Greed: BP’s Mess, and Wall Street’s

Comment from MoveOn, 6/12/10 Needed: Your ideas for a better democracy” - " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://freedomtimes.blogspot.com/
http://www.fuel2000.net


Greed: BP’s Mess, and Wall Street’s NYT 6/10/10
Just because you can do something, does that mean you should? It’s a question that might have saved us a lot of pain in recent months if both Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum had asked it of themselves during the last decade.
Sure, Goldman, and other Wall Street firms, could — and did — create “synthetic C.D.O.s” to allow consenting investors, including Goldman itself, to gamble on the risk in the U.S. housing market. Sure, Goldman and others could — and did — package up mortgages that should never have been issued into mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investors around the world who, in turn, abdicated their responsibility to investigate the soundness of the investment because some rating agency — paid by the underwriters — had slapped a AAA-rating on them. That technology existed, and Goldman and others just availed themselves of it, right? Besides, they were simply supplying the demands of the marketplace, right?
The Gulf of Mexico spill, like the financial implosion, was largely the product of people taking risks and knowing they wouldn’t be held accountable if things went wrong.
Few people on Wall Street — let alone on Main Street, or regulators in Washington — had any idea what a “synthetic C.D.O.” was or what a “mortgage-backed security” was, or what they were designed to do, or the risks they were injecting into the global financial system. One thing bankers and traders — and their high-powered bosses — knew for sure was that they could make billions of dollars for their firms manufacturing and selling these toxic securities to investors around the world, and pocket millions of dollars in annual bonuses for doing it. And that’s what mattered most, right? Everything seemed fine, until one day it wasn’t — and fear overwhelmed us, credit markets froze, unemployment ratcheted up to 10 percent, a deep recession took hold and the American taxpayer got left holding the bag to the tune of around $12 trillion. We’re still digging out.
A similar story, as we now know, with similarly devastating consequences, occurred 51 days ago a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. BP — and other oil companies — simply took advantage of the prevailing technology to drill for oil at unheard-of depths of seawater. The risks inherent in such a dangerous enterprise seemed minimal, right? And BP was simply meeting customer demand for oil, right? And oil companies were raking in the profits doing so — last year, BP made $16.7 billion; ExxonMobil made $19.3 billion (Goldman made $13.4 billion). And that’s what mattered most, right? But thanks to BP’s extraordinary level of incompetence — and an apparent failure to anticipate or plan for a well blowout — the American people now have been handed not only the senseless deaths of 11 men working on the BP rig but also the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history. It is both heartbreaking and sickening.
What these two disasters — one financial, the other environmental — prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the right incentives no longer exist to get corporate executives to do what they should want to do, and what they must do, to prevent such calamities from happening. The “corporation,” as a legal entity, is very good at attracting capital, providing jobs, maintaining a focus on profitability, creating wealth for the people who work there (especially at the top). It is also very good at shielding executives and boards of directors from liability for their poor own decision-making.
What these two crises reveal is that some corporations and their leaders aren’t very good at making decisions that take full account of the risks they and their companies are taking. It is a truism that human beings do what they are rewarded to do. But the corporate structure these days rewards bad behavior. The problem is that the corporate veil protects the decision makers from the consequences of their decisions and, accordingly, they are encouraged to take asymmetrical risks — huge paydays for them if everything works out; huge consequences for us if they don’t. As Senator Christopher Dodd correctly said in April 2008, during the first Senate hearing about the unfolding financial crisis, “We’ve socialized risk and we’ve privatized reward.”
Unfortunately, the financial reform legislation that Senator Dodd and his colleagues are working so hard on to make law does nothing to change that dynamic. Nowhere in the approximately 1,500 pages of the proposed bill is there anything about making Wall Street executives financially and legally liable for their decisions, as they once were when Wall Street was a series of private partnerships and a partner’s entire net worth was on the line every day. Talk about accountability! But that ethic was lost 40 years ago when Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette went public and the rest of Wall Street followed soon thereafter.
As a result, our financial crises come fast and furious these days, since Wall Street bankers and traders get rewarded for selling, and generating revenue, not for worrying about what they create. The time has come for actions to have consequences. You can be sure that if Jimmy Cayne, the former C.E.O. of Bear Stearns, or Dick Fuld, the former C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers, had their entire net-worth on the line every day instead of being able to gamble with the house’s money, they would have been much more focused on the risks their firms were taking.
Americans are angry, and rightly so. One measure of how far in the public’s estimation Goldman has fallen off its once lofty perch came from an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 1,000 adults last month. Goldman’s positive approval rating stood at just 4 percent, below that of BP, at 11 percent, and that of Toyota, the Japanese car manufacturer experiencing acute quality problems, at 31 percent. Goldman’s negative ratings clocked in at 50 percent, fairly dreadful for a firm that was No. 8 on Fortune’s 2010 list of the world’s most admired companies, up seven spots from 2009. (Toyota was number seven on the list.)
Although there is no equivalent (yet) of the “spill-cam” in front 200 West Street — the site of Goldman’s sparkling $2.1 billion headquarters building across from Ground Zero — perhaps there should be, because it sure seems that what Goldman and other Wall Street firms are manufacturing every day has proved every bit as toxic as what’s spewing from a pipe at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. High-def, please.

