Really really good post. I’ve felt the same way but you put it in an excellent frame. Congrats. I’ve often thought about the “American Dream.” It used to be to be able to make decent living free from the fear of an oppressive government, perhaps to establish yourself in a profession, or own a piece of land, a farm or a house, and to provide for your old age and the education of your children, who you hoped would do even better than you did. I always felt my father, who emigrated here from eastern Europe in 1917 penniless and ended up being an oral surgeon and university professor (NYU) was the embodiment of the American Dream. And, no, he never made a million dollars or anything close to it. Maybe that was partially because he devoted one day a week of his practice to working for free in a clinic that served the poor. He did it in recognition of all those who helped him when he was impoverished and without whom he would never have been able to go to college. Now it seems the “dream” is to make $10 million – at least, and screw everyone else.

Frankly, that’s corrupt and the sign of a decaying society.

Also this from Redd’s post:

“Housing is the least affordable it has been in 14 years. [U.S. Census]”

Ummm, 14 years ago. Let’s see, that would be ‘92 or if the numbers are a few months old, ‘91. What happened then in the housing market? How about a rather big bust. Here in California the median price of homes dropped 27% between ‘92 and ‘96 after peaking in ‘91. Didn’t recover until ‘98. We all know real estate, like most economic things, is cyclical. Does this tell us anything, you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…..e_equality

Do we know what debt is included in this figure? Does it include car loans, mortgages, and everything else? Or is it more “discretionary”?

EPU – After spending more time looking than I expected, I believe it includes all consumer debt servicing. It appears the FED uses it to calculate the DSR (Debt Service Ratio) and FOR (Financial Obliations Ratio).

The household debt service ratio (DSR) is an estimate of the ratio of debt payments to disposable personal income. Debt payments consist of the estimated required payments on outstanding mortgage and consumer debt.

The financial obligations ratio (FOR) adds automobile lease payments, rental payments on tenant-occupied property, homeowners’ insurance, and property tax payments to the debt service ratio.

From the Federal Reserve some explanation and links for deeper digging, but I’d say the short answer is “yes.”

Egypt, in other words, is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt –- a 500-mile miracle that exists only because the highland forests of central Africa happen to drain north, through the Sahara, instead of west, into the Congo basin, or east, into the Indian Ocean. It’s hard to imagine a country more completely defined by an accidental quirk of geography – or, as the high priests at Karnak probably would have argued, that represents such a unique gift from the Gods.

Fair enough.

Hate to quibble w/billmon, whose writing is both insightful and elegant, but it’s always struck me as an even bigger accidental quirk of geography (and even more fortuitous for its residents) that the warm waters of Gulf Stream flow northeast toward Europe.

Talk about an immense region being defined by geography. Consider: Madrid, Spain is roughly on the same parallel as Boston, Mass.

No Gulf Stream and its ameliorating effect upon the weather, and alla Europe ain’t ought but an ice-box.

Onna separate note, I very much look forward to billmon’s resumption of his regular political commentary gig, tho’ I confess I’ve enjoyed his Egyptian interlude. Along w/many here, I suspect, billmon and digby and this site, are three of my leading sources for commentary on politics.

Can’t really begrudge billmon his time away neither. Seems like he needs to slip away for a spell periodically, so’s he can reorient, recharge and come back w/even sharper acuity.

If you enjoy this sorta writing, here’re a coupla lovely bits of evocative imagery and insight from billmon’s dispatch of his train-trip from Cairo down the Nile to Luxor (scroll on by if no interest, course; promise not to make a habit of this post-length but wanted to share for any that somehow might notta stumbled onto billmon yet):

… The real Egypt is shaped like a sinuous snake, with its fangs clamped firmly into the bottom of the Mediterranean.

To the west, a string of oases – the snake’s ba, or soul shadow — follow the parallel line of another ancient valley, which once marked the river’s course to the sea. Beyond that, only sand and wind and the faint sound of scorpions, scuttling across the dunes.

… Laundry –- a blend of Western and traditional Egyptian garments –- hung from balconies and windows, not so much drying in the sun as baking in it.

