a permanent depression

A recession that lost 2.6 million jobs last year, the most in a single year since the end of World War II. No surprise. Many of them were redundant, unnecessary jobs, like building new cars when there were already enough beautiful, new long lasting, well made cars to go around, Jobs at obsolete newspapers and magazines, jobs at brick and morter stores, redundant outlets like Circuit City and Starbucks. Not the result of mismanagement or greed, but the nature of business, of the market place. It's the economy stupid. The nature of any economy is uncertainty.


Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

We are in the midst of a systemic breakdown, a breakdown to the economy, politics, healthcare, education, etc. Such breakdowns always occur at the end of eras, when one epoch gives way to another. Such are the times in which we live. --Darryl Schoon in The American Dream - An Obituary

This time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes -- and a resolute new consensus about what to do.

Resolute new consensus about what to do?

Nobody knows what to do.


We are in the midst of a systemic breakdown, a breakdown of healthcare, education, politics, the economy, etc.

Healthcare is not broken. Above average Americans have very good healthcare. We have never been promised a free ride.

Education is not broken. Except for the college racket (see 20/20 article, below) American education is better than ever. One example; contrary to popular belief, in science, fourth and eighth graders were above the international average, and only three countries did significantly better than the United States at the elementary school level. It's the bottom thirty percent that suffers, and that is always a low priority. (see Wilson Quarterly article below)


Politics is not broken It remains deeply flawed. Recent backfire of campaign finance reform. A royal Senate, with its unheard of 60% rule. The highly questionable electoral college. Seven hour voter lines. No election day holiday. Little will for progress other than early voting.


Is the economy broken ? Schoon writes; Although capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme, credit-based economies, ie capitalism, and Ponzi schemes share the same fatal flaw. Both must constantly expand or they collapse.

Most commentators expect an eventual recovery. Just another very painful Depression.

Perhaps our dramatic avoidance of the word depression has damaged our perception, otherwise we would call the 70's a depression, with seven hundred percent inflation and the forcing of homemakers into the workplace. Certainly that period saw an enormous blight in the quality of life.

Unemplyoment and underemployment on the current scale has been going on for decades. Forty percent of Americans have never been secure while the top thirty percent continue to thrive.


In general, current unemployment numbers would be between 5% and 10% higher if calculated in the same way as in the nineteen thirties; conversely, the numbers from the 1930s and 1940s would be 5% - 10% lower if calculated using our contemporary methods.
accordingly, the 25% depression unemployment figure was really 15% throughout the Great Depression and by the same token we were in the same range three years ago. Given the immigrant population and the povertizing effect of divorce and drugs and the culture of vulgarity, unemployment is arguably endemic at ten to fifteen percent, and growing because of globalization and automation. Employment figures are also skewed because so many young people don't work for four years due to college, compared to the 1930's, when sixteen year olds were considered unemployed if they didn't finish high school, and of course a huge fraction of them did not. And today's huge prison population is not considered unemployed. The exclusion of prisoners from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rates misconstrues the actual unemployment figures. Given all these variables, it might simply be that unemployment has never differed all that much from that of the nineteen thirties at its worst. There may simply be a permanent depression with a 15 to 30% under employed and unemployed population. (see Jesse Jackson American Dream article below)