Thursday, December 31, 2009

The Depression In America

Folks, this is depression. The term recession came into use during the 1st great depression of the 30's. The government decided to change the term to recession from depression, because people saw the depression as deep dark pit that had no way out.
The, so called, recovery is a huge sham. Jobs are still being sent over seas and more people will lose there jobs after the holiday shopping season is over. The strategy of spending billions on road projects is a failure. No matter what the government says about the number of jobs that would have been lost without that strategy, the fact is that 10 percent of the country is out of work and many of those jobs will never come back. In fact, companies have decided that they can operate just fine with the employment level that they are at right now.
More and more of the information technology jobs are going out of the country. This will eventually eliminate those careers as an option. High tech is dead and buried in the United States. The only thing that is missing is the funeral.
People know that buying electronics of any kind is a fruitless pursuit, because next years model is always better. It is all a game. They have developed all these technological advances and they let them trickle out slowly, so that people will buy and buy and buy. The problem is that the content on the web and TV is dwindling into nothingness. What do you really do with your TV, cell phone and computer? You are throwing good money after bad to make these things better, but a fast computer on a slow Internet connection is still slow. Television shows run for ten episodes and end in an anti climatic mystery for the season. The same movies play sequentially from channel to channel. New releases happen once a year and are usually movies you've rented before. You spend a thousand dollars a year on your cell phone and most of the time you aren't talking about anything. The phones cost hundreds of dollars and there are dead spots. You grow apart from your friends and family, because you don't get quality time together and the phone makes your relationships less meaningful. You text people across the room, rather than talk to them. This leads to an inability to talk to people face to face, because you have lost your social skills.
We have grown apart as a society and as communities. Everything is sterile and seems to have nothing to do with our lives. Video games have replaced outside recreation. People are not only feeling the effects of the economic depression, but are generally depressed.
What's the point? The rat race needs to end. People need to spend quality time together. They need to put away the toys and live real lives. The store is not meeting your needs. You long for real relationships, but you can't let anyone into your life who isn't on your face book page. Human contact is extinct.
All these things add up to a society where people have no incentive to hire people in our own country. If people haven't got a relationship with you, they have no reason to save your jobs, because they have the same attachment to people here as they do to people in India and China. None at all. Now days a warm body is a warm body no matter where it's location might be,
There was a time when people bought from the people they knew, because those people took good care of them. Those days are over. It's dog eat dog.
Yes we are in a depression and we made this depression. We spent more than we made. We went for the quick buck and ignored the consequences. We invested our money without knowing where it was invested. We might have well stuffed it in the mattress and set the mattress on fire. We think that people with their own television shows and radio shows know what they are talking about, simply because they have a show. This depression is going to last for years. We have not turned the corner yet. We are not supporting local businesses and big business has pushed us off a cliff, time after time. There is no money flowing into our economy from any one but us and we are hurting. Buying things can not create a stable and vibrant economy. There simply aren't enough dollars for us to spend to make that an option. Americans must begin to make things again. And the things that we make must be priced to sell. No one can afford to spends hundreds of dollars on things that cost 25 dollars to make. We have to stop trying to sell things that cost the war debt to people. If we don't get realistic about what things should cost, our products simply won't sell. When fast food costs what a sit down meal used to cost there is something wrong.
When the grocery bags get smaller and smaller , so that you won't feel like your getting less and less of everything in the store and it's all half as big, we don't complain, we pay. People we are throwing money we don't have into the basic necessities of life. We are suffering day after day, because we won't stand up for ourselves. There is a sense of helplessness in this country that has grown into an epidemic. This depression is not about what you are doing. It is about what you are not doing. Americans no longer demand certain standards from business. They reach blindly into their wallets and surrender their cash for less and less product. Until you demand more for your money your going to have less money. This country will never recover until Americans demand more for less.