Our Gigantic Delusion

A 6/12/10 Move On Request: Your ideas for a better democracy - stating " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://www.fuel2000.net

Our Gigantic Delusion
Can We Overcome It In Time?
by Doug Page / September 21st, 2009
We live in a culture wide, all embracing fantasy world. It has become our total “reality.” It is our Conventional Wisdom. Paul Ehrlich called this intellectual fog “wonderland.” In 1973 Jonah Raskin called it “mythology.” In 1978, Columbia Professor Edward Said wrote his famous book Orientalism in which he surveyed Western academic literature and novels about our attitudes toward Asia, Arabs, Palestinians, East Indians, and Moslems. He found that even novelists assumed that Westerners were more moral, advanced, and enlightened than Asians and that it was our duty to bring our civilization to them. Orientalism boiled down to racism: Our Caucasian race, our Western way of life, our civilization, our economy is good and clean, and theirs is backward, antiquated, dirty, ignorant. and bad. John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology and Richard York, Associate professor of Sociology, at the University of Oregon, and Brett Clark, Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University, in a Monthly Review article, “Capitalism in Wonderland,” show that all of our mainstream economists, policy makers, media owners, editors, journalists, and politicians conform to the dictates of this falsified view of reality. President Obama, Lawrence Summers and all his other advisors, and most members of Congress are captives of this false view of reality.
Even when presented with facts that challenge this gigantic delusion, being frightened, hypnotized, addicted, and brainwashed, we reject them. The irony is that the delusion is so grandiose, that one like me who challenges it, runs the risk of seeming to be a grandiose crazy individual.
Our reigning economic falsehood is that our market economy whose principal goal is short term private profit, is the best that humans can create, is the best for everybody, and is in every respect unchallengeable. Moreover, THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. Thus, we cannot have and cannot even consider
Serious measures to deal with the needs of our damaged planet home.
Socialism in any form.
Extensive public hiring and public works.
Caring for ourselves and for each other using the powers of our government.
Directly giving people who want to work, employment to meet our vast unmet needs.
Mondragon type cooperative businesses.
The immorality of a system based on selfish, short term, private greed and absence of caring.
Medicare for everybody or a VA-type public Hospital and doctor available for everybody.
Any health care system that does not provide some private persons with a generous private profit making opportunity from our accidents and illnesses .
Solutions to the ever increasing disparity between the rich and the poor.
Our President and his economic advisors are imprisoned by this reigning market falsehood. It embodies the further falsehoods that our market economy is basically stable, contains no systemic defects, contains no laws of motion or dynamics or anti-social tendencies, and that its minor aberrations can be managed by unlimited expenditures of our tax dollars or by borrowing. The fact that systemic defects caused our “capitalism to hit the fan”1 in 1980 are simply ignored. Thus our President and our government by exhaustive efforts to restore bank lending, seek to create a new credit bubble to replace the housing bubble that crashed. Their stated rationale is that the banks will lend, businesses and individuals will borrow, and that ultimately new jobs will be created. They seek also to maintain and restore the many forms of collateralized debt obligations free of any new regulation. They ignore the basic truth that our economy can be re-started only by directly creating jobs providing enough earned income so that citizen employees can afford to purchase the products of their labor. Moreover, our governmental leaders urge that we must restore “growth” of our existing economy, with its inevitable growth of our emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, of pollution, and our depletion of the planet’s finite resources of oil, soil, and fresh water. As a consequence:
* We are ignoring a basic rule of arithmetic that even “reasonable” growth of 3% per year leads to doubling within an unexpectedly short time. (To get the doubling time simply divide the number 70 by the percentage rate of growth. Thus 70 divided by 3 gives us a doubling time of 35 years. A 4% growth rate would have a doubling time of 17.5 years. A 6% growth rate would give a doubling time of about 12 years. Such doubling continues over and over again so long as the growth rate continues.) Do we really want to double our carbon emissions and consequent global warming? Do we really want to double the consumption of oil, soil and fresh water? Do we really want to double the population of the planet? Is not any talk of growth idiotic? We need a sustainable, stable economy with zero growth.
* We are frightened and uneasy. We are acting irrationally in street marches and in public hearings. We do have to fear fear itself. We have no FDR who promises to meet our needs. We have a presiding eloquent Black Herbert Hoover and not a Black FDR. There are no plans on the shelf for any plausible solutions, and no leaders or academicians promoting them.
* We, of the political left, right and center, with good reason, are worried about how we and our children will pay for all of this vast expenditure of public tax dollars. We worry whether there will be the disastrous inflation experienced by Argentina a few years ago, deflation even worse than the Great Depression of our grandfathers, or, for us, both at the same time.
Then there are the many falsehoods that accompany the extension of this reigning falsehood, our “good” market economy abroad to foreign countries, an extension that we used to call Imperialism:
* Does anybody really believe that our own sons and daughters in the military, and Afghanistan and Pakistan civilian men women and children are being killed or wounded every day as a part of our effort to help them or to bring them Democracy?
* Does anybody really believe that the Honduran military Generals trained in our School for the Americas, financed by loans and grants from our government, using a plane that we financed, landing on the way out at a US military base in Nicaragua, acted without U.S. consent in deposing democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya?
* Does anybody really believe that we are getting out of Iraq when we replace every soldier withdrawn with a hired Blackwater mercenary soldier, and when we are building 4 large permanent military bases in Iraq, and the most lavish US Embassy building in Asia?
* Do we really need 800 military installations in 45 foreign countries staffed with 240,000 military personnel?
Then there is the deepest secret of all, so well hidden in our gigantic delusion, that almost nobody is aware of it. It is the secret Ponzi-like scheme of our private bankers that produces an almost unimaginable annual private profit for them at our expense. This secret private money creating scheme involves the following characteristics:
1. Congress in 1913 delegated the power to create our money supply to the private bankers that constitute the Federal Reserve system. Congress does not use its power to coin our money. Private bankers create 95% of our money supply simply out of thin air. The privately owned “Federal” Reserve Bank simply writes a check out of thin air and issues the money to a private bank. The private bank then loans this money to a private or governmental borrower who promises to repay with interest. The promise to repay becomes an “asset” of the lending bank that it then uses to make many other loans under what is called “fractional reserve banking.” It is thus a fact that 95% or more of our money is based on debt. All existing money thus equals the total of all public and private debt.
2. Our government instead of using its Constitutional power to issue money directly to meet governmental needs (as Lincoln did to finance the Northern side of the Civil War) borrows money to meet its needs from private bankers and pays private bankers interest on what it borrows. Repayment is promised from our tax dollars.
3. Over time, the annual profits for the owners of private banks have compounded enormously. We cannot know how much because the private bankers secured a federal law making it unlawful to audit the activities of the Federal Reserve Banks. One can estimate the annual profit by simply multiplying a probable average interest rate times the total money supply since all money is debt. Is it reasonable to assume that the rate of return is at least 3 %? The total money supply was recently estimated to be $50 Trillion. 3% x $50 Trillion gives private bankers an annual gross profit of $1.5 Trillion per year. This profit compounded over the decades produces an unimaginable stash of total wealth for the owners of the private banks.
4. The private banks use this immense secret stash of wealth to control our government and to override our votes on every issue that is important to banks. Thus it is accurate to say that we have a government of, by and for private bankers. It is also accurate to say that every aspect of the reigning gigantic delusion about our capitalism, including the Imperialism of defending and promoting capitalism abroad, partially set forth above, serves the interests and the profits of private bankers.
5. These private bankers, having the authority to create money out of thin air have created too much money in the recent past and caused inflation, and are now creating too little money and thus are causing our current depression.
In the 1990s, Professor Jared Diamond wrote his book Collapse where he studied four civilizations that had perished in the past and two that survived. The two that survived, managed to overcome their prevailing falsehoods, their Conventional Wisdoms. The four fallen civilizations could not and did not. The question for all of us is: Do we have what it takes to overcome our gigantic delusion? Or will our democratic civilization fall into a new dark age where the only law is the Law of the Jungle?

