[boriscleto]

On Winner-Take-All Politics | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com

A chart that show income inequality from 1970-2010 (presented in 2008 dollars).
The Triggers of Economic Inequality | BillMoyers.com

Calculate what your income would be in "Broadland" as opposed to the "Richistan" we live in.
Broadland v. Richistan: We Do the Math | BillMoyers.com

[Ratmagiclady]

I'm glad Bill Moyers is back on the air: I saw a lot of that show, as much as I could concentrate on at the time, anyway. Really would be worth a lot of people watching. A lot of points were brought up that people really ought to see put together in those ways.

I'm particularly thinking of some mention of how this extended, err, 'decession,' (to coin a phrase: it'd be more accurate to say a 'repression,' but that term's in use. ) affects the kids in college or coming into the workplace, now... In my own experience of getting caught really just on the divide about education funding, (literally over the summer between my high school graduation and my arrival at a 'safety school' I'd intended to go to in hopes of independence via merit-scholarships, suddenly 'working your way through school in a college town' became not-possible, which led to certain 'perfect storms' in my personal case, but also left a lot of my peers struggling to complete school in five or six years and all the expense and even extra class-load that went with that. )

A certain amount of 'lost generation' ensued *there,* and it wasn't even so extreme. There were a lot of people living pretty Bohemian as perennial students/various lousy-job employees, which in some ways didn't seem so bad, though even that's not possible for a lot of the kids these days: moving back in with the folks used to be considered 'failure,' now it's almost standard procedure. I still experience repercussions of foolishly-deciding over twenty years ago that it'd be better to settle debts (by dropping out) and start over than to keep both the funds and debt in play. (Old fashioned cash-on-the barrelhead, I found out too late, is not considered a virtue by the corporate world, even back then, despite the political record and the 'old fashined commonsense' they try and justify it with.) I also did *want* to disappear/cut ties, because I was experiencing a bit too much 'disagreement with my 'lifestyle' in ways that actually kind of had me working with some suddenly-very-acute PTSD... as well as what that did to redouble chronic health problems. Interestingly, the system was such that income of people who, let's say, weren't exactly being friendly at the time, especially thanks to the 'culture war,' disqualified me from just the sort of help or even education loans that at least in the latter case, the system now utterly relies on.

And now a lot of things just don't take 'perfect storms.'

But twenty years later, still having a lot of the same struggles. Still feeling the repercussions. The same 'Get a job' mentality from the Right while insisting on the right to mean there aren't enough jobs for *anyone,* never mind people they want to discriminate against, who've been behind various 8-balls for however long and by now just haven't even got the reserves of stamina that were worse-than-exhausted in the intervening time.



This cause this Moyers show goes into about much more of the nation's debt load actually being in student loans than consumer credit-spending. Which is unbalanced even for those who make it into the supposedly high-demand workplace. (One place where big finance and budget cuts are directly adversarial to the health of the real economy, even for business.)


And what now. What does my nephew go through. With the prices up, the pay down, jobs at the end uncertain, and his mother dealing with some of the same 'pre-existing conditions' as got so bad so early for me. Instead of me being a help to the now-friendly family, I'm still in the 'liabilities' column, though. (Though it's nothing compared to the fact that schools *he* got into are now effectively charging more than me going to *Yale* with would have. And even back then, when you see *that* admissions package without financial aid, it's like, 'You may as well have turned me down. ) )

Anyway, while politics and economics blame the 'consumer debt' of people who *did* put a lot of their lives into being able to have a home that was taken from then, or turned directly into 'underwater' debt while Big Finance profits are preserved and homes and neighborhoods are ripped down or left to rot while people can't afford the rent... One has to realize that while we've been messing around about rhetoric and election cycles and whether or not 'Family Values' is to be used to hurt 'undesireables' and how much, the *system* has been serving only that 1 Percent.

Easy enough to call me a freak or a liability and then claim there's some virtue to me being like, 'Crap, what I used to be trying to bootstrap a little business on is now not going to cover even mean survival, here, And I've even got some of those 'poverty skills,' not that there's much to scavenge these days. ....but a lot of this has been cast as the 'new normal' and being in hock before you even crack a book is now *expected.*

'Winner take all' politics, right? Seems like Big Finance and all is taking it all before you've even gotten the much-dangled, but ever-dwindling paycheck.

This is... Not going to work, is the problem. And every year they try to milk it for is the more people whose lives are *owned* (or discarded) before they even begin. That's more people's lives sabotaged. Every year. Every election cycle. Every diversion, scapegoating, terrorism scare, wedge issue, prevarication, filibuster, or stonewalling... The cost is in the lives of people and the very national prosperity they claim to represent.

Either the big money decides to get something smart and sustainable moving here, or they *will* find that, increasingly, they aren't so admired as they like to think.