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Showing Original Post only (View all)Why are you so *angry*, Manny? [View all]
Tonight I had dinner with an old friend who's in town for a job interview. Unbelievably talented engineering manager, possibly the best I've seen at what he does.
Like most people who are roughly my age, say, 45-60, he's been getting bounced around from job to job over the past decade as companies get bought, sold, and harvested by by the 0.01%. He just started a new job a few weeks ago, then found out after he started that - surprise! - his position's only funded for a few months. So he needs to look in case funding doesn't continue. Oh, and his new company is flush with contractors from India learning everyone's jobs. You know, the normal @#$% that happens everywhere in America today.
This is the state of America in 2013.
Confession: I went to an Ivy League college (although my acceptance was likely due to a fluke - buy me a beer and I'll tell you the story). At said school, I got to meet some really smart people. Today, those folks can be lumped into three categories in terms of how they've fared economically as we navigate midlife:
1. Unemployed/underemployed for months or years.
2. Scraping by - getting bounced around by the whims of the 1%, hoping to have enough to retire on.
3. Unbelievably rich. Yachts, waterfront mansions, that whole deal.
All three groups are made, pretty much, from the same people. All smart and ambitious. When we all get together, we're all still the same schmucks we were in college, there are no class distinctions. But due to luck more than anything (as far as I can tell) a few have made out fabulously while most are just scraping by or worse. This is a group of people who came out of college at the top of the world - yet most are, financially, on swampy ground.
So what becomes of the rest of our country? What about the folks that don't go to college? Frankly, I find it mind-blowing that they get by on the insanely-low wages that we pay blue-collar workers here. Even before a private equity firm steals their meager pensions, has them train their foreign replacement, then fires them.
Retirement? Ha. Middle-aged Americans don't earn enough to save, and Social Security is being cut every year through a COLA formula that understates inflation for seniors, rather than overstating it (as billionaires and their purchased politicians and pundits claim). Of course, cutting Social Security through phoney COLA math isn't enough for the Predator Class, so every few months they take another crack at slashing it outright, or making the COLA formula even worse than it is. Ain't gonna be much money for people retiring in a decade or two.
The ship's going down, baby. A few folks are getting away in jewel-encrusted lifeboats, nibbling on foie gras and sipping Sauternes, while our political class strips the few possessions still held by us fools in steerage as still-more plunder for their predator patrons. Paul Ryan's budgets are serious proposals, we're told. We need to compromise, we're told. Let's be reasonable, we're told.
We are being attacked, brutally attacked, and we refuse to fight back. Hell, most of us haven't even figured out who the enemy is.
This used to be a great country, now it is a wreck. Needlessly. We put people on the Moon, we hauled the planet back from The Abyss in the 1940s, we created a middle class that could live a good life on a typical blue-collar salary. Now we are reduced to predators and prey, a cold and hard existence, and the spectacle of our leadership hating math, science, and facts.
WTF?
That's why I'm so angry.
We need change, and we need it fast. Don't ask me to be nice to people who only want to complete our destruction a little more slowly than the other guys. That's not a selling point, sorry.