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"The belief that democracy lies in the choice
between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth
at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud." - Chris Hedges
"We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome
comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it
is that we're still in denial - we still think this is some kind of unfortunate
accident, not something that was created by
the group of psychopaths on Wall
Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the
American Dream." - Matt Taibbi 03/19/09
"Many individuals and groups now find themselves
living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of
cost-benefit analysis. The central issue of life and politics is no longer
about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups,
who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color,
elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but
have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that
not longer considers them of any value." - Henry A. Giroux
"The American Dream has become what the ruling
class dreams for us. The American dream has become one where you step on
everyone and everything you have to in order to rise to the top of the heap.
It's time to remind everyone that this is not the real American dream. The real
American dream is a dream of a good life for everyone, a decent job and the
ability to live our lives free of other people telling us what we can and can't
do. Most of us have no need or desire to "have it all." We just want enough to
live a comfortable, simple life." - Bruce McDonald
"From Bernie Ebbers and WorldCom to Jeff Skilling
and the Enron boys,
to Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, to the bait-and-switch
that Bush and Cheney
used to take the country into war, this was the
Decade of Deception.
No deceit was more
malevolently corrosive than the fiction that this was a period of expansive
prosperity in which significant numbers of our people were able to share in the
American dream of financial security. A tiny minority of insiders, on the other
hand, did very well for themselves.
Economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas
Piketty report that the highest-earning 0.1% of Americans accounted for 8.2% of
the country's total pretax income.
That's the highest concentration of
wealth since 1917." - Tim Rutten 01/02/10
American
popular culture has lost
sight of the truly
valuable, although ordinary, experiences
that life has to offer.
Too much emphasis has been placed on
the acquistion of material
possessions.
The items of true
value, friendly conversation,
time spent with family, enjoying
the summer breeze, watching the
birds feed and preen
have been relegated to a subordinate position.
The
Industrial Revolution in America was the
motivating factor in the initial
corruption of the American Dream.
During this time, sometimes referred to as the
Golden Age of the Entrepreneur, Horatio Alger wrote rags to
riches novels. In Horatio Alger's
novels a pauper, through studious labor,
always became a rich tycoon.
The
prevalent philosophy is now
Social Darwinism which preaches that
survival of the fittest - in the
economic terms of
acquisition,
control and manipulation of
resources - is the mark of the
successful pursuit of the American
Dream.
"The Industrial Revolution
concentrated labor into mills, factories, and mines, but industrial workers
could never experience the sense of satisfaction and pride that craftsmen
derived from their creations. Working a craft is a mentally stimulating and
creative activity; operating a machine is not. The best craftsmen were renowned
as artists. Some are still renowned today: Thomas Chippendale and George
Hepplewhite, for example. The integral strength of Windsor chairs has never
been duplicated in a factory. Handmade textiles, Persian rugs, even handcrafted
toys are renowned for their artistry. Today that pride and satisfaction accrues
only to hobbyists, such as quilters, but never to industrial workers. The
Industrial Revolution degraded human life to the status of coal. People became
fuel for machines. Bought cheap, people are used until unneeded and then
discarded like slag. Individuality, talent, imagination, originality, the best
attributes of human beings, are suppressed to the point of extinction. The
Industrial Revolution sucked the humanity out of the human race; people became
things." - John Kozy
There are modern reasons as well as the
historical reasons for Americans
to
elevate the
acquisition of
possessions to such a lofty plateau.
A major one of these is the advertising
industry.
Americans are constantly and consistently
bombarded by advertisements pushing a
menagerie of products.
Most
play upon the
individuals
sense of self worth.
The individual invariably
compares his or herself to the flashy,
successful, adventurous or lovable characters portrayed. Explicitly implied is
the idea that once one becomes the owner or
user of certain advertised commercial
products one's social status will be elevated to a position above the
current one. These new users will become as the
individual portrayed -
attractive, smart and sophisticated.
Much of what Americans
purchase are called "positional goods" - objects whose
value is measured in relation to the purchases of other individuals
within the same social cultural
niche.
" We would all be better off if we decided
collectively to rachet down the economic
one-upmanship and instead devote more time and resources to the leisure
goods we claim to desire." - Ezra Klein When
individuals become trapped in the
hamster wheel of ever increasing desire to be
seen as the actors they attempt
to emulate and even though these characters are fictitious there is a
fine line between reality and fantasy which can be and is bridged in the
subconscious mind.
This "bridging" allows an
individual to swallow
wholeheartedly the deception that
happiness can be found and
dreams fulfilled through the continual
willy-nilly purchases of the objects
they have been conditioned to desire - just like
Pavlov's dogs.
"Consumerism needs an infantilist
ethos as it favors laxity over
discipline,
values childish impetuosity and juvenile
narcissism over
enlightened self
interest preferring consumption
directed play to spontaneous recreation. This
ethos feeds a
private
market logic
combating the public logic fashioned by a
republican democracy." - Benjamin R. Barber
ball and chain
= "Economic exigencies - the exchange of time for money - have rendered us
unable to afford the virtue and pleasure
of taking care of things." -
Charles
Eisenstein
In American
popular culture a
man's worth is judged by his possessions and his ability to
manipulate resources.
