Down Is a Dangerous Direction: How the 40-Year "Long Recession" Led to the Great Recession

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:




Down Is a Dangerous Direction
How the 40-Year "Long Recession" Led to the Great Recession

By Barbara Garson


If you had to date the Great Recession, you might say it started in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers vaporized over a weekend and a massive mortgage-based Ponzi scheme began to go down. By 2008, however, the majority of American workers had already endured a 40-year decline in wages, security, and hope -- a Long Recession of their own.

In the 1960s, I met a young man about to be discharged from the Army and then, by happenstance, caught up with him again in each of the next two decades. Though he died two months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, those brief encounters taught me how the Long Recession led directly to our Great Recession.

In the late 1960s, I was working at an antiwar coffee house near an army base from which soldiers shipped out to Vietnam. One gangly young man, recently back from “the Nam,” was particularly handy and would fix our record player or make our old mimeograph machine run more smoothly. He rarely spoke about the war, except to say that his company had stayed stoned the whole time. “Our motto,” he once told me, “was ‘let’s not and say we did.’” Duane had no intention of becoming a professional Vietnam vet like John Kerry when discharged. His plan was to return home to Cleveland and make up for time missed in the civilian counterculture of that era.

I often sat with him during my breaks, enjoying his warmth and his self-aware sense of humor. But thousands of GIs passed through the coffee house and, to be honest, I didn’t really notice when he left. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175685/tomgram%3A_barbara_garson%2C_going_underwater_in_the_long_recession/#more

[PETRUS]

1. "In other words, the average worker’s productivity rose 25 times more than his or her pay."

K&R

Hope you're well, marmar.

[On the Road]

2. This is a Very Good Anecdotal Account of US Economic History over the Last Four Decades

and I agree with almost all of it.

However, I tend to dislike overusing the phrase "ponzi scheme," since it lumps together dissimilar things: banks, social security, bitcoin, and multi-level marketing programs.