The world has been mired in recession since 2008 — nowhere more so than in Europe. It might thus come as some surprise that sales of super-luxury cars are booming — nowhere more so than in Europe.

In fact, sales of Bentleys (average price around $300,000) are up 60% this year in the United Kingdom, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.  Bentley sales are also up 35% in the United States.

To put this in perspective, the US economy grew by just 2.2% in 2012. The UK economy grew even less: 0.2%, according to statistics from the International Monetary Fund.

How can sales of super-luxury cars grow at super-fast rates during a recession? The answer is simple: it’s not a recession for everyone.

The last five years have been one of the best times in human history to be rich, and an even better time to be super-rich. The plutonomy — the economy of the super-wealthy — has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t live in the plutonomy. In the realonomy where ordinary people work (or don’t work) things have been much tougher.

The difference is striking. Consider that all-American company, General Motors. According to data compiled by Automotive News, GM sales are up 10% so far this year. Not bad.

But GM famously offers a brand for every level of consumer. Chevy sales are up just 6%. Buick sales are doing better, up 23%. And Cadillac sales? You guessed it: up 37%.

[pullquote]“The greatest country, the richest country, is not that which has the most capitalists, monopolists, immense grabbings, vast fortunes, with its sad, sad soil of extreme, degrading, damning poverty, but the land in which there are the most homesteads, freeholds — where wealth does not show such contrasts high and low, where all men have enough — a modest living— and no man is made possessor beyond the sane and beautiful necessities.”

Acura sales are outpacing Honda sales. Infiniti sales are outpacing Nissan sales. Lexus sales are outpacing Toyota sales. In fact, the only company where the mass-market brand is growing faster than the elite brand is Ford — and that’s only because Ford doesn’t separate Ford car from Ford truck sales.

Of course, it’s the more expensive trucks that are leading Ford to higher profits.

The fact is that times are not tough for everyone. Times are tough for low-income people, unemployed people, farmers, and the elderly. For high-income professionals times are pretty good.

For corporate leaders, hedge fund managers, and CEOs, happy days are here again.

The fact is that times are not tough for everyone. Times are tough for low-income people, unemployed people, farmers, and the elderly.

So the next time you hear that times are tough and belts need tightening, ask yourself who’s saying that times are tough and whose belts it is they want to tighten. Changes are it’s a highly-paid corporate lobbyist who’s saying that times are tough … and it’s someone else’s belt that needs tightening.

American national income per person is now just about back at 2007 levels. The losses of the Great Recession have been made up. In a very real sense, every American could be doing just as well as in 2007.

The reality is that America’s plutonomy is doing fabulously better than in 2007, while America’s realonomy flounders along at rock bottom. The Great Recession hasn’t meant so much the destruction of wealth as the transfer of wealth. The poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer, leaving the whole country right back where it was.

Except that the country as a whole is now even more unequal than it was in 2007.

We have to ask ourselves: how unequal should a country be? Was the America of 2007 really just too equal for our taste? Were there simply too few Bentleys on our roads in 2007?

Or was the America of 2007 already dangerously unequal — in which case the America of 2013 is even worse?

Personally, I find it hard to believe that 2007 America was a dangerously equal communist worker’s paradise. If you think that 2007 was about right, then you agree that we need to correct the country’s income distribution to bring down our grotesque level of inequality. If you agree with me that America was already grotesquely unequal in 2007, then we have that much farther to go.

Should we have a Bentley tax? Perhaps not. But we should have a seriously progressive income tax that restores some sanity to our economy and our income distribution. Until we do, America will keep moving backwards as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

But then, we’ve been moving backwards for forty years now. Working Americans reached their highest income levels in 1973. We have a lot of lost ground to make up. As of 2013, we haven’t even started. That more perfect union is going to be a long time coming.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Salvatore Babones (@sbabones) is a senior lecturer in sociology and social policy at the University of Sydney and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). He holds both a master’s degree in statistics and a Ph.D. in sociology from the Johns Hopkins University. Before moving to Australia in 2008, he worked in financial risk management and taught sociology and statistics at several universities in the United States.

Dr. Babones is an American citizen, born in New Jersey and educated in Florida, Alabama, and Maryland.

Readers should not take this to be a primer on what God those contemplating terrible crimes should believe in prior to committing those crimes.  Nonetheless, and notwithstanding Constitutional guarantees, they should be aware that in the United States how you are treated after you commit an indescribably evil crime may well depend on what kind of a God, if any, you believe in. Within the last 5 years we have had four horrific criminal acts arranged by people who when first apprehended appeared to have acted alone.  Three of those occurred within the last 10 months.

