Our lexicon of business activities is being expanded daily, thanks to the “wonder boys” on Wall Street. We are learning about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, recapitalization, puts, short selling and so on. We are gaining a new vocabulary from the recent meltdown of the financial system and expected slowdown of the real economy worldwide.

Where did this debacle begin? Well, it began in the center of human community’s banking and investment houses in the financial district of NYC. Supposedly, the “brightest and best” among us go to Wall Street, know what they are doing and do the right thing. Unfortunately, such assumptions turn out to be colossal mistakes.

How did this calamity occur and why is the human family in such dire economic straits? It appears that grotesque greed and a culture of corruption have come to dominate significant operating systems of the global political economy.

Powerful people in high offices within huge business institutions with access to great wealth are recklessly and deleteriously manipulating the unbridled expansion of the global economy in the small, finite planetary home God blesses us to inhabit.

Self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe have surreptitiously “manufactured” a sub prime “asset bubble” and perversely fostered its uneconomic growth within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, this asset bubble did what bubbles do. The sub prime bubble burst and made a mess. Global credit markets have frozen, stock prices are tumbling and the value of the dollar is gyrating.

Evidently organizers, managers and whiz kids overseeing the global economy, and the unraveling {ie, deleveraging} of the worldwide sub prime swindle, are running the artificially designed financial system of the global economy as a pyramid scheme. This is to say that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth funneled pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated. Note that thirty percent of annual corporate profits end up in the accounts of a tiny number of people. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. Does the economy of the family of humanity exist primarily to provide wealth to the already stupendously wealthy? The “bankstas” among us evidently think so.

In the 1980s, this extremely inequitable method of distributing wealth and arranging business activities was called a “trickle down” economy. We have been repeatedly told how this ‘rational’ economic scheme is good because it “raises all ships.” And yet, from my limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources now appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ’ships’ carrying these billions of less fortunate people {ie, more people than lived on Earth in the year of my birth} do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

Best,
Frank Miller
http://www.theoffshorebankaccount.com

If Medicaid goes away, she may make less money, but at the point when the old folks homes close down completely there will be worse things to worry about than being broke.

Rosa - I’m curious, what’s the line of work you refer to as recession-proof?

I was surprised, when I was pregnant, how many of my coworkers had been on food stamps and medical assistance - I guess in Minnesota it’s about half of all families with young children get assistance at some point. And my stepsister has been on & off medical assistance forever - her husband has a good job, but for a small family company with no health insurance. Lots of time they couldn’t afford health care for their kids if she worked - the benefits were worth more than she could make, until she got her degree finished. (And, thankfully, she finished her degree in a recession-proof field just before the construction work started to disappear - I think she’s gonna have a house husband this winter.)

Going through foreclosure was hard to explain to close friends in the beginning, but as events unfolded in the news and we all heard about just how many people were facing the same situation it became easier. I just count us as incrediblty fortunate to have somewhere to go. The fact that that somewhere is a few acres of arable land is also fortunate.

I’m sorry you had to go through the bankruptcy and foreclosure, but it sounds like you are handling it really well.

Now we share basic utility costs with my parents, spend not even a dollar that we don’t have to, and use food stamps and WIC to feed us what we can’t grow. My husband works at a dull job, but he’s thrilled to have it.

It is not always easy to share space, chores and childcare with my parents and to use foodstamps and WIC coupons at the store. Overall, though, our lives will be much easier and more secure because we are sharing resources, both human and material.