Gus Mirsalis273 Richmond Rd.Richmond Hts., OH 44143-1405


  Dear ZMAG:
I am 90 years old. I am blind in one eye as the result of a stroke and have a stent in one of my coronary arteries. Although I am "mobile", I have lost my enthusiasm for "activism".

 McCarthyism, the Korean war, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Iraq. Protests? Been there, done that. 

I'm a longtime subscriber to Zmag, Progressive Populist, etc. Since I had a wife in a nursing home for 4 years, I'm a bit short of cash, but I do what I can.
  It took a long time for me to wake up to the fact that greatest obstacle to any substantive improvements in the American political and social system is the American people. What H.L. Mencken referred to as the "booboisie".
  When I was 16 years old, I lived in an inner city millionaires mansion that had been converted into a rooming house, along with other millionaires mansions, as the upper class moved out to plush suburbs.
  The large kitchen also was used for "socializing" by the tenants, who sat around evenings drinking coffee and solving the world's problems.
One tenant was a 55 year old single woman who lived in a one room "apartment" on the third floor, with kitchen and bathroom facilities.
She worked for a company that made shipping cartons and employed mostly women. It paid 25 cents an hour because that was the minimum wage. The company was "one of the worst sweatshops in the city."
The New Dealers were pushing to raise the minimum wage to 40 cents an hour and this woman sat there ranting and raving.
 "Those damn Democrats are going to lose me my job!", she said angrily.
"My boss isn't going to pay me 40 cents an hour. He said he's going to close the factory and fire us all. Those damn Democrats are going to lose me my job!" Well the 40 cents/hour minimum wage went through and she didn't lose her job. The boss was bluffing of course. Then Social Security was started and they took some money out of her paycheck.
 "Those damn Democrats, they give it to you with one hand and take it away with the other!" she raved.  
 Then her health declined with the passing years and she had to quit working. Thanks to her modest savings from the 40 cent minimum wage, plus some Social Security, she was able to pay her rent and feed herself and "keep body and soul together". Like a good conscientious citizen she has a friend drive her to the polling place every election so she can keep voting against "those damn Democrats".
 Was this woman an anomaly? Only one in a million?
Yeah, one of millions who vote for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and G.W. Bush.
  I was talking with a friend about health care and the excellent Canadian system. "Yeah right", he says, "That's why there are busloads of Canadians coming down to the U.S. so they don't have to wait a year to see a doctor!"
  Talking with another friend about the excellent mass transit systems of New York, London, and Paris. "Yeah right," he says, "as long as you don't mind carrying a gun to protect yourself!"

I don't mind doing battle with rapacious, ruthless corporations, and corrupt "public servants". But when it comes to trying to reason with the typical "well-informed" ordinary American, I'll have to admit defeat.  

 

More insanse capitalist madness from today's Wall Street Journal:

"Elderly Emerge as New Class of Workers - and the Jobless"

WSJ, Feb. 23, 2008, A1

By CLARE ANSBERRY

AKRON, Ohio -- Mary Appleby, 76 years old, lost her job in January as a cashier at a courthouse cafeteria here. She is now looking for minimum-wage work.

Mary Bennett, 80, began filling out applications for fast-food restaurants and convenience stores after she was laid off last March as a machinist. Fred Dase, 81, a bartender until last summer, also needs another job.

During past recessions, older workers simply would have retired rather than searching want ads and applying for jobs. But these days, with outstanding mortgages, bank loans and high medical bills, many of them can't afford to be out of work.

With jobs so scarce, people in their seventh and eighth decades are up against those half their age in a desperate scramble for work.

The number of unemployed workers 75 and older increased to more than 73,000 in January, up 46% from the prior January. Among workers 65 and older, the jobless rate stands at 5.7%. That's below the national average, but well above what it was in previous recessions, including the recession of 1981, when it reached at 4.3%.

The growing numbers reflect, in part, an increase in the number of older workers. The percentage of people 65 and older who are in the work force rose to 16.8% at year end, from 11.9% a decade earlier. Among people 75 and older, the increase was even greater -- to 7.3%, from 4.7%.....MORE

Another Nauseating Nugget from the Capitalist Nuthouse, courtesy of the ongoing "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" (Marx's excellent phrase): a New York Times article reporting that many thousands of American children are forced to "provid[e] care for sick parents or grandparents — lifting frail bodies off beds or toilets, managing medication, washing, feeding, dressing, talking with doctors” – because their families cannot afford medical care.  According to The Times, “A 2005 nationwide study suggested that about 3 percent of households with children ages 8 to 18 included child caregivers. Experts say they expect the numbers to grow as chronically ill patients leave hospitals sooner and live longer, the recession compels patients to forgo paid help and veterans need home care.” 

