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What is so clear, but where the conversation always stops short of going, is the real reason behind the impending economic collapse of this country.
It's decades worth of traitorous economic polices pushed by our plutocratic government, with the willing participation of both parties.
It's the loss of a critical mass of living wage jobs in this country that is now rearing it's head.
Why the home foreclosures? Because too many people can't earn enough to pay a mortgage or rent anymore.
Why the credit market collapse? Because too many people can't earn enough to pay for mortgages, rents, or even utilities and food, and when that started happening the markets had to find ways to continue to make loans even though people clearly couldn't afford them. The markets simply followed the result of a shrinking middle class, turning to any device it could come up with to continue to make money off them, even if it was destined to fail in the long run.
Over the past decades we've lost tens of millions of middle class jobs - manufacturing jobs - which were the backbone of the middle class. Mostly once union jobs, these core jobs paid well and offered benefits. People could live the American dream on one.
Each of those jobs used to bring home a paycheck into the local community, where it was spent, supporting many more downstream jobs. A single paycheck from a single factor worker circulated around local and by extension a national economy many times. Many other middle class jobs were a result of that one factory job.
When the factory's closed and moved across borders, those paychecks ceased coming into the community. Those paychecks stopped supporting other local businesses and those jobs were eventually lost as well. And the jobs that those jobs supported downstream as well.
The ripple effect of losing tens of millions of what were arguably the best working class jobs in the country is immeasurable, but the consequences are obvious. Not just tens of millions of living-wage middle class jobs lost, but many times that.
A critical mass of middle class, living wage jobs has been systematically destroyed in this country and the results were only just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg.
It's not really just 8 years of Bush, or deregulating Wall Street, or 10 billion a month in Iraq that is to blame. Those are just icing on the cake of destruction.
No, it's decades worth of plutocratic economic policies, supported by both parties, which have devastated the middle class in this country past a point of critical mass. The system is now in self-destruct mode and nothing can be done about it.
It took decades go steer this country to this point, and it would take decades to reverse course. It would require the re-imposition of "protectionist" (what's wrong with protecting what you've got?) trade policies which force manufacturing to return to this country. That's simply not going to happen.
Especially since few people are willing to look at and acknowledge what's really going on here.
It's the loss of a critical mass of middle class jobs, stupid!
