The lies employed to camouflage our economic decline have been in place for several decades. President Reagan included 1.5 million U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine service personnel with the civilian work force to magically reduce the nation's unemployment rate by 2%. President Clinton decided that those who had given up looking for work, or those who wanted full-time jobs but could find only part-time employment, were no longer to be counted as unemployed. His trick "disappeared' some 5 million unemployed from the official unemployment rolls. If you work more than twenty-one hours a week -- most low-wage workers at places like Walmart average twenty-eight hours a week -- you are counted as employed even though your real wages put you below the poverty line. Our actual unemployment rate, when you include those who have stopped looking for work and those who can find only very poorly paid part-time jobs, is not 8.5% but 15%. A sixth of the country was effectively unemployed in May of 2009. And we were shedding jobs at a faster rate than in the months after the 1929 crash.
Our elected officials base their decisions not on the public good but on the possibility of campaign contributions and lucrative employment on leaving office. Our corporate elite tell us government is part of the problem and the markets should regulate themselves -- and then that same elite plunders the U.S. Treasury when they trash the economy. We insist we are a market economy, one based on the principles of capitalism and free trade, and yet the single largest sectors of international trade are the armaments and weapons systems of empire. There is a vast and growing disconnect between what we say we believe and what we do. We are blinded, enchanted, and finally enslaved by illusion.
Financial collapses have always led to political extremism
It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the WeimarRepublic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. (See Hedges' book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America)
In former manufacturing towns, the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Most who live there have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working classes into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fantasy of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we rapidly re-enfranchise our dispossessed workers into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.
As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class; as the Democratic and Republican parties expose themselves as craven tools of our corporate state; as savings accounts, college funds, and retirement plans become worthless; as unemployment skyrockets and home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of reinvigorated right-wing radicals including those within the Christian Right. The engine of the Christian Right -- as is true for all radical movements -- is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.
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