THE SUBPRIME FINAL SOLUTION

The MSM did their usual spin job on the consumer credit data released earlier this week. They reported a 5.4% increase in consumer debt outstanding to an ALL-TIME high of $3.051 trillion. In the Orwellian doublethink world we currently inhabit, the consumer taking on more debt is seen as a constructive sign. Consumer debt has grown by 5.8% over the first nine months of 2013, after growing by 6.1% in 2012 and 4.1% in 2011. The storyline being sold by the corporate MSM propaganda machine, serving the establishment, is that consumers’ taking on debt is a sure sign of economic recovery. They must be confident about the future and rolling in dough from their new part-time jobs as Pizza Hut delivery men. Plus, they are now eligible for free healthcare, compliments of Obama, once they can log-on.

Of course, buried at the bottom of the Federal Reserve press release and never mentioned on CNBC or the other dying legacy media outlets is the facts and details behind the all-time high in consumer credit. They count on the high probability the average math challenged American has no clue regarding the distinction between revolving and non-revolving credit or who controls the distribution of such credit. It is fascinating examining the historical data on the Federal Reserve website and realizing how far we’ve fallen as a society in the last 45 years.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/HIST/cc_hist_sa_levels.html

Revolving credit is a fancy term for credit card debt. Imagine our society today without credit cards. That sounds outrageous to the debt addicted populace inhabiting our suburban wasteland and urban badlands. What is truly outrageous is the fact we have allowed ourselves to be duped into $846 billion of revolving credit card debt charging an average interest rate of 13% by Wall Street bankers who have used the American Dream of a better life as the bait to lure a dumbed down easily manipulated populace into believing that material possessions purchased with high interest debt represented advancement rather than servitude. Debt accumulation is seen as a badge of honor. Keeping up with the Joneses is all that matters. Our shallow culture has no notion about the concept of deferred gratification or saving to pay for your wants.

A shocking fact (to historically challenged government educated drones) revealed by the Federal Reserve data is that credit card debt did not exist prior to 1968. How could people live their lives without credit cards? It must have been a nightmare. You mean to tell me when people wanted new clothes, jewelry, a TV, or to eat out at a restaurant, they actually had to save up the cash to do so? What kind of barbaric system would make you live within your means? The Depression era adults had somehow survived for over two decades after WWII without buying cheap foreign crap they didn’t need with money they didn’t have using a piece of plastic with a Wall Street bank logo emblazoned on the front.

1968 marked a turning point for America. LBJ’s welfare/warfare state had begun the downward spiral of a once rational country. We chose guns and butter, with the bill being charged to the national credit card. It was fitting that Wall Street introduced the credit card in 1968.

There were 200 million Americans in 1968 and $2 billion of credit card debt outstanding, or $10 per person.
By 1980 there were 227 million Americans and $54 billion of credit card debt outstanding, or $238 per person.
By 1990 there were 249 million Americans and $230 billion of credit card debt outstanding, or $924 per person.
By 2000 there were 281 million Americans and $650 billion of credit card debt outstanding, $2,313 per person.
By July of 2008 credit card debt outstanding peaked at $1.022 trillion and the population was 304 million, with credit card debt per person topping out at $3,361 per person.

Over the course of 40 years, the population of this country grew by 52%. Credit card debt grew by 51,000%. Credit card debt per person grew by 33,600%. This was a case of credit induced mass hysteria and it continues today. Have the American people benefitted from this enslavement in chains of debt? I’d venture to answer no. Who benefitted? The corporate fascist oligarchy of Wall Street banks, mega-corporations sourcing their crap from Chinese slave labor factories, and politicians in the back pockets of the bankers and corporate CEOs benefitted.

The evil oligarch scum grew too greedy and blew up the worldwide financial system in 2008. Since July 2008 credit card debt has declined by $175 billion, with the majority of the decrease from banks writing off bad debt and passing it along to the American taxpayer through their TARP bailout and 0% money from their puppet Bernanke. It bottomed out at $834 billion in April 2011 and has only grown by a miniscule $13 billion in the last 29 months, and only $1.7 billion in the last twelve months. The muppets have refused to cooperate by running up those credit cards. Not having jobs, paying 40% more for health insurance due to Obamacare, and real inflation exceeding 5% on the things they need to live, have caused some hesitation among the delusional masses. Even a government educated, math challenged, iGadget addicted moron realizes their credit card is the only thing standing between them and living in a cardboard box on a street corner.

Your owners have been forced to implement Plan B. The monster they have created is like a shark. The debt must keep growing or the monster will die. In 2008, the oligarchs were staring into the abyss. Their wealth, power and control were in grave jeopardy. Rather than accept the consequences of their actions like men and allowing the economy to return to normalcy, these weasels have doubled down by accelerating the debt production and dropping it from helicopters to subprime borrowers across the land, like unemployed construction workers named Gus getting a degree in liberal arts from the University of Phoenix while sitting in their basement in boxer shorts. The Federal Reserve Black Hawks are hovering over the inner cities dropping Bennie Bucks on the very same people they put in McMansions with no doc negative amortization subprime mortgages in 2005, so they can occupy Cadillac Escalades for a couple years before defaulting again. The appearance of normalcy is crucial to the evil oligarchs as they attempt to pillage the remaining loot in this country.

Before the credit card was rolled out in 1968, there was non-revolving debt strictly related to auto loans made by banks and credit unions. The Federal government was nowhere to be found in the mix as banks and consumers made economic decisions based upon risk and reward. There were $110 billion of loans outstanding to a population of 200 million, or $550 per person. The Federal government stuck their nose into the free market with the creation of Sallie Mae in the 1970’s. But they were still a miniscule portion of total consumer debt at $115 billion in 2008, or only 11% of total consumer debt outstanding. The chart below from Zero Hedge reveals what has happened since the oligarchs crashed the financial system with their vampire squid blood sucking tentacles syphoning the lifeblood from the American middle class. Non-revolving debt has increased from $1.65 trillion in July 2008 to $2.2 trillion today, solely due to Obama and his minions doling out subprime auto and student loan debt to anyone that can scratch an X on a loan document.

If middle class consumers were unwilling to borrow and spend, the oligarchs were going to use their control over the government to dole out billions to subprime borrowers in a final, ultimately futile, attempt to keep this Ponzi scheme going for a while longer. The subprime game worked wonders in the final phase of the housing bubble. And now the losses will fall solely on the 50% of Americans who actually pay taxes. It wasn’t a mistake the Federal government took complete control of the student loan market in 2009. It isn’t a mistake the only TARP recipient the Feds have not attempted to disengage from happens to be the largest issuer of subprime auto loans in the world – Ally Financial (aka GMAC, Ditech, ResCap).

