Down the Up Escalator Lib/E: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession

by Barbara Garson, Jeanine Kane (Reading)

One of our most incisive and committed journalists--author of the classic All the Livelong Day--shows us the real human cost of our economic follies.The Great Recession has thrown huge economic chal-lenges at almost all Americans save the superaffluent few, and we are only now beginning to reckon up the human toll it is taking. Down the Up Escalator is an urgent dispatch from the front lines of our vast collective struggle to keep our heads above water and maybe even--someday--get ahead. Garson has interviewed an economically and geographically wide variety of Americans to show the pain-ful waste in all this loss and insecurity, and describe how individuals are coping. Her broader historical focus, though, is on the causes and consequences of the long stag-nation of wages and how it has resulted in an increasingly desperate reliance on credit and a series of ever-larger bubbles--stocks, technology, real estate. This is no way to run an economy, or a democracy.From the members of the Pink Slip Club in New York, to a California home health-care aide on the eve of eviction, to a subprime mortgage broker who still thinks it could have worked, Down the Up Escalator presents a sobering picture of what happens to a society when it becomes economically organized to benefit only the very rich and the quick-buck speculators. But it also demonstrates the wit and resilience of ordinary Americans--and why they deserve so much bet-ter than the hand they've been dealt.

Audio CD

Published May 1, 2013

About the author

Barbara Garson is an American playwright, author and social activist, perhaps best known for the play MacBird. Garson attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. specializing in Classical History in 1964. She was active in the Free Speech Movement, as the editor of The Free Speech Movement Newsletter, which was printed on an offset press that she herself had restored. She was one of 800 arrested on December 2, 1964 at a sit-in at Sproul Hall, Berkeley, following the "Machine Speech" by Mario Savio. In 1968, Garson had a child, Juliet, and in 1969 she went to work at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI coffee house near Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Washington. In the early 1970s, she moved to Manhattan, publishing short, humorous essays and theater reviews primarily for The Village Voice as well as plays.