I enjoy Don Peck’s attempt at capturing the zeitgeist of the American empire’s decline – the article over at The Atlantic Online includes more than a few choice observations and anecdotal truisms for a generation losing its grasp on the American Dream and its alternately apathetic and unprepared antecedents:

Some neighbors were at the Walmart a couple of weeks ago, he said, and he rang up their purchase. “Maybe they were used to seeing me in a different setting,” he said—in a suit as he left for work in the morning, or walking the dog in the neighborhood. Or “maybe they were daydreaming.” But they didn’t greet him, and he didn’t say anything. He looked down at his soup, pushing it around the bowl with his spoon for a few seconds before looking back up at me. “I know they knew me,” he said. “I’ve been in their home.”

- How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by Don Peck for The Atlantic Online
March 2010

Economic Recession as Vampiric Entity

How does one invite such malaise? The boom years, the lives unexamined, the wrong prescription, and complacency.

Will the ignorance and susceptibility to manipulation cultivated in the US population finish sucking the value out of the dollar and lead the country to the relative wasteland of a developing nation?

[via Before It's News]

A large number of Americans who are underwater on their mortgages would be better off financially if they walked away from their homes. They don’t because we have a double standard…individuals are told they have a moral obligation to pay their mortgages and corporations understand that contracts are to be breached when it’s not economically efficient.

- Brent White, University of Arizona real estate expert
How To Walk Away From Your Mortgage
by Lawrence Delevingne
BusinessInsider.com
2010-01-11

A moral obligation? Unlike a corporation (i.e. a group of economically-motivated individuals whose situation more closely resembles the insulated world of a SCUBA or deep sea diver than a snorkeler), an individual stands to suffer credit-wise by defaulting on a mortgage.

A corporation can lawyer its way out of debts, change its name overnight, and effectively escape culpability for malfeasance (while most of the same well-paid individuals remain in charge); if a typical individual were to attempt the same it would equate to some serious criminal charges and bankruptcy – you can’t walk out of your identity as an individual.

The economic options available to a typical individual are nothing like those available to a corporate entity – if, for comparison, an individual were to rack up $69.8 billion in debt (or even $689.00), he or she couldn’t very well expect a bailout from the government…

Such is the plight of the snorkeler – and let us not forget about the sharks…

Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. It has long been used to justify the killing, subjugation, and torture of another people.

Racism is a vital weapon employed by this government. It is a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank, a bomber, or a battleship. It is more destructive than an artillery shell, or a bunker buster, or a Tomahawk missile.

While all those weapons are created an owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them. Those who send us to war do not have to pull a trigger or lob a mortar round. They do not have to fight the war, they merely have to sell the war.

. . .

We need to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land. They’re not people whose names we don’t know, and cultures we don’t understand.

The enemy is people we know very well and can identify.

- Mike Prysner of Iraq Veterans Against War

Answer: Rapidly.

The Geography of Jobs map [via Sources and Methods] demonstrates succinctly.

… but do you ever wonder how economic catastrophes occur..?

Wall Street now serves, in the words of one former investment executive, as “Lucy to America’s Charlie Brown,” endlessly creating new products to lure the great herd of unwitting investors into whatever tawdry greed-bubble is being spun at the moment: Come kick the football again, only this time we’ll call it the Internet, real estate, oil futures. Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

- Wall Street’s Naked Swindle
by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone
2009-10-14

Lt. Paul Shastany said Boc told police he wanted to return to Guatemala but can’t afford a ticket. He told police he has no job or money and is worried about surviving the winter. He told police he came to the U.S. 13 years ago.

- Cops: Man can’t afford U.S., seeks deportation
2009-09-29

It’s a subtle hint that the floor may have dropped out of the economy when illegal immigrants seek deportation to improve their odds for survival.

Ain’t it a shame when you can differentiate your news broadcast by claiming that it’s true?

People throw all sorts of personal information up on Facebook that can be very useful if you’re trying to get in touch with them, or hunt them down. Phone numbers, email addresses, web pages, messages that mention your whereabouts, all of this is potentially useful to a professional skiptracer. The trick is that some people set their profile pages as private and you have to be their friend to see it. So, as a debt collection agency, just make a profile with a cute chick in it, put a plausible amount of real content in it, and have her friend the people you want to keep tabs on.

- Debt Collectors Using Cute Chicks On Facebook As Bait
by Ben Popken for Consumerist.com

As America needs most desperately to re-tool its entire environment from our current abject dependence on peripheral loot (including fossil hydrocarbons), the political establishment — dominated in the end by demagogues — will continue with the equivalent of enabling addicts with comforting lies and provision of the drugs of choice. That the drugs will run out — and this is sure — is the decisive reality that ensures Obama’s failure.

- Warring Out of Depression at FeralScholar.org

More than 240,000 contractor employees, about 80 percent of them foreign nationals, are working in Iraq and Afghanistan to support operations and projects of the U.S. military, the Department of State, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Contractor employees outnumber U.S. troops in the region. While contractors provide vital services, the Commission believes their use has also entailed billions of dollars lost to waste, fraud, and abuse due to inadequate planning, poor contract drafting, limited competition, understaffed oversight functions, and other problems.

- Wartime Contracting Concerns
To Be Aired At June 10 House Hearing

The beauty of this new Panopticon is not that it simply takes our eyes off the real war, the real plunder, the real system; it is that it stations a pernicious little watcher inside our individual brains. We become aware that we are under surveillance all the time, and this surveillance constitutes not the one discipline of the edict, but the implanted discipline that a complex society requires of its subjects to police themselves.

. . .

The bill for the United States from Treasury loans to other nations—already impossible to pay—grows exponentially to support the cost of the military now conducting the war, those we see as the guardians of civilization. Our children are inheriting this impasse. We have witnessed what happens when the suburbanites are fleeced; with the taxpayer bailout of the savings and loan criminals, the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund, these burdens will invoke the “too big to fail” principle. From Chrysler to Enron, the so-called middle class will pick up the tab.

- Keeping Our Demons at Bay by Stan Goff
March 16th, 2007

Pity he had it all right.