In 2008 there was $730 billion of student loan debt outstanding, of which the Federal government was responsible for $120 billion. Five short years later there is $1.2 trillion of student loan debt outstanding and the Federal government (aka YOU the taxpayer) is responsible for $716 billion. Using my top notch math skills, I’ve determined that student loan debt has risen by $470 billion, while Federal government issuance of student loan debt has expanded by $600 billion. The rational risk adverse lenders have reduced their exposure to the most subprime borrowers on earth, undergrads at the University of Phoenix and thousands of other “for profit” educational black holes across the country. Only an organization who didn’t care about getting repaid would lend billions to borrowers without a job, hope of a job, or intellectual ability to hold a job. A critical thinking person might wonder why student loan debt would rise by almost $500 billion in 5 years when college enrollment has grown by only 2 million. That comes to $250,000 per additional student.

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The Federal government couldn’t possibly have distributed $500 billion to anyone with a pulse as a way to manipulate the national unemployment rate lower, because anyone in school is not considered unemployed. Do you think the $500 billion was spent on tuition and books? Or do you think those “students” used it to buy iGadgets, HDTVs, weed and Twitter stock? With default rates already at all-time highs and accelerating skyward and $146 billion of loans already in default, you don’t need a PhD from the University of Phoenix (where default rates exceed 30%) like Shaq to realize the American taxpayer is going to get it good and hard once again.

My personal observations during my daily trek through the slums of West Philly would befuddle someone who didn’t understand the oligarch scheme to create an artificial auto recovery by distributing auto loans to deadbeats, the SNAP army, and hip hop nitwits. As I maneuver quickly through the West Philly badlands in my four year old paid off compact car praying I don’t get caught in gang crossfire, I see an inordinate number of brand new BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus, Cadillacs, and Jaguars parked in front of $20,000 dilapidated fleapits that tend to collapse during heavy rain storms. The real unemployment rate in these garbage strewn, disintegrating neighborhoods exceeds 50%. The median household income is less than $20,000. Over 40% of the adult population hasn’t graduated high school and 63% of the population lives below the poverty level. These people put the “sub” in subprime. How can anyone in this American version of third world Baghdad afford to drive a $40,000 vehicle? The answer is they can’t. But you the taxpayer, out of the goodness of your heart and without your knowledge, have loaned them the money so they can cruise around West Philly in Jay Z or Kanye style.

Bernanke’s ZIRP creates the environment for mal-investment and reckless lending. With the Federal government owned Ally Financial leading the charge, the miraculous auto sales recovery is nothing but a bad loan driven illusion. With the Federal government pushing subprime loans like a West Philly drug dealer, the Too Big To Trust Wall Street cabal have followed suit providing financing to deadbeats with FICO scores of 500, no job, but a nice smile. When you can borrow from the Fed at 0% and loan money to SNAP nation at 18%, with a Bernanke unspoken promise to bail them out when the inevitable defaults come as a complete shock, this is why you see thousands of luxury automobiles parked in the urban kill zones across America.

Zero Hedge documented the new subprime bubble in a story earlier this week. As auto dealers allow losers with sub-500 FICO scores to drive off their lots with new cars, ZH summarized the next taxpayer bailout:

“No Car, no FICO score, no problem. The NINJAs have once again taken over the subprime asylum.”

Someone with a 500 FICO score has defaulted on multiple debt obligations in the recent past. The issuance of hundreds of billions of subprime debt can give the appearance of economic growth for a short period of time, just like it did from 2004 through 2007. Then it all collapsed in a heap because the debt eventually must be repaid. Cash flow is required to service debt. Maybe the West Philly subprime Mercedes drivers can trade their SNAP cards for cash to make their car loan payments, since they don’t have jobs. Even the captured MSM is being forced to admit the truth.

While surging light-vehicle sales have been one of the bright spots in the U.S. economy, it’s increasingly being fueled by borrowers with imperfect credit. Such car buyers account for more than 27 percent of loans for new vehicles, the highest proportion since Experian Automotive started tracking the data in 2007. That compares with 25 percent last year and 18 percent in 2009, as lenders pulled back during the recession. Issuance of bonds linked to subprime auto loans soared to $17.2 billion this year, more than double the amount sold during the same period in 2010, according to Harris Trifon, a debt analyst at Deutsche Bank AG. The market for such debt, which peaked at about $20 billion in 2005, was dwarfed by the record $1.2 trillion in mortgage bonds sold that year.

When has packaging subprime loans, getting them rated AAA by a trustworthy ratings agency, and selling them to little old ladies and pension funds, ever caused a problem before? With subprime auto loan issuance accounting for 50% of all car loans and an average loan to value ratio of 114.5%, what could possibly go wrong? Think about that for one minute. The government and Wall Street banks are loaning deadbeats $33,000 of your money to buy a $30,000 car, despite the fact the high school dropout borrower doesn’t have a job and has a history of defaulting on their obligations.

Can you really blame the borrowers? For the second time in the last decade the rich folk have generously offered to let them experience the good life, with debt that is never expected to be repaid. The people in West Philly live in rat infested, rundown, leaky shacks waiting for the 1st of the month to get their EBT card recharged. They have nothing, so they have nothing to lose. When the MAN offered to loan them $300,000 in 2005 so they could buy their very own McMansion, what did they have to lose? They got to live in a fancy house for a few years until they were booted out by the bank and left in exactly the same spot they were before the MAN came along. These people don’t even know what a FICO score means.

Now the MAN has knocked on their hovel door again and offered to put them in a brand spanking new Cadillac Escalade with no money down, requiring no proof of employment, and no prospects of repaying the loan. Hallelujah, there is a God!!! They get to tool around West Philly for a year or two impressing their fellow SNAP recipients until the repo man shows up and absconds with their wheels. They will be left right where they were, hoofing it with their $200 Air Jordans. Anyone with an ounce of brains (eliminates Cramer & Bartiromo) can see this will end exactly as all easy money, Federal Reserve propagated, and government sanctioned scams end.

“Perhaps more than any other factor, easing credit has been the key to the U.S. auto recovery,” Adam Jonas, a New York-based analyst with Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to investors last month. The rise of subprime lending back to record levels, the lengthening of loan terms and increasing credit losses are some of factors that lead Jonas to say there are “serious warning signs” for automaker’s ability to maintain pricing discipline.

