Decius wrote:

It is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.

The US has just had its weakest period of expansion since the 1950s. Consumption growth has been poor. Investment growth has been modest. Exports have been sluggish. But if you are at the top of the tree, the years since the last recession in 2001 has been a veritable golden age. Salaries for executives have rocketed and profits have soared, because the productivity gains from a growing economy have been disproportionately skewed towards capital.

For ordinary Americans, though, it has been a different story. Real wages have been growing slowly; at just 1.6% a year on average over the latest upswing, well down on the experience of earlier decades. Business, of course, needs consumers to carry on spending in order to make money, so a way had to be found to persuade households to do their patriotic duty. The method chosen was simple. Whip up a colossal housing bubble, convince consumers that it makes sense to borrow money against the rising value of their homes to supplement their meagre real wage growth and watch the profits roll in.

As they did - for a while. Now it's payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned.

This, I think, is a realistic perspective. See my rant here.

No, what's sad is that this happens CONSTANTLY. People have been conned out of their money over the ages so many times it's not even worth recounting. The US system of government was designed to try and eliminate or at least slow down the ability of this to happen, not just by the state but by other institutional entities, but sadly, it's been co-opted and simply serves to be a mechanism for conning rather than a prophylactic. People keep dreaming that it won't happen by believing in things like "happiness" or "liberty" or "freedom" but those are just ideas and they're relative to the reality that they seek to defy. We like to think that if it gets bad enough, someone will rise up and declare rebellion to free people of their tyranny, but sadly, that never happens. In the end, you're just a wage slave and the best you can hope for is to be on the lucky side of "The Visible God". Have a nice day. =)

RE: America was conned - who will pay? | Business | The Guardian