Witness now the end of the power of the United States to craft its own destiny as the only product it now produces is more and more poor people. This is America’s newest growth industry; there are more poor people in this country now than at almost any other time in history:

US adds 4.8 million more to ranks of the poor as poverty rate jumps

By Ron Scherer,

US poverty rate hit 14.3 percent last year, up from 13.2 percent in 2008. The jump bring the number of the poor to its highest level since 1959, five years before the Johnson-era War on Poverty.

The deepest recession in modern times has sharply increased the ranks of the poor during the past year, with 1 in 7 people in America officially counted as living in poverty.

The news from a US Census Bureau report released Thursday underscores how deeply the Great Recession has affected the nation’s standard of living. The key findings of report, which compared income, poverty rate, and health-care insurance coverage in 2009 with 2008 numbers, include the following.

1) Some 43.6 million people were living in poverty last year – the highest number since 1959, five years before President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty. The poverty rate was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 and the highest level since 1994. Hispanic households took the hardest hit: Their poverty rate rose 2.1 percent from 2008’s level, compared with a 1.1 percent jump in the rate for blacks and whites.

2) A record number of Americans, 50.7 million, were not covered by health-care insurance in 2009. At the same time the survey was being taken, Congress passed President Obama’s contentious health-care reform law.

3) The median household income was $49,800 last year, about the same as in 2008. This “hold steady” figure for income may reflect the fact that many people were helped by the government safety net, such as unemployment insurance, which Congress repeatedly extended and which kept some 3.3 million people out of poverty, according to the Census data.

The data, contained in a statistic-thick 87-page report, are likely to have widespread implications for policymakers, say economists and analysts. Here is how some of them interpret the numbers.

• The poverty rate is likely to rise further, predicts Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, in a new analysis. The rate will approach 16 percent and stay high for most of this decade, she says. The recession will add some 10 million people, including 6 million children, to the poverty rolls.

The erosion at the bottom of the economic food chain has been a characteristic of our economic undertow beginning in 2004, witness the end of the ‘Great Energy Hedge’ ponzi scheme and the marooning of energy consumption by ever- higher real energy prices. Erosion removes ever- more final demand, more dollars from circulation and drives prices lower. Is the current price of crude oil @ $77 the ‘new’ $147?

It was $82 a few weeks ago … the rise in poverty coincides with the decline in energy prices. Causation/correlation … who cares? The lockstep is fatal to business as usual.

What is needed is some “Change we believe in!”

Witness now the march of history, the unprecedented success of the destabilizing Tea Party ‘movement’ and king- making fakir Sarah Palin. Certainly, this is just what the country/world needs, a new dose of magical thinking and reliance on unicorns to bail us all out. Unlike the Orange/Cedar/Pink/Rose revolutions in tyrannized nations breaking free or attempting find political representation, witness now the geriatric movement of Social Security recipients eager to preserve their place in the bailout queue at the expense of their fellows. Ours is the Gray Revolution, the rebellion of the entitled. These are the post- Greatest Generation- generation; come of age during Jack Kennedy’s regime of …

“Ask not what your country can do for you …”

Right!

Witness what is sure to come another bracing dose of Reaganistic free lunches for the well-heeled and (attempted) credit expansion alongside Gingrich- style nihilistic anti- governance. Truly the mad hatters are gaining ascendance. Given enough ideologues and the government will be shut down as it was during Gingrich’s first reign during the Clinton presidency. Can a fatal default be far behind? Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin evaded default by ‘borrowing’ funds from the Social Security trust fund to retire maturing notes. Who would do such tomorrow? What would be the source of free funds?

The Tea Party is the ‘spontaneous’ outgrowth of the New Feudalism that is arising in the United States and the rest of the developed/developing world. The Dick Armeys, Richard Mellon Scaifes and Koch brothers represent the bleeding edge of onrushing revival of the back-to- the- 14th century aristocratic plutocracy. This is a movement rooted firmly in the slave- and slave- master past, beyond the point of failure of ‘Big Energy’ driven economics- as- usual and into the Mad Max aftermath of that paradigm’s collapse.

Talk about forward thinking. Who are the real doomers, now? The revival of Gingrich- ism is both the love that cannot be named (dictatorship of the aristocrats) as well as industrial society’s self- fulfilling death wish.

Where does this leave the thoughtful citizen? Perplexed and fearful. In times of trouble the country turns to the clowns. It is hard to see how this can end any other way but badly. But … where are our children? When will the young take to the streets? What will be the outcome of the current trajectory? A despoiled world, bereft of resources, a poisoned atmosphere, an ocean waste, exhausted soil and water, ruined cities, a worthless currency and unserviceable debts … surrounded by pitiless enemies sworn to destroy us.

Why are the young silent? Is it not time for a new politics? One of restraint, service, sacrifice and work? Can we not have a reality- based politics?

For all the efforts and struggles, the individual desire to fend for oneself cannot succeed in a systemic context. Only a revolution of political thinking and a new form of policy can hope to succeed. Is this a manifesto? Perhaps … a binding together of necessities centered around shared sacrifice is the only form of policy that can allow our race to avoid the Koch/Armey/Gingrich doom.

Where are the young people? Where are you? This is your world, can you not fight for it?

Ours is a war against our slaves, our machines. By serving our indulgences our machines and their insatiable needs are destroying … the very futures the machines themselves were intended to provide. Far from giving the world a post- modern fantasy, the outcome of industrialization has been the steady elimination of it. This is not words on a page but the actions of the Armey’s, the Koch’s and the Scaife’s. These are the actions of those who know best, who have control. We have been given unnatural choices; we can work or we can have ‘conveniences’. Magical thinking suggests we can all have both but this is a fraud, the great fraud at the center of modernism and industrialization. In reality, we can work or we can have our toys. So far the choice has been the wrong one, the consequence is increasing poverty and the imminent end of the waste- based society.

It is also the struggle of the vanishing future against the resurgent past. Instead of a gray revolution giving license to the has- beens for one more spasm of self- immolation, why not something different?