In the last year 99% of all consumer debt issued was doled out by government drones, with no interest in getting repaid, to subprime deadbeats, with no interest in repaying. It’s a match made in subprime heaven with your tax dollars. As an Ivy League educated Wall Street banker CEO once said:

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

Chuck “Doing the Boogie Woogie” Prince – FORMER CEO of Citicorp – July 2007

You see it is always about liquidity, also known as Bernanke Bucks or QEternity. Without Bernanke and his Federal Reserve sycophants printing $2.8 billion of new money every single day, shoveling it into the grubby hands of his Wall Street bank bosses and a corrupt fetid festering pustule of a government running trillion dollar deficits and showering your money on loafers and welfare queens, this subprime final solution would not be possible. This is an exact replay of the subprime mortgage debacle, except the oligarchs have cut out the middleman. Holding the American people hostage for the $700 billion TARP bailout proved to be messy, with 90% of Americans against the “Save a Corrupt Criminal Banker” scheme. This time, there will not be a vote in Congress when the hundreds of billions in subprime student loans and subprime auto loans go bad and become the responsibility of the few remaining American taxpayers. What’s another few hundred billion among friends when our annual deficits soar past $1 trillion, our national debt approaches $20 trillion, and our unfunded entitlement liabilities exceed $200 trillion?

When the music stopped in 2008, Chuck Prince bopped away with a $40 million severance package and you were left to sweep the confetti off the floors, pick up the empty champagne bottles and caviar plates, scrub the vomitorium, and pay for all the damages that occurred during the sordid subprime orgy of greed, lust, gluttony, envy and sloth. Somehow the distracted, techno-narcissistic, easily duped zombies have been lured into the subprime web of deceit again. We have only ourselves to blame as the corporate fascist oligarchs implement their final solution for the American middle class and our once proud nation – a bullet to the back of the head.

WEST PHILLY – WILDWOOD CONUNDRUM

While walking down the street in Wildwood yesterday I noticed something that most people would find highly unusual. There was a gang of teenagers coming towards me and I wasn’t scared. It was because they were all Asian and dressed in blue Morey’s Piers work shirts. They were headed to their jobs on the boardwalk. I had previously passed a gaggle of Eastern Europeans in blue Morey’s work shirts while riding my bike on the boardwalk. This is not a recent development. Morey’s has been employing foreign students for years to man their rides and concession booths.

The Morey family essentially runs the Wildwood Boardwalk. They operate the three amusement piers and many of the game and food booths. They have been model citizens and have done many good things for the town and the people. They have been the major player in Wildwood for decades.

They employ 1,500 people every summer and half of them are foreign students. They come from China, Thailand, Bulgaria, Egypt, Ireland and other Eastern European countries. This fact has always had me scratching my head. Morey’s pays them $7.50 to $8.00 per hour. They provide housing and transportation. They feed them lunch and dinner. The foreign workers are pleasant, efficient, and competent. They are clean cut and show up every day for work. They appear to be loving the experience.

You might be wondering how foreigners can come to the U.S. over the summer and get jobs when our real unemployment rate is north of 20%. It seems there is a Federal government program called the Summer Work Travel Program, run by the State Department. It was created in 1961 to bolster diplomatic ties with other countries by way of cultural exchange. As a reminder, Federal programs NEVER die. They just get bigger. The primary purpose of the program is to acquaint foreign students with the culture and life of modern America and the distribution of other cultures among its inhabitants. I guess taking ride tickets and selling fried oreos to obese tattooed Americans is really acquainting them with our culture. Approximately 120,000 foreign university students are shipped over for three or four months every year to work low level tourist industry jobs.

The foreign students actually end up paying $2,000 to just get over here to work. Would-be participants typically first make contact with a recruiter in their home country. From there, they are connected with one of dozens of private “sponsors,” who are tasked by the State Department with overseeing the visa program. The sponsors acquire visas for students and connect them with employers or, at times, another company before they are granted entrance into the United States. Those who gain entry into the program typically spend more than $2,000 in travel expenses and fees to recruiters and sponsors, but some pay much, much more. “With recruiters, you don’t know how much they might be charging. We found someone who was charging $10,000,” said Allan Smith, chief executive officer at American Camp And Work Experience, the sole New Jersey-based Summer Work Travel sponsor. “On the other side,” Smith said, “you have employers who house kids, charging them over $100 a week. At the end of the summer, they end up owing the company money. When you get stuff like that, it hurts everybody.”

Morey’s does not treat their employees badly. But this program is not really a cultural immersion program. It’s a cheap labor program for American companies. Federal taxes are waived for participants in the program. That means Morey’s does not have to pay their 7.65% portion into the Social Security fund. But at the end of the day, I believe Morey’s when they say they can’t fill the positions locally. I do not believe Morey’s are racists, but there are very few African American or Hispanic workers on their piers. This is interesting since 31% of the local population is Hispanic and 12% is African American. The total local population is only 5,500, with only 500 or so residents between 18 and 24 years old. It makes sense that they would need teenagers from outside of Wildwood to fill their needs.

This brings me to West Philly and how the welfare state policies of this country are the reason the Morey family has to seek out good teenage workers from across the globe. My Section 8 neighbors have a 17 year old son living in the condo. He lives 50 yards from the Wildwood boardwalk between two Morey’s amusement piers. He does not work. Morey’s is going through a lot of effort to ship in teenagers from foreign countries. The people living next door have not interest in working. If they earned money working at a real job, they would lose some of their free shit. That kid has no interest in working on the Boardwalk. He has learned already that not working is easier and more profitable than working.

This entitlement attitude extends into West Philly. Philadelphia is 90 miles from Wildwood. There are 205,000 18 to 24 year olds living in Philadelphia. The true youth unemployment rate in Philadelphia is in excess of 50%. The black unemployment rate is north of 70%. How screwed up is our country that Morey’s couldn’t find 750 teenagers in Philadelphia to collect ride tickets and sell funnel cake? Any normal teenager would love to spend the summer at a shore house with an easy night time job. I blame the 45 years of welfare state policies for this ridiculous situation. The teenagers in West Philly have been raised with an entitlement mindset. Working would reduce their government freebies. Most of these teenagers have never had an example of two parents working hard at jobs. Many don’t even know their fathers. They have no concept of personal responsibility or getting ahead in life. They know their family EBT cards will be recharged on the 1st of the month. They aren’t capable of adding, subtracting, using correct grammar or dressing like a normal human being. The kids from China have a better grasp of the English language than kids in West Philly.

It is a sad reflection on our government run educational system, entitlement plantation mentality instilled by liberal do-gooder politicians, and complete lack of parental responsibility within the urban ghettos, that employers have to seek workers from 7,000 miles away when there are 200,000 teenagers only ninety miles away. Do you blame Morey’s for not hiring these Philadelphia teenagers?

ARE YOU SEEING WHAT I’M SEEING?

Is it just me, or are the signs of consumer collapse as clear as a Lowes parking lot on a Saturday afternoon? Sometimes I wonder if I’m just seeing the world through my pessimistic lens, skewing my point of view. My daily commute through West Philadelphia is not very enlightening, as the squalor, filth and lack of legal commerce remain consistent from year to year. This community is sustained by taxpayer subsidized low income housing, taxpayer subsidized food stamps, welfare payments, and illegal drug dealing. The dependency attitude, lifestyles of slothfulness and total lack of commerce has remained constant for decades in West Philly. It is on the weekends, cruising around a once thriving suburbia, where you perceive the persistent deterioration and decay of our debt fixated consumer spending based society.

The last two weekends I’ve needed to travel the highways of Montgomery County, PA going to a family party and purchasing a garbage disposal for my sink at my local Lowes store. Montgomery County is the typical white upper middle class suburb, with tracts of McMansions dotting the landscape. The population of 800,000 is spread over a 500 square mile area. Over 81% of the population is white, with the 9% black population confined to the urban enclaves of Norristown and Pottstown.

The median age is 38 and the median household income is $75,000, 50% above the national average. The employers are well diversified with an even distribution between education, health care, manufacturing, retail, professional services, finance and real estate. The median home price is $300,000, also 50% above the national average. The county leans Democrat, with Obama winning 60% of the vote in 2008. The 300,000 households were occupied by college educated white collar professionals. From a strictly demographic standpoint, Montgomery County appears to be a prosperous flourishing community where the residents are living lives of relative affluence. But, if you look closer and connect the dots, you see fissures in this façade of affluence that spread more expansively by the day. The cheap oil based, automobile dependent, mall centric, suburban sprawl, sanctuary of consumerism lifestyle is showing distinct signs of erosion. The clues are there for all to see and portend a bleak future for those mentally trapped in the delusions of a debt dependent suburban oasis of retail outlets, chain restaurants, office parks and enclaves of cookie cutter McMansions. An unsustainable paradigm can’t be sustained.

The first weekend had me driving along Ridge Pike, from Collegeville to Pottstown. Ridge Pike is a meandering two lane road that extends from Philadelphia, winds through Conshohocken, Plymouth Meeting, Norristown, past Ursinus College in Collegeville, to the farthest reaches of Montgomery County, at least 50 miles in length. It served as a main artery prior to the introduction of the interstates and superhighways that now connect the larger cities in eastern PA. Except for morning and evening rush hours, this road is fairly sedate. Like many primary routes in suburbia, the landscape is engulfed by strip malls, gas stations, automobile dealerships, office buildings, fast food joints, once thriving manufacturing facilities sitting vacant and older homes that preceded the proliferation of cookie cutter communities that now dominate what was once farmland.

Telltale Signs

I should probably be keeping my eyes on the road, but I can’t help but notice the telltale signs of an economic system gone haywire. As you drive along, the number of For Sale signs in front of homes stands out. When you consider how bad the housing market has been, the 40% decline in national home prices since 2007, the 30% of home dwellers underwater on their mortgage, and declining household income, you realize how desperate a home seller must be to try and unload a home in this market. The reality of the number of For Sale signs does not match the rhetoric coming from the NAR, government mouthpieces, CNBC pundits, and other housing recovery shills about record low inventory and home price increases.

The Federal Reserve/Wall Street/U.S. Treasury charade of foreclosure delaying tactics and selling thousands of properties in bulk to their crony capitalist buddies at a discount is designed to misinform the public. My local paper lists foreclosures in the community every Monday morning. In 2009 it would extend for four full pages. Today, it still extends four full pages. The fact that Wall Street bankers have criminally forged mortgage documents, people are living in houses for two years without making mortgage payments, and the Federal Government backing 97% of all mortgages while encouraging 3.5% down financing does not constitute a true housing recovery. Show me the housing recovery in these charts.

Existing home sales are at 1998 levels, with 45 million more people living in the country today.

New single family homes under construction are below levels in 1969, when there were 112 million less people in the country.

Another observation that can be made as you cruise through this suburban mecca of malaise is the overall decay of the infrastructure, appearances and disinterest or inability to maintain properties. The roadways are potholed with fading traffic lines, utility poles leaning and rotting, and signage corroding and antiquated. Houses are missing roof tiles, siding is cracked, gutters astray, porches sagging, windows cracked, a paint brush hasn’t been utilized in decades, and yards are inundated with debris and weeds. Not every house looks this way, but far more than you would think when viewing the overall demographics for Montgomery County. You wonder how many number among the 10 million vacant houses in the country today. The number of dilapidated run down properties paints a picture of the silent, barely perceptible Depression that grips the country today. With such little sense of community in the suburbs, most people don’t even know their neighbors. With the electronic transfer of food stamps, unemployment compensation, and other welfare benefits you would never know that your neighbor is unemployed and hasn’t made the mortgage payment on his house in 30 months. The corporate fascist ruling plutocracy uses their propaganda mouthpieces in the mainstream corporate media and government agency drones to misinform and obscure the truth, but the data and anecdotal observational evidence reveal the true nature of our societal implosion.

A report by the Census Bureau this past week inadvertently reveals data that confirms my observations on the roadways of my suburban existence. Annual household income fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year, to an inflation-adjusted $50,054. The median income — meaning half earned more, half less — now stands 8.9% lower than the all-time peak of $54,932 in 1999. It is far worse than even that dreadful result. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1989. When you understand that real household income hasn’t risen in 23 years, you can connect the dots with the decay and deterioration of properties in suburbia. A vast swath of Americans cannot afford to maintain their residences. If the choice is feeding your kids and keeping the heat on versus repairing the porch, replacing the windows or getting a new roof, the only option is survival.

All races have seen their income fall, with educational achievement reflected in the much higher incomes of Whites and Asians. It is interesting to note that after a 45 year War on Poverty the median household income for black families is only up 19% since 1968.

