While Wall Street crows that “it’s over,“ financial stress continues to cause great pain up and down Main Street. Like an iceberg, most of it lies beneath the surface, out of sight and out of the minds of those still getting by.
But the small amount that manages to break the surface and loom into our consciousness gives us a picture of desperation far beyond anything we could have previously imagined.
Until recently, I thought Cameron Brown had committed the most unthinkable act imaginable, at least, if the prosecutor’s charges are correct. Brown had lost his job as a baggage handler at LAX. He was also separated from his girlfriend, the mother of his four-year-old daughter, Lauren.
One fine California day, while Lauren was spending the weekend with her dad, he took her to view the beautiful coastline along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. There, according to the charges against him, he threw the child to her death off a 120-foot cliff because he didn’t want to pay her child support of $1,000 per month.
Certainly, nothing could be worse than that, I thought at the time. The mental images of little Lauren’s last few seconds would undoubtedly be worse than anything else I could ever imagine.
But I underestimated the potential of the recession to wreak havoc in its wake, and this was brought home in dramatic fashion last week.
Until then, Jason Mulvaney, age 12, and his seven-year-old sister, Jennifer, had lived in an upscale section of eastern Ventura county, on the fringe of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Jennifer was particularly fond of playing with her dolls and Jason was actively involved in the local soccer program.
They both liked going to school, partly because it was a break from the stressful conditions at home. Last September, their Dad had lost his high-level job at Citibank. Their parents had subsequently separated and there was an ongoing court battle over custody and financial issues.
When they visited their dad at the apartment project he had moved into, they generally went to the swimming pool or to a local park.
However, last Tuesday, after their mother dropped them off, it’s not clear how the three of them spent the day. What is clear is that, after the children were in bed, their dad went into each of their rooms and stabbed them multiple times. The Los Angeles Times reported: “the killings were so frenzied that the scene in the children’s bedrooms shook even seasoned homicide investigators.”
The father then took his own life by what was suspected to be a prescription drug overdose.
On that very same day, Thuy Lee, 38, and her daughters, ages three and five, were visiting her cousin’s home in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles.
Thuy was enmeshed in financial difficulties, having recently lost her business. She and the girls turned in that evening in their usual manner, preparing to sleep on a spare mattress in the living room. However, that night would be anything but usual.
Shortly before 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, as people were just beginning to read about the deaths in Ventura County, Thuy stabbed both of the girls and then herself.
So far, the girls have survived, but the mental trauma they experienced may forever haunt them. The five-year-old underwent surgery. She is considered critical and is in an induced coma. The three year old and the mother are classified as stable.
Again, these stories, and others like them, represent only the tip of the iceberg.
Clearly, all is still not well. For the millions who are struggling through each day, the recession has a long way to go.
The recovery efforts of the Obama administration have, so far, focused in large part on rescuing companies in the financial sector…
…but it is not too late to shift the spotlight, in a meaningful way, to the problems along Main Street.
Dave McGill, News Correspondent
Dave’s column, “The Contrarian,” generally published every Friday, to Gather Essential News and other groups will sometimes present a contrary view to various aspects of the news, or an alternate take on the conventional wisdom of the day. It will also often appear on other days of the week
Dave has been a senior officer of an eastern insurance company, involved in economic projections and investment strategy, president of a Midwestern mortgage banking company, and a financial consultant in Southern California, serving clients in the field of commercial real estate development.
You can find all of Dave’s “the contrarian” columns at: http://gather.com/thecontrarian. Keep up with Dave’s other postings and Gather activity by joining his Gather network at: http://atadaskew.gather.com. You’ll find Dave and other News correspondents, plus celebrity content and plenty of news experts at: news.gather.com.
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Comments: 49
YA RIGHT yourself. Unless Joe Wilson is right, and EVERY IDIOT IN TALK RADIO AS STUPID AS I THINK THE AUDIENCE FOR THEIR CRAP IS, the recession is ending, slowly, and painfully, after about 30 months of continuous terror for every working man and woman in the country, the corner is being turned.
There remain pitfalls and mines along the path to vigorous economic health, but PARTISAN PARSIMONIOUS PRURIENT PESSIMISM IS COUNTER PRODUCTIVE PALAVER.
Cheer up, listen to some good music. CLICK HERE.
Which makes anything else he says become meaningless.....
By the way, the administration is trying the "say it's good so people will spend" and often that ploy works, for awhile. Time will tell
Strange way to show your concern and love for your family.
Tim Geithner said recently that though the signs of the recovery are beginning to show, it will not be until people feel the recession is gone that it will be (paraphrase). He's right.
People are not going to the restaurants, bowling, buying a new suit of clothes as much because the money is going to ER visits, high costs of prescription meds and out of pocket medical expenses. Medical care is a need not a luxury item that can be scrapped and has eaten up a lot of money in times past that could have went towards recovery efforts on main street.
For unemployment I have heard only one prediction that was not hedged. No source was referenced anytime I heard it either. It went something like this:
"They say that unemployment won't be back to 5% for another 10 years".
Speaking as a member of the unemployed...
Welfare alert! welfare alert!
people are fools to think the stock market is an indicator of a healthy or unhealthy economy. We will get much worse before we get better and soon the criminals that caused our economic downfall and can't stand to think about how they brought down the economy will be jumping out windows like the cowards they are.
Obama made a big mistake listening to the GOP hacks he kept in power and its his economy now.
Unfortunately Obama will never be the leader he told us he was and he is doing everything to jeopardize what little we have left.
Though of course, murder/suicide is never the logical answer.
Those who put their trust in government are doomed to be disappointed. Governments have no soul. Governments only care for their mindless craving for more power.