At midnight on July 20, 2102 James Holmes entered a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado dressed all in black and accompanied by four guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.  He announced his presence by opening fire on those in the crowded theater killing 12 people and injuring 58.  In addition to the assault on those in the theater he had rigged his apartment with sophisticated explosives that were designed to kill those who entered the apartment and cause casualties to those in surrounding units.

According to an NBC News report of the testimony offered at a January 8, 2013 hearing, there were more than a dozen explosive devices in the apartment loaded with napalm, smokeless powder and live ammunition. Among other things in the apartment was a thermos bottle filled with glycerin suspended over a frying pan filled with potassium permanganate.  When combined the two substances would set off a chain reaction.  Carpets had been soaked with oil and gasoline.  If someone had entered the apartment or played with some toys left in front of the building that were connected to the devices, the explosion would have been triggered. As a boy James attended the Penasquitos Lutheran Church in San Diego, California and his pastor describes him as a proud, intelligent but retiring boy.  His attendance at that church suggests he is a Christian. Following his arrest no one suggested that James was a terrorist and should be deprived of his constitutional rights.

On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six members of the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  Dressed in black and armed with a rifle and many rounds of ammunition he shot his way into the school and began his killing spree.   Before going to school he murdered his mother.  It was she who had home schooled him.  Before he was home schooled he attended St. Rose of Lima Catholic School.  Since he killed himself after killing others there was no reason for authorities to comment on his religious affiliation or to describe him as a terrorist.

On April 16, 20076, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in a mass shooting at Virginia Tech.  Cho was a South Korean citizen but had permanent resident status in the United States. He and his family attended a Christian church in the town in which they lived. After the killing he committed suicide.  A note found in his room said:  “Thanks to you I died like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people.” Since he killed himself after killing others there was no reason for authorities to comment on his religious affiliation nor to describe him as a terrorist.

The Boston bombers were every bit as evil and sophisticated as James Holmes and every bit as vicious as the other individuals described above.  The two men, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were both legally in the United States.  Dzhokhar was a naturalized U.S. citizen and a follower of Islam who reportedly posted links to Islamic websites.  His friends described him as not particularly religious and none had seen signs of his being a radical Muslim.  None of that affected commentators and politicians.  The Muslim connection was quite enough.

Some members of Congress whose allegiance to the U.S. constitution depends completely on what parts of it are being considered, immediately demanded that the constitutional rights of Dzhokhar be suspended and that he not be advised of his right to counsel. Those comments were made long before any connection to known terrorist groups by the two men had been suggested.  Senator Lindsay Grahamsaid in a tweet::  “A decision to not read Miranda rights to the suspect was sound and in our national security interests.”

Senator John McCain said Dzhokhar should be treated as an enemy combatant so that he could be questioned more aggressively.  Senators McCain, Lindsay Graham, Kelly Ayotte and Rep. Pete King said:  “The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim and kill innocent Americans.” That is the shallow explanation offered by shallow legislators to justify  their willingness to set aside an American citizen’s constitutional rights.

Rational observers might observe that none of the killings described above had anything to with the murderers’ interest in making money as McCain et al suggested.  The only murderers from those described above that people immediately defined as terrorists were the Boston murderers.  It would seem that how some people choose to define depraved hearts depends on what God those depraved hearts worship. Dzhokhar made a bad choice.

Christopher Brauchli can be emailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com

Welcome to the Age of Murder.Gov

Times of murderous indecency.—Eds

At last we know. The mysterious legal authority for Barack Obama’s killer drone program flows from another administration with an elastic interpretation of executive power: that of Richard Nixon.

In a chilling 16-page dossier known simply as the White Paper, one of Obama’s statutory brains at the Justice Department cites the 1969 secret bombing of Cambodia as a legal rationale justifying drone strikes, deep inside nations, against which the United States is not officially at war.

This startling disclosure is drafted in the antiseptic prose of an insurance adjuster announcing the denial of a claim based on a pre-existing condition. Yet, the bombing of Cambodia (aka Operation Menu), which involved more than 3,000 air strikes, was almost universally acknowledged as a war crime. Now the Obama administration has officially enshrined that atrocity as precedent for its own killing rampages.

Since Obama’s election, the CIA has overseen nearly 320 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, killing more than 3,000 people, as many as 900 of them civilians. Among the dead are at least 176 children. Assassination was never this easy, never so risk-free.

