Written by David Martin   

The American Idyll, the American Dream, has become the American Idle, (thanks and see Connie Tuttle), the American Nightmare. We used to be able to expect our children to progress, to have better, more prosperous lives than their parents.If they worked hard, whether in blue or white collar jobs, they would be able to buy a home, support their families, and live reasonably well. Now we just hope we will manage to still have a home for them to move back to when they can’t find the job their college degrees earned at the cost of five or six-figure loan balances were supposed to qualify them for. Qualified, yes, available, no. Or when their manufacturing plants were closed. Or when their service center jobs were shipped off-shore. Or when the dream house they purchased a few years ago ended up worth half of their mortgage balance.Meanwhile, Corporate America, sitting on record trillions in un-invested cash balances, often as the result of taxpayer bailouts, isn’t hiring new workers, or even rehiring those previously euphemistically ‘downsized’. Corporate quarterly reports often show record profits, many directly attributed to increasing consumer prices, as with the gas and oil companies, though these same corporations continue to receive giant government subsidies.Corporate taxes and income taxes on the ultra-rich don’t approach the rates from as recently as those prosperous Clinton, or even Reagan, years, while the social support structure for the poor and the ever-shrinking middle-class is slashed to reduce the deficits brought on by our dual wars for oil, and the slashing of taxes on the ever- richer wealthy, and bailouts for the very same banks that caused this mess. For a really graphic display of how society is becoming ever-more stratified with a larger lower class and an ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the very small ultra-rich class, check out www.connectthedotsusa.com It is eye-opening, if not something to cheer you up.In the meantime, carbon dioxide and other even more potent atmospheric greenhouse gases like methane continue to rise well beyond sustainable levels and fear of ‘slowing the economy’ with new regulations on industry’ is used as an excuse for not doing anything significant to try to fix the problem. Business as usual. The riverboat heads for the falls while the onboard gamblers insist everyone must play out their hands rather than heading for the rotted lifeboats that might still stay afloat long enough to get at least some of the passengers to shore. And the Washington captain and the engine crew are so busy arguing over which way to turn that it’s ‘full steam ahead’ towards disaster.I am not a religious person but at this point the phrase ‘God help us’ makes me understand why so many are. I can’t see any other solution and don’t have any Faith in that one. I have always been an optimist but now I fear for my daughter’s future—and my own—and that of everyone else. David Martin Tucson, AZ