aaahhhh ... it's good to be back!

I posted last over six months ago.

Feels good to be back here.

March, 2005 I finally found a decent fulltime permanent job. Us over 40 ex-techworkers are not exactly being snatched up on the job market. Lots of us got the short-end when telecom/network/IT companies and departments were slashing payrolls. I have acquaintances who, even after retraining, still can't find anything over ~12bucks an hour. There is darn near no such thing as a "permanent position with benefits" out there for us. For someone who used to make ~30bucks an hour with excellent benefits, that economic fall sucks ohsomuch worse than you can imagine.

My stats: used to make ~22bucks an hour; now make ~16bucks an hour. I'm one of the lucky ones and I know it. My older brother: used to make ~40bucks an hour; now makes ~20bucks an hour. My best friend: used to make ~35bucks an hour; now makes ~19bucks an hour.

There are tens of thousands of us older tech workers who've taken this harsh economic fall. Those over 40 are finding it VERY difficult to get comparable work at all, and those over 50 are pretty much finding nothing. Of all my contacts who had passed their 50th b'day when they were "optimized" out of the tech industry, only one has found new employment ... though the wage is nothing close to what he used to pull.

Economic recovery? Unemployment numbers? I have to laugh when I hear that crap from number crunchers who never bother to look out their windows. None of us, certainly none of the God-squad in Washington, knows how bad it really is. I find it utterly impossible to believe they even care.

They know us middle-classers don't go around complaining about how tight things are. We don't announce the fact that bankruptcy now makes it damn near impossible to go buy a car and get the interest rates we used to enjoy. We don't bitch&moan down at the drug store pharmacy counter that even though we make half what we used to make, everything costs us more because of the hard time we had finding new work.

We don't announce the fact that our straight A, 1200 SAT kid chose to do her first two years at community college, live at home, and work 40hours a week because she had no other choice. We don't speak of feeling as though we've failed our children because they have it harder than we did.

We don't talk about all the broken dreams and empty hopes we had about retirement. We don't let each other see how bad it hurts. We don't let the anger boil up ... knowing that we did all the right things and we are still getting economically screwed and politically flipped off by people who squawk about the badnastygays and unmarried sex NON-STOP. Neither of those two R boogeymen has ever hurt me, or anyone I know.

Yep, the economic picture for us middle-classers is bad, but not near as bad as it used to be, before we had protection we could count on when the worst happened. Unfortunately, it can and will get worse for us if Republicans keep on with their quest to destroy everything the Federal Gov't does/used to do for us little guys.

The R controlled Congress has made bankruptcy harder, but still lets credit card companies bump us up to loanshark interest rates for the slightest infraction. They killed funding for CAFTA and NAFTA affected workers' retraining. They killed the ability of the average citizen to keep corporations from putting out lethal products by making it impossible to sue them for an amount of money that they actually care about losing. They've given seniors a bogus new Medicare system. They've slashed funding for student loans. And let's not forget that they STILL want to destroy Social Security. Oh no, they haven't given up on that yet.

Friend - if there had been no Unemployment Insurance, no retraining funds, no support system, and no way for those who found it necessary to declare bankruptcy to do so without being put on the street ... by 2004 this country would have looked exactly like it looked in ~1931.

Republican ownership society = you're. on. your. OWN. society.

Do you remember all those flowery R promises about returning morality and responsibility to Washington. They sent carpetbagger R candidates everywhere to run against the Democrats - the only party that ever gave a shit about the middle-class. They sent Santorum to PA and Dole to NC. Their highly tunned moral compass told them it was fine to tell horrible ugly lies about brave Vietnam vets who were running against their chosen R's from New Hampshire to Georgia.

mmm.mmm.MMM. What a load of crap we bought.

I don't care if they meant it then - they sure as heck couldn't give a darn about morality and responsibility in the Fed. government now.

If you allow yourself to think about what they've done, it becomes pretty obvious that what they really meant was - let's kill everything the Democrats have ever done for the middle-class in this country and put everything back to the way it was in the good old days of 1929. Once the little blue collars, pink-collars, wage earners, and middle-class people get bumped down a couple notches and find themselves working their asses off just to keep the heat on and the foreclosure sign off the door, they'll stop paying attention to what we're doing and we can really make out like bandits!! woohoo!!!

Yes, sir ... your tax dollars hard at work - making sleezy R's stinking filthy ugly rich. Don't get me wrong - rich isn't bad. Some of my best friends are rich. But even they agree ... Rich + Mean-as-a-snake ... that just is not what I would call a "Christlike character."

Okay. Update over. So anyway, damn it feels good to be a blogger. :)