Contemplate the "gigantic delusion" as you travel down Freedom's Highway

These Persistent, Cosmetic Pipedreams

A 6/12/10 Move On Request: Your ideas for a better democracy - stating " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://www.fuel2000.net





































These Persistent, Cosmetic Pipedreams

You Still Believe America's So Special?
Harry Fuller: The Lies We Tell, and The People Who Believe Them

(CBS) Harry Fuller spent decades in TV news in the San Francisco Bay Area, including stints as General Manager of KPIX-TV (CBS) and News Direcor at TechTV when it was founded in 1998. In 2001 he become Executive Producer for CNBC Europe. He later was the Executive Editor for CNET News.com.

I just saw a stage performance of "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof." The scene where Big Daddy smells out mendacity is rich with metaphor for this time in our America. Because, everywhere, it seems, there is the stench of mendacity. A back-of-the-envelope listing might include the likes of Enron, Iraq's WMD, Tiger Woods John Edwards, Hurricane Katrina, Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers' accounting methods, death panels, and, of course, pending Armageddon. It's not that we present-day Americans are more dishonest or devious than other cultures or previous generations. Scandals, crooks, thievery, falsehood are part of the deal with humans. What makes our mendacity so smelly? There are lies that we Americans constantly tell ourselves and sadly believe. Worse still, we act on those lies as if they were truth. Some of Our Lies We're the Greatest Nation on Earth Huh? By what measure? Longevity? Then we're 38th, behind two other American territories. Wealth? We're in hock, borrowing billions every month to keep our party going. Railroad infrastructure? This nation practically invented long-distance railroads but now has zero high-speed trains. Our cell phone system lags behind many nations. One area where we're doing splendidly is incarceration. We boast one-fourth of all the world's prisoners, despite comprising only 5% of the global population. Our military can level any target. But our experience in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan has proved that military might doesn't necessarily insure a welcome reception from the local population. We can't even count on Israel, a close ally, doing what we want. Sure, we can kill anybody we choose (except Bin Laden), but we can't always make people behave as we wish. This leads to the second lie. Everybody wants to be American, or destroy us Here's the long-standing myth of American exceptionalism. We find ourselves too wonderful to behold. Some of us claim that we're God's chosen people. Let's wake up and take a clearer look. Switzerland has an older democracy. Denmark's been a stable nation for a millennium while France has more vacation and offers its citizens better medical care. Most nations, even Russia, rank higher in living sustainably. In many parts of the world the U.S. is totally irrelevant to hundreds of millions of people. They live without Wal-Mart or Starbucks. (And I'm sure they'd find another service if Google disappeared tomorrow.) Sure, some would like to see our military and borrowing power destroyed. But to most humans we're only a source of movies and other software. We have the greatest system on earth De-regulation of corporations is based on this lie. So is money-rich lobbying. No system is infallible. "Greatest system" excuses government incompetence, political dishonesty, corporate mendacity and bonus-mongering. See what similar self-anointing has done to the Catholic Church? It's doing the same thing to American government, corporations, and our other institutions where self-preservation is paramount. Some politicians claimed during the recent political battle that the U.S. has the world's best medical "system." There's no objective measurement supporting that. We pay more for less than any other post-industrial nation. 38th in longevity. No group with great power or enormous wealth will always act in the interest of others, whether shareholders, voters or patients. Greed's real. It's pathological optimism to expect any system to naturally protect the many from the few at the top. Eternal vigilance, remember? We Americans are God's chosen people How many times in history has nation, king, empire, shaman, or tribe claimed to be at one with their chosen deity? And where did it get them? When some fellow human begins to describe God's will, beware. Sniff for mendacity. Must we persist on a fallacious and foolhardy self-image based on the above and corollary lies? From the Iraq invasion to adjustable rate mortgages, we have repeatedly acted on our lies and self-delusion. Now there's much that needs doing. Right now we're getting a heavy dose of reality therapy here in America. What's unclear is how many of us will face reality rather than cling to these persistent, cosmetic pipedreams? By Harry FullerSpecial to CBSNews.com

Freedom Of The Press
Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/10access.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1276167771-0oR1m9aO5PGy/Cq8WIqmAQ

In Decaying Societies, Politics Become Theater

A 6/12/10 Move On Request: Your ideas for a better democracy - stating " Big corporations from Wall Street to Big Oil, backed by over 17,000 lobbyists in Washington, have been running roughshod over our democracy. For years they've been rigging the rules and fixing the system so that 98% of the country gets little or no say."

