The Machine Is Stacked Against You

This isn't a complaint as much as it is a report of how our current economic system works against us.  I'd like to see it differently, but this is how it looks right now to me.

I've been unemployed for one day short of fifteen months straight now.  I used to make a lot of money, and with some help from the family, I managed to spend nearly all of it.  All right, all of it, and then some.  My savings are gone, my retirement no longer exists and I'm working with the state of California to get me back to work, as well as fielding offers of interest from whoever reads my resume on Dice or wherever else it shows up online.  Want one?  :-)

One of my goals in my quest for work at this point is to broaden my field, so I'm looking at what the state can offer me in terms of training, just to do that.  They have some really great programs available, but the devil is in the details, as they say.

In Orange County, where I live, you can't get a place to live for one person for less than around $1000 per month.  That's just a fact of life around here.  If you are the sole supporter of a family, the costs are the same, but the expenses are higher.  If you happen to "own" a home (i.e., you bought a house and live in it but the house isn't paid off yet), it costs more.

According to information I have, I'm getting the top rate that unemployment pays out - roughly 2/5 of what I actually need to cover all my ongoing bills and expenses, so of course I am cutting corners, borrowing from pretty much anyone who will loan me money, gratefully accepting donations (note the donation button to the right of this post - hint, hint  :-), returning CRV redemptible cans and bottles, even the glass ones I used to avoid because they weigh a ton and aren't worth all that much for the weight - pretty much scraping together anything I can to get by.

In its infinite wisdom, Congress was able to get through a nifty little (and I mean that literally) bill called the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, or ARRA for short, that creates opportunities for the unemployed to find a way back to work.  This includes some money for training if you want to broaden your field of expertise and have a reasonable expectation of being successful in the changed field.

There are some restrictions on the money: to qualify for it, you have to be dead flat broke and yet still be able to support your family on the pittance that you get from unemployment AND go to school to get your new classes completed.  For me, this is really quite simple: lose my house and the attendant 60+% of my bills that go with it, along with a huge majority of my personal property that has little or no market value, move in with someone else and hope my unemployment will actually cover our survival needs until I can finish the classes and get back to work.

In other words, in order to benefit from the generosity of our Congress and President, who are amazingly willing to spend Hundreds of Billions of dollars killing people all over the planet, TRILLIONS of dollars to help bail out the richest people on the planet (Wall Street and the too-big-to-fail banks), I need to be below the poverty level of income and still support my family to afford to take advantage of this government "handout."

Isn't that completely upside down?

Doesn't it make more sense to invest TRILLIONS of dollars getting a productive economy back in order, putting people back to work and letting the ultra-rich 0.5% who own the rest of us flounder to find their own way without gouging the taxpayers (which they are NOT) for the next ten generations?

Doesn't it make more sense to stop wasting Hundreds of Billions of dollars manufacturing and using devices whose sole purpose is to obliterate themselves and anyone who happens to be within the blast radius (or live in it later on for millennia to come in the case of radioactive weapons like "depleted uranium" ammunition, which is about as safe as living inside the active part of an X-ray machine) and instead devote even a significant fraction of that amount in genuine living support for tens of millions of citizens who are the fastest growing segment of our population (the unemployed, like me)?

Okay, I guess that last part was complaining.  The rest before that was how it works.  Just the facts.

I realize that there are other options, and I don't mean leaving the country, which you need a passport to do, and guess what?  That costs money, too.  Come to think of it, pretty much all the other options also cost money, and credit is a little tight right now because the banks haven't figured out a way to use up all that bailout money before they deign to loan out the pennies that are left to the rest of us, and Exxon-Mobil is making so much profit they don't know what to do with all those billions, either.  They've already bought everything they didn't own before....

The middle class, that segment of society that makes it work and which was growing from the late 1930s until the early 2000s, is dying of starvation.  The rich like it that way, and the poor - get more numerous.  Even given the dark sneaky stuff that the government has been pulling right under our noses and behind our backs during that same time frame, America was strongest when the middle class was growing, and corporations took care of their employees.

Instead of continuing and expanding that power and building ourselves up to be completely indomitable and unassailable, we funded the Germans and the Japanese who "lost" WWII, and they learned the lessons that apparently we did not.  Despite all of their weaknesses, they now have the strongest economies in the world, while we have the richest and poorest and are sinking faster than anything or anyone else.

How many times do we really need to learn the lessons of the 1929 depression?  Apparently at least one more, because we're spiralling down into that same kind of situation, but many times worse and on a global scale.

The machine is stacked against us.  We need to work to reverse this insanity.