The Fury of Me

My First Meme Contribution

When I Grow Up.....

In nearly every Republican debate, town hall speech, or random news clip, you can hear a Republican candidate talk about how he isn’t a “Washington insider” or he isn’t a “career politician” while his opponents all are.  I am not sure when it became unfashionable to spend your life serving your country.  God knows we don’t put down career soldiers for being “military insiders” or too indoctrinated into a command structure to think creatively and critically (although this is a large problem in today’s military).  So why is it horrible thing for somebody to want to devote their life to representing their city, district, state, or country?  The only time I have a problem with “career politicians” is when they get so old and outdated they won’t give up control or admit they don’t know what the hell they are legislating (i.e. SOPA).

We’re supposed to want our kids to want to grow up and be president some day. This shows aspiration, altruism, and leadership.  Of course, children aren’t thinking I’m going to become a billionaire by running a venture capital firm in which I enjoy firing people so that I can someday afford to run for president.  The children are just thinking that they’d like to lead and help others.

Running for president nowadays is something that only ridiculously rich or well connected people can afford to do.  I would love to run for office someday, but as a middling average person in regards to wealth, I have a snowball’s chance in hell. This is wrong.

While I do think we should pay our politicians more, in order to drive down the desire to leave and become a lobbyist and cash in on your government connections, I’ll save that for another post.  Rather, we should encourage civil servants to make careers out of it.  Experience is needed to become a good legislator.  You can’t just swoop in and write a bill and get it passed.  I would much rather have a lifelong politician, like Joe Biden who doesn’t make millions representing me, than Darrel Issa (multi-millions from car alarms), Jane Harman (husband found Harman Industries), Jay Rockefeller (last name should say it all), and Michael McCaul (married into the Clear Channel empire).

You shouldn’t get rich serving your country, but it shouldn’t be so enticing to serve in order to leave and make money afterwards.  It also shouldn’t be so cost prohibitive that the only people who can afford to run are non-“career politicians.”  I realize this might be confusing, but essentially we’re burning the candle at both ends.

Either you get rich and then run for government, criticizing those that have served.  Or you run, serve a short time and leave so you can make millions as a lobbyist.  In bigger areas, to even run and win, you still need a lot of money or connections up front in order to win.  Essentially, though, the outcome is the same.  With social mobility nearly stagnant, if you’re poor you’re fucked, so don’t even dream of being president.  This is not as it should be.

Collateral Damage

Being in a situation like the one I am in causes me to look back on my life and regret virtually every decision I have ever made that brought me to the point I am at.  For someone who considers himself intelligent and extremely self-aware, I feel naïve and childish.  I have no social safety net outside of my parents (not a single close friend, nor extended family).  I picked poor areas to get my degrees in (finance and political science), I moved to an area that has a high external quality of life but a few employment opportunities (California instead of Texas or Colorado).  I switched jobs at an inopportune time and got completely screwed by my new employer.  I made poor personal decisions in choosing to help somebody out financially in a way that blew up in my face. 

Those and many other decisions have lead me to the point where I have become one of the people that is literally immediate collateral damage for our government’s inability to function in any meaningful way.  I hold both parties responsible in a 35-65 split.  Republicans get the heap of the blame because they have basically turned every decision in the Senate into a super-majority vote.  The Senate has become a tyranny.  The minority party holds it hostage instead of legislating from the minority position as has been historically down (historically being pre-1994).

The House functions only slightly better, even though the Majority Leader barely has control of his own caucus.  Instead of being a moderating force, he is caught between keeping the support of die-hard wing-nuts, and the more center-right, instead of trying to secure a Republican and center-Left group to pass legislation.  This is largely due to the destruction brought on by Newt Gingrich take-no-prisoner politics that he introduced in the 1990s.  He is only a “big thinker” if you are a fucktard.  That’s the honest painful truth. Hauling judges before Congress if he doesn’t agree with them.  Militarily engaging Iran.  Putting poor kids to work as janitors in their own schools.  That isn’t big thinking.  But, I digress.

Now we have a Senate that decided to go home for Christmas after passing their version of a payroll tax-cut bill.  The House, as promised, voted it down.  Obama is such a coward that instead of just deciding on the Keystone XL Pipeline, that is the unwelcome rider attached to the payroll tax bill (which doesn’t belong on the bill anyway, but it’s there) he is allowing it to hold up a bill that more important than the tax cut, includes the continuation of unemployment benefits.  I consider myself informed and I did not realize that unemployment benefits were part of this bill until I was informed yesterday, that my unemployment has completely run out.  To be able to get the first federal extension of unemployment I would have had to file for benefits before June 19, 2011.  Since my last contract/temporary job ran until July 15, 2011, I got cut off on December 9, 2011.  It would have been better for me to terminate my contract a month earlier so that I wouldn’t have to worry about having my only source of income taken away.

Obama should come out and make a decision on the pipeline. I think he should say no, but either make, make the fucking decision.  It’s not like he hasn’t actually already decided.  Take the card away from the Tea Party idiots. 

Republicans disgust me the most in this situation, however, because if this was a tax cut for the upper class, it would have passed, no problem.  Instead, we’re talking about tax cuts for the poor and unemployment for the screwed, and they insist on putting amendments that they know will just muddy the whole issue up to the point that people like me, become collateral damage just before the holidays.

I hate Christmas.  I don’t think I will ever be able to enjoy it again for the rest of my life.  I haven’t had a job at Christmas time for the last four of them.  I can’t get gifts for the people I care about.  I can’t actually relax at all.  I get to stress about money and survival.  And I’m a single 27 year old.  There are families out there that are going through the same thing.  It’s a very terrible and helpless experience that is too often repeated for the same victims. 

As Stalin is claimed to have said, “one death is a tragedy, millions is a statistic.”  The same is true in the United States regarding unemployment.  I don’t want sympathy or condolences from my friends and acquaintances.  Sympathy is often condescending and useless.  Instead I want people to realize what is actually happening.  That there is a very personal face to the headlines and stories that say millions are on unemployment and what it means.  I can honestly attest, that I have looked for a job starting months before my last temporary one ended. In fact, I haven’t stopped looking for a permanent job since I lost my last one on December 15, 2008. 

It is a humiliating experience to be so desperate.  In the correct use of the word, it is brutalizing.  You are unproductive and meaningless.  You discover that there is no level too low in which you can grovel in order to somehow get employment.  Instead, you sit and think about all of the decisions you’ve made that brought you to your current point and look forward to all the decisions that are and will be made for you by people who don’t actually care.  People like our government that are supposed to represent us. 

To anybody that doesn’t believe unemployment benefits should be extended and that it just causes people to be lazy, I wish I could understand and see your point.  In many things, I can see the opposing side, but in this, I cannot.  It just subjugates people to consequences that they had no or very little responsibility in creating.

They say the end of the year is a time for reflecting.  I think in a time like this, it should be a time to empathize and put faces to the millions of people that are having a hard time surviving.

I am unsure about publishing this post.  It is not intended as a “woe is me” cry for pity.  And I truly mean that.  I wish I could post this without anybody knowing who I am.  I suppose I am posting this to emphasize the failure of our country to help the least fortunate among us.  Our politicians, that we elect, have decided to cast aside the huddled masses and use them as pawns to obtain other, personal, financial, and selfish goals.  Nobody is willing to take a stand.  Nobody is willing to call out what is going on at the risk that they may lose their position.  The fact that the Senate went home without a solution is a disgrace and they should all be ashamed.  They do not deserve a holiday.  They do not deserve comfort.

I do not really have a concluding thought.  Just that, maybe for those that are able to have a comfortable and “normal” holiday, to be more aware of what our government is doing in the coming year and to try to remember a face or name to people that are included in the nameless “millions” that get described in papers or by politicians.  To be a more compassionate citizen and value your advantages all the more, knowing that there in an increasing number of people who are facing futures without any.

The Retardation of California

I have tried to explain how Californians screwed themselves by passing Prop 13 in 1978 (it’s why my parents left California) but as usual, Jon Oliver does it much more eloquently than I do.  And instead of repealing Prop 13, because why would you ever want to pay property tax based on the actual value of your property when you could instead support a much more regressive tax like sales tax. I’m okay with sales tax in general, but I think that before we go about trying to expand sales tax, homeowners should have to pay fair tax-value on their property.