It's time to take our democracy back.

There is only one idea that stands the slightest chance of succeeding, and in fact, its omission is the Primary Cause of the “roughshod over our democracy”: Comprehension and application of Energy’s Evolutionary Stages - a Survival Requirement, as natural and necessary as breathing.

As GreenChipstocks’ article (6/12/10) asked: “Will the BP oil spill be an energy game-changer? ....It's the question everyone has; it's the question no one can answer…..Because honestly, no one knows... http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nicks-title/996

In a free country, why does no one know?

Going beyond the pre-kindergarten concept of energy (i.e., lack of comprehension of the nature and total interdependence of Space, Time, Mass, Matter, Gravity, Fields - with Energy) is a natural fundamental evolutionary survival requirement, a requirement as natural as breathing.

Imagine the consequences, if you did not know that breathing was required for survival.

On a larger scale, Energy is the breath of all Existence in the Universe. Without energy, not even space & time exist.

"Poverty in all its forms is the greatest single threat to peace, democracy, human rights, and the environment. It is a time bomb against the heart of liberty" World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore.

"Inadequate comprehension and application of Energy, in all its forms, in an increasingly complex and evolving civilization, is the single greatest causal factor of poverty - and the vehicle to self-destruct." Decatalyst

"As systems increase in complexity, their energy intensity and energy requirements to sustain life rise accordingly." Hydrocarbons ceased fitting the energy bill, became obsolete, years ago. Nobel Prize winner, Ilya Progogine
http://www.fuel2000.net

In Decaying Societies, Politics Become Theater
America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout by Chris Hedges
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HED20090324&articleId=12880

In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged." He wrote that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.
"All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again," he wrote. "This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this, education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms."
Our elites are imploding. Their fraud and corruption are slowly being exposed as the disparity between their words and our reality becomes wider and more apparent. The rage that is bubbling up across the country will have to be countered by the elite with less subtle forms of control. But unless we grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms" we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.
I had lunch a few days ago in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada and who for many years was the Waterbury Chair Professor at Penn State. Giroux, who has been one of the most prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the systematic destruction of American education, was driven to the margins of academia because he kept asking the uncomfortable questions Adorno knew should be asked by university professors. He left the United States in 2004 for Canada.
"The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip on higher education that may have exceeded even what he had anticipated and most feared," Giroux, who wrote "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex," told me. "Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on the university was tightening as made clear not only in the emergence of business models of governance, but also in the money being pumped into research and programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was now funding research projects and increasingly knowledge was being militarized in the service of developing weapons of destruction, surveillance and death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a democratic public sphere."
Frank Donoghue, the author of "The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities," details how liberal arts education has been dismantled. Any form of learning that is not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools has been abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the assumptions of the power elite or an economic system that serves the corporate state. This has led many bright graduates into the arms of corporate entities they do not examine morally or ethically. They accept the assumptions of corporate culture because they have never been taught to think.
Only 8 percent of U.S. college graduates now receive degrees in the humanities, about 110,000 students. Between 1970 and 2001, bachelor's degrees in English declined from 7.6 percent to 4 percent, as did degrees in foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics (3 percent to 1 percent), social science and history (18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor's degrees in business, which promise the accumulation of wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the graduation population to 21.7 percent. Business has now replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2 percent, as the most popular major.
The values that sustain an open society have been crushed. A university, as John Ralston Saul writes, now "actively seeks students who suffer from the appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge, common sense, a social view-all these things wither. Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a talent for manipulating situations-all these things are encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows; as does extreme aggressivity when they are questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in which winning is what counts."
This moral nihilism would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed and confused population, a system of propaganda and a press that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper-masculinity, one championed by ruthless capitalists (think of the brutal backstabbing and deception cheered by TV shows like "Survivor") and Hollywood action heroes like the governor of California.
"This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong," Adorno wrote. "The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism."
Sadism is as much a part of popular culture as it is of corporate culture. It dominates pornography, runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs and is at the core of the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice. And it has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our lack of compassion for the homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed and the sick.
"The political and economic forces fuelling such crimes against humanity-whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation and disease or genocidal acts-are always mediated by educational forces," Giroux said. "Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place."
The single most important quality needed to resist evil is moral autonomy. Moral autonomy, as Immanuel Kant wrote, is possible only through reflection, self-determination and the courage not to cooperate.
Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and "leftist" professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called "the manipulative character." The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a systems manager. He or she exclusively trained to sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites are wasting mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG. "He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person," Adorno wrote of this personality type. These manipulative characters, people like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG's Edward Liddy and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves and in the halls of Congress while they looted the country.
"It is especially difficult to fight against it," warned Adorno, "because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids."
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."
Global Research Articles by Chris Hedges

Changing the Dream of the Modern World

Changing the Dream of the Modern World
Awakening the Dreamer Changing the Dream Symposium.
http://awakeningthedreamer.org/content/view/115/135
Requires the Understanding of Energy, The Science of Light, the expanded edition of E=MC2, comprising the Universal factor - The radius of Curvature of All Natural Law ....... whose definition, the Quantity C, equates to the properties of Light. Evolution can only proceed in the context of what is real; distortion, suppression in the sciences create deadly barriers and Alice in Wonderland pseudo scenarios which cripple progress toward healthy, prosperous and sustainable Evolution http://evolution-intelligentdesign-survival.blogspot.com/2010/01/its-musical-universe.html

Awakening the Dreamer Symposium Trailer from Pachamama Alliance on Vimeo.