… By all other appearances, it was just another Egyptian provincial city, with the same dirty paint peeling from the same crumbling architecture, and the same unpaved streets jammed with cars, people and assorted livestock. But, as it was, I thought I could sense a kind of tension in the air, just as the bleak villages we’d already passed had seemed to exude a kind of sullen anger -– the defiance of a defeated, but unreconciled population.

… Copts [Egyptian Christians] are, at least by reputation, the shop owners, goldsmiths, crop buyers and petty lenders of the local economy, roles almost guaranteed to produce conflict -– in rural Egypt as much as in L.A.’s South Central District.

… One can’t blame the Copts for seeking allies where they can find them, but pretending that Egypt is a Satanic hell-hole of religious persecution, instead of a grindingly poor Third World country with lots of social problems and not many solutions, is the apex of intellectual dishonesty –- which, of course, is exactly what we’ve come to expect from the neocons and their fellow travelers.

… The valley had narrowed, and I could see the deserts on either side now –- a line of low hills to the west, almost lost in the sun’s glare, and to the east, luminous white cliffs, the color of the moon, rising out of the deepening shadows by the river’s edge.

Now that the hottest part of the day had passed, the landscape had come alive again. Early evening appeared to be irrigation time, and I could see the fellaheen [Egyptian peasantry] guiding silver fingers of precious water between rows of green. In other fields, which had already received their daily allotment, stripes of darker earth lay moist and muddy under the slanting rays of the sun.

Everywhere there were people –- men working in the ankle-deep mud of the irrigated fields; a group of women sitting in a circle on a huge cloth, doing some kind of handwork I couldn’t quite see; children chasing each other down the long narrow mounds that divided the rectangular plots, or shooing cows from one meager pasture to another with long switches. I could have sworn I saw one fellow … just sitting and watching his crops grow –- like Caleb in East of Eden, admiring his bean field. Then again, maybe he was just saying his evening prayers.

Either way, the scene was a reminder that just as life in the Cairo slums is lived largely in the streets, the fellaheen don’t so much farm their fields as inhabit them –- mud, manure, parasitic worms and all. It is a life as far removed from my own existence as the polar regions of Mars, although my great grandfather, last in a long line of Virginia dirt farmers, no doubt would have found it more familiar.

On the bony backs of such people, ultimately, the future of the Middle East’s most populous country will be built –- and yet their thoughts, beliefs, hopes and desires are a complete mystery to me, as I suspect they increasingly are to their Westernized, university-educated rulers.

So much rides on something we know so little about.

[and finally, the Charlie Chaplin of Nag Hammadi, evidently]

… We stopped on the platform for only a brief minute –- long enough to watch a pantomime comedy sketch of a waiter at the station café trying to chase away a bum who kept circling back to empty tables to drain the last dregs of tea and coffee from the cups left sitting on them.

When Bush says that the tax cuts are working, he means that the Bush family trust is growing more than they ever imagined.

I see 10 times as many cracks as that every single day from the young ladies — overweight or not — in low cut jeans.

Message to women everywhere: look at the picture. It’s gross, right? How about buying a bigger size of pants? Thanks from all of us.

Excellent point about the paradigms of work vs. investment, and how the Repubs have framed themselves as the economically sexier party of rising to the top on the wave of the markets, with pundits like Neil Cavuto as their cheerleaders and champions.

Makes me think of the Enron movie’s depiction of the Portland Gas and Electric employee who plugged away in the field all his life–working to fulfill his dream–yet knowing that it wasn’t even his work per se that would get him there but his retirement portfolio tied to Enron stock, which… we know the end of that story.

There’s even a parallel between the whole “mark to-market” accounting fraud that shrouded Enron’s true numbers and the economic and foreign policy paradigm of this administration: “We’ll be greeted as liberators” and “the invasion will pay for itself” are the faux-future profits adverstised and booked in advance to convince everyone that America’s stock looks good. And this is exactly the way the Bushies continue to plug their economic numbers – by ignoring key realities, and undervaluing genuine work.

From this lot?

You’ve got be kidding!