The Sixties are back in The Teens

Was a kid during the sixties but I picked up the vibes and they are the same. The squares thought they could do an end run under the crummy guise of patriotism and fiscal responsibility and call themselves a name hearkening back to throwing tea into the Boston Harbor. Figure the left had gone to sleep and now look what has happened, we have a generational conflict mirroring the big push back of the counterculture in the sixties when Vietnam lit the fuse. Now it is pillaging of the American dream on a massive scale touching off the new powderkeg of populist discontent.

And it is the young again. The middle aged middle class people have too much to lose usually to go park it in New York or Chicago or LA. But if you read about the OWS movement and listen to the pundits calling them anti American or class warfare warriors or mobs or rabble rousers or just plain un-American you think all the way back to the bearded bums statements by many during the sixties. The students then were agitators or Communists or anarchists or socialists or agents of the Soviet Union. The college students to Nixon and company were nothing short of the enemy and Kent State proved the point.

And will we have another Kent State? The keg is being filled and you wonder who will touch it off. Will the police try and clear the park or will somebody call in the National Guard again. Who knows? But the lines are being drawn and it is lining up just like fifty years ago when one generation drew a line against another. And look what came out of that turbulence...our very culture.

We'll see this time what comes out of our new sixties which might well be called... the teens.
It fits doesn't it?

http://www.billhazelgrove/.

Rocket Man...one mans war against suburbia

Corporations are not people

I used to know a guy in college who always said, you are either for me or against me. Usually he wanted help in some way and everyone had a good laugh. But there is no laughing now. Sixteen million people unemployed with a double dip recession looming, one quarter of all mortgages under water, houses worthless, and a vanguard of zealots running for President who want to destroy Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. See Paul Ryans plan if you doubt what I am saying or watch Governor Perry in the debate last night.

These are the times of you are either for the people or against the people. Ideology aside. Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, green whatever, this concerns the people. Black, white, yellow, brown, it doesn't matter your color. The people are on the line right now. The American Jobs Act will be unveiled and it will help middle class people. It will help the people. Even if you are employed and doing very well, this plan will be better than doing nothing because we might have a chance to get things going.

Corporate America will bail out nobody in the United States. They are in pursuit of other markets. They are in other countries where the emerging middle class has buying power. They are after those consumers. They are sitting on trillions and are not going to employ Americans because the American consumer has been shucked and left with only the husk. There is no more money for the corporations to mine. This is a basic concept. There is no Buy America. The buyers have left the country for ports where people can buy. And corporations are not churches, they do not have our best interests at heart. They could give a damn.

Mitt Romney was wrong. Corporations are not people. They are not feeling creatures. They are entities created to make money anywhere in the world. America to them is like a service station where you can pick up some gas and a few goodies, but you are on your way somewhere else. The right will try and obstruct Obamas plan. They have already begun. But they are not obstructing the Presidents plan. They are obstructing the people.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man  One Man's Search for the new American Dream. James Frey

Why does the Tea Party hate the Unions?

If you are populist party why pick on working people? I mean what did they do to you but work and try to get a little ahead and raise their families and own a home and maybe a couple of cars. What is wrong with people who want just a sliver of the pie that the rich gobble up like a feral cats? If the Bush tax cuts expired and the rich kicked in then half of the deficit would disappear tomorrow. Poof. So why does the Tea Party want to bust the unions and get rid of middle class entitlements if they are really the party of the people?

Or are they a shill for corporations that exploit the dark crevasses of the American psyche. Our secret xenophobia of the other that creates a birther movement because we have an African American President, then starts in on middle class entitlements like they are a Socialist plot. Could there be any bigger power play in America than dressing up a woman in Patriotism and folksy idiotic Alaska ditties, outfitting her with a great body and looks that can kill and then having her say every heinous thing about working people that gets fed to her by a network designed to break the backs of the working class?

So why does the Tea Party hate Unions? Are they an extension of the heinous government that offers Medicaid to the poor, Medicare to the elderly, tax deductions and Social Security for the middle class? Its like the woman from Wisconsin I talked too who said she hated the teacher unions, but whose husband was in a union. But that's different. They aren't radicals she said. Teachers are radicals? Oh I get it now. Those people in puffy jackets with a hats and scarves in Madison Wisconsin are radicals. My daughters first grade teacher a radical. Right.

