Inside Story: Is the American Dream Fading?
With more people living on the breadline in the United states, we ask how can prosperity be restored for the Americans. Inside Story US2012 discusses with guests: Tavis Smiley, Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West.

Midterms 2010: Democrats to Pay Heavily for Failure on Jobs
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Americans are set in Tuesday's midterm elections to make their president and Democrats pay heavily for their failure to stem unemployment amid gathering fears that the American dream has moved beyond reach for a generation.

In poll after poll in the long run-up to the midterm elections, voters have said that the economy was their main concern. Unemployment has risen by 20 per cent under Mr Obama, remaining stuck on or close to 9.6 per cent for since May 2009.

Julietta Strauss, of New York, lost her administrative job with the US census bureau in March, and has struggled to find work since.

More and more people were taking an "apocalyptic view" of America's prospects, she said. "The general word on the street seems to be that middle-class jobs are disappearing, and while there's an increasing tendency for the rich to get richer, middle-class wages are stagnant," she said.

At the Tailhook Tavern in Philadelphia, a city visited by Mr Obama in his final campaign swing, Joseph Carroll said he had not had steady work for two years. "The economy sucks. They talk about trickle down but we don't see it round here," said the 44-year-old, who specialises in fire suppressants in new constructions. "They bailed out the banks, they are making billions in profits again, they are making millions in bonuses again, but they don't want to lend to people who want to build up businesses." >>> Alex Spillius in Washington and Jon Swaine in New York | Monday, November 01, 2010

Jobless Millions Signal Death of the American Dream for Many
THE OBSERVER: Even the criminals have fallen on hard times in America's poorest city as the long-term unemployed struggle to keep a grasp on normality

Union members hold up "I want to work" placards as they join a protest of several thousand people demanding jobs outside City Hall in Los Angeles on August 13, 2010. Photograph: The Observer
Richard Gaines is one of the best-known faces on Camden's Haddon Avenue. It is a rough-and-tumble street, lined with cheap businesses and boarded-up houses, and is prey to drug gangs. Gaines, 50, runs a barbershop, a hair salon and a fitness business. He works hard and is committed to his community. But Haddon Avenue is not an easy place to make a living in the best of times. And these are far from the best of times.

Just how badly the great recession has struck this fragile New Jersey city, which is currently the poorest in America, was recently spelled out to Gaines. In happier times – whatever that might mean for a city as destitute as Camden – local businesses on Haddon Avenue could at least rely on a bit of trade from those who made their money on the street.

Young men bought flashy clothes and got sharp haircuts and always paid in cash. But no longer. The economy is now so bad in Camden that even the criminals are struggling and going short. "Even the guys who got money from illegal means really don't want to spend it," Gaines said.

Such a development, though, is just a snapshot of the deep problems still hitting the wider American economy. Growth rates are stuttering and a recovery is struggling to take hold. It may even now be showing signs of going backwards again, as countries such as Germany start to power forward. Joblessness has taken hold in America, with the numbers of long-term unemployed reaching levels not seen since the Depression of the 1930s. The figures are frightening and illustrate a society that remains in deep trouble.

The headline jobless figure of 9.5% is bad enough but does not begin to convey the problem as it fails to measure those who have stopped looking for work. Over the past three months alone more than a million Americans have fallen into that category: effectively giving up hope of finding a job and dropping out of the official statistics. Such cases now number some 5.9 million and their ranks are likely to grow as millions more find their jobless status becoming a permanent state of hopelessness. Surveys show that with each passing week on the dole their chances of finding a job get slimmer.

Though corporations, especially in the banking sector, are posting healthy profits, they are not hiring new workers. At the same time, government cuts are sweeping through city and state governments alike, threatening tens of thousands of jobs and slicing away at services once thought vital. Schools, street lighting, libraries, refuse collection, the police, fire services and public transport networks are all being scaled back. >>> Paul Harris | Sunday, August 15, 2010

UN Meets Homeless Victims of American Property Dream
NAME: UN special rapporteur says wealthy US ignoring deepening homeless crisis while pumping billions into bank rescues / UN say US is neglecting deepening homeless crisis

A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US by the Bush administration has accused the American government of pouring billions of dollars into rescuing banks and big business while treating as "invisible" a deepening homeless crisis.

Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, who has just completed a seven-city tour of America, said it was shameful that a country as wealthy as the US was not spending more money on lifting its citizens out of homelessness and substandard, overcrowded housing.

"The housing crisis is invisible for many in the US," she said. "I learned through this visit that real affordable housing and poverty is something that hasn't been dealt with as an issue. Even if we talk about the financial crisis and government stepping in in order to promote economic recovery, there is no such help for the homeless." >>> Chris McGreal in Los Angeles | Thursday, November 12, 2009

American Dream Evaporating
YNET NEWS: Great hopes stirred by Obama waning in wake of questionable performance

The fact that Barack Obama is the first American president since 1991 not to meet the Dalai Lama is not worrying in and of itself.

The reason why Obama chose to adopt this dubious step (his wish not to upset China) is also not perturbing. After all, he does not fundamentally object to anything about the Dalai Lama. He simply listened to the wrong advisor and underestimated his power as an American president and his ability to be received with great honors anywhere in the world, regardless of who he met with the day before.