Dead Canaries and Flying Pigs
http://campaign.constantcontact.com/render?v=0011-u4wRWTE7QEQBJ7XOX9JLOiCuuoW05x5HPsVx1cgOXq7UEirA_Z4g0zb2mjv9_swdElygs8Khq_uHKHmDWuIR3j-NLrJr9ame3iXovV3Dcyb_js3OYBDwT0mz9RPVQW

This is for the part of you that looks around and sees broken systems, red flags and dying canaries. And is worried and anxious about taking care of yourself, your family and your future.

This is for the contributor, server, host, adventurer, dreamer, pioneer, explorer, scout, and seeker in you.

For the part of you that knows there is a higher service you can bestow, yet hasn't quite found what that is to align with or how to give it.

This for the altruistic higher self in you that knows the giving and serving are their own reward.

This is for those of you who have children, and possibly grandchildren, and find a visceral concern about the legacy and conditions we may be leaving them.

And this is for those of you who experience frustration, and even anger, and are tiring enough of the outside and inside negativity to want to contribute something positive--to yourself, as well as others, the planet and the future.

My most successful best friend Dave frequently says to me, "Terry, I still don't have a job." So, this is for those who know that work can be play and fun, or for those who what to experience and learn that.

And this is for those of you who don't have the time or money to make all this a career (as well of those who might), yet want to DO SOMETHING!!

I'm one of those.

We've chosen to move beyond my concern, complaining, criticism and upset and move my focus to service, solution and positive possibility in those areas that are my levels of concern.

How about you?

I'm very enthused about a new invitation I've received, and accepted!! And I'd like to pass along the invitation to you too.

My good friend Brian O'Leary has invited me to co-facilitate a workshop with him at Montesueños, his beautiful mountain eco-retreat in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador.

For those of you who don't know Brian, he's one of the first scientist astronauts, an international speaker, researcher, author, expert on new energy and one of the true living visionaries.

We're calling the workshop Transforming the Dreamer. Great title, don't ya think? (I must be channeling my grandmother)... : )

We'd like you to join us.

What?

Transforming the Dreamer-an interactive experiential workshop. The Tillman-O'Leary duo will provide participants with some practical tools to transform themselves and society by tapping into their inner wisdom and identifying achievable goals that are needed in today's world.

Included in and integrated into the workshop, participants will experience the Pachamama Alliance's internationally acclaimed Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, which is interactive and based upon media produced by multi-award winning filmmaker Neal Rogin. For an inspiring and motivating sample, click here.

Click here for more detail about the workshop, and some photos.

When?

Friday, March 19, at 8pm through Tuesday, March 23, at 2pm

Where?

Montesueños Eco-Retreat in Vilcabamba, Ecuador

and the Amazon jungle near Zamora

Tuition - $1750 includes the workshop, transportation to and from the Quito airport and the jungle, meals, and double or twin accommodations. For singles there will be a surcharge of $150, and for triples or quads a reduction in cost of $150.

Airline fares we've checked from various European and American cities are quite low right now.

Registration - You can reserve a place in the workshop or obtain more information by writing us at info@montesuenos.org.

Why Ecuador, and Montesueños?

Most don't know that some of the seminal work in the areas of environmental sustainability, social justice and spiritual fulfillment are taking place in Ecuador, outside the distorting lens of today's media.

Some of earth's last remaining untouched pristine environments and isolated indigenous populations are found in the Amazon jungle and Andes Mountains of Ecuador. And some of the most painful damage done by extraction industries has been done in Ecuador--So it's a perfect setting for the profound, inspiring, deeply moving and galvanizing work we will be experiencing.

Ecuador recently rewrote its constitution and included rights for flora and fauna--the first, and only, country to do so. So far.

Ecuador is the first nation to begin experimenting with a new system of commerce and trade that isn't based on debt. They're testing it parallel to their dollar economy. Some of you know that the financial and economic challenges faced by almost all countries on the planet today have a source in our debt-based fiat monetary systems. Solutions may come out of Ecuador.

The Galapagos Islands are 600 miles west of Ecuador and our travel agent can assist those of you who chose to add on a visit before or after the workshop. I plan to. It's been on my "Someday Maybe" list for years.

Montesueños means mountain of dreams, a place to mount or climb up on dreams, high place of dreams and where dreams are realized. So the venue provides the ideal context for aligning higher energies and inspiring action.

Please join us. Those of you who have traveled with me previously know that this will be another not-to-be-forgotten memorable, treasured lifetime experience.

Often I've heard people say to me, "Boy, you sure do you have an interesting life..." Yes, I do. I will claim that. I am very grateful to be able to say it. And... It's been that way because I'm OK with choosing into uncertainty and unknown. I don't need to have it all worked out with guarantees before hand. I've learned that understanding follows experience and clarity shows up on the way. I'm curious. And I don't want to find myself at age 90 looking back saying, "I wish I would have. Why didn't I? If only... It's too late now." I know that it's precisely in a time of contraction that I need to expand. So I take what is often a "faith-step" past my time and money considerations.

And I'll be darned, I got to here. That's often amazing, magical and miraculous to me... : )

It's much more fun when a group of us do this together. Would you like to join us?

I hope to see you in Ecuador.

