Prices for homes escalated north of 10% per year because of a false demand created by banker types who created financial instruments that made loans available to people who could not afford homes. Even as the economy started to stall in 2007 oil prices zoomed not because of supply and demand but because of market manipulation. Inasmuch as America has an abundant oversupply of food, somehow that abundance is not reflected in year over year prices.
Food, energy and lodging are indispensible to every living human being yet the average middle class person plays virtually no part in how these commodities are priced. They must be purchased or acquired irrespective of price for survival.
Over the last thirty year it is a fact that wealth acquired from businesses that sell to the middle class have been growing faster than that of the middle class. If income earned by the middle class is not increasing at a faster rate than food, energy, and lodging charged by the corporations then there is an imbalance. That imbalance is a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy. Instruments like reverse mortgages and home equity loans are the nail in the coffin. That is a war on the Middle Class.
Every month one hears of American factories opening overseas factories as unemployment remains high for the middleclass and taxes low for the corporations and wealthy. Every day one sees extravagant profits by corporations on Wall Street. Corporations are sitting on over one trillion dollars of profits and cash. The Federal Reserve is lending money to corporations and banks at almost zero percent as these corporations lend it to credit card holders and other borrowers at upwards of twelve percent. Middle class mortgages underwater partially instigated by the same bailed out bankers are left not renegotiated. This is a war on the Middle Class.
Make no mistake; unless the Middle Class peacefully but forcefully rise up, America’s future is in doubt. The wealthy, plutocrats, and oligarchs are not patriotic American citizens, they are citizens of wherever capital flows. The Middle Class is but their tool.
My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
Book’s Webpage: http://books.egbertowillies.com – Twitter: http://twitter.com/egbertowillies
Homelessness In The Middle Class: Stable Families Reduced To Poverty Alden@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting
SANTA ANA, Calif. — Three and a half years ago, Kathleen Cooke was breathing easy. Having left her well-paying job for a new career as a teacher, she spent a blissful summer with her kids, sipping lemonade and baking cookies.
But within months, the life she had built evaporated. When she failed to secure a new job, she entered a steady downward spiral that eventually led her to a homeless shelter. Homelessness, once an abstract idea, had become real.
After the worst economic downturn since the Depression, formerly middle-class people like Cooke have found themselves reduced to poverty. With jobs scarce, and with government safety nets shrinking, one misfortune — a layoff, an injury, a mortgage default — can transform a person’s life beyond recognition. No longer a condition reserved for the margins of society, for drug addicts and the mentally ill, homelessness has infiltrated the heart of America.
As foreclosure and unemployment rates have swelled to epidemic proportions in the past two years, the ranks of the American homeless have grown: the number of homeless families rose 4 percent in 2009, and then 9 percent last year, a pair of new reports show. In effect, even more Americans were homeless than those numbers suggest, stranded in the awkward process of staying with friends and relatives, for lack of a home of their own. Instances of families "doubling up" between 2008 and 2010 rose nearly 12 percent.
"People who I would have gone to as donors of ours I now talk to as clients," said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House, a shelter organization here in Santa Ana. "It’s in their consciousness."
For Cooke, in the summer of 2007, things finally seemed to be going her way. Her ex-husband was paying regular child support. Her former boss had been helping her transition into teaching. Her apartment, in a safe, suburban neighborhood in Costa Mesa, Calif., was comfortable.
That summer, with her teaching credential in her pocket and a teaching internship lined up for the fall, Cooke, now 51, decided to reward herself. The job she had just left, as an administrative assistant in risk management for the paint company Behr Process Corporation, had paid her $38,000 a year, with generous quarterly bonuses, she said. With her kids out of school for the summer, she devoted herself entirely to them, and decided to coast for a short while on her savings.
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"I had such a great outlook about what my future was going to be like," she said. "I don’t remember thinking about how much money I had, how much money I didn’t have."
But then came the financial crisis. As tax revenue withered, local governments across the nation were forced to slash spending. When Cooke finished her internship and looked for a teaching job, she found no one was hiring.
Suddenly, she was stranded. Her ex-husband, out of work himself, stopped regular payments. The work she found as a substitute teacher paid only $100 a day. Without a significant source of income, she was consistently behind on her rent and was finally evicted from her apartment at the end of 2009. By the spring of 2010, after exhausting friends’ hospitality, she called a homeless shelter and begged for help.
Homelessness In The Middle Class: Stable Families Reduced To Poverty