These are tough times.  These are tough times globally, but for the United States this is also no day a the beach.  These are tough times economically, what with personal wealth devastated by the real estate  market, the depletion of pensions funds.  Money is scarce and credit is tight.

What money there is in the banks and among the fat cats is being horded.   The government seems weak and ineffective in forcing the banks to literally get off a dime.   While the media shifts back and forth, trumpeting contradictory statistics, supposed financial and industrial experts inveigh equally conflicting predictions about the the economic recovery.   The more honest of the pundits, after hemming and hawing on air time, in order to collect their money or sell their book, finally admit, “hell, I don’t know.”

Whether there will be an economic recovery or where there will be a double dip, where the economy drops, recovers and then drops again like some erratic  roller coaster ride, it all remains to be seen.   Meanwhile, people need to find work.  They need to make bucks just to survive or in the luckier cases supplement their diminished savings, before it leaves them looking like bit players in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

So where do you find work when there is not work?  Good question.  Where do you find work when a great many jobs have either been rendered obsolete or have been outsourced to another country?   Simply.  Why you go to Disneyland, of course.

If not Disneyland, then you attend the job fairs at any one of the amusement parks and destination sites where people with a couple of bucks left still take their families.   According to an article in The Los Angeles Times, amusement park job fairs are enjoying, if that’s the word, record turnouts.   It’s not just kids anymore, recent high school and college graduates looking for a summer job or something to do until they can find something else, that are attending the job fairs.   Be it the Disney Parks, Knotts Berry Farm, Six Flags,  Universal Studios, or  Hoolah’s Tuba Land, job candidates from every background and of every description are lining up and looking for work.

At a recent job fair at Six Flags Magic Mountain, in Valencia, California, more than 1,600 applicants stood in line in search of work.  Another 1,100 attended the job fair at Universal Studios,  Hollywood.   Those who attended were mortgage agents and sales clerks.   These are teachers and construction workers, forklift operators.  These are office managers and restaurant managers, loan processors and once-retired seniors who thought they had enough to retire until the economic meltdown and the loss to their portfolio and pensions made them think again.

These are people looking to work for less than $400 a week.    To be  Goofy in an amusement park.    In this day and age, $400 a week is a long way from big money.  It is a long way from what most of us deem “a living.”  It is the kind of salary that makes you feel impotent and humiliated, that assures your purchases will be largely guided by what is being featured at the Dollar Store.   It is the kind of money that allows you to believe at least you are doing something to tide you over and feed your family, until something better comes along.  And then, if nothing better does come along, it is the kind of money that reminds you at the end of every week there is probably no way out.

In short, we have not only ruined an economy.  We have damaged its people.   Through greed, unnecessary risk, and blatant audacity we have all but bankrupted a country.   We have caused such grievous harm to ourselves, and yet we wonder why there are so many among us who become Tea Baggers or whatever, to vent their anger.   No matter how misdirected we believe the anger may be, there is no denying people have the right to be extremely pissed off.

We have allowed the few, the venal, and the undisciplined to not only steal away our money but steal away our future as well.  For this they are rewarded.   For this, we make excuses and mumble something about our institutions being too big to fail and then pray that people will be distracted by one more stupid romance, an athlete gone awry, or a prefabricated news event.   We hope that the distractions will prevent the anger from escalating into more tangible manifestations, other than parading around with misspelled signs.

Some claim this is the Great Recession and second only to our Great Depression.  While much of it may be true, I also beg to differ.   When the Great Depression ended, American people had jobs to which they could return.  We had our industries intact.  There wasn’t talk of technical innovations and alternate fuel sources creating new jobs, while our present industries were demoted to the trash heaps or shipped offshore.    We didn’t have a situation where the greatest concern was the bottom line, to the point where industries were downsized and American workers deemed obsolete by virtue of their professions and job descriptions.

When we recovered from the Great Depression, there was industry and with the industry there were jobs.  And from the jobs came money, and with the money people were able to buy what they needed.  But after the Great Recession, many jobs are gone and will never return to these shores.   These were jobs were people worked, made their livings, had their dignity.   But not now.

If there are no jobs, then where do people come up with the money to buy what they need?  How do they send their kids to school?   How do they enjoy the brief time they have on Earth?   Certainly those who used Tarp money to consolidate their own businesses and award themselves bonuses haven’t given it much consideration.   Clearly, from the way they ran this country into the ground,  they are not prone to think that far in advance.

In short, we may have demoted ourselves to a second tier nation.   We have former industrial workers now performing menial service tasks in rusted and blighted cities.   We have journalists out of work, news sources collapsing around us.  Small businesses are in jeopardy and have no credit sources.    We have collapsing infrastructures and a public education system that does anything but make our kids competitive in the global economy.