The
American Dream
has been corrupted into a
dream in which an
individual
achieves great
power and wealth
and the means in which this is done is unimportant.
"What
America really needs is a
policy vision
which sparks community building and cooperation among its
citizens rather than instructing them to
simply spend their way into the
American Dream.
What Americans don't
realize is in so many ways
it is in their self interest to
work in cooperation." - Mark Winston Grifith
"Studies show that
happiness rises with incomes - up to the
point at which basic needs are met, after which it stagnates as aspirations
also rise with income. Nobel Prize-winning
economist and
psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this a "hedonic treadmill." Like the
proverbial rats, we run faster and faster - and so do our aspirations - but the
bottom line is the old cliche: Money can't
buy happiness." - Andrew L. Yarrow
"It may be too late for
this year, but next year the malls and stores can put up their
real symbol of
the season and Jews and
Christians alike will be able to get behind
it: a 12-foot gilded dollar sign, decorated with credit cards and shopping
bags." - Marta Goldstein
"What is the chief end of man? - to get
rich. In what way? - dishonestly if we can;
honestly if we must. Who is god, the one only and true?
Money is god.
God and Greenbacks
and Stock - father, son, and the ghost of same -
three persons in one; these are the true and only god,
mighty and supreme." - Mark
Twain"Wait a minute - you're going to help firefighters and
police to attain the American
dream while some of us can only
dream! Let's see, we help
school teachers, we help
welfare mothers (Section 8) and now we want to
help firefighters and police who already
make a good salary. There's a group of us who are just under the "middle class" who get no help at all.
Am I jealous? You're damn right I am." - Charles Martin
"A survey for the New York Times in 2005 found that 80 percent
of those polled believed that it was possible
to start out poor, work hard and become
rich, compared with less than 60 percent back in
1983.
By international
standards, America has an unusually low level
of intergenerational mobility: our parents' income is highly predictive of our
incomes as adults.
Intergenerational mobility in
America is lower than in France, Germany,
Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.
Among high-income countries
for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a
lower rate of mobility than America.
The intergenerational findings paint a portrait of a
society in which family background matters a great deal.
For the middle
class, an increase in income volatility has led to an increase in the
frequency of
large negative income shocks, which
may be expected to translate to an
increase in financial distress.
Despite solid growth in GDP,
household short-term income mobility at
the median in 2003-04 was no more favorable than in the recession years of
1990-91. The recent economic
expansion has generated tepid growth in median
household income, and a considerable
increase in the risk of major income losses
from year to year.
Today's record levels of both secured and unsecured
debt mean income
losses may have lasting effects on finances.
Both large upward and large downward movements have become more
frequent, and it is coherent to argue
that this combination produces greater insecurity compared with a more stable
economic environment.
This may be evidence
of a fundamental shift in the
relation between economic growth and economic security, as may be the finding that even
those who work overtime on a consistent basis no
longer appear to be able to generate much upward mobility for their
families." - Tom Hertz, American University
In 2001 married couples were twice as likely to
file for bankruptcy or more likely to
lose their homes to foreclosure than childless couples or single adults.
To most families in
America today a second income is not a luxury
but a necessity.
Because it takes two incomes to
survive, financial shocks such as the
involuntary loss of a job or a health crisis,
are much more likely to devastate the family.
In America today over 30% of marriages
end within the first 10 years.
Working Americans are now being
forced to chose between
economic security or getting
married and having children.
"This debunks the myth
of America as the land of
opportunity, but it doesn't tell us
what to do to fix it." - Bhashkar Mazumder, senior
economist Federal
Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
retirement and the
401(k)"Unless things change fast, human history
will show that the phenomenon of "retirement" was limited to one generation.
After World War
II, when European and Japanese economies stood
in tatters, American
corporatism could fulfill "the American dream," since there was little foreign
competition to speak of. For the first time ever, workers were promised that
"after working thirty or so years" they would be able to securely
retire.
That was largely the case for one generation.
The second
generation is having a devastating reality
check.
2008 was supposed to be a watershed year for retirement: it was
the first year that the baby-boomers turned 62, and the retirement frenzy was
to begin (since people could begin to draw on their social security benefits).
The economy has since nosedived, and many more
retirements are being delayed. The unfortunate reality is that many who planned on retiring
will work until the grave, joining the millions of other baby-boomers
who never had such dreams.
At the end of
September, just as the crisis was beginning to gain steam, it was discovered
that in the previous year the value of stocks in 401(k) accounts had fallen by
nearly $2 trillion! Much more has been lost since then. This is especially
devastating since almost one-third of 401(k) participants in their 60s had 80
percent of their money in stocks (pension funds have been similarly destroyed).
The 401(k) was the scheme of the century.
Corporations offloaded their
"burdensome" pensions and used the combined forces of the
media and politicians to sell the ruse to
the public, to the great benefit of Wall
Street. Workers were told that the boom-slump cycle was over, and that
stocks were a sure thing." - Shamus Cooke
12/2008
See Social
Control
See American
aristocracy
See The Subversion of American
Democracy |
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This website defines a new religious
ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification
of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern
propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an
international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt
version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any
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develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of
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the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the
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America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of
self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization
is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a
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American social mores and values have declined precipitously over
the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more
power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general
through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed
into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The
results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social
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