Apparently the desire for political change and the goals of the bill, largely written by the Apollo Alliance, were greater than their concern for America's families and children.
In the mean time they continue to print money, raise the national debt, and keep interest rates artificially low... things that helped create this mess in the first place?
I want to point out some of the stories that do not end in savagery, but the continual quiet desperation of a mother and father unable to provide sustenance and shelter for themselves and their children. The stories of young families gathering what they can and abandoning their dream home. The frustrated men tearing themselves away from loving families, lost and confused, faced with seemingly insurmountable difficulties. These stories don't get told, not because they are hard to find, they are less dramatic, and already in the mind of all the people who go off to a not quite secure job each day. They don't get told because we already know them. Millions of us are living them.
These stories are the tales of the young mothers, staying at a job that provides enough for food and lodging while her husband desperately seeks a new post that will include a good wage and medical insurance. And that same husband near tears because of his failures.
Once in a while we hear of the parent, taken into custody, charged with a homicide because a child dies for lack of medicine. The accusation is willful denial of medical care, child abuse. Reality may well be different. The family may have been unable to pay for the care. Those stories do get told, but the story of the child passing through an ear infection without prescription drugs or the millions of other stories with good endings, but horrifying beginnings and middles don't. And we still hear of the bankruptcies brought on by illness, and the home foreclosures that come in the wake of debilitating disease.
And, we will never cease hearing the whining and outrage of those who do not face or fear these futures as they resist any kind of safety net. They think they will never need one. So did every other unemployed father or mother in the nation, until it happened.
We are not hearing of the psychological trauma of the raw anger that often accompanies frustration and fear. We don't know the pain of our neighbor who has just heard about possible layoffs. We never share our own fears and frustrations.
Compassion for the desperate is easy to generate, but without action to prevent the desperation and fear it's A WASTE OF TIME.
I agree that we should focus on solving the problems on main street, and my sense is that a good, solid, publicly financed medical insurance option would go a very long way toward that goal. We might even consider including counseling for depression and frustration in the coverage.
KARL.
I agree that we should include counseling in any medical-insurance bill. Not "consider" it, do it. And word it so that the conseling gets reviewed on a semi-annual or annual basis to determine if it's still needed. A girl I knew was on suicide watch at a hospital as long as the insurance would pay for it; when it ran out, she magically "got better".
What these people did was ugly to say the least but is it the blame of the government or the economy itself?
I don't recall such "horror stories" when conditions along Main Street were ok...The fact is, there were many more I could have drawn from...
And the point is, this is a capitalist's country...
Because of the distortions in the system introduced by our insidious system of campaign finance, Main Street has little if any representation. Whether you and others want to face it or not the result, today, is an extreme high in the misery index, if there were such a thing...
I believe these "horror stories" are extremely relevant...
This nation is far from a capitalist's country, its more managed economy light. A progressive pointed that put for me several years ago when I talked of the free market. He was correct, we have no free market but a increasingly government/corporatist managed one.
We have organizations too big to fail because they have been enticed/forced to buy bankrupt organizations. We have utilities whose monopolies are enforced by government.
In the meantime, some are preparing for energy descent. Energy descent now has to happen because even if there is more oil, it takes so many years to get it out that prices will rise in the meantime. Localization is happening because it must. Governments are not prepared. Other organizations will need to step in.
Suicides have begun to happen among the wealthy also. Resistance to auditing the federal government may not carry the day now that so much attention is on the issue of where the money went. There is precedent for busting huge companies into smaller chunks. It happened with phone companies, and it can happen with banks and insurance companies as well.
It would be a dangerous game for Obama to lead on this, but the clamor in the House of Representatives may mean he will not have to lead. He can shrug his shoulders at the donors who put him in as the legislation is passed to him.
He cannot veto opening the records if it passes both houses with veto-proof majorities. Some think this is not possible, but I pray that it is. We cannot fix what is broken without figuring out what happened.
"Socialism,"of course, is anything that theatens the greed of the upper-class capitalists. With the help of the media it has become a dirty word that no one seems to have the courage to be associated with...
I've often wondered what word could have been applied to the looting of the middle class over the last 30 years or so by the upper class, not to suggest that it has stopped...
Socialism gets overused by some but its use is increasingly appropriate the last decade or so. Increasing government control over more and more aspects of peoples lives and the general economy fits in the line with the definition nicely. Saying "socialism" is what endangers the upper class capitalists' (coincidentally the rest of us too but who cares right?) interests is a helluva a simplification that I'm surprised as good a writer as you would even attempt to slide by anyone.
As for shills, I'm always fascinated myself how government can find so many of them to promote its continual growth and power. But it always does, both of the left and right too.
It's simply amazing and quite discouraging...
There are so many avenues of help available to people - through churches and non-profits - that don't involve the government. And yet most people don't know about them. Or if they've heard about them, they've heard that people are always treated badly and turned away.
If we care about each other, we need to make sure that each one has the opportunity to succeed in our capitalist society, not that each one is imprisoned by socialism or worse.
"There are so many avenues of help available to people - through churches and non-profits..." That's what conservatives always say. But studies have shown that when the need is greatest (as it is now), donations to such groups actually go down. "People too often abandon generosity in favor of charity."
And, Marilyn, your "or worse" is having neighbors like you who judge others' motives and actions without knowledge or compassion.
There are some out there who truly did not put themselves in their position. But the great majority made consecutive bad choices for some starting way back in school.
And now they and their shills say there is no need for regulatory controls. could it be that they think there's some money they missed...?...
The dead, aside from the shooter, were his wife Jennifer, 37, son Charles Jr., 14, and daughter Emmaline, age 7.