OpEdNews
Original Content at
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_jim_free_080203_credit_card_meltdown.htmFrom Sunday's Washington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich writes a column that might better have been a WaPo series over the last 30 years or so that they championed and cheer-led the economic miracle.
"Boom Was a Bust For Ordinary People
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Sunday, February 3, 2008
It begins to sound a bit naughty -- all this talk about the need to "stimulate" the economy, as if we were discussing how to make a porn film. I don't mean to trivialize our economic difficulties or the need for effective government intervention, but we have to face a disconcerting fact: For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans.
. . . I first began to sense this in the boom years of the late 1990s, when I was working in entry-level jobs for my book "Nickel and Dimed." While the stock market soared and fortunes were being made in the time it takes to say "IPO," my $6-to-$8-an-hour co-workers lunched on hot dog buns because that was all they could afford and, in some cases, fretted about whether they could find a safe place to sleep.
. . . Not that we hadn't been warned. A century ago, Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy Fords. But, like Wal-Mart, too many of our employers today haven't figured out that their cruelly low wages would eventually curtail their own growth and profits...."
A brutally frank and honest assessment of our past 30 years would make the argument there is little hope for the credit-addicted working poor but a '29 style crash. An entire nation has been sold down the river of hopeless wages and easy credit.
Take the $1.2 trillion Americans took out in home-equity loans over the past five years, double it and you see our current $2.5 trillion credit-card borrowing that is at risk.
...It's not even easy credit--for thirty years it's been increasingly desperate credit as real wages and decent jobs shifted out from under workers like sand underfoot. Every single economic decision during those 30 years, that chose between the welfare of people and the welfare of greed, was settled in favor of greed.
A Congress that will not vote in a decent minimum wage, allows 18% interest on credit purchases that jump to 30% if a single payment is late.
A Congress that will not vote in a decent minimum wage, tightens bankruptcy laws in favor of the lender.
A Congress that will not vote in a decent minimum wage, votes for $3 trillion in tax benefits to the already rich and strips its people of health care, threatens their social security and makes of us a 'temp agency' society.
A Congressman who will not and has not voted in a decent minimum wage, answers a constituent's query about why this is possible with a computer-generated response that he 'shares my concern and will take my position into account as economic issues develop.'
MORE AT LINK
Authors Website: www.opinion-columns.com
Authors Bio: Jim Freeman's op-ed pieces and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald-Tribune, CNN, The New York Review, The Jon Stewart Daily Show and a number of magazines.
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