Reply #112: Not Personal Anymore--The Family Debt Crisis is National Now

[Hidden Stillness]

Everything that happens now is a sign, and every indicator will lead to further indicators of the total, calamitous slide. Anyone paying any attention to general social trends might have noticed how disastrous the big-business-centered, deregulating policies of concervatism are, long ago, just by noticing over the years what happens to industries that are deregulated--they go bankrupt and die. As a matter of fact, when Pres. Carter, an economic conservative (which was why the economy suffered), started deregulating industries, I noticed that you could use as a rule of thumb, which industries were deregulated, by which ones were dead or dying--trucking industry, airlines, etc. Gearing government policy to corporations and their profit, rather than the modest well-being of citizens, does not work.

If you Google...negative savings depression...you can read several articles on this problem (and also learn that most of them used the same source, from a Martin Crutsinger, containing some of the most stupid misunderstandings of "the little people" I have ever read). This is the only time the national savings rate has been negative--spending more than taking in--other than 1932 and 1933, the worst of the Depression. Bizarrely, the "economists" who run things now have been using that statistic as a "reason" why the economy is "doing well"! "Consumer spending" (regardless of reason, or on what) is considered "overall economic growth" that raises the Gross Domestic Product--so Republicans have been using this disastrous situation to claim that the economy is good! "Strangely," they go the other way on the Federal Reserve's "price gauge," that might have told us how the American people are being gouged to death. For that "measure," they exclude food and energy costs! So everything is rosy! (Like Reagan, who introduced the system of counting people who work only one hour a week, as "fully employed," and counting members of the armed services as among the employment rate, to artifically boost it. Prick liar.)

Because the media is the mouthpiece for big business nowadays, and not the reporters of the press anymore, they fuck around with "explanations" of these things, to deflect anger from the corporations and rich Republicans who caused this; everything is strategy and positioning now. These articles actually have a part where they claim, (unlike the Great Depression), "This time the reasons for the negative savings rate are vastly different." They claim people are digging themselves into increasing debt "because they feel wealthier because of the soaring value of their homes," they claim with no evidence and no reference. It is not only creepy, it is scary. Now the only obligation the media feels, as this country unravels all the laws that once protected us and returns to Depression, is to their corporate sponsors, and so they lie... The reasons for poverty and debt do not CHANGE, asshole, but the reasons for propaganda do.

I was able to pay my bills and expenses, and make a little headway on my credit card debt, until a few months ago, and the largest profit for the gas-and-oil industries in the history of the world, which they achieved by cutting our throats. Now, I also do not have any more savings, and I fear--with that withering dread of someone barely hanging on now--any emergency of any kind. It is not "inflation" that is killing us, is it straightforward, unregulated price-gouging, which no one will stop. We do not have enough money, anymore, to pay for all these skyrocketing bills and prices, fees for things that never used to have fees, and all the rest of the Capitalists' Dream.

(By the way, to sweetbriarose, replies # 45 and 91--fabulous posts! This is what Democrats are!)