I know, I hear others say, “well hey compared to other countries around the world, we are still doing pretty well.”   This is sophistry.     We have been reduced as a nation to comparing ourselves to less fortunate nations, developing nations, so that we can somehow feel better about our own condition.   It is no longer a nation where we are looking toward a brighter future, except for maybe in television commercials and in the rhetoric of politicians.    Never mind that our condition stinks, and as adults we are looking for jobs in a theme park.   We should take refuge in the fact our long term outlook isn’t quite as dismal as that of some other country.

In an oblique way, it may be a good thing millions of us are on Prozac or some other antidepressant.   If not, then the wacky outbursts we are seeing in the news with increasing frequency may turn into ever more violent wacky outbursts.  The pissed off may become more organized and encourage true public disobedience.  The Tea Baggers in true American tradition may put down those misspelled signs, grab a little tar and feathers,  and start hoisting the bonus babies on rails.   Out of work intellectuals could join them, along with the downsized and disenfranchised and the permanently neglected.

I am not saying this should happen.  There are better ways to address our problems and to solve the present and future crises.   But when the political body proves unresponsive,  and when people feel they are being overtaxed and without representation, true representation, legislators concerned with the public interest and not lining their own pockets, then history dictates that things can get out of hand.   History is indeed in this way a cruel teacher.  History is an even harsher teacher when its lessons are ignored.

I don’t believe we are in anyway near the breaking point, reaching critical mass, if you will, where the people start acting up and the Shays Rebellion and the Boston Tea Party start looking like good ideas.   I think we are a country too smart to tear itself entirely apart, having learned that lesson 150 years ago in our previous debacle known as The Civil War.   But life is full of surprises, and with the advent of modern media and technology, news travels fast if not all that accurately.

But let’s face it.   Unemployed people need something to do.   If you are an adult and working a menial job for $400 a week, then the magic is gone from our magic mountain.

The segment concerns Chinese Espionage in America .   For those who do not consider Charlie Sheen’s entering rehab to be the ultimate in current events will find  the 60 Minutes segment  all too revealing about a prevalent problem that has long been ignored for what is perceived as long term economic gain. In short, we have taken way too lightly the continuing issues of Chinese Espionage and how it has impacted our economy and strategic advantage. Both Chinese Nationals and American workers trusted with our most sensitive technological and military secrets have sold them off for ideological purposes but mostly for personal financial gain. I hope this segment of 60 Minutes when aired, we make its viewers aware of our need to establish measures that can best blunt Chinese Espionage efforts.

You can check out the video teaser at this link on CBS.Com

The good news is that a student will graduate from college.  With a college degree, a younger person has a greater capability of shaping his career and life in general.  The student has the opportunity to make more money.   Advancements come easier when you have a college degree.   Or so the story goes.

The fact is many college students are drowning in debt created by borrowing money to go to school.   They borrowed the money out of necessity, to obtain a decent education.  Without a college education, you then are stuck with a high school education, which for all intent and purpose is pretty useless in this modern age.

Kids borrow the money and graduate college, believing there will be jobs and opportunity.  Instead, for the last number of years they have walked into a world where the jobs are limited, the economy in a meltdown, and where outsourcing to other countries has depleted the job market.  Competition for jobs is fierce and the student debt keeps piling up.  According to the Huffington Post , the average student will graduate $23,000 in debt.   I believe that is a very conservative estimate.   Having looked over the cost of college tuition recently, that’s about one year’s tuition in most public universities.

There are two kinds of student loans.  The first is the Stafford or government loan.  It is a good loan, but it has its limitations.  Mainly, you can’t borrow all the money you need as a student.  So, especially if you enroll in a private school, you take out private loans.  From a bank.  Which is guaranteed by the Federal government.

Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae employ some 35,000 persons.   They are the middle men in the great bank loan debacle.  They and the banks employ lobbyists to persuade congressman to do such things as deny students what’s left of  the common consumer rights that most people enjoy.  Students can not file bankruptcy as a means of walking away from their loans.  Should they hit a bad patch, and many graduates have, then the interest builds, compounds, becomes outrageous and the bank can assess an additional 25% on the principal should the student have the tough luck to default.

It is probably the closest thing to indentured bondage we have seen in this country in quite awhile.  The kind of slavery we cluck in anguish over, should it happen to immigrants who have their freedom held for ransom by the coyotes and others who smuggled them into this country for exorbitant prices.   But when it happens to our kids, well hell, it’s just a matter of doing business.  We just sell them down the river.