Yet the issue is becoming disquieting because of the feeling that is increasingly being reinforced in our collective sense of anxiety that the charismatic guy who ran the exciting campaign – the guy who for a moment convinced all of us that we’ll be seeing an acute change and that the world will at once turn into a good place to live in – is turning before our eyes into a so-so president, at best.

His rhetorical ability is still there, but suddenly everyone is talking about the fact that the American president is reading from a teleprompter. Charisma isn’t enough >>> Hanoch Daum | Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Tea Party Express Hits the Road in Protest at Obama Healthcare Plans
TIMES ONLINE: On a warm, wet night in Michigan, Jan Crandall stands to attention while Taps is played on the sound system in honour of America’s war dead. Then she explains why she is carrying a placard bearing an astonishingly large number: $11,801,149,166,949.

It is the US national debt — and it is rising by $3.5 billion a day. “We came out tonight because of the excessive spending,” she said. “We don’t like the Government trying to take over everything. We are for healthcare reform, but they are not going about it the right way.” After a pause Mrs Crandall added: “Gee, are we going to talk about Barack Obama? We might get on his hit list.”

A powerful cocktail of hard-headed conservatism and wilful paranoia is driving a quixotic bus convoy from California to Washington, where Mr Obama will try tonight to rebut its claims and regain the initiative in the most important domestic policy speech of his presidency so far.

The Tea Party Express has no leader, no big donors and no formal goal except to “take back our country” from an Administration it believes has fundamentally misunderstood the role of America’s federal Government — and from Republicans who abandoned fiscal restraint to bail out the country’s banks last year.

The convoy consists of two 12-berth coaches built for rock band roadies and a permanent crew of two singers, two speakers and a supporting cast of mild-mannered political consultants from California. It would be no more than a fringe attraction had its members not already wrong-footed the White House in the health reform debate with talking points for hundreds of Republican town hall meetings over the summer. One of the brains behind the movement is Sal Russo, of Russo, Marsh and Associates, a Sacramento campaigning firm, formerly an adviser to Ronald Reagan and Rudy Giuliani.

The Tea Party people are now targeting congressional districts won last year by Democrats that they think can be won back in next year’s midterm elections. The coaches have stopped for four rallies in Michigan in the past two days, including one attended by Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher — known to followers of John McCain’s presidential campaign as Joe the Plumber. Yesterday he railed against big government at a meeting in Brighton, and signed copies of his new book, Fighting for the American Dream.

Mr Obama’s version of that dream has always included universal healthcare. His speech tonight to both houses of Congress will be a “very forceful” argument for wholesale reform, aides said, and a reply to a misinformation campaign by opponents that has encouraged conspiracy theories about state-run “death panels” and “population control experiments”.

The President’s problem is that no US legislation this ambitious has ever been passed with a majority of Americans opposed to it. A Gallup poll yesterday showed that only 37 per cent of voters back the Bill now being worked on by the Senate Finance Committee.

Tonight’s speech will, therefore, stop short of demanding the public insurance plan — the “public option” — even though Mr Obama still supports the idea and even though it is considered non-negotiable by about 40 liberal Democrats in the House. >>> Giles Whittell in Jackson, Michigan | Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Oprah Loses the Midas Touch. Has Oprah’s Dalliance with Politcs Cost Her Dear?
Photo of Oprah Winfrey courtesy of Google Images
THE INDEPENDENT: She is the embodiment of the American Dream, a Mississippi girl born into poverty who became the queen of US television. But now viewers are deserting her.

They call it the O-Factor: the power to make or break, to change lives, to sell millions of books, and to exercise a magnetic pull on the hearts, minds and wallets of middle America. For Oprah Winfrey, it is the intangible quality that brought her fame, made her fortune, and turned her into perhaps the most influential woman on the planet.

So it is with a slight sense of disbelief that some in the US have begun to wonder whether the magicO-Factor could be on the wane. How can a country that has embraced Oprah for so long, and turned her into a living embodiment of the American Dream, now explain a slow decline that has apparently begun to tarnish her glittering multimedia empire?

Look at the figures: this week, it emerged that average audiences for The Oprah Winfrey Show have fallen by nearly 7 per cent in 2008, its third straight year of decline. From a peak of nearly nine million in 2004, the afternoon chat show's viewing figures are hovering perilously close to the psychologically-crucial seven million mark.

Then there's the failure of Oprah's Big Give, a prime-time philanthropy show that was launched with huge fanfare before Christmas, only to mislay nearly a third of its audience during an eight-week run. A mooted second series, again on the mass-market channel ABC, has been abandoned.

Or what about the slow decline of O, the Oprah magazine? Its circulation has fallen more than 10 per cent in the past three years, to 2.4 million. At the Chicago headquarters of Harpo, Winfrey's global business (its name is Oprah, spelled backwards), they are now seeking a new editor-in-chief after the departure of the longstanding incumbent, Amy Gross.

Talk of terminal crisis may be premature but one thing's for sure: the universal adulation that turned Oprah into the most popular TV host in history is no more. At 54, her longstanding Midas touch is vanishing, fast. The End of the O-factor? Oprah Loses Her Crown >>> By Guy Adams

The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardcover – USA)