Take out the words “the recession” and replace them with “capitalism” or “the profits system.” Rewrite the last clause as follows: “and as the imperial masters’ colonial wars produce more poor and working-class veterans in need of home care they cannot afford even as the United States’ unimaginably wealthy Few enjoy the finest health care in history and never ‘serve’ in the criminal wars from which they profit.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/health/23care.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Okay Duane - no problem. When a new "Super Wal-Mart" ("super" meaning with grocery store) went up in DeKalb, Illinois  many years ago, I quite casually asked a check-out girl how the working condtions were there and I told her that folks were making better money (double and triple her wage) down at the Jewel Grocery store (the main northern Illinois chain) doing the same job (scanning and loading groceries) and she got on the phone to have me escorted out.  Seems that when you got hired there you were subjected to (among other things) a propaganda film about evil terrorist union organizers who want to destroy the happy corporate family. Whatever, the work and skill composition/level down at the Jewel was identical and the wages were higher for one simple reason: the Jewel workers were in a union (the admittedly not-so hot United Food and Commercial Workers/UFCW). Yeah, Wal-Mart Shamer would be a good skit for Second City 

Tom and Terence I agree.  This little episode is horrific beyond words.  Duane I was being sarcastic about the Greeter job openings; I'm quite sure they are dead-end positions, along with most of the other jobs at Wal-Mart.  I've always been amused by the Wal Mart Greeter: they put this nice older person up there to say "hello welcome to Wal Mart"  and make it all feel like a big happy family all to cover merciless labor exploitaiton both within Wal Mart and in the hidden and largely Chinese abodes of production where their low prices are sweated out of the super-exploited global proletariat.  My Vonnegutian sensibilities say there should maybe be a Wal Mart Shamer --- someone like Don Rickels to abuse you as walk in the doors of that giant template for neoliberal, low-road capitalism.  But of course people do need low prices. Tolstoy's Cat  I will check that out; thank you for the heads up. I'll look for that AIG commercial...sounds interesting. 

I may be applying for a Greeter job one of these years. No "woe-is-me" for for this good American!  

Hi Paul,

The sustainers have formed a new group to work together on site ideas, community building, and other stuff.

Check out Jon's Blog for a project we're working on to build community. The project started on this blog and moved to the forum. There's a link you can follow.

Hope to see you there!

--Cat

P.S. Thought-provoking blog post. I saw a commercial the other day. I think for AIG. It featured a series of depressed rich people looking forlornly out of windows (floor to ceiling ones which perfectly framed the Manhattan skyline) pondering their losses. It was jolting in its ironic effect.

For those of you that don't know, Ben Lomond is nestled in a beautiful little river valley between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean. I lived in this valley for 20 years and raised my son there. Around 2001 I became a refugee from the computer business along with a couple hundred thousand other folks. The people of the San Lorenzo Valley are great people and there is an active charitable community. I myself have used the available services during employment downturns. This community does come together and helps those in need. I'm saying this because although the place and people are great, what we have here is the grandstanding of an business with the collusion of the media. The Puppet Show Must Go On.

With all due respect, a Greeter is at best a dead end job. And as other commenters have mentioned this could quite well be literal in this case. As the link here indicates the function of a greeter is to give the store a friendlier atmosphere. I've shopped there myself over the years and this small, friendly local market needs a friendlier atmosphere like Pepsi needs more carbonation. I don't know Ian but he didn't get work he got a makework paycheck. And it would be interesting to check back in 6 months or so to see if he's still sitting there saying Hi! to people.

(My thought is he should be placed outside as a parking lot monitor seeing a show the lot is incredibly small for the volume of traffic and people seem to play nicer if they they have someone watching and helping with minor traffic logistics. But then I'm a grump that has no use for greeters or overly cheerful people anyway.)

We've moved from being a nation of producers (agriculture, manufacturing, education) to a nation of servers (you want fries with that?) and now to a nation of sales and marketing folk (the link above mentions a grocery chain that is hiring actors for that all important greeting position, look out retirees).

I still find people who believe that all anybody needs to do to get a job is to walk into the nearest fast food operation and ask for one (why sure! here's your job! you want fries with that?). This is the same mindset that Reagan had when he pointed to the classifieds as proof that unemployment was a choice.

Imagine working your whole life saving for retirement, then having your life savings disappear.

This is the comment that angers me. This is the danger of investment. He could have put his money in the stock market directly, sort of like those private Social Security accounts that the last administration pushed for so long (and we'll see again and again...). Oh but wait a minute. He may have been in the same shoes now what with the crash and all. He could have put them into T-Bills that wouldn't implode until the whole country does. Madoff is a scapegoat in this case. I'm no dismal scientist but it seems to me that the whole of the current system requires that there be losers. And lots of them. A lot more losers than winners.

So, having all or part of your hard earned savings disappear is a feature not a bug.

Ian's real problem was that he wasn't big enough not to fail.

The saddest part is that, without the prestige of being 90 years old and thus good media fodder--say he was only 60--Ian wouldn't have had much chance of getting any kind of job.

But there are so many disgusting layers of poison to this kind of "story" it makes you vomit.