Now for the really bad news. Any critical thinking person should realize the Federal Government has been systematically under-reporting inflation since the early 1980’s in an effort to obscure the fact they are debasing the currency and methodically destroying the lives of middle class Americans. If inflation was calculated exactly as it was in 1980, the GDP figures would be substantially lower and inflation would be reported 5% higher than it is today. Faking the numbers does not change reality, only the perception of reality. Calculating real median household income with the true level of inflation exposes the true picture for middle class America. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1970, just prior to Nixon closing the gold window and unleashing the full fury of a Federal Reserve able to print fiat currency and politicians to promise the earth, moon and the sun to voters. With incomes not rising over the last four decades is it any wonder many of our 115 million households slowly rot and decay from within like an old diseased oak tree. The slightest gust of wind can lead to disaster.

Eliminating the last remnants of fiscal discipline on bankers and politicians in 1971 accomplished the desired result of enriching the top 0.1% while leaving the bottom 90% in debt and desolation. The Wall Street debt peddlers, Military Industrial arms dealers, and job destroying corporate goliaths have reaped the benefits of financialization (money printing) while shoveling the costs, their gambling losses, trillions of consumer debt, and relentless inflation upon the working tax paying middle class. The creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of the individual income tax in 1913, along with leaving the gold standard has rewarded the cabal of private banking interests who have captured our economic and political systems with obscene levels of wealth, while senior citizens are left with no interest earnings ($400 billion per year has been absconded from savers and doled out to bankers since 2008 by Ben Bernanke) and the middle class has gone decades seeing their earnings stagnate and their purchasing power fall precipitously.

The facts exposed in the chart above didn’t happen by accident. The system has been rigged by those in power to enrich them, while impoverishing the masses. When you gain control over the issuance of currency, issuance of debt, tax system, political system and legal apparatus, you’ve essentially hijacked the country and can funnel all the benefits to yourself and costs to the math challenged, government educated, brainwashed dupes, known as the masses. But there is a problem for the 0.1%. Their sociopathic personalities never allow them to stop plundering and preying upon the sheep. They have left nothing but carcasses of the once proud hard working middle class across the country side. There are only so many Lear jets, estates in the Hamptons, Jaguars, and Rolexes the 0.1% can buy. There are only 152,000 of them. Their sociopathic looting and pillaging of the national wealth has destroyed the host. When 90% of the population can barely subsist, collapse and revolution beckon.

Extend, Pretend & Depend

As I drove further along Ridge Pike we passed the endless monuments to our spiral into the depths of materialism, consumerism, and the illusion that goods purchased on credit represented true wealth. Mile after mile of strip malls, restaurants, gas stations, and office buildings rolled by my window. Anyone who lives in the suburbs knows what I’m talking about. You can’t travel three miles in any direction without passing a Dunkin Donuts, KFC, McDonalds, Subway, 7-11, Dairy Queen, Supercuts, Jiffy Lube or Exxon Station. The proliferation of office parks to accommodate the millions of paper pushers that make our service economy hum has been unprecedented in human history. Never have so many done so little in so many places. Everyone knows what a standard American strip mall consists of – a pizza place, a Chinese takeout, beer store, a tanning, salon, a weight loss center, a nail salon, a Curves, karate studio, Gamestop, Radioshack, Dollar Store, H&R Block, and a debt counseling service. They are a reflection of who we’ve become – an obese drunken species with excessive narcissistic tendencies that prefers to play video games while texting on our iGadgets as our debt financed lifestyles ultimately require professional financial assistance.

What you can’t ignore today is the number of vacant storefronts in these strip malls and the overwhelming number of SPACE AVAILABLE, FOR LEASE, and FOR RENT signs that proliferate in front of these dying testaments to an unsustainable economic system based upon debt fueled consumer spending and infinite growth assumptions. The booming sign manufacturer is surely based in China. The officially reported national vacancy rates of 11% are already at record highs, but anyone with two eyes knows these self-reported numbers are a fraud. Vacancy rates based on my observations are closer to 30%. This is part of the extend and pretend strategy that has been implemented by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, the FASB, and the Wall Street banking cabal. The fraud and false storyline of a commercial real estate recovery is evident to anyone willing to think critically. The incriminating data is provided by the Federal Reserve in their Quarterly Delinquency Report.

The last commercial real estate crisis occurred in 1991. Mall vacancy rates were at levels consistent with today.

The current reported office vacancy rates of 17.5% are only slightly below the 19% levels of 1991.

As reported by the Federal Reserve, delinquency rates on commercial real estate loans in 1991 were 12%, leading to major losses among the banks that made those imprudent loans. Amazingly, after the greatest financial collapse in history, delinquency rates on commercial loans supposedly peaked at 8.8% in the 2^nd quarter of 2010 and have now miraculously plummeted to pre-collapse levels of 4.9%. This is while residential loan delinquencies have resumed their upward trajectory, the number of employed Americans has fallen by 414,000 in the last two months, 9 million Americans have left the labor force since 2008, and vacancy rates are at or near all-time highs. This doesn’t pass the smell test. The Federal Reserve, owned and controlled by the Wall Street, instructed these banks to extend all commercial real estate loans, pretend they will be paid, and value them on their books at 100% of the original loan amount. Real estate developers pretend they are collecting rent from non-existent tenants, Wall Street banks pretend they are being paid by the developers, and their highly compensated public accounting firm pretends the loans aren’t really delinquent. Again, the purpose of this scam is to shield the Wall Street bankers from accepting the losses from their reckless behavior. Ben rewards them with risk free income on their deposits, propped up by mark to fantasy accounting, while they reward themselves with billions in bonuses for a job well done. The master plan requires an eventual real recovery that isn’t going to happen. Press releases and fake data do not change the reality on the ground.

I have two strip malls within three miles of my house that opened in 1990. When I moved to the area in 1995, they were 100% occupied and a vital part of the community. The closest center has since lost its Genuardi grocery store, Sears Hardware, Blockbuster, Donatos, Sears Optical, Hollywood Tans, hair salon, pizza pub and a local book store. It is essentially a ghost mall, with two banks, a couple chain restaurants and empty parking spaces. The other strip mall lost its grocery store anchor and sporting goods store. This has happened in an outwardly prosperous community. The reality is the apparent prosperity is a sham. The entire tottering edifice of housing, autos, and retail has been sustained by ever increasing levels of debt for the last thirty years and the American consumer has hit the wall. From 1950 through the early 1980s, when the working middle class saw their standard of living rise, personal consumption expenditures accounted for between 60% and 65% of GDP. Over the last thirty years consumption has relentlessly grown as a percentage of GDP to its current level of 71%, higher than before the 2008 collapse.

