I’ll include a dream I had last night- it being September 11th, and the dream leading me down quite a train of though- I don’t mind being quite grim today.
I dreamed las night that I was explaining an insight over dinner at a restaurant where my mom was present along with some other relatives and or friends.
My mom kept interrupting before I could make my point. I ended up sort of battling her for the right to complete my thought explaining that if I could just quickly get the complete thought out we could discuss it. She quickly grew offended but ultimately after much effort I was able to explain it.
The insight was this: (I have had no such “insight” before outside of the dream by the way)
America has not recovered from it’s recession some six years ago (beginning 2000) despite the suggestion of some of our indices.
Specifically minorities especially the blacks have not recovered from it’s sociological effects. The poor and minority demographics have suffered a tremendous blow which will have untold and deep implications upon community and family life.
At that point we did discuss this a little further. My mother agreed with the assessment and I mentioned that five years ago when I suggested America would not recover from the recession I had been exactly half right. Though there has generally been a full GDP and stock market recovery- the fallout has devastated the poor, spread and embittered urban blight, incarceration rates, “career unemployment” (oxymoron- I realise), and drug abuse (perhaps crystal-meth addition escalation should be sited) and many consequential social ailments such as child neglect, community degeneration and dissenfranchisement.
That’s the end of the dream. Truth be told- I don’t know if I’d had the original conversation sited in the dream projecting the economy’s failure to recover. Also I am not sure how well such an insight matches up with actual data. It does however highlight and value the relationship between an economy (measured qualitatively) with it’s subject communities and domestic as well as foreign societies. For instance, aside from the size, activity and worth or power of an economy, what is it’s shape and color; and how does this ’shape’ effect it’s subjects?
By contemporary measurements the slave economies of the pre-civil war Southern States and of some ancient successful Egyptian periods were probably steller. I last year heard it argued that “Hitler did a lot of good for the German economy. He sure did something about the immigrants too!”- I guess that depends on your definition of “good” and how far you think means (extermination, sterilization, relocation, enslavement and exile) may justify an ends (solving immigration problems).
By humanistic standards, such economic engines would fall abysmally short and as far as I am aware, we really don’t have sufficient national or even academic concern with respect to measuring the influence of our economy in far-reaching and humanistic terms. Certainly, we aught to if we on the one hand we believe that virtue is not automatic to capitalism, or if on the other we are able to understand economic linkages between dismal and plummeting national and global humanitarian and environmental conditions on the whole.
It seems present humanitarian norms are determined increasingly by the corporation, and by the multinational-”conglomerate” whose level of organization and political and legal influence reach increasingly into realms approaching national and international immunity.
Such norms seem to define three increasingly distinct classes:
1. The very wealthy and powerful ruling class which obviously includes the wealthy and powerful, but which should include the stock market its’ self and stockholders categorically as “wealthy and powerful ruling” though individual stockholders might include anyone who may not be wealthy or powerful at all individually.
2. The Middle class (think blue and white collar America)
3. The Exploited class - Slums; slavish consumerism as a category to the extent that debt interest payment begins to account for the expenditure of a persons pay check; the second and third world economies providing the brunt of our slave labor, and receiving the primary heritage of our externalized environmental degradation and industrial pollution.
September 11, 2006 at 1:55 pm
You have a style of communicating/writing that is very difficult for me to understand. I have to read it several times to even get the gist of what you say most of the time. So forgive me if I’ve missed the point, but I’ll give it a try… From this, it seems you are saying that you don’t believe that the economic recovery of the last few years is true. I can’t argue with that one way or the other. To me, it’s not horrible but then again not great. But I don’t really have any facts to back that up. But it looks like you’re saying your dream was half right and that the economy is indeed doing okay but social problems are worse.
There were a few things in your post that got me thinking about other things. Like immigration. Your Hitler reference was funny
Yeah, if we could only get rid of the people lining the ghetto then America could really prosper ! Of course, now in the U.S. we are debating sending most of the illegal immigrants back to Mexico, but there are many who are afraid that employers wouldn’t be able to get sufficient help - or at least at the pay rate they want to pay. Another reference was to the Southern states using slave labor to boost their economy. In a way, I think this is similar to what we are doing now with the Mexicans. But I guess I won’t get into that here - that’s another story.
Yeah, it does seem like the void between the haves and the have-nots is getting greater by the day. I think most studies back that up.
But how much worse have social problems within the lower class really become since 9/11/2001 ? I’m not sure that I understand this part. Have things really become worse in regard to drug use, broken families and employment within the middle class ?
>> It seems present humanitarian norms are determined increasingly by the corporation, and by the multinational-”conglomerate” whose level of organization and political and legal influence reach increasingly into realms approaching national and international immunity.
Can you give specific examples on that last quote ? Do you mean like how the company we work for might predominately determine our health insurance choices and retirement choices ? Or are you hinting at the Wal-Mart-ing of the world and how corporations have undue influence on social issues ?