• Markets
• Economy
• Federal Reserve
• Housing
• Energy
• Digital Media

Denver Reality: Ignore Economists/Politicians, Speak to Regular People

With celebrations set to kick off in Denver for the Democratic National Convention, the JOURNAL travels to Colorado where tough economic times are hitting suburban communities.

Click for Video:

PBS and Bill Moyers go to the suburbs of Denver as the Democratic Convention is about to being to speak to "real people" -- not Economists or Politicians:

Working Americans, and that's most people, are experiencing the "big squeeze." In fact, they're trying to survive one of the most profound social and economic changes in our history. The middle class is disappearing, facing a decline in standards of living. So you'd hope that the Democrats in Denver next week and the Republicans in St. Paul the following week would confront this crisis head on and not just serenade struggling families with a chorus of sympathetic but meaningless sound bites.

As wages stagnate, prices are soaring. Economists call this pain the "misery index." It's a combination of the unemployment and inflation rates, and it's what politicians have in mind when they ask, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Well, the misery index is the highest it's been since George Bush's father became president, seventeen years ago.

When it comes to feeling the misery index, however, you don't go to the economists or the politicians. You go to where regular people live. And that's what we have been doing on this broadcast for months now. We've seen how the mortgage crisis has devastated neighborhoods in Cleveland, how workers in Los Angeles are scrambling for a living wage, and how gas and food prices are choking the ability of food pantries to stave off hunger here in metropolitan New York.

This relates to our earlier discussion on Intersting stuff, Psychological Recessions.

> 

Source:
Denver Reality
BILL MOYERS
The Journal, August 22, 2008
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08222008/watch.html

Saturday, August 23, 2008 | 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (37) | TrackBack (0)
add to de.li.cious | digg this! | add to technorati | email this post

Comments

This is the Fight of Our Lives by Bill Moyers

Keynote speech
Inequality Matters Forum
New York University
June 3, 2004
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0616-09.htm

"The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us."
-- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004

You just can't make this stuff up. You have to hear it to believe it. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.

But what they are doing to middle class and working Americans -- and to the workings of American democracy -- is no laughing matter.

Let's face the reality: If ripping off the public trust; if distributing tax breaks to the wealthy at the expense of the poor; if driving the country into deficits deliberately to starve social benefits; if requiring states to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor; if squeezing the wages of workers until the labor force resembles a nation of serfs -- if this isn't class war, what is?

It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it's wrong.

IMO it will take at least 12 yrs of Dem Pres. and dominance in Congress to right this bleak situation that Reagan kicked off in the 1980's.

And if Obama does not win it's very very bleak for America's fast diminishing middle class.

Posted by: km4 | Aug 23, 2008 6:43:03 PM