In the Spirit of loving contribution,

Terry Tillman
TTillman@227company.com
http://www.227company.com/
twitter.com/TerryTillman

P.S. Flying Pigs? Ask Brian. I've already assumed you understood the Dying Canaries metaphor. You may also learn more about this in the workshop : )

Suburban Homeless: Rising Tide of Families

Human servants, kneel and subjugate yourselves to the New Lords, Non-Living Corporate Entities - Beyond Law - of the Universe.
For the corporation, By the corporation, Of the corporation
Above the law, Bought the law, Creates the law.
I concede! All these are not conspiracies!
As all the experts scream, these are market fundamentals

Farewell - American Democracy
It's Official. Corporations Rule.
The American Justice System has decided
Ask your two year old on a seesaw about balance, weight and power when 2% golden greedy guts owns 98% of the worlds’ Wealth and Resources









true to scale model would render top image invisible



total world population Feb 2010:......... 6,801,000,000
2% Golden Greedy Guts population:........ 136,020,000
98% rest of us population:................... 6,664,980,000

“Fascism is about the state running things on behalf of corporations. Adrian Lyttelton in his book on Mussolini wrote that ‘Fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly.’ It was a point that Orwell noted when he described fascism as being but an extension of capitalism. Lyttelton quoted Italian Nationalist theorist Affredo Rocco: ‘The Fascist economy is. . . an organized economy. It is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme direction and control of the State.’ ”

Could Terrorists do more to destroy America: Millions of Americans losing their life savings, losing their homes, losing their jobs, going hungry, without health insurance, with surging productivity among those still working accompanied by steady decline in wages and benefits, local and state governments running out of money, interest rates on savings at negative 0 (Zero), and everyone stuck in nightmare traffic…………………. A declining economy on a planet whose population is exploding - an incredible impossibility
Root Cause: Advances in the science of energy would have eliminated all the above, providing prosperity and understanding for all people.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/16/national/main6213988.shtml
ROOSEVELT, N.Y., Feb. 16, 2010
Suburban Homeless: Rising Tide of Families
Rural Shelters Strained this Winter amid "Perfect Storm" of Foreclosures, Unemployment and Affordable Housing Shortage
Homelessness in rural and suburban America is straining shelters this winter as the economy founders and joblessness hovers near double digits - a "perfect storm of foreclosures, unemployment and a shortage of affordable housing," in one official's eyes. "We are seeing many families that never before sought government help," said Greg Blass, commissioner of Social Services in Suffolk County on eastern Long Island. "We see a spiral in food stamps, heating assistance applications; Medicaid is skyrocketing," Blass added. "It is truly reaching a stage of being alarming." The federal government is again counting the nation's homeless and, by many accounts, the suburban numbers continue to rise, especially for families, women, children, Latinos and men seeking help for the first time. Some have to be turned away. "Yes, there has definitely been an increased number of turnaways this year," said Jennifer Hill, executive director of the Alliance to End Homelessness in suburban Cook County, Illinois. "We're seeing increases in shelter use along the lines of 30 percent or more." The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's annual survey last year found homelessness remained steady at about 1.6 million people, but the percentage of rural or suburban homelessness rose from 23 percent to 32 percent. The 2009 HUD report, which reflected the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2008, also found the number of sheltered homeless families grew from about 473,000 to 517,000. Greta Guarton, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk Coalition for the Homeless on Long Island, led a recent group of about 40 volunteers to scour vacant lots and industrial parks for this year's HUD survey; results are expected in several months. "One of the things that we've noticed is a lot more unsheltered, mostly men who claim this is the first time they've been homeless, who indicate that it's due to a loss of wages or loss of job, because of the economy," Guarton said. Stephanie Hawkins, who lost her manager's job when a shelter for drug addicts and alcoholics closed last summer, is now among about a dozen or more "guests" living in a different kind of Long Island shelter - this one for women who have nowhere else to go. "I lost my job and I lost my home," said Hawkins, 44, fighting tears. Her issues are compounded by a cancer diagnosis that requires chemotherapy. "I lived where I worked." Nery Nij came to the United States from Guatemala six years ago. For much of that time he was a landscaper, manicuring the lawns of million-dollar seaside Hamptons estates. Most nights this winter, Nij joins dozens of day laborers and others who are provided shelter in church basements and auditoriums across eastern Long Island. "There's just no work," Nij says in Spanish through an interpreter. "It's a big challenge. If you have no work, you have no rent. If you have no rent, you're out on the street." Naiquan Pritchett says he was devastated when he lost his job in construction about four months ago. His bills quickly mounted and he now lives in a Long Island shelter for men. "I had been doing construction for nine years," Pritchett said. The crunch is seen in suburbs around the country. Northeast of Atlanta, foreclosures rose 77 percent from 2008 to 2009, said Suzy Bus of the Gwinnett County Coalition for Health and Human Services. About 60 percent of the county's homeless are children 9 and younger, she said. "People equate homeless to a guy under a bridge, but it's a lot more complex than that, and it permeates much further into our society than a lot of people realize," Bus said. When families lose their homes and relocate, their children's schooling can be disrupted. Some move into extended-stay hotels that cost about $175 a week, but that sometimes exposes them to criminal activity like prostitution and drug deals, Bus said. In Coatesville, Pa., a former steel town of about 11,000 outside Philadelphia, the City Gate Mission added five beds to its shelter in November 2008. But director Jim Davis said that even with 21 beds, the shelter has still had to turn people away on many nights. "There was a period of time recently where maybe as many as five people a day they would say no to by phone," Davis said. Even in the Hamptons, a summer playground for millionaires, demand is increasing for homeless services, according to Denis Yuen, director of Maureen's Haven, a consortium of 25 churches on eastern Long Island. Churches alternate hosting the homeless on different nights, offering cots or inflatable beds and hot meals. "This year we saw an influx of Latinos, some of whom had not worked in four or five months," Yuen said. "They are living hand-to-mouth, depending on soup kitchens. Before this, they at least had a little work." Nadia Marin-Molina, executive director of the Workplace Project, a Latino advocacy group, said undocumented workers from Mexico or Central America have limited access to government-run shelters and depend on groups like Maureen's Haven. She said more must be done to determine how many homeless don't benefit from either government or community aid. Part of the problem is that some undocumented live in fear of deportation and therefore avoid any interaction with authorities. "There isn't an understanding of how many people are living in the woods," she said. Daphne Haynes, who has operated the Peace Valley Haven shelters in Roosevelt, Long Island, finds homeless people seeking warmth in 24-hour coin-operated laundries, huddled behind shopping centers and in retail stores. "Most of the problem I noticed with homeless that come stay with us is their family don't want to be bothered with them," Haynes said. Tom Sweeney worked in private security for 25 years before the company folded. Now he stays at Peace Valley Haven. "I didn't have any money saved," said Sweeney, who admitted battling drug and alcohol abuse in the past. "You gotta hustle to get something to eat, panhandle, do whatever you can. If you can find a warm bed, take it, because being on the street ain't life as it's supposed to be."