The student loan system is a disgrace.  Or I should say the part where students are forced to borrow from private banks for the extra money they need.   It preys upon the poor and middle class, the kids whose parents are either too poor or too strapped in a bad economy to pay for their tuition.   Work your way through college?   With college tuition as high as it is, this is hardly likely.   If you could live, eat, and pay your tuition you would have the kind of job in the first place that wouldn’t require you to sacrifice it for a college diploma.

There is a reform bill proposed by Congress, but lobbyists are working hard to beat it down.   The banks detest the fact that the loan money may go directly to the students without the banks taking their unfair share of the cut.   So they can jack up the interest rates and bonus their executives for a job well done.    So they can pay off persons in the legislature so they will not institute any real reform.   It’s not bribery, of course.  It is campaign contributions, a couple of dozen favors, and a job once you retire from the hallowed halls of Congress.

And kids starve.  They struggle.  They try to gain traction in an already tough and competitive world.  They watched their jobs outsourced by another group of corporate interests who also lobby Congress so they can send American jobs overseas while still enjoying hefty tax cuts.

This is an entire  generation we are talking about, with additional generations to follow.  This is our best and our brightest.  And we are screwing them royally.  Charging them a bunch for the opportunity to go to school and make something of themselves, and then holding their lives for ransom afterwords.  It’s a new form of the old company store, where the company owns everything and the coal mine, including your ass.

We watch self-righteous legislators go on about how budgetary concerns are burdening and  bankrupting our future generations.   But we don’t hear much about the burden of student loans.   Not more than a whisper.  Never mind the fact that the poor kids in the land of opportunity, make that the new poor, the middle class, are disrupted at the starting gate from seizing that opportunity.   Forget that we took away their consumer rights with the sole justification being that they are students.

Forget everything.  Including the future.

]]> http://www.hopefulromantics.org/2010/02/burying-a-generation-in-student-debt/feed/ 0 http://www.hopefulromantics.org/2010/02/natures-way-of-sorting-out-the-environment/ http://www.hopefulromantics.org/2010/02/natures-way-of-sorting-out-the-environment/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:31:31 +0000 Gordon Basichis http://www.hopefulromantics.org/?p=1000

I was reading a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about how the cold spell in Florida is killing many of the nonnative animal life.   Burmese Pythons and African Rock Pythons are buying the farm on a major scale.  Iguanas are falling dead from trees.  Nonnative fish are dying by the thousands.   The Mayan cichlid, walking catfish, and spotfin spiny eel, are among the fish floating lifeless to the water’s surface.

I would take this to mean that this is nature’s way of telling these invasive animals to get the hell out of where they don’t belong.   Not that they had a choice in the matter, as many were brought over on ships, or in the case of the snakes, they were former pets that were let go in the Everglades when the novelty wore off or when the hurricane deposited their former domiciles on FEMA’s statistical list of trash.   Nevertheless, these animals who thrive in the warmer climes of he tropics will only thrive so long when the temperature takes a dramatic turn.

Yes, I would take this as part of nature’s way of rearranging the order of things.   I have to wonder what else does nature have in store for us.   We are inundated with dire predictions about global warming, which is not global warming, really, but dramatic climate change.  What’s this mean?  It means that not everything will warm up, but in places that are already warm, it will probably get warmer still.  In the colder spots on the climate, it may get colder still.

Yet the Arctic is melting and Florida has a cold spell.  Who knows what is really going on?   What I do know is that things change.  I have stood in places up on the high desert of Four Corners, Monument National Valley and further North.   It is hard rock, bone dry.  Yet in places you can still see actual dinosaur footprints in what is now rock or really hard ground.   Dinosaur footprints.  I kid you not.   This is the legacy of an earlier time when this vast region was under water, either covered by seawater or vast marshes that prevailed for millions of years.

Things change.  As a civilization that wants to believe that all things are safe and permanent, we have yet to get the memo that the planet is ever changing and in doing so is making things more or less secure at his own universal discretion.  Or in reaction to the conditions we inflict upon our planet.

Suffice it to say that while some of the global changes my be cyclical, it still doesn’t mean it is a good idea to pollute the hell out of it.  You can’t treat the Earth like a rental car and expect it to run smoothly.  Common sense would have it that dumping poisons into our water, filling our air with toxic crap, and leaving piles of waste on our lands and in our oceans will hardly result in something positive.   Common sense would say if you put poison in water then you will poison yourself when you drink the water, and poison the fish that live in that water.  Who you will eat.