If the consumption had been driven by wage increases, then this trend would not have been a problem. But, we already know real median household income is lower than it was in 1970. The thirty years of delusion were financed with debt – peddled, hawked, marketed, and pushed by the drug dealers on Wall Street. The American people got hooked on debt and still have not kicked the habit. The decline in household debt since 2008 is solely due to the Wall Street banks writing off $800 billion of mortgage, credit card, and auto loan debt and transferring the cost to the already drowning American taxpayer.

The powers that be are desperately attempting to keep this unsustainable, dysfunctional debt choked scheme from disintegrating by doling out more subprime auto debt, subprime student loan debt, low down payment mortgages, and good old credit card debt. It won’t work. The consumer is tapped out. Last week’s horrific retail sales report for August confirmed this fact. Declining household income and rising costs for energy, food, clothing, tuition, taxes, health insurance, and the other things needed to survive in the real world, have broken the spirit of Middle America. The protracted implosion of our consumer society has only just begun. There are thousands of retail outlets to be closed, hundreds of thousands of jobs to be eliminated, thousands of malls to be demolished, and billions of loan losses to be incurred by the criminal Wall Street banks.

The Faces of Failure & Futility

My fourteen years working in key positions for big box retailer IKEA has made me particularly observant of the hubris and foolishness of the big chain stores that dominate the retail landscape. There are 1.1 million retail establishments in the United States, but the top 25 mega-store national chains account for 25% of all the retail sales in the country. The top 100 retailers operate 243,000 stores and account for approximately $1.6 trillion in sales, or 36% of all the retail sales in the country. Their misconceived strategic plans assumed 5% same store growth for eternity, economic growth of 3% per year for eternity, a rising market share, and ignorance of the possible plans of their competitors. They believed they could saturate a market without over cannibalizing their existing stores. Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowes have all hit the limits of profitable expansion. Each incremental store in a market results in lower profits.

My trip to my local Lowes last weekend gave me a glimpse into a future of failure and futility. Until 2009, I had four choices of Lowes within 15 miles of my house. There was a store 8 miles east, 12 miles west, 15 miles north, and 15 miles south of my house. In an act of supreme hubris, Lowes opened a store smack in the middle of these four stores, four miles from my house. The Hatfield store opened in early 2009 and I wrote an article detailing how Lowes was about to ruin their profitability in Montgomery County. It just so happens that I meet a couple of my old real estate buddies from IKEA at a local pub every few months. In 2009 one of them had a real estate position with Lowes and we had a spirited discussion about the prospects for the Lowes Hatfield store. He assured me it would be a huge success. I insisted it would be a dud and would crush the profitability of the market by cannibalizing the other four stores. We met at that same pub a few months ago. Lowes had laid him off and he admitted to me the Hatfield store was a disaster.

I pulled into the Lowes parking lot at 11:30 am on a Saturday. Big Box retailers do 50% of their business on the weekend. The busiest time frame is from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm on Saturday. Big box retailers build enough parking spots to handle this peak period. The 120,000 square feet Hatfield Lowes has approximately 1,000 parking spaces. I pulled into the spot closest to the entrance during their supposed peak period. There were about 70 cars in the parking lot, with most probably owned by Lowes workers. It is a pleasure to shop in this store, with wide open aisles, and an employee to customer ratio of four to one. The store has 14 checkout lanes and at peak period on a Saturday, there was ONE checkout lane open, with no lines. This is a corporate profit disaster in the making, but the human tragedy far overrides the declining profits of this mega-retailer.

As you walk around this museum of tools and toilets you notice the looks on the faces of the workers. These aren’t the tattooed, face pierced freaks you find in many retail establishments these days. They are my neighbors. They are the beaten down middle class. They are the middle aged professionals who got cast aside by the mega-corporations in the name of efficiency, outsourcing, right sizing, stock buybacks, and executive stock options. The irony of this situation is lost on those who have gutted the American middle class. When you look into the eyes of these people, you see sadness, confusion and embarrassment. They know they can do more. They want to do more. They know they’ve been screwed, but they aren’t sure who to blame. They were once the very customers propelling Lowes’ growth, buying new kitchens, appliances, and power tools. Now they can’t afford a can of paint on their $10 per hour, no benefit retail careers. As depressing as this portrait appears, it is about to get worse.

This Lowes will be shut down and boarded up within the next two years. The parking lot will become a weed infested eyesore occupied by 14 year old skateboarders. One hundred and fifty already down on their luck neighbors will lose their jobs, the township will have a gaping hole in their tax revenue, and the CEO of Lowes will receive a $50 million bonus for his foresight in announcing the closing of 100 stores that he had opened five years before. This exact scenario will play out across suburbia, as our unsustainable system comes undone. Our future path will parallel the course of the labor participation rate. Just as the 9 million Americans who have “left” the labor force since 2008 did not willfully make that choice, the debt burdened American consumer will be dragged kicking and screaming into the new reality of a dramatically reduced standard of living.

Connecting the dots between my anecdotal observations of suburbia and a critical review of the true non-manipulated data bestows me with a not optimistic outlook for the coming decade. Is what I’m seeing just the view of a pessimist, or are you seeing the same thing?

A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.

“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” – Chris Hedges

FREE SH*T ARMY LINES UP FOR FREE SHIT

As I travelled my usual route into work this morning through the badlands of West Philly, I witnessed the usual Thursday morning phenomenon. I usually make my way down 36th Street between 7:00 am and 7:30 am every day. I never get stuck in traffic on this route as no one in this community is rushing off to work in the morning. I rarely see any human beings in Mantua in the morning. Bustling is not a word that describes this section of West Philly. They are snug in their government issued posturepedic beds, in their government subsidized low income luxury townhouses, watching their government subsidized Direct TV, and munching on pork rinds and cheetos bought with their EBT card.

Thursday mornings are different. There is a large non-descript building on the corner of 36th & Haverford Ave. housing the Grace Lutheran Evangelical Church. Below is a partial picture of the building.

On Thursday’s there is a long line of folks with their grocery carts in tow lined up in front of this building. They even bring their own chairs to stake out their position in line. By my estimation they are lined up two hours before they open the doors. It is sort of a Black Friday in Squalorville. This morning there was even a dude in his government subsidized Hoveround in line. Did you know those hoverounds are practically free? I couldn’t help noticing that 80% of the people waiting for the free food were obese. I thought the point of distributing food to poor people was to prevent them from starving. It sure is working, because there were no famished people in that line.

I’m a big fan of those who are well off, donating food and money to foodbanks to help those less fortunate. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the “free” food being distributed to the fine folks in West Philly has been donated at gunpoint by your tax dollars. The government has taken over deciding how charity should function. It’s almost as if the Savior himself was handing out the food to his people. I wonder if I would get any funny looks if I parked my car, got out and joined the ranks of the Free Shit Army in the line. It would probably make for a humourous post if I lived to tell it.

