LATELY,

I've been nursing some griefs from my personal life which relate to the lives of almost all of us here in the 99%. Particularly, I've been bothered about the fact that I've had so damn few realistic options in my adult life. I know for the fact that it is that this is driven by the complete lack of debt-free access to a stable adult livelihood.

I graduated from high school in 1976. By that time, the deindustrialization of the United States of America was well underway. One had no real access to a unionized job unless one lived in the right place and had the correct parents (read: your father, not your mother or anyone else, belonged to the union and worked a similar job). The inexpensive higher education enjoyed by Silents (born during the lifetime of the German Weimar Republic through World War II) had gone into the history books, at least in flyover country States like my native Colorado. And if all you had was a high school diploma, all you could ever get was minimum wage, just like today. And, just like today, that's not enough to raise a family on, or pay for one's own education, or anything else for that matter. Bottom line: if you arrived at high school graduation with nothing else but that diploma in your hand, you were screwed. Again, just like today. And that was exactly where I was at, and where I ended up spending all my adult life no matter what I did. I have never known genuine prosperity; money has always been a major object in every life decision and remains so today.

I will assume that most of my readers don't want things to continue any longer in this toxic vein. I will assume that we are basically agreed that Americans need to arrive at adulthood -- high school graduation -- able to make a decent living for themselves without having to hoist a debt burden in order to achieve this. One needs to be fully able to obtain a grown-up job with grown-up wages and grown-up position stability with only the education (s)he can obtain for free. Remember, folks, this was the norm only one generation before me. I am old enough to have experienced this as a child, but not old enough to have tasted of it as an adult.

I will also assume that most of my readers also understand that we cannot either go without manufactured energy products or make these from carbon-burning any more. We need manufactured energy simply to stay alive, and have needed it since we mastered fire and clothing, with the subsequent loss of natural biological armors like fur.
For better or worse, we're now naked apes, and we need help staying warm in the civilized parts of the United States (i.e., where it snows in the winter and palm trees don't grow). Moreover, we now need manufactured energy to get around our yuuuge inhabitancies as well, and also to fuel the technologies which make our lives livable. And to complicate matters yet further, nuclear fission electric power is no solution here, not even a temporary one; even looked at with the most optimistic possible light, a favor it definitely does not earn, the fact remains that fissile heavy metals are nothing else but YAFC, Yet Another Fucking Coal, another scarce mined thing whose mines will peter out and leave us high and dry just like oil and coal will.

We also need to go back to producing truly wholesome foods of all kinds, which means a return to family farming. Corporatistic agriculture results in food production with poor nutrient quality, with volume (profit$) taking precedence over wholesomeness. And this is present in the entire food chain to an absolute degree, to the point that everything an ordinary working-class stiff can afford to eat is completely affected. Legacy non-GMO foods remain available, but their scarcity means that they draw top-dollar prices that we plebs can't afford. And the super-hybridized, GMO crops whose products we plebs can afford have resulted in autoimmune sicknesses, obesity at a level unheard-of before my generation's adult years, and an unheard-of incidence of cancer as a cause of morbidity and mortality, even if one completely removes tobacco smoking from consideration. Moreover, the second we lose petroleum-based fertilizers, our human race is done. Stick a fork in our asses.

Additionally, our nation is hopelessly addicted to war. I have yet to draw even one single breath in an America on a peace footing (read: minimal or no standing military and NO foreign intervention). Our taxes go to pay for wars, more than any other single thing. And our people keep dying and getting mangled up in these wars, which do nothing for ordinary Americans but cost, cost, cost. Big Al wants us to call this "imperialism"; I respectfully submit that this situation is actually an arch-insult to honest imperialisms (!), such as those of the British or the French, which at least did some good things for the mother country's ordinary working-class dweeb on the street. (The Spanish imperialism prior to 1650 CE, on the other hand, resembles ours in many painful ways!)

Healthcare. I need to not forget to rant about this. Who the fuck decided to victimize Americans by insisting on sticking to fee-for-service medical care and "insurance" 50 years after all other civilized lands figured out that healthcare needs to be a human right, paid for by the society as a whole and enjoyed by every individual? You want to talk about special sections of Hell, I'll name two who would have guaranteed seats in the Ultimate Crispy section if I were God: Joseph Isadore Lieberman and Max Sieben Baucus! We had a perfectly good opportunity to make real headway towards national single public payer healthcare until these two got hold of it; why??!!??