than it has known in the past. That economy, despite cyclically painful periods, was so generous compared to the rest of the world over its 200-year history in terms of the rate at which it expanded the typical American’s standard of living that the country’s national character was formed by it. The resulting tendency in America, though thankfully violated from time to time, is decidedly toward a laissez faire philosophy of government.


But that national character is now being tested in a less friendly economic environment. Are America’s reflexes, honed over a couple of centuries, up to the task? It is not clear.


Peter Gosselin’s admirable objective is to show how many people of all income levels are now insecure and afraid in an economy that Americans are constantly told, by Republicans and Democrats alike, has long been back on track. At least, that was the conventional wisdom until a year or so ago, when the current hydra-headed crisis emerged. But, in truth, the American economy has not been on track for a generation now. Even the Clinton interlude was, as we now know, prompted by intense and unsustainable financial and housing speculation.