The New Poor

Human servants, kneel and subjugate yourselves to the New Lords, Non-Living Corporate Entities - Beyond Law - of the Universe.
For the corporation, By the corporation, Of the corporation
Above the law, Bought the law, Creates the law.
I concede! All these are not conspiracies!
As all the experts scream, these are market fundamentals

Farewell - American Democracy
It's Official. Corporations Rule.
The American Justice System has decided
Ask your two year old on a seesaw about balance, weight and power when 2% golden greedy guts owns 98% of the worlds’ Wealth and Resources









true to scale model would render top image invisible



total world population Feb 2010:......... 6,801,000,000
2% Golden Greedy Guts population:........ 136,020,000
98% rest of us population:................... 6,664,980,000

“Fascism is about the state running things on behalf of corporations. Adrian Lyttelton in his book on Mussolini wrote that ‘Fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly.’ It was a point that Orwell noted when he described fascism as being but an extension of capitalism. Lyttelton quoted Italian Nationalist theorist Affredo Rocco: ‘The Fascist economy is. . . an organized economy. It is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme direction and control of the State.’ ”

Could Terrorists do more to destroy America: Millions of Americans losing their life savings, losing their homes, losing their jobs, going hungry, without health insurance, with surging productivity among those still working accompanied by steady decline in wages and benefits, local and state governments running out of money, interest rates on savings at negative 0 (Zero), and everyone stuck in nightmare traffic…………………. A declining economy on a planet whose population is exploding - an incredible impossibility
Root Cause: Advances in the science of energy would have eliminated all the above, providing prosperity and understanding for all people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html

