Mark Twain has said that "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
We are in a challenging environment that echos of the Great Depression. The greatest theft of our lives didn't happen with a $700 billion dollar bailout legislation - it happened with our future. The prosperity of the young, up and coming, professionals has suffered a major heart attack at the hands of the expiring generation and no one of my age seems to care. It makes me question, at what age do we begin to care about our future?
You are lead to believe that there is pride and honor in selling yourself for monotonous labor. If you staple enough papers or answer calls with extra chipper, you are a valued member of a society that honors your life. But the moment business slows, the first action is to leave you jobless. Leaders hail soldiers as heroes and patriots, yet 1 in every 4 homeless people are veterans. It's a sad deal. Your loyalty is sold and never returned. And still, we love to point our noses above others because arbitrary seniorship was added to our title.
The truth is that you are an indentured servant. You are a slave with pay. Corporations, companies, and entrepreneurs are the machines that add value to society. The rest of us are merely the grease between the wheels.
We should be mad as hell and not take this anymore. We should be using our voice and sharing our thoughts to create a future we deem fit, rather than simply accepting the scraps our elders are leaving us with. This is supposed to be a democracy where our voice can be heard. Why do we choose to be silent and complacent with the robbery of our future?
The American system certainly does reward those with ambition. But it also punishes those stuck in the middle class. If you knew the rules of the game, you would see that working a typical 9 to 5 is among the worst of decisions.
Did you know that Social Security tax is only paid on income of up to $90,000? That's right! The rich pay LESS for the welfare of retirees than most of us.
Who's looking out for you? The person that manages your 401k? Ha! The truth is that no one is looking out for your well-being. And still, you pride yourself on filing enough papers to ensure the well-being of your boss.
If you were to invest solely in US treasuries, you can actually save a healthy amount of money for retirement with almost no risk. Has anyone ever taught you how? I doubt most of you know. Everyone just talks about their 401k or IRA, but few of us really understand the rules. A 3% annual yield on a savings bond can equal a little under a 6% annual yield in a bank savings account. But heck, you don't want to be a person...you'd rather be an associate...
Do you even know who the BEST business customer in the nation is? It's the US government. Did you honestly believe that tax dollars were all spent on salaries and fixing roads? The federal government AND the state government operate by contracting business with Joe Schmo. Best of all, the government never defaults on payments for these contracts. There's even a secondary market for these deals.
For a monetary culture, it's astonishing how little is taught in personal finance. The system doesn't teach you the fundamentals. What is taught is how to obey orders (whether it's in a classroom or anywhere else). Our parents were once able to provide for a family with a high school education. How far has your bachelor's degree gotten you? The unemployment rate for new graduates is over 7%, and the number of graduates whose work dramatically undervalues their education is speculated to be very significant. Unless you rank among the top 10% of your class, it might not make financial sense to expand your education before beginning your career.
It's unfortunate how near-sighted our values often are. Ben Franklin has said that "they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The power of his words ring more clear with recent events.
Too often are we quick to act petty when there are pennies left on the table. If only we realized that competition is global, maybe there would be less deceit and more cooperation among neighbors.
America does not want a nation of employees. America loves entrepreneurship and ambition. The American dream is to create your life the way you want it. The dream was to assemble with those of similar ambitions and prosper through cooperation. Why have we been lead to believe that we deserve less?
Is there a too young to care?
Zeitgeist: Addendum
It's a Scary November
When you pick a beauty queen, you get beauty pageant answers. The fact that McCain decided to have Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate makes me question the quality and care behind his decisions. How deeply and thoroughly does McCain evaluate situations before making major decisions that can have global consequences? We are in the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, and the right wing of the race has openly admitted to not understanding economics. There seems to be an increasing lack of talent in Washington...
The Economist: America not quite at its best
NOTE - The Economist is not known to be a left-wing, liberal, publication...and still, even they recognize that McCain is slinging mud.
America not quite at its best
From The Economist print edition
The election has taken a nasty turn. This is mainly the Republicans’ fault
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AS RECENTLY as a few months ago, it seemed possible to hope that this year’s presidential election would be a civilised affair. Barack Obama and John McCain both represent much that is best about their respective parties. Mr Obama is intelligent, inspiring and appears by instinct to be a consensus-seeking pragmatist. John McCain has always stood for limited, principled government, and has distanced himself throughout his career from the religious ideologues that have warped Republicanism. An intelligent debate about issues of the utmost importance—how America should rebuild its standing in the world, how more Americans could share in the proceeds of growth—seemed an attainable proposition.
It doesn’t seem so now. In the past two weeks, while banks have tottered and markets reeled, the contending Democrats and Republicans have squabbled and lied rather than debated. Mr McCain’s team has been nastier, accusing Mr Obama of sexism for calling the Republican vice-presidential candidate a pig, when he clearly did no such thing. Much nastier has been the assertion that Mr Obama once backed a bill that would give kindergarten children comprehensive sex education. Again, this was a distortion: the bill Mr Obama backed provided for age-appropriate sex education, and was intended to protect children from sex offenders.
