Sunday, November 8, 2009

Modern Day Versions of Depression Apple Selling

http://seekingalpha.com/article/172044-the-new-version-of-depression-apple-selling

Tim Iacono has an article at seeking alpha addressing the emergence of Anglo day laborers at Home Depot and other such locales formerly inhabited exclusively by immigrant day laborers.

What this trend illustrates is that working class populations of all origins have been utterly impoverished by the contemporary depression.

I have seen homeless Anglo men on roads and by grocery stores. These men are clearly not substance abusers, but rather are individuals whose marginal attachment to the labor force has been severed. Never before have I witnessed this spectacle of dispossession.

I have also seen Hispanic men and families parked on the side of trafficked roads selling tiny potted plants and small numbers of pepper wreaths. Their desperation reminds me of the shoe-lace sellers during the Great Depression. Xenophobic attitudes toward Hispanic immigrant populations are no doubt exacerbating their desperation.

I wonder how many people are depending on food banks for their survival?

Why have we allowed this situation to arise? America still contains vast wealth. The federal government has bailed out financial institutions using trillions of dollars. And yet we allow living standards to deteriorate so much that vulnerable populations have become utterly impoverished and desperate.

The recent mediated spectacles of violence enacted by adolescents (rape, murder, torture) and by military members demonstrate the strain and degradation of humanity that is occurring as our broken (financial and military) empire wages war directly against foreign populations and indirectly against vulnerable domestic populations.

The anger and desperation produced by the assaults of empire are easily subject to manipulation so that rage is directed inward rather than outwards at the true sources of imperial exploitation.

The time has come to demand an end to the financial looting of this nation by elite interests and to demand the end of a failed project of empire that is looting America's wealth and destroying the lives of its citizens and the lives of citizens abroad.

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