What bluey said about peak oil...Right on! With whipped cream on top!
Personally I think the 5.5% unemployment stat is quite misleading. There's a lot of data massaging that goes into that number. I would say it's probably at least double that number, realistically. When you count all the people who have simply stopped looking for work after years of being out of work, people who are laid off from full-time work and now can only find part-time or temp work, that sort of thing.
I also will have to disagree with MayberrySaint--there are lots and lots and LOTS of people who have not been fiscally irresponsible and are nevertheless struggling and not very far from homelessness. There actually are indeed Hoovervilles in these modern times, especially around the large agribusiness farms that use migrant workers--same places you found Hoovervilles in the 1930s. They still exist. There are plenty of hobo jungles and people living in camps under bridges and such. And our local food banks and Second Harvest do indeed have long lines of hungry people waiting daily. And those lines have been getting longer and the food banks find they have less food to distribute.
I know that psychologically there is a great temptation to find any way you can possibly say, "That will NEVER happen to me because I am special because I am too lucky/smart/clever/blessed/loved/morally righteous/whatever," but seriously, disasters happen quite often through no fault of the people they happen to. And they can happen to you, me, anybody. There but for the grace of god, you know? You can do your best to be very employable, you can live as far below your means as possible and save money and all that, but sometimes bad things happen to perfectly good people.
You have no idea how common this is, to victim-blame, until you see people doing it in a way that you absolutely KNOW is irrational. When I was in college, a student group I worked with did date rape awareness workshops for the fraternities and sororities. There had been a few rapes on campus, and several at the fraternity houses, one of which was a 15-year-old who had been visiting her big brother for the weekend. In more than one instance, the guy admitted to doing it but thought it was no big deal to commit a felony. When we did the presentation for the sorority one victim belonged to, the very same sorority sisters who had escaped being raped by mere chance--the two rapists had picked their victim randomly, any woman would have done--insisted that the same could never possibly happen to them. No, "Sorority XYZ sticks together! We would never let some guy just grab one of our sisters and drag her upstairs!" Despite the fact that, obviously, they had done exactly that. Whenever I see someone saying, "Bad Thing will never happen to me because I didn't (insert rationalization here)," it's those sorority bimbos I think of. It can happen to you, even though you do your best.
I think that there are social and cultural conditions that cause people to be more bad than good, though, and that governing bodies and large organizations (I don't see them as separate entities, although technically they are such on paper) have a social and ethical responsibility to ensure that those conditions don't happen. Poor quality of life is one of those conditions that tend to make otherwise decent people behave badly; we've seen it happen in our own country, we've seen it happen in other countries. And I think that some people are very much predators, and that executives of big companies and governments and so forth are often these predator types, and they use organizations as extensions of themselves. And I think we are fools if we believe it can't happen to us because of XYZ.