February 21, 2010
The New Poor
Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs
By PETER S. GOODMAN
BUENA PARK, Calif. — Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.
Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.
Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.
Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.
Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.
She has learned to live without the prescription medications she is supposed to take for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She has become effusively religious — an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material — finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.
“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”
Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.
Men have suffered the largest numbers of job losses in this recession. But Ms. Eisen has the unfortunate distinction of being among a group — women from 45 to 64 years of age — whose long-term unemployment rate has grown rapidly.
In 1983, after a deep recession, women in that range made up only 7 percent of those who had been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. Last year, they made up 14 percent.
Twice, Ms. Eisen exhausted her unemployment benefits before her check was restored by a federal extension. Last week, her check ran out again. She and her husband now settle their bills with only his $1,595 monthly disability check. The rent on their apartment is $1,380.
“We’re looking at the very real possibility of being homeless,” she said.
Every downturn pushes some people out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding. Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different. An unusual constellation of forces — some embedded in the modern-day economy, others unique to this wrenching recession — might make it especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives.
Labor experts say the economy needs 100,000 new jobs a month just to absorb entrants to the labor force. With more than 15 million people officially jobless, even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.
Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns are generally followed by powerful expansions, suggesting that aggressive hiring will soon resume. But doubts remain about whether such hiring can last long enough to absorb anywhere close to the millions of unemployed.
A New Scarcity of Jobs
Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce — particularly for older, less-educated people like Ms. Eisen, who has only a high school diploma.
Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.
“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”
During periods of American economic expansion in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of private-sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a research firm. During expansions in the 1980s and ’90s, jobs grew just 2.4 percent annually. And during the last decade, job growth fell to 0.9 percent annually.
“The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each expansion,” Mr. Achuthan said. “There is no indication that this pattern is about to change.”
Before 1990, it took an average of 21 months for the economy to regain the jobs shed during a recession, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.
After the recessions in 1990 and in 2001, 31 and 46 months passed before employment returned to its previous peaks. The economy was growing, but companies remained conservative in their hiring.
Some 34 million people were hired into new and existing private-sector jobs in 2000, at the tail end of an expansion, according to Labor Department data. A year later, in the midst of recession, hiring had fallen off to 31.6 million. And as late as 2003, with the economy again growing, hiring in the private sector continued to slip, to 29.8 million.
It was a jobless recovery: Business was picking up, but it simply did not translate into more work. This time, hiring may be especially subdued, labor economists say.
Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking. But auto companies have been shrinking because strapped households have less buying power. Home building is limited by fears about a glut of foreclosed properties. Banking is expanding, but this seems largely a function of government support that is being withdrawn.
At the same time, the continued bite of the financial crisis has crimped the flow of money to small businesses and new ventures, which tend to be major sources of new jobs.
All of which helps explain why Ms. Eisen — who has never before struggled to find work — feels a familiar pain each time she scans job listings on her computer: There are positions in health care, most requiring experience she lacks. Office jobs demand familiarity with software she has never used. Jobs at fast food restaurants are mostly secured by young people and immigrants.
If, as Mr. Sinai expects, the economy again expands without adding many jobs, millions of people like Ms. Eisen will be dependent on an unemployment insurance already being severely tested.
“The system was ill prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director for the National Employment Law Project. “Now, you add a severe recession, and you have created a crisis of historic proportions.”
Fewer Protections
Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.
On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.
“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”
When Ms. Eisen and her husband, Jeff, applied for food stamps, they were turned away for having too much monthly income. The cutoff was $1,570 a month — $25 less than her husband’s disability check.
Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks.
Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level — then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three — according to an analysis by Ms. Albelda.
“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “People with more education and skills will probably figure something out once the economy picks up. It’s the ones with less education and skills: that’s the new poor.”
Here in Orange County, the expanse of suburbia stretching south from Los Angeles, long-term unemployment reaches even those who once had six-figure salaries. A center of the national mortgage industry, the area prospered in the real estate boom and suffered with the bust.
Until she was laid off two years ago, Janine Booth, 41, brought home roughly $10,000 a month in commissions from her job selling electronics to retailers. A single mother of three, she has been living lately on $2,000 a month in child support and about $450 a week in unemployment insurance — a stream of checks that ran out last week.
For Ms. Booth, work has been a constant since her teenage years, when she cleaned houses under pressure from her mother to earn pocket money. Today, Ms. Booth pays her $1,500 monthly mortgage with help from her mother, who is herself living off savings after being laid off.
“I don’t want to take money from her,” Ms. Booth said. “I just want to find a job.”
Ms. Booth, with a résumé full of well-paid sales jobs, seems the sort of person who would have little difficulty getting work. Yet two years of looking have yielded little but anxiety.
She sends out dozens of résumés a week and rarely hears back. She responds to online ads, only to learn they are seeking operators for telephone sex lines or people willing to send mysterious packages from their homes.
She spends weekdays in a classroom in Anaheim, in a state-financed training program that is supposed to land her a job in medical administration. Even if she does find a job, she will be lucky if it pays $15 an hour.
“What is going to happen?” she asked plaintively. “I worry about my kids. I just don’t want them to think I’m a failure.”
On a recent weekend, she was running errands with her 18-year-old son when they stopped at an A.T.M. and he saw her checking account balance: $50.
“He says, ‘Is that all you have?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Are we going to be O.K.?’ ”
Yes, she replied — and not only for his benefit.
“I have to keep telling myself it’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d go into a deep depression.”
Last week, she made up fliers advertising her eagerness to clean houses — the same activity that provided her with spending money in high school, and now the only way she sees fit to provide for her kids. She plans to place the fliers on porches in some other neighborhood.
“I don’t want to clean my neighbors’ houses,” she said. “I know I’m going to come out of this. There’s no way I’m going to be homeless and poverty-stricken. But I am scared. I have a lot of sleepless nights.”
For the Eisens, poverty is already here. In the two years Ms. Eisen has been without work, they have exhausted their savings of about $24,000. Their credit card balances have grown to $15,000.
“I don’t know how we’re still indoors,” she said.
Her 1994 Dodge Caravan broke down in January, leaving her to ask for rides to an employment center.
She does not have the money to move to a cheaper apartment.
“You have to have money for first and last month’s rent, and to open utility accounts,” she said.
What she has is personality and presence — two traits that used to seem enough. She narrates her life in a stream of self-deprecating wisecracks, her punch lines tinged with desperation.
“See that,” she said, spotting a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Standing on a sidewalk, he waved at passing cars with a sign advertising a tax preparation business. “That will be me next week. Do you think this guy ever thought he’d be doing this?”
And yet, she would gladly do this. She would do nearly anything.
“There are no bad jobs now,” she says. “Any job is a good job.”
She has applied everywhere she can think of — at offices, at gas stations. Nothing.
“I’m being seen as a person who is no longer viable,” she said. “I’m chalking it up to my age and my weight. Blame it on your most prominent insecurity.”
Two Incomes, Then None
Ms. Eisen grew up poor, in Flatbush in Brooklyn. Her father was in maintenance. Her mother worked part time at a company that made window blinds.
She married Jeff when she was 19, and they soon moved to California, where he had grown up. He worked in sales for a chemical company. They rented an apartment in Buena Park, a growing spread of houses filling out former orange groves. She stayed home and took care of their daughter.
“I never asked him how much he earned,” Ms. Eisen said. “I was of the mentality that the husband took care of everything. But we never wanted.”
By the early 1980s, gas and rent strained their finances. So she took a job as a quality assurance clerk at a factory that made aircraft parts. It paid $13.50 an hour and had health insurance.
When the company moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, Ms. Eisen quickly found a job at a travel agency. When online booking killed that business, she got the job at the beauty salon equipment company. It paid $13.25 an hour, with an annual bonus — enough for presents under the Christmas tree.
But six years ago, her husband took a fall at work and then succumbed to various ailments — diabetes, liver disease, high blood pressure — leaving him confined to the couch. Not until 2008 did he secure his disability check.
And now they find themselves in this desert of joblessness, her paycheck replaced by a $702 unemployment check every other week. She received 14 weeks of benefits after she lost her job, and then a seven-week extension.
For most of October through December 2008, she received nothing, as she waited for another extension. The checks came again, then ran out in September 2009. They were restored by an extension right before Christmas.
Their daughter has back problems and is living on disability checks, making the church their ultimate safety net.
“I never thought I’d be in the position where I had to go to a food bank,” Ms. Eisen said. But there she is, standing in the parking lot of the Calvary Chapel church, chatting with a half-dozen women, all waiting to enter the Bread of Life Food Pantry.
When her name is called, she steps into a windowless alcove, where a smiling woman hands her three bags of groceries: carrots, potatoes, bread, cheese and a hunk of frozen meat.
“Haven’t we got a lot to be thankful for?” Ms. Eisen asks.
For one thing, no pinto beans.
“I’ve got 10 bags of pinto beans,” she says. “And I have no clue how to cook a pinto bean.”
Local job listings are just as mysterious. On a bulletin board at the county-financed ProPath Business and Career Services Center, many are written in jargon hinting of accounting or computers.
“Nothing I’m qualified for,” Ms. Eisen says. “When you can’t define what it is, that’s a pretty good indication.”
Her counselor has a couple of possibilities — a cashier at a supermarket and a night desk job at a motel.
“I’ll e-mail them,” Ms. Eisen promises. “I’ll tell them what a shining example of humanity I am.”