America Is Rapidly Bleeding Wealth And Jobs: 28 Statistics About The Gutting Of The U.S. Economy That Will Blow Your Mind
Red alert! Over 40 billion dollars of America's national wealth is being shipped out of the country every single month. Our economy is being gutted and we are bleeding wealth and we are bleeding jobs. This is a distress call. Is anyone listening? Thousands of our factories and millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas. Over the past decade over 6 trillion dollars have been transferred into the hands of foreigners. Our national government is so broke that they constantly have to go and beg those foreigners to lend us back some of that money in order to finance our exploding debt. The number of good jobs continues to decline and there are millions upon millions of my countrymen that are unemployed. Can anybody help us? Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
Sadly, the vast majority of Americans really are dead asleep on this issue. They just continue to run out to the big retail stores and fill their carts with products made in China and yet they seem completely bewildered by the fact that the number of good jobs continues to decline.
Over the past decade, the number of middle class jobs has fallen by about ten percent. There is a reason for this. America is becoming poorer. The economic pie is shrinking. When we ship 40 to 50 billion dollars into the hands of foreigners every single month, that means that there is a lot less wealth for all of us to divide up.
Every single month, the U.S. ships in massive amounts of foreign oil and massive amounts of cheap plastic trinkets from places such as China which we greedily consume. In return, we send them a giant pile of money.
This happens month after month after month. You see, we always need more of their oil and more of their plastic trinkets. They are more than happy to keep getting richer and richer.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/america-is-rapidly-bleeding-wealth-and-jobs-28-statistics-about-the-gutting-of-the-u-s-economy-that-will-blow-your-mind
Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.
More: http://www.truth-out.org/why-united-states-destroying-its-education-system/1302418800
The Decline of the "Two Breadwinner" Family: How Long-Term Unemployment Threatens to Demolish the Middle Class
The two-income family was once a means for staying in the middle class. One of those incomes is rapidly disappearing as more and more husbands or wives lose a job.
Keith Baudendistel counts himself lucky. The reason is convoluted. He is, after all, unemployed, having lost his factory job in East St. Louis nearly three and a half years ago.That puts him easily among the 6.1 million Americans labeled by the government as long-term unemployed. What makes Baudendistel lucky is that his wife works. And her second income, which once made the couple comfortable, is now in effect their unemployment insurance.
Born of the women’s movement and the income stagnation that started in the 1970s—soon making one income inadequate—the two-income family became a means of staying in the middle class or striving for that status. Now, one of those incomes is rapidly disappearing as more and more husbands or wives lose a job and, in a period of minimal job creation, can’t get back into the workforce. Once the unemployment benefits expire for the jobless husband or wife, the working spouse’s income then becomes the couple’s jobless pay, sustaining them, but at a lower—sometimes much lower—standard of living.
“We started out after World War II telling people that one person could support a family, and after a while that one income was not enough,” notes Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, in Washington. “Then we said that if the husband and wife both worked, they would get into the middle class. And now more and more the second person is not working.”
http://www.alternet.org/economy/150871/the_decline_of_the_%22two_breadwinner%22_family%3A_how_long-term_unemployment_threatens_to_demolish_the_middle_class/
