Love letters straight from the Heart

Apparently this email made the rounds recently -- it's the swan song of the utopian capitalist, the death rattle of the "survival-of-the-fittest" individualist, the last gasp of the crass materialist. It is weird how detached Wall Street bankers are from the so-called "Main Street" lives they assume they will be leading. $85K per year? Four months vacation? The median household income in America is around $50K and three weeks vacation is the average for someone with 25 years in at their job. To which Main Street does Joe Wall Street think s/he'll be moving I wonder?

"We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401K doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?"

A Year's Hiatus

At the end of April, 2009, I decided to stop blogging about what seemed, then, as a looming global economic collapse and started to practice what I was preaching. I finished my postgraduate degree, started "leveraging" my skill-set to make a little money, and I have been working at being less spendy and more attune to the value of free stuff - you know, the good stuff, the stuff with substance and meaning: family, friends, art, music, literature, living well, and living less encumbered. Still working on the last one. It's been quite a year. Here are a few things I've learned.

1. Your skills and talents are valuable and there are people who are happy to pay you for your knowledge.

2. Getting out from behind the computer is the best, maybe only, way to live.

3. Despite the neoluddite sentiment of point #2, meetup.com is a great site to find groups of others with similar interests...

4. and craigslist.org is a good way to get the word out about what you have to offer the world.

5. Jogging keeps one sane and fit (two things we should all strive for).

6. Making a good soup is the most important skill one could possess.

So, why am I blogging here again? I guess things are getting pretty bad politically, environmentally, and economically and 1) attention needs to be paid to, let's say, alternative reactions to calamity, 2) blogging is one way to build community and, truth to tell, it's something that I have missed, 3) I find that blogging helps me place events in perspective and makes me spend some time carefully considering how to articulate with the future.

What's new after a year? Not much economically. The unemployment rate is higher and likely to climb; there is an oil slick covering the Gulf and threatening to catch ocean currents, spreading it even farther; Europe is in crisis; the stock market is slumping...again...

How about the positives? CO2 emissions drop in 2009 due to the recession; consensus on important issues is starting to emerge - e.g. the US National Academy of Scientists have agreed that global warming is real and due to human activities; a new deal protects millions of acres of forest lands in Canada; the recession has prompted a record number of startups in the US; contraction is the new growth (which is not necessarily a bad thing).