In short, global warming may not be a result of our human transgressions, but our human transgressions aren’t helping things either.  No matter how long we care to live in denial.   You do not have to tie natural cycles and human pollution together to validate the fact the planet is going through changes.   Planetary cycles can still take effect, regardless of human pollution.  But for sure as hell, human pollution is not going to improve the situation, any.   Poison the oceans, the fresh water and the landscape, and it is still poisoned, whether there is climate change or not.   Common sense should bear that out.

But, unfortunately, common sense is not so common.  It took certain people hundreds if not thousands of years to realize that crapping upstream and drinking the same water downstream will result in disease.   People in some spots took thousands of years to correlate sex with the making of babies.  In some places on the globe, it seems it is still the case.  Recognizing the existence of germs took awhile.

And then there is the money factor.  There are those who are making money and those who are making more money by ignoring the obvious.   It is cost effective n the short run to ignore the obvious.  If you take the precautions and impose the industrial standards to eliminate or reduce pollution it will cost you bucks in the short run.   This cuts into your bottom line.  The bottom line in America and most countries is the major modern religion and messing with the bottom line for the sake of such minor considerations as the welfare of humanity borders on sacrilege.

Then there are the people who are allegedly in power.  The legislators.   What was once a somewhat responsible body of lawmakers who tried to oversee the well being of their constituents, looks more like a group of small time hustlers, working the corridors of government for their next corporate handout.   With some exception, most are being paid by their keepers to assure us that all is well and that they are maintaining “our way of life.”    They are paid to nod their heads and look the other way, examining their purses and the prospects of future elections, which more often than not conflicts with public interest.

In short,  depending on which side of the argument you come down on,most of the exploration of global change and its consequence is based  on mixes of scientific research, religious and social conjecture, guesswork, and omission.  Why omission ?   Good question.

We leave a lot of things out of any argument.  We do this out of convenience.   While there are obscure noises about overcrowding,  increased strain on an already fragile infrastructure and ecosystem, we don’t talk much about overpopulation.  We fear for social and political repercussions when entertain the fact that the world has too many people.   We are are overcrowded.  Some of the population is undernourished.  And most of the population is undereducated and hardly prepared for the next decades of the twenty-first century.

We cover this by talking about the unique quality of every human being and making Hallmark cards of our sentiment, without addressing the true dangers that overpopulation will create.   We talk about global warning and claim hundred of millions will die.   What we don’t do is say that if we keep flooding this planet with the crushing hordes, it will cause natural reaction.    And natural reactions are often grim and consequential.

We cry over an earthquake in Haiti but ignore the fact that overcrowding, ignorance and the rest may well result in a pandemic, the likes of which we have never experienced.   Yes, it is a pity for Haiti, but if watching a quarter million die on one small island is nearly unbearable, what will it be like when hundreds of millions, billions, start dying from previously unknown diseases?  Diseases for what there will not be a cure.

So we argue out of convenience.  Convenience in this case means we pick and choose the safer salient points while leaving out the dozens of considerations that may really cause us harm.   We find consolation in sentiment when pressing issues loom before us.  We deal in modern day superstitions and embrace the religious either in its traditional form or as some metaphysical salad bar to support whatever half baked theory we are using to confront very real global events.

I would consider that more people have died from ignorance than anything else.  Ignorance has led to war, has caused us to crap upstream and drink downstream.  We overpopulate out of ignorance of the consequences and how it reduces the general well being of this planet.   We declare theory and conjecture as truth and fact,  although we have not yet been able to gather all the relevant information.  We are ignorant and proud of it.

Will all this happen?   It’s probable but not certain.   History is often a cruel prognosticator of what life has in store.   Historically, civilizations have come and gone.   Civilizations here have vanished.   There is room to speculate that even on other planets what was once living is now long since dead.

But then there is the other side of the coin.   Despite the cold spell in Florida, not every nonnative animal has died.   the smaller pythons are surviving, as they are able to adapt by slipping into smaller rock crevices and other spots that may keep them warm enough to ride out of the cold.    Only half the green iguanas have succumbed.  Maybe it’s dumb iguana luck, or it is Darwin’s Laws of Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest, as it is sometimes known.  Or as the more religious will inveigh, it is the hand of divine providence.

I don’t know.  In the case of how and why some live and others don’t everyone has a valid opinion.   As long as it remains an opinion and isn’t carved in stone as absolute fact.

What we do know is that things chance.  Nothing remains the same, whether we want it to, or not.  And life goes on.

The book has been receiving good reviews, with critics calling in quirky and darkly humorous.  I dare say it is by no means your typical spy story.  It is character based and has a unique perspective.  Anyway, enough of that.   For those interested here is the interview between Nanci and I.