Now, without further ado, here is Jon Oliver.

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The Real Job Creators

My initial response to a record setting Black Friday was that it was a bunch of people acting like animals (probably indicative of something that Wal-Mart was ground zero for most of the violence) and spending money they don’t have.  While I still stand by that statement, economically speaking, we need people to spend money (while, hopefully not plummeting into debt in doing so) because that is the only way that we can stimulate demand.  Since Republicans are completely focused on making government as weak and feckless as possible so that they can bolster their case that government is weak and feckless, the biggest boost to demand that we could have is not possible.  We need the US government to undertake big spending projects like infrastructure and high-speed rail.  If the government helped people like me with health care, that would give me more money to spend on consumer goods which in turn  would generate demand which means companies start producing and hiring again.

Corporations are sitting on over two trillion dollars in cash.  Right now the Fed is loaning money to corporations for free who buy government bonds with that cash and earn tax-free interest. If this doesn’t seem wrong to you, then you’re probably also okay with sticking babies in microwaves.  This is a complete waste of money!  All of the interest that our government is paying banks and corporations, who are essentially free bondholders, is money that could be spend on actually improving our country. (For improvement ideas, see my previous blog post.)  Essentially, the Republican termed “job creators” are doing dick to create any jobs.  The only people that are helping create any jobs are the poorest and hardest hit people that essentially have to spend every dollar they have in one way or another just to survive. 

If Black Friday gave these people the most bang for their buck, then I was wrong to be derisive in their spending habits (excluding those that acted like animals). 

Obama was also wrong: there are two Americas.  They aren’t blue and red, but rather, rich and poor.  Poor people disproportionately serve in our military.  Poor people have the least access to education and health care.  And I’m not talking about people who fucked their lives up by doing drugs, dropping out of school, or hurt themselves in some other way, but instead people who were born into poverty and were never given a path out. 

When Bush was legacied into Yale because of his father and money even though he had crap grades and no ambition, he took the place of another student who may have come from a poor background but had worked their butt off taking advantage of every opportunity they had, only to get turned down because a politician’s son wanted to get in.  It’s not a level playing field.  It’s not even the same field.

There are a lot of hyperbolic morons taking part in the Occupy movement that throw around terms like “police state” and “end the Fed” and that’s truly unfortunate because those clowns cover up the truly good points that can be made.  One of which being the incredible amount of inequality in our country and political system.  There are good points to be made. They just aren’t as jarring and abrasive as “police state” which honestly makes you sound like a dumbass. (Just ask the people in Congo, Chad, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, you get the point?!)  A police presence does not equate to a police state.

The Fed is necessary. Instead of ending it, we need to make it accountable to it’s charter and the general population again by trying to maximize unemployment and control inflation.  The problem is that the fiscal policy of Bush, mixed in with a little Clinton, and Obama having to clean the mess up means that the Fed is basically neutered.  It can’t do what it was meant to do effectively.  However, I put the responsibility of cognitive clarity on the occupiers.  As long as they are the sellers of ideas (change) no matter how right they are, it is incumbent upon them to take away the defects which make the product unappealing. 

That doesn’t mean politicians should make stupid declarations like “take a bath and get a job,” when it is obvious there aren’t jobs readily available for the most clean among us.  It does however, mean that 98%ers like me are stuck defending Occupy to those that dismiss it on one hand.  While on the other hand, we try to inform Occupy that they are not actually causing any lasting change and need to shape up.

To conclude, it should be painfully obvious that the political “job creators” aren’t the actual job creators.  The job creators are in the middle and lower class that are forced to spend money because they have to, regardless of whether or not it is on holiday crap, medicine, food, rent, etc.  They are the demand that stimulates the economy because basic items are necessities to them.  The rich have homes, cars, and generally won’t need anything at the urgency that poorer people do.  In essence, they aren’t holding up their end of the demand equation proportionate to their income or wealth.  It is with that that I send my gratitude to those of you that sanely and humanely went about your Black Friday shopping.