George W. Bush was mocked by liberals for calling himself the Decider. Bush deployed this pathetic bit of oil slang to defend himself against accusations that Cheney and his coterie of Neo-Cons were calling the shots in the Iraq war. But was Bush’s posturing any more absurd than the image of Obama piously consulting the homilies of Aquinas, as he personally checks off the names on his drone kill list and watches streaming videos of the writhing bodies shredded by Hellfire missiles?

Bush’s murderous psyche at least presented presented itself for analysis and explication. Perhaps W’s blood lust stemmed from a Freudian fixation on Saddam’s pathetic attempt to off his father in Kuwait City. Perhaps it was warped by spasms of subconscious guilt over allowing 9/11 to occur on his watch. What, however, is the driving force behind Obama’s savagery? Unlike Bush, who tended to show revealing glimpses of emotional strain, Obama operates with the icy rectitude of a political sociopath.

In Obama’s game of drones, the atrocities in the name of empire seem consciously geared to some deep political algorithm of power and death.

The Left remains largely insensate to the moral and constitutional transgressions being committed by their champion, leaving only the faintly ludicrous figure of Rand Paul to offer official denunciations against these malignant operations. For his troubles, Paul’s admirable filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan, master of the drones, to head the CIA is ridiculed as an exercise in paranoia by the likes of Frank Rich and Lawrence O’Donnell.

The professional Left, from the progressive caucus to the robotic minions of Moveon.org, lodge no objections and launch no protests over the administration’s acts of sanctimonious violence against the empire’s enemies.

Worse, they behave like political eunuchs, offering groveling tributes and degrading supplications to their Master, even as Obama defiles their ideological aspirations.

The president has offered us a master class in political mesmerism, transforming the anti-war Left into supine functionaries of the imperial management team.

The cyber-Left is kept rigidly in line by the architects of liberal opinion. From David Corn to Rachel Maddow, the progressive press acts in sinister harmony with the administration’s neoliberal agenda. They seduously ignore Obama’s constitutional depredations, and instead devote acres of airspace to the faux clashes over sequestration and gay marriage.

Night after night, we are presented with sideshows, what Hitchcock called the McGuffin in his films, the dramatic diversions designed to distract the audience’s attention from the real game being played. Meanwhile, the liberal commentariat is balefully complacent to the rapacity of Obama’s remote control death squadrons, even in the face of somber evidence regarding the drone program’s criminal nature. Raid after raid, kill after kill, ruin after ruin, they remain silent. But their silence only serves to emphasize their complicity, their consciousness of guilt. Their fingers too are stained by distant blood.

Even Nixon, the ultimate enforcer, was rocked by insubordinates defecting from his regime, aides and staffers who reached their limit and resigned in disgust. One of them was Roger Morris. Morris, an occasional contributor to CounterPunch, served on the National Security Council during LBJ’s administration and continued after Nixon’s election under Henry Kissinger. But Morris reached his limit in the spring of 1970, resigning over the covert bombing of Cambodia. How times have changed.

Where are similar figures of conscience in the Obama White House, or even the Democratic Party? Where are the leaks and resignations? Perhaps this is the ultimate object lesson on display in the ongoing persecution of Bradley Manning. Internal dissent, regardless of its legal and moral standing, shall not be tolerated. Indeed, it will be considered sedition and will be smothered by the supreme sanction of the government.

Acts that were once considered outrages against conscience are now routine.

Welcome to the age of Murder.Gov.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book (with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.

Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-aged Americans is surprising.

From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000.

The most pronounced increases were seen among men in their 50s, a group in which suicide rates jumped by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000. For women, the largest increase was seen in those ages 60 to 64, among whom rates increased by nearly 60 percent, to 7.0 per 100,000.

Suicide rates can be difficult to interpret because of variations in the way local officials report causes of death. But C.D.C. and academic researchers said they were confident that the data documented an actual increase in deaths by suicide and not a statistical anomaly. While reporting of suicides is not always consistent around the country, the current numbers are, if anything, too low.

“It’s vastly underreported,” said Julie Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University who has published research on rising suicide rates. “We know we’re not counting all suicides.”

[pullquote]More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.[/pullquote]

The reasons for suicide are often complex, and officials and researchers acknowledge that no one can explain with certainty what is behind the rise. But C.D.C. officials cited a number of possible explanations, including that as adolescents people in this generation also posted higher rates of suicide compared with other cohorts.