I wonder how many people would line up if they were distributing brooms, trash bags, paint brushes and hammers and requesting that these people clean up their neighborhood? What a silly question. That’s the government’s responsibility.

The Free Shit Army marches onward to its rendevous with destiny.

Here is a link to google maps. If you click Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church and then go to Street View, you can experience my morning commute firsthand. If you cruise down 36th street, you can see some beautiful murals of black people doing great things. You may see a few $25,000 hovels with a few $60,000 Escalades parked nearby.

http://maps.google.com/maps?um=1&hl=en&q=36th%20%26%20Haverford%20ave%20west%20phila%20grace%20evangelical%20lutheran%20church&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&biw=1600&bih=695&wrapid=tlif134514162532911&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il

You know who will be showing up at the food bank sometime today.

FARMER FSA WADDLES UP TO THE TROUGH

Corporate Green Acres is the place to be. It seems the free shit army isn’t just occupying West Philly. They are crawling all over the Midwest farmbelt. It’s not your small family farm. It’s the giant corporate farms that have big time lobbyists and congressmen in their pockets. These bloated bills are nothing but handouts to corporations. Why should corporate farms be guaranteed a profit even if they don’t produce a crop? Why should I pay so that corporate fat cat farmers have no risk if their crops fail? Why should milk prices be controlled? Why should government be spending almost $100 billion per year of our tax dollars to promote and subsidize farmers in any way? Since the SNAP food stamp program falls under this bloated bill, maybe the West Philly FSA can join forces with the Iowa FSA to lobby for this bill.

Farm Bill Redux

Tuesday, June 12,2012

THE U.S. SENATE is poised this week to take up the crucial 2012 Farm Bill. This inordinately complex legislation is projected to cost $969 billion over the next 10 years, about $24 billion less than the cost of extending the soon-to-expire existing farm bill.

Big agriculture and its deep-pocketed lobbyists support the new bill, having accepted deep cuts in direct crop subsidies in exchange for legislators “protecting and strengthening” crop insurance programs. Industry considers the latter its safety net against adverse weather and unpredictable fluctuations of global commodities prices.

It’s less of a safety net than a security blanket that shifts risks to taxpayers and guarantees farmers substantial profits. That must change; otherwise, the cost of the new insurance programs could greatly exceed Congressional Budget Office estimates, leaving the federal government on the hook for billions of added dollars each year.

In a particularly cruel twist, the bill pays for these new programs in part by taking food out of the mouths of poor children.

Farm bills are the long-time home of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps. The proposal strips $4.5 billion from the SNAP program over 10 years, even as the struggling economy has record numbers of Americans seeking food stamps to help feed their families. The reductions would eliminate about $90 worth of groceries a month from the kitchens of low-income families. According to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who is introducing an amendment to restore the SNAP funds, half of those who benefit from the program are children.

The Obama White House is supporting the bill, S. 3240, sponsored by Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee. The administration opposes the SNAP reductions, however, and wants the cost of crop insurance reduced.

MEANWHILE, AN odd amalgamation has emerged to oppose the bill. The liberal Environmental Working Group used U.S. Department of Agriculture data to reaffirm that corporate and very large individual agriculture operations — not small and mid-sized family farms — enjoy the vast majority of the insurance benefits. Last year in Missouri, for example, 74 percent of the $267 million in benefits went to 20 percent of recipients. In Illinois, the top 20 percent received 72 percent of $518.5 million.

From the right comes the American Enterprise Institute with its “Field of Schemes” report. It’s part of a broader AEI project called “American Boondoggle: Fixing the 2012 Farm Bill.” In “Schemes,” AEI experts focused on the bill’s proposed ‘shallow losses” insurance. Such insurance would cost far more than the direct crop subsidy programs being dropped and “create incentives for the wasteful use of economic resources,” the report says.

EXISTING CROP insurance programs already are out of whack. If crop yields fall short of projections, farmers collect from the government. If harvest prices fall short of projections, farmers collect. To make sure that farmers can afford the insurance premiums, the government pays an average of 60 percent of the cost. To make sure private companies offer the insurance, the government pays their commissions and administrative costs.

Expanded shallow-loss coverage would distort the system even further. As one Minnesota farmer told “The New York Times” last week, “I can farm on low-quality land that I know is not going to produce and still turn a profit.”

The farm bill needs a lot of work before it merits the support of the American people.

— The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

THE POLITICS OF POVERTY

Star Parker cuts through all the left wing political crap about poverty in America. About 46.2 million people are now considered in poverty as of the end of 2010, up 2.6 million from 2009. The government defines the poverty line as income of $22,314 a year for a family of four and $11,139 for an individual. This explains the 46.5 million people on food stamps. All you have to do is drive through West Philly to confirm that poverty is a big problem in this country.

Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in 1964. We’ve spent over $10 trillion on this war in the last five decades and the chart below shows you the ROI. A higher percentage of Americans are living in poverty today than in 1965.

Obama and his minions like Tavis Smiley and Cornell West think if we spend another $10 trillion we can solve poverty. Star Parker cuts to the chase. It’s about personal responsibility, education and men marrying the women they impregnate. It really is that simple. Of course we should have a safety net for those who got a bad break in life through no fault of their own. There should not be transfers to people who chose not to educate themselves, had kids out of wedlock, and take no responsibility for their actions. Expect the race card to be played over and over in the next 6 months by Obama. It will probably work. The Free Shit Army likes their free shit. I guess I don’t have a heart as I drive through West Philly and see gang bangers driving a Mercedes and talking on their iPhone and using their EBT card at Taco Bell. If I could just be more compassionate and volunteer that my taxes be increased, all would be well in West Philly.

How to keep the poor poor

Sunday, April 29,2012

Media personality Tavis Smiley and Princeton philosophy professor Cornell West have just published their latest contribution to American poverty propaganda, “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto.”

The book should have a second subtitle: “How to keep the poor poor and blacks enslaved to government.” To the extent this book is taken seriously by anyone, the result can only be more, entrenched poverty.

Smiley and West’s message is simple. America today consists of a few powerful, rapacious rich people and a lot of unfortunate, exploited poor people. The rich are rich because they are lucky. The poor are poor because they are unlucky. And the only way to solve the problem is activist government to manage the American economy and redistribute wealth.

