“Skin Deep Town” by X

“And You Shall Say God Did It.”

State government shortfalls in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 are expected to reach $375 billion, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.Among the worst hit: California, Illinois and New York, which expect to massively cut health care and education spending and lay off thousands of state workers to close respective shortfalls  of $12.3 billion, $13 billion and $9.2 billion.

What these shortfalls mean for the working classes of these states is a collapse in public services, attempts at the mass firing of state and municipal workers, the slaughter of pension and benefit standards and a battle even  for the survival of public sector unions, which today constitute the majority of the nation’s unionized workforce.  The fiscal crises of the states and who pays for the crisis is the terrain on which class struggle will be fought in the coming five years.

“New Day Rising” by Hüsker Dü

The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape offered for the taking from the moment of European settlement. Size was our birthright, our conditioning, the justification for our exceptionalism, bigness our manifest destiny, and for a long time, whole centuries, it worked. The free land and timber and animals to be hunted down and coal and oil and ore to be dug out of the ground made us very wealthy very fast, taught us that growthmania was the norm, the shape of progress, the American way.

Thus, we prefer our Big Macs and our Whoppers, our food portions supersized, our big cars and sprawling cities, our enormous football players (growing bigger every year, the average offensive lineman now topping three hundred pounds), our big breasts and big penises and big houses (up from an average of 1,200 square feet in 1950 to 2,216 square feet today), our big armies with big reach, and, though we complain about it incessantly, big government that spends big money running up big debt (more now than at any other period in our history). That we allow corporations to grow to outrageous size is just another symptom of the disease. Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.

Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computer. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.

In the halcyon days of the final economic booms, everyone on your cul de sac could have died overnight from some mysterious plague, and while you might have been sad, you wouldn’t have been inconvenienced. Our economy, unlike any that came before it, is designed to work without the input of your neighbors. Borne on cheap oil, our food arrives as if by magic from a great distance (typically, two thousand miles). If you have a credit card and an Internet connection, you can order most of what you need and have it left anonymously at your door. We’ve evolved a neighborless lifestyle; on average an American eats half as many meals with family and friends as she did fifty years ago. On average, we have half as many close friends.

Uri Avnery: “This night a crime was perpetrated in the middle of the sea, by order of the government of Israel and the IDF Command

A warlike attack against aid ships and deadly shooting at peace and humanitarian aid activists

It is a crazy thing that only a government that crossed all red lines can do.

“Only a crazy government that has lost all restraint and all connection to reality could something like that - consider ships carrying humanitarian aid and peace activists from around the world as an enemy and send massive military force to international waters to attack them, shoot and kill.

New calculations by Edward Wolff, the New York University economist and an expert on U.S. wealth statistics, show that the top 1% actually held onto its share of national wealth in the crisis, and may have even gained a bit.

According to his analysis, the top 1% held 34.6% of all national wealth in 2007. By Dec. 31, 2009, they held 35.6%.

Meanwhile, share of national wealth held by the bottom 90% fell to 25% from 27%.

The reason is that the wealthy benefited disproportionately from the rebound in financial markets. Their wealth generally is mostly in stocks and businesses, the values of which have surged since the depths of the crisis.

Real estate, which accounts for the bulk of household wealth for the nonrich, hasn’t recovered. From 2007 through the end of 2009, owner-occupied homes fell 26% in value, while other real estate also fell 26%. Yet stocks fell only 24%, while other financial securities shed 14%.

The rich, in other words, suffered a smaller percentage decline than did the bottom 90%.

The question now is what will happen to inequality when economic growth resumes. Will it go even higher?

Things were supposed to be different by 2010, and not just in the mining industry. The economic crisis had everyone convinced that banks and corporate honchos had too much power; their greed-is-good bubble had popped. Our 30-year love affair with deregulation was over. The swashbuckling executives who spent the last generation fattening corporate bottom lines—and their own bank accounts—would be put on a short leash, especially with a new Democratic administration in D.C.

Business Week spoke of “a fundamental rethink of the proper boundaries between the public and private sectors” and said “once-cherished assumptions about the superiority of the U.S. economic model are now in doubt.”

A year and a half later, it looks like nobody told Washington or Wall Street. The rich are still cruising down easy street while the rest of us are stuck in a ditch.

With millions still unemployed and millions more losing their homes, politicians are now talking about the biggest economic crisis in our lifetimes in the past tense.

Bankers and CEOs crashed the economy—but turn on the news and somehow auto workers and school teachers are the real problem!

It seems to me lately that the crack-up we’ve entered is liable to play out more gruesomely for our privileged elites than the orgy of bloodletting that attended the French Revolution. That historical moment was a sharp transition between old, settled social relations and the new political realities of imminent industrialization and a rising middle class. The elites in charge of things to that moment, an ossified aristocracy, responded to rising discontent with utter feckless stupidity. To make matters worse, a great many of them were hunkered down in the fantasy-land Royal Palace of Versailles, enjoying what was for practical purposes a non-stop mega house party. They must have thought they were safe twelve miles outside Paris.

“Born Secular” by Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins