American Pyschological Association survey reports money is the biggest stressor in Americans’ lives
Differences in the experience of stress between the richest and poorest are increasing, just like differences in wealth.
Money stress has far reaching consequences. The APA report says about 1 in 5 people say that they have either avoided going to the doctor or have not gone because of money worries. Money also affects relationships: 31 percentof Americans report that money is a major source of conflict.
Conclusion? Money is wreaking grievous damage across America. When the average person spends hours a day worrying about money, (3.3 hours a day according to a USA Today report), that is time taken out of the nation’s good functioning. It’s a drag on productivity.
Second this report is official because it’s the APA, the voice of psychology in America. It cements the connection between money problems and health as a political problem because it involves another institution. Institutions – from banks to hospitals to the APA to marriage itself – institutions are are power concentrations. Balances of power are what politics is all about.
Enough stress will break a person’s spirit, of course, whether the stress be huge sudden, or milder but unending. So more depression, and more anesthetics like alcohol and drugs, and more addiction. Doesn’t sound like the stress is making us stronger, does it? A take-away is that money is breaking the American spirit.
This report is not a quirky finding. It’s not something you read and get a little angry on the inside. It’s that the whole system that allows this public damage is decayed.
Differences between how rich and the poor are suffering is always a big political problem.
If the collective damage – to health and wellbeing – visited on this counry by financial stress was something caused by a foreign country, it would be an act of war. That’s a political thing too. Does the direction the damage is coming from – outside or inside – make the damage less? No.
It’s our system. Our ideology. We’re looking at an inside job.
Big angry on the inside. Why doesn’t the American Psychological Association bite the bullet and write in its book of psychological symptoms (DSM5) about mental health and greed?
The APA report is here .
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Keeping the pilot light on
Since the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration we’ve seen supply side economics, deregulation, an explosive growth of free markets, the sapping of union power.
The Left’s objective is still vague. Liberalism gets its spirit from equity, justice, and collective action. That spirit is all but broken, witness the precipitous inequalities in America, witness the virtual disappearance from our language of terms like “the common good,” witness unions at their all-time low memberships, witness the Supreme Court retreating from enforcement of anti-trust laws.
During the Bush administration, the Left’s tolerance melted into passivity. Energetic leftists of the 1960s, once in the media spotlight, grew wealthy and cautious.
Not just that. Any spirit on the left was also broken down into fractions. Watch a peace march, a good place to find leftists, and you saw a sea of different banners, for as many different causes. All of them good. But there is no center.
The left reached another crisis point. Since then, an agitated search for what’s to blame.
It’s partly the money. The left needs to find something else besides wealth. Today, everybody in America sleeps safe under a star, the idea that one day, they will be rich. Americans navigate their whole lives by that star. So commercialism dominates everything – and it has saturated even the left. Commercialism everywhere. Lefties worry about their credit score and worry about security.
Sold out.
This President has abandoned any serious atteempts at facing up to the banks. It looks like loss of nerve.
Which way to turn?
After Obama took the presidency, the first order of business was the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the Bush administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those had the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But all that is not ‘forward.’
It’s partly that Liberals have lost their ‘forward.’ This is as deep a crisis as our submission to Wall Street. It is a collective loss of nerve.
There’s no fallen flag to grab up in the Liberal movement because there is no longer any flag.
Congress has no unified ‘forward.’ The American people have no unified forward. Once, we had the Occupy Movement. It suffered from lack of any forward agenda, and caved to police action. So now liberals talk about their frightening college debts or get fearful about retirement. Since we have no more effective restriction on exorbitant interest rates, they sap anybody’s courage.
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
There’s few leftist commentators, talk show liberals who churn the air like windmills.
But no coherent new theory, to unify.
Except here.
Only on this blog can you read whetherexploitation is ethical. Only here can you read about the contradiction between the American workplace – undemocratic and authoritarian – and the surrounding democracy. Read why social inequality is a killer (there’s new scientific evidence). About the long shadow of materialism. On widening corruption. Here the zero-sum concept is explained. Read how, in the long run, exorbitant greed may threaten democracyitself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here andhere.
Opinion is power.
But every year for the last 30 years, debate has faded; the left almost became mute. Liberals have avoided theory confrontations. Not in Congress, not at beer parties.
Every time that happened, the left’s light dimmed.
Left ideology. This blog is where we keep the pilot light on.
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How the Right dominates
People are fascinated by conflict.
The Right wing is energetically shoving blame for the national economy onto the Left. One of the right’s bullies, Bill O’Reilly, dealt out his thrashings on t.v.
Right wing commentators run an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right.
The Left considers itself too nice for this bruiser style. The Left simply doesn’t have head-crushers like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. There is no Fox News on the left, and right-wing radio shows vastly outnumber left-wing. The Left thinks that being morally good, maybe showing a tolerant sense of humor, should be enough to prevail.
It is not, and the Left has no real idea how to push back. So the Left, with its natural compassion, its collective action, its trust, its usury laws, are all being put through the meat grinder.
Surviving a reactionary
One look at this man and you know you’re dead: here.
Civil war looming within the Democratic party?
The Democratic party has lost its soul. Here’s why.
If our children are being raised on Ayn Rand, we’re in trouble
– here’swhy.
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