The Archeology of Decline

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/archeology-decline-1354551090

And yet the pit exists. It goes by the name of “austerity.” However, it didn’t just appear in time for the last election season or the lame-duck session of Congress to follow. It was dug more than a generation ago, and has been getting wider and deeper ever since. Millions of people have long made it their home. “Debtpocalypse” is merely the latest installment in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the dispossession of American working people.

Think of it as the archeology of decline, or a tale of two worlds. As a long generation of austerity politics hollowed out the heartland, the quants and traders and financial wizards of Wall Street gobbled up ever more of the nation’s resources. It was another Great Migration -- instead of people, though, trillions of dollars were being sucked out of industrial America and turned into “financial instruments” and new, exotic forms of wealth. If blue-collar Americans were the particular victims here, then high finance is what consumed them. Now, it promises to consume the rest of us.

A recent grim statistic suggests just how Bellamy’s utopian hopes have given way to an increasingly dystopian reality. For the first time in American history, the life expectancy of white people, men and women, has actually dropped. Life spans for the least educated, in particular, have fallen by about four years since 1990. The steepest decline: white women lacking a high school diploma. They, on average, lost five years of life, while white men lacking a diploma lost three years.

One other marker of this eerie story of a developed nation undergoing underdevelopmentand a striking reproach to a cherished national faith: for the first time since the Great Depression, the social mobility of Americans ismoving in reverse. In every decade from the 1970s on, fewer people have been able to move up the income ladder than in the previous 10 years. Now Americans in their thirties earn 12% less on average than their parents’ generation at the same age. Danes, Norwegians, Finns, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, and the French now all enjoy higher rates of upward mobility than Americans. Remarkably, 42% of American men raised in the bottom one-fifth income cohort remain there for life, as compared to 25% in Denmark and 30% in notoriously class-stratified Great Britain.

[jtuck004]

1. Jonathan Kozel has been writing about the lives of students and the poverty that inflicts them

for a long time. He recently put out a book "Fire in the Ashes" where he returns to tell the stories of some of the folk he kept up with through the years described in the piece above.

He tells the story of a city housing project with families deep in poverty years ago, before they moved the tenants away. The show Les Misérables, sometimes translated from the French as The Wretched, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, (according to Wiki), in Paris, was showing on Broadway. The show opens with a man being released from jail after being sentenced to 5 years for stealing bread for his starving family.

Since the housing project was not far from Broadway, kids, many whose families simply didn't make enough for regular meals, would walk up and array themselves around the theater to try and beg for money for food when patrons left the show. The patrons complained,

From the book:

“The last thing that they wanted was to come out of the theater at the end and be obliged to see real children begging on the sidewalk right in front of them.”

and got the nearby hotel owners to move the kids out of sight.

With all this destruction around us, some willfully avoid seeing it. It's as if the American way is to teach people to be amoral, so as to be immune to the wrong that takes opportunity away only to stick it deep in the rich person's pocket.

Thank you for posting that.