It’s as if the wealthy belong to a different species of life with no common thread of humanity linking who they are to those who have less. The idea that “haves” once might have been “have nots”— or that that they did something to become “haves” that today’s “have nots” might consider doing — never enters the equation.

Even if Smiley and West conceded that there might be some element of personal responsibility in how one’s life turns out, their portrait is of an America now so unfair, that personal responsibility is irrelevant. There is no hope for anyone to rise, according to this book, without government boosting them using other people’s money.

A good candidate for one of the more outrageous distortions, in a book filled with them, is No. 1 on their list of “Lies about poverty that America can no longer afford.”

That No. 1 lie is: “Poverty is a character flaw.” No way, according to the authors, is there a chance that poverty has anything to do with one’s behavior. Rather, “The 150 million Americans in or near poverty are there as result of unemployment, war, the Great Recession, corporate greed, and income inequality.”

Given this insight — that there are 150 million poor Americans whose economic condition is the result of extenuating circumstances — it is no wonder that Smiley and West never once mention what many scholars see as the major causes of poverty — poor education and family breakdown.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2011 unemployment for those without a high school diploma was 50 percent higher than those with a high school diploma and almost three times higher than those with a college degree.

According to the Census Bureau, 17.8 percent of American families with children under 18 lived in poverty in 2010. However, in households with children that had married parents, 8.4 percent lived in poverty. In households with children headed by a single mother, 39.6 percent lived in poverty.

The evidence is powerful that getting educated and getting married dramatically reduces the prospects for living in poverty. Yet apparently not sufficiently powerful to interest Smiley and West to note these factors once in their “poverty manifesto.”

Can better government policy expand opportunity for those who actually choose to get educated and live responsible lives? Certainly. But what we need is totally the opposite of what these authors advocate. Evidence abounds that countries with limited government and more economic freedom are far and away the most prosperous.

Despite this book’s message of the inherent hopelessness and unfairness of today’s America, the authors themselves seems to be doing quite well, selling their paperback “poverty manifesto” at $12 a pop. Apparently it’s quite good business to tell Americans that America is unfair.

Perhaps this book can be used to reduce competition for jobs by immigrants.

According to the State Department, there are currently 4.6 million visa applicants wishing to enter the United States under the family and employment preferences immigration program. They apparently haven’t gotten the word that America is no longer a land of opportunity.

Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Center for Urban Renewal and Education. See www.urbancure.org.

THIS SHIT MAKES MY HEAD HURT

Below is an article about Americans not being able to feed themselves in 2011. According to the study 18.6% are struggling to put food on the table. The data on food stamp usage supports this contention. When the Wall Street created financial meltdown occurred in 2008 there were 30.8 million Americans on food stamps. When the government announced the recession was over in December 2009, there were 39 million Americans on food stamps. We are now supposedly over two years into an economic recovery (Obama & CNBC tell me so) and the number of Americans on food stamps is 46.3 million – and still rising. Anecdotal evidence is everywhere as the food bank near my house had to move to a building three times as large as their old facility. Senior citizens have barely gotten an increase in their Social Security payments for the last three years, while the price of food is up 20% to 30%. Anyone who shops at a grocery store knows this is true (except for Ben Bernanke).

But, the stock market is soaring. The MSM is proclaiming good times are back. Even though millions of Americans have given up looking for a job, the unemployment rate keeps falling. Bernanke and the BLS tells us there is no inflation. When I drive through West Philly I see brand new luxury automobiles surrounding low income housing and broken down hovels. The wheels on some of these luxury autos cost more than my Honda Insight. There is no one starving in West Philly. The inhabitants of this squalor are generally obese. Their hovels have Direct TV satellite dishes on their roofs. Every supposedly poor person I see has a cell phone to their ear. The average household income in this neighborhood is $16,000. The median home value is $25,000. The true unemployment rate exceeds 50%.

You can see why this shit makes my head hurt. Nothing makes sense anymore. My belief is that there are millions of good proud people who are having a very difficult time feeding themselves. They are the people in the formerly working middle class. They never took a handout from the government like the parasites living in West Philly. They worked blue collar jobs and lived within their means. Their jobs got shipped off to China by Harvard MBA efficiency experts. They are dying a slow painful death. The 99 weeks of unemployment has run out. Despite the government propaganda, there are no new jobs being created. The entitlement class knows how to play the system. They are not starving. Obama will keep them happy in order to get re-elected. It’s the once proud working middle class (the backbone of the country) that are suffering the most.

Even though I think I understand what is going on, this shit still makes my head hurt.

Growing Number Of Americans Can’t Afford Food, Study Finds

The Huffington Post Alexander Eichler

Here in the United States, growing numbers of people can’t afford that most basic of necessities: food.

More Americans said they struggled to buy food in 2011 than in any year since the financial crisis, according to a recent report from the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit research group. About 18.6 percent of people — almost one out of every five — told Gallup pollsters that they couldn’t always afford to feed everyone in their family in 2011.

One might assume that number got smaller wrapped up with the national unemployment rate falling for several consecutive months. In actuality, the reverse proved true: the number of people who said they couldn’t afford food just kept rising and rising.

The findings from FRAC highlight what many people already know: The economic recovery, in theory now more than two years old, has done little to keep millions of Americans out of poverty and deprivation. Incomes for many haven’t kept pace with the cost of living, and for a large swath of the country, things today are as bad as ever, or worse.

Forty-six million people lived below the poverty line as of 2010, a record number, according to the Census Bureau, and one that’s not even as high as some other estimates would have it. Take a further step back and the situation appears even more dire. About 45 percent of people in the U.S. have reported not being able to cover their basic living expenses, including food, shelter and transportation, according to the group Wider Opportunities for Women.

The official poverty rate is about 15 percent, but over two-fifths of Americans have so little saved that one financial emergency is all it would take to put them in poverty, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development.

These high rates of financial insecurity — a consequence of the weak job market, and the prevalence of jobs that don’t pay very well — are making themselves felt at the level of everyday spending.

Recently, for example, a Center for Housing Policy study found that a growing number of middle-income owners and renters are paying more than half their earnings just to keep a roof over their heads. And as of 2009, almost one in five Americans over 50 years old were skipping on doctor visits, switching to cheaper medications or forgoing some medicines entirely out of financial necessity, according to a recently published study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank.

As for widespread hunger of the kind recorded by FRAC, research shows that the entire country ends up paying one way or another. While the people who can’t afford food are obviously suffering the worst, the social costs incurred — from the money spent to keep food pantries open to the lifelong diminished earning power of impoverished children — come to about $167 billion a year, or $542 for every man, woman and child in the country.

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