“It is the baby boomer group where we see the highest rates of suicide,” said the C.D.C.’s deputy director, Ileana Arias. “There may be something about that group, and how they think about life issues and their life choices that may make a difference.”

The rise in suicides may also stem from the economic downturn over the past decade. Historically, suicide rates rise during times of financial stress and economic setbacks. “The increase does coincide with a decrease in financial standing for a lot of families over the same time period,” Dr. Arias said.

Another factor may be the widespread availability of opioid drugs like OxyContin and oxycodone, which can be particularly deadly in large doses.

Although most suicides are still committed using firearms, officials said there was a marked increase in poisoning deaths, which include intentional overdoses of prescription drugs, and hangings. Poisoning deaths were up 24 percent over all during the 10-year period and hangings were up 81 percent.

Dr. Arias noted that the higher suicide rates might be due to a series of life and financial circumstances that are unique to the baby boomer generation. Men and women in that age group are often coping with the stress of caring for aging parents while still providing financial and emotional support to adult children.

“Their lives are configured a little differently than it has been in the past for that age group,” Dr. Arias said. “It may not be that they are more sensitive or that they have a predisposition to suicide, but that they may be dealing with more.”

Preliminary research at Rutgers suggests that the risk for suicide is unlikely to abate for future generations. Changes in marriage, social isolation and family roles mean many of the pressures faced by baby boomers will continue in the next generation, Dr. Phillips said.

“The boomers had great expectations for what their life might look like, but I think perhaps it hasn’t panned out that way,” she said. “All these conditions the boomers are facing, future cohorts are going to be facing many of these conditions as well.”

Nancy Berliner, a Boston historian, lost her 58-year-old husband to suicide nearly two years ago. She said that while the reasons for his suicide were complex, she would like to see more attention paid to prevention and support for family members who lose someone to suicide.

“One suicide can inspire other people, unfortunately, to view suicide as an option,” Ms. Berliner said. “It’s important that society becomes more comfortable with discussing it. Then the people left behind will not have this stigma.”
_______________________

SELECT COMMENTS

1. • Jen D
   • New Jersey

   NYT Pick

   Economic hopelessness. My brother committed suicide last July. He had just turned 60. He lost his IT job in the Great Recession in 2008. Despite hundreds of resumes being sent out, and a lifetime of IT experience, he got few interviews and no job offers. He spent down his 401(k) and when he died the only thing he owned was a beat-up car. We later found out he had a lot of credit card debt, with which he had tried to keep himself afloat. After four years of no job offers, unemployment running out, having no health insurance, etc., his dignity was shot. He had lost hope of ever working again. How I wish he had not committed suicide; how I would give anything and everything to have him back. I consider him one of the casualties of the Recession and when I read of the fat bonuses the banksters award themselves, I shake with rage that they have continued to prosper while people like my brother lost all hope and people like me lost a loved one.

   • May 2, 2013 at 5:50 p.m.
   • RECOMMENDED996
2. 

   • David
   • Toledo

   NYT Pick

   Shrink the jobs, multiply the guns, and widen the gap between rich and poor so far that the American dream of equal opportunity is a sad joke.

   • May 2, 2013 at 6:36 p.m.
   • RECOMMENDED453
3. 
   • AW
   • Boston

   NYT Pick

   I’m not at all surprised–and would expect the increase among 50+ men to be recession-based, given the much greater permanent unemployment in that cohort than in past recessions. 

   Losing your ability to provide for your family is devastating. If you’re over 50, lose your job, can’t find another, need to provide for your family and are fortunate enough to have substantial life insurance that has been in place long enough to pay off for suicide, it’s not even an irrational choice. Not the choice most people would want to make, especially when you consider the emotional impact on children, spouse, other loved ones. But being an economic provider may come first in many men’s minds.

   K.R.
   New Jersey

   This is the first wave of people to go backward, having less than their parents. It is a shock. So it is shameful, on top of being devastating. You can’t admit that you don’t have money in this country. You’re viewed as “bad”. Let’s face it, even our Congress acts that way. People who need help (even health insurance) are seen as mooches. We just came off a decade or so of people spending well beyond their means, taking out gigantic home equity loans so they could pretend that they had money, purchase status items. Once society adjusts to the new normal– fewer opportunities, lower expectations–maybe the suicide rate will level off. Maybe people’s values will change a little bit when they see how quickly wealth can evaporate. Maybe those who govern will adjust as well, and start viewing this as a permanent change in the American way of life rather than a bump in the road.

    

    

Related

• Health Guide: Suicide and Suicidal Behavior