Poverty is the price of opulence. n/t

They had the benefits given them because of things their parents did, they took these

benefits to improve their own lives, and then pulled the ladder up behind them, denying them to their own kids. They got the free/low cost education, they grew up with access to health care, they grew up in cites and towns that had, supported, and recognized the value of the commons.

The Hippies were right, but not very many of them were ever really Hippies. Most of them were the arrogant, greedy, short-sighted fools that eagerly cut their own throats in the mistaken belief that they would never face any of the consequences of their actions. As adults, they did exactly what they did in their youth, take it, break it, and leave it for someone else to deal with. And as for the generation unfortunate enough to immediately follow them, well we got a lifetime of ill-used leftovers and the bills for their party,

Theirs is the generation that stopped looking up and turned inward.

You've perfectly described the desired perception of the game.

The "values" of the houses were going up because of the legalized financial crimes that were made legal so that the parasites wouldn't have to take the losses they created in the financial markets. There never were real market forces (demand outstripping supply) driving the prices up, the prices were driven up by the prospect of collecting fees and leveraging the debt created by the transaction.

Tens of millions more losers were made in The Greatest Robbery in History than won even a little bit and literally everybody that still earns a paycheck, or will for decades to come, be paying off the winners... unless there is another collapse... the game isn't over...

Both better and worse of course, but from a historical perspective the last half

century has become worse for more Americans. Picking 1963 is a good choice as it was a decisive year in the turmoil that was growing due to rising tensions amongst a wide range of factions.

It is far better today if you are gay, it is far better if you are a woman, it is worse for all men that don't belong to the parasite class, worse still if you are a man other than white, and much, much worse if you are a kid. Health care is better, if you have access to it, but it is much worse overall for most people since it has been converted from a social responsibility into a salable commodity owned by the parasite class.

Life is much worse for the people that built this nation through hard work, innovation, tenacity, and skilled labor as all of these assets have virtually no value any longer.

And perhaps the biggest, and most destructive change has been the perversion of the American mind. The foundations of what being an American meant 50 years ago have all but disappeared.

We are much, much less thoughtful and meaner than we once were, and while there have always been those with little or no education, today we have something approaching a majority of complete ignoramuses that believe they are educated and possess an understanding of the workings or the world that they, in fact, utterly lack. We have accepted a complete, media created fantasy as reality and have become so ignorant of reality that when the fantasy fails (because it is a fantasy, duh), we are at a loss to understand why it failed.

50 years ago America was a nation coming into a time of change and the accompanying turmoil with a strong trajectory toward being better. Today America is a nation in a time of change and the accompanying turmoil with a strong trajectory toward getting worse.

Superficially, no it wasn't. but there is a fundamental yes underlying that time.

1963 was not a really good time to be anything in America but a white male, preferably a veteran, but the trend was toward improvement, Women, blacks, draftees etc., were at the breaking point and five years later the nation was in flames. By 1983 things were much better for women, but the trend had reversed, quite quickly and quite deliberately.

Long before they funded the teahaddists, they were also among the who's who of

funding sources for Al From's Democratic Leadership Counsel. Kochs, Coors, Chevron, Merk, the list goes on and on, created the DLC to do just what it's done, remake the Democratic Party in the image of the republican Party. Could that be why the DLC has tried so hard for so long to keep its financial sources "private"? Of course it is.

But a bunch of reporters (remember what those were), after digging for over a decade began to unearth some of the names. For anyone interested in verifying it, it's not going to be easy, because, quite coincidentally I'm sure, the stories listed in your web searches have frequently been "removed, renamed, or deleted" from site after site. The most recent one that I'm aware of was written by Bill Berkowitz.

Neo-feudalism.

Put yourself in the place of an owner and think about it. You're young and educated and have (hopefully) acquired the knowledge and thinking skills to achieve a measure of freedom. Free people make decisions about how they wish to live and many of them will choose to do something other than what the owners want them to do.

California built one of, if not the, best education systems in the world and made it free to residents for a generation. That one generation of Californians changed the world in virtually every field. Philosophy, Medicine, Sociology, Science, Technology, Politics, Art, Literature, etc. They intruded on and forever exposed a world that had been the exclusive province of the ruling class. Worse, they rejected just about all of the notions that that system of authority is based on. They proved that the commoners were not only equal in capability, but that through sheer numbers produced more and better leaders than the established ruling class. One generation from one large state threatened the entire social order.

So what better way to control the young, than to saddle them with large, inescapable debts that will force them to limit their options?

Exactly. There is no other occupation I can think of where the rewards are so large, the risks

so small, and the effort nearly nonexistent, as American politics.

We have to start looking up again.

This is one of his main points and it's a very important one.

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey again last night and, since it's been probably 20 years since the last time, I was struck by how far we've fallen and how pathetic we've become as a people.

We no longer strive to achieve great things, we just grub around looking for fictitious symbols of debt as if they are of any substance. Sure, we got out of our gravity well for a minute and we littered the moon a little, but Clark wrote his book by looking at how far we advanced in the forty-some prior years and extrapolating that same pace forty-some years into the future.

My great grandmother (1881 - 1980) was born in a sod house with a hand-pumped well and an outhouse and saw the advent of electricity, flight, workers rights, women’s suffrage, space flight, the civil rights act, networks of paved roads, skyscrapers, cars, computers, the double helix, fatal diseases eradicated, the ability to produce enough food to end hunger, telephones, refrigeration, moving pictures, talkies, unions, radio, television, atomic power, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and a thousand other things we don't even imagine living without.

Do you think any of us will see anything that even approaches that kind of progress? I'm at least half done with my life and the greatest advances I've seen are computer networks and propaganda being elevated to a science.

Because I was (un?)fortunate enough to be born early enough to see

the cusp of this nation's most critical junction since the Civil war.

As a small child I grew up in a nation of hope and opportunity. Watching man set foot on the moon is one of my very earliest memories. As a teenager, I saw this nation make a specific, deliberate choice to turn its back on the future and embrace a fantasy created by the most bankrupt, evil men on earth, and here's the most important part, I saw tens of millions of people that absolutely knew full well that what was being done was pure evil, and they went along with it for the chance that they could get rich along the way. They sold their souls and our future for a BMW and a 3-piece suit. They turned their backs on their fellow human beings and ignored their suffering and deprivation.

Since then I have watched this nation literally disintegrate, while most of those around me developed the capacity to purposely blind themselves to what was happening all around them.

It permeates this site and DU is, believe it or not, better than the overall reality. Small, mean, minds that take a perverse pleasure in making everything that they can influence, worse.

The racism, bigotry, the NRA, all that you mentioned and much more are merely symptoms of the underlying cancer that is consuming us all. America is the embodiment of evil in the world today.