More Americans Dissatisfied Over Country's Direction, NYT Says

By Joseph Galante

April 3 (Bloomberg) -- More than 80 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, the most since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking the question in the early 1990s, the New York Times reported.

Eighty-one percent of 1,368 respondents, who were surveyed by telephone between March 28 and April 2, said ``things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,'' the Times reported. Sixty-nine percent gave that response last year and 35 percent in 2002, according to the report.

Seventy-eight percent of those surveyed said the country is worse off than five years ago, while just 4 percent said it was better off, the Times said. The economy and job market top people's list of concerns compared with the Iraq War and terrorism last year, the newspaper said.

Typically, dissatisfaction rises in the months and years following an economic downturn, not at the beginning, the newspaper said. The survey's margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points, the Times said.

It hasn't been this high since 1994. Between the economy and the Iraq War, you've got a perfect shit storm of public dissatisfaction brewing right now.

I think the dissatisfatcion that people are feeling goes well beyond politics and any politician's ability to give solutions.

Our society has been building to a critical mass of unimportance and unsustainability. Nobody has a real connection with the things that provide them with life anymore. We're basically helpless flotsom floating on a sea of meaningless "economic growth". Everyone bought into the idea that a house in the suburbs or exburbs and the SUV to get to the jobs and big box retail stores in the city was the be all, end all of American life. Somewhere along the line people mistook quality of life with the ability to accumulate worthless junk.

And now that those foundations are being eroded by peak oil and the housing bubble bursting, they're being confronted with the fact that everything they thought had value doesn't really mean much. They're stuck with houses they overpaid for (and can't afford in the worst cases) in areas with no way for them to buffer themselves from peak oil. They're slaves to a system that they have zero control over that they are reliant on to provide them with every single necessity of life. And as this system is put under strain because the underlying cheap energy sourse that made it all possible reaches it's inevitable peak, this is just the very beginning of the social awakening about to take place.

Great post. It's definately going to get worse before it gets better.