James Wolcott on some stuff to think about...NOW

(Excerpt from JamesWolcottdotcom)

Call me a pessimist, a proud Eeyore, because I don't think America will smell the fine aroma of Gevalia anytime soon, if ever. This country is wearing a blindfold, staggering backwards, and slitting its own throat in slow motion. Watch the cable news, listen to our elected leaders: there's no more urgency about the economic decline in living standards dead ahead than there is about addressing global warming or loosening the chokehold of military spending. A country where "evolution" is becoming a bad word is not a country interested in facing reality. Instead, as the passage of the bankruptcy bill shows, corporate-political power is going to grind every last dollar out of the desperate and destitute rather than confront the difficult macro decisions. The elites in this country have never had it so good, and as long as they're prospering the distress will smothered under the surface, kept under a lid.

"Many Americans have virtually no leeway on their monthly budgets," writes Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch. "A co-pay on some relatively minor health emergency sends them scrambling to the loanshops. If interest rates start to move upwards many households on flexible mortgage rates will default, and plummet into bankruptcy and debt peonage for the rest of their lives.

"If the current trend among countries such as China, Japan and India to reduce their dollar holdings continues, the dollar's status will plummet, and eventually its role as the world's reserve currency will come to an end. No longer will the Asian nations subsidize America's debt, and in consequence the cost of living for ordinary Americans will start to soar, pushing even more over the edge.

"And as the dollar tumbles, so does one of the keystones of what in the 1950s used to be termed reverently, the American Way of Life, meaning in coarse material terms a civilization that guaranteed its middle class affordable higher education and the decent jobs consequent upon same."

You can kiss that dream goodbye.