These kinds of slurs seem much more personal, and therefore unpleasant, than the more routine distortions seen on both sides. Team McCain accuses Mr Obama of planning to raise taxes for middle-income Americans (in fact, the Democrat’s plan raises them only for those earning more than $250,000); Mr Obama claims Mr McCain wants to fight in Iraq for 100 years (when the Republican merely agreed that he would gladly keep bases there for that long to help preserve the peace, as in Germany) and caricatures him far too readily as a Bush toady (when Mr McCain’s record as an independent senator has been anything but that).
The decision to descend into tactics such as the kindergarten slur shows that America is back in the territory of the “culture wars”, where the battle will be less about policy than about values and moral character. That is partly because Mr Obama’s campaign, perhaps foolishly, chose to make such a big deal of the virtues of their candidate’s character. Most people are more concerned about the alarming state of the economy than anything else; yet the Democrats spent far more time in Denver talking about Mr Obama’s family than his economic policy. The Republicans leapt in, partly because they have a candidate with a still more heroic life story; partly because economics is not Mr McCain’s strongest suit and his fiscal plan is pretty similar to Mr Bush’s; but mostly because painting Mr Obama as an arrogant, elitist, east-coast liberal is an easy way of revving up the Republican Party’s base and what Richard Nixon called the “silent majority” (see article).
The decision to play this election, like that of 2004, as a fresh instalment of the culture wars is disappointing to those who thought Mr McCain was more principled than that. By choosing Sarah Palin as his running-mate he made a cynical tryst with a party base that he has never much liked and that has never much liked him. Mr McCain’s whole candidacy rests on his assertion that these are perilous times that require a strong and experienced commander-in-chief; but he has chosen, as the person who may be a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency, someone who demonstrably knows very little about international affairs or the economy.
What Mrs Palin does do, as a committed pro-lifer, is to ensure that the evangelical wing of the Republican party will turn out in their multitudes. Mr McCain has thus placed abortion, the most divisive cultural issue in America, at the centre of his campaign. His defenders claim that it is too big an issue to be ignored, that he has always opposed abortion, that culture wars are an inevitable part of American elections, and that it was only when he appointed Mrs Palin that the American public started to listen to him. All this is true: but the old Mr McCain, who derided the religious right as “agents of intolerance”, would not have stooped to that.
Women...I'm confused
I know I'm not supposed to understand women, but some things are just downright perplexing.
I don't believe in PMS. A woman's crabby-ness derives from simple choices that she makes without regard for it's cumulative impact. Layman's explanation goes as follows:
In a slightly different way from women judging men by their shoes, I look at a girl's feet to scale where she would rank in the bitch-o-meter. Every notch higher in fashion usually indicates a sacrifice in comfort. And the less comfortable her shoes, the crabbier she will become as the day progresses. She's snappy because she loves to keep her tootsies in a vise with diamonds. There's no chemical imbalance. It's simply pain that radiates upward from her toes to her head, and then eventually formalizes itself into degrading remarks about the size of a man's penis and sudden onsets of bedtime headaches. Cute without comfort can turn ugly fast.
I don't understand why some women wait for a guy's suggestions on a date. Women seem to make guys choose the restaurant for the date, and some even go so far as to have the guy order for them. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot. Because when the relationship turns serious, it'll be the last decisions he ever gets to make. We guys don't even find out until we're near marriage town that we won't even get to decide what we want to eat ourselves. "You can't have that...you have high blood pressure," she says. "Why do you always have to eat three chili dogs and seven beers when you know your cholesterol is high," she nags. The relation "ship" sets sail with men as the captain, but it isn't until we hit high water that we find out our wheel ain't connected to the rudder. Geez...it's no wonder why the captain chooses to go down with the ship.
As a single guy, I keep my home empty. It would only make sense that women be more attracted to the bareness of a bachelor's pad. When I get married, it's all of my stuff that's going to get thrown out anyway. I might as well live light now and intentionally leave her the closet. Yet, experience proves the contrary. I just don't get it. Somehow, this message gets lost in translation.
I guess I could be way off base with my assumptions. Its just that...it seems like women get more turned on with each discovery of possessions she can throw out the deeper she enters a man's life. Like, her life isn't fulfilled until she has completely surrounded a man with her decisions - material or not. Women pick away at men until the hole is big enough to be filled with her love. Is that what mothers teach their daughters before the wedding? Do mothers say, "Jane...you know you were a good wife if you can look back and not see a trace of the man from before this day." I guess I'll never know.
What do women do on a girls' night? Do women get together and brag about who threw away more of their man's stuff? Does the crown go to the one that can get the most pink on their guy? These are just a few of the weird questions that find their way in my head.
You can always tell the state of a relationship by the distance of a guy's sports stuff to the TV. If he's got lawn chairs and USC beer mugs in front of the TV, he's single. If the lawn chairs are outside but the remote is next to his beer on top of a Maxim, dating. If a football phone got hurled out into on-coming traffic, it's a committed relationship. And when there's a yard sale of old magazines and jerseys, someone just got married.
But all and all, it is true that a man is only as happy as his wife. Start your week right by making someone happy. And remember, if you had to eat a row of frogs, you don't start with the smallest one. =)
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