I know the political and social reasons why this is happening. Neoliberalism is bringing the whole f--ing thing down. I'm just one of millions of other victims. At least I have a roof over my house, and a supportive family.
This is terrifying and infuriating, but it doesn't matter. No one who will make a difference cares. They'd rather play cat and mouse with something very, very dangerous.
So, folks, let's see what next week will bring.
I can't wait to see how the lenders are going to respond if we default. Shit is going to get ugly.
Now I think I can confirm that I will never own a home, I will never have children, and I will never live a life that I thought was within my reach. But apparently wanting those sorts of things is just crazy and selfish and entitled. How dare I want to have a home? God. I am so selfish and absurd! Same goes for wanting to have a family. God! That's even worse!
So glad I spent time reading and learning at the most elite schools in this soon-to-be ravaged, destroyed country.
"So, uh . . . I've heard about these things called people . . . what does that term mean exactly?"
Related Links
"Call to Action: Tell Leaders to Raise the Debt Ceiling," AEM (July 28, 2011)
"John Boehner: Yet Another Lobbying Slut?" Village Voice (January 2006)
8 comments:
I am with you on this.
My sentiments and words exactly C. I like you live with a supportive family member, struggle obtaining the essentials of life as a 60 year old polio survivor, no chance of having a family or home of my own. I am here because of lies manipulation and deception. I live your every word daily year after sickening year, the pain of it all just as you do. I wonder when this country will wake up to this.
My gosh. You are an intelligent person. You read and study what is going on extensively, right? Do you honestly believe that it's "neolibralism" that is the root and cause? That everyone in both the house and the senate is equally to blame for what is going on.
Do you ever read Paul Krugman?
Yes, I read Krugman on a regular basis. I also read Stiglitz and many others. Please elaborate. And thanks for being polite. It is appreciated.
What I find terribly ironic is that the very same members of Congress who are in this pissing contest are some of the same ones who talk about "family values." Yet they are the ones that are preventing you, and other people, from having families.
I agree that neoliberalism - a post-Christian heir of the Calvinist conflation of wealth with merit and poverty with moral failure - is in fact one of the main ideological proximate causes of this catastrophe.
However, equally culpable is the creed of American Exceptionalism and its 20th century mutation into militarism and empire. And both the "Left" and "Right" - at least in Washingon share this appalling superstition and have continually acted upon it since at least 1945, and arguably earlier.
"Entitlements" have not bankrupted America. The bloody American Empire has.
And although I'm a man of the antiwar right - informed by Edmund Burke and Pope John Paul II rather than the revolutionary neocon/neoliberal lunatics - in fairness I hold the American Left marginally less culpable, EXCEPT to fault the elites among them for substituting shibboleths of "diversity" instead of categorical concern for the economically disadvantaged per se.
Elaborating -- sorry, I misread and think we agree on fundamental points. But I got the impression that you saw both sides as equally responsible, something I don't see. One of our political parties has gone so crazy that my lifelong conservative sister now considers herself a moderate Democrat. Still, you are right, this is market driven. Our country, controlled by special interest groups and a supreme court that regards corporations as people, has moved even farther to the right than I had ever thought would be possible in the country I grew up in. Our president, who the right thinks of as "liberal", is actually a moderate conservative who started with the negotiating position of giving away the store. At least he tried to do something about student loans and health care (a plan that was full of Republican ideas from the past, but now is deridingly called "Obamacare").
There used to be a social contract in this country between young and old, employers and employees. Incomes weren't nearly as disparate. Education was considered important, not just as a factory to churn young people into jobs.
Before student loans became available, there were no loans and education was much, much cheaper. If you didn't have the money to go to school, you didn't go. The schools couldn't keep jacking up the price because if they did, the only students able to go to college would be the rich. Students would work their summers and save up money for school in the fall. School was affordable.
Now, among other things, the GOP wants to do away with the Pell grant, calling it social welfare. No one is doing anything about the long term unemployment crises, and surprisingly the young and unemployed are not taking to the streets in protest.
If they don't raise the debt ceiling, I'm all for a jubilee or absent that, a people's revolution.
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