But really. Mr. Hoffa calls the Tea Party a bunch of sonsofbitches and can you blame him? They are trying to eviscerate working class people. Wouldn't you call them a bunch of sonsofbitches. I'm not in union. I don't have a pension or retirement. I will will work (write) until the day I die. Should I bust the union because they are covered and I'm not? Thinking of it that way it does seem like class envy.

So that must be it. I think I will trade off my two degrees and years of doing what the hell I wanted to be in a Union and work my ass off. This must be the reason the Tea Party people hate them because they envy the unions for their jobs and their benefits. Wow. I guess things are pretty bad when we are envying a bunch of people working on assembly lines and in factories,warehouses and mills.  Or those rogue teachers in their cinder block luxury offices grading papers in schools without air conditioning.

 Sonsofbitches. All of them.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man First Chapter--The American Dream Gone Wrong

Rethinking College for the Recession Generation

I was talking to a friend of mine who has kids in college and he lamented that he would be two hundred thousand dollars in debt when it was all done. The college students in question mooned around the graduation party for another friend soon to partake in the great middle class migration started after WWII with the GI Bill allowing people for the first time to partake in higher education. Up until that FDR moment there was college for the rich and the few who could actually work their way through college at a time when someone could actually pay as they went.

But now there are loans galore and middle class people follow the script of revved up highshool GPAs to revved up ACT and SAT scores and the eventual departure to private state Big Ten or the coveted Ivy League prize. Then they return four years later to look for a job. In the worst economy since the Great Depression. With incredible debt. We have heard of young women turning to prostitution to pay for these  debts now. Such is the desperation of a job market that marginalizes even the best and brightest. Maybe it's time to rethink the auto return of going to college.

Now if you are going to college like days of old to get a liberal arts education and become that limited of all specialists "the well rounded man" So be it. Take your debt like a man or a woman and pursue your journey. But ninety nine percent of the middle class take the utilitarian view that college will get you a job. And that is why the debt and the four years are worth it. A leg up on the rest of the population. There is still a leg up but the problem is there a lot more people with legs now. In fact the whole world is growing legs.  

The difference is the Global job market. College graduates are now competing globally for the more highly technical jobs that a twenty first century economy demands. If you are not specializing and at the top of your class then you will be in the great unwashed of college graduate moving back home. As the New York Times put it "college graduates now have to up their game." Which brings me back to this point, college is maybe not for everyone anymore.

The weighing of debt and time and getting a job is a brutal equation. And if you are going to be a salesman or you have that burning entrepreneurial idea, then maybe the four year hiatus is a waste of time. The fact is the mediocre middleclass jobs for mediocre college students don't exist anymore. These jobs are being replaced by computers or eliminated. Or there is one for every thousand applicants What used to be vast fertile ground for middle management white collar jobs has now gone vertical. Specialization and cream of the crop applicants take the jobs corporate America has to offer. For the rest it is a straight commission landscape or entry level sweatshops.

So this paradyme of middle class kids to college for a job might have reached it's level of obsolescence. The brutal truth is if you are going to take on that debt you better have a game plan. Or go for an education and call it at that and be comfortable you will be in debt for many many years.  Educated and broke is not without precedent.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man kindle or paperback First chapter

The Battle of Britain

Like the World War that we wanted to keep across the ocean the last Battle of Britain headed our way and Charles Lindbergh and the rest of America First could do little to keep their troubles away from our shores while a few people like Edward R Murrow broadcast the carnage to let Americans know that they could not hide from this horrific event and that unless we did something it would end up in our laps. FDR knew The Battle of Britain was our problem and he threw everything he could at them until the Japanese bailed him out with Pearl Harbor.

Such is the history lesson we now confront. Watch those rioters in London. Watch those fires burn and you see the beginning of something people do not want to think about. It is a breakdown of society. Think Arab Spring. Think the fall of the Soviet Union. Great nations do fall and it is usually because the will of the people was subverted by forces bent on looting and taking power for themselves at the plight of the many. We hold these truths to be self evident: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So says our founding fathers but for our middle class these truths now ring hollow.

They certainly ring hollow for the great swath of people in Britain marginalized by an economy and austerity measures. If people have nothing to lose then they will riot and burn and pillage and steal and even murder. We have seen it before, but because of the strange duality of hard economic times coupled with governments going into austerity mode we now see gasoline thrown on an already burning fire. It is to our detriment that we are heading down austerity road with the Republicans and The Tea Party who believe pain is our only salvation. That pain is burning down buildings in London right now.

The middle class are not children and our leaders are not school masters. They were right there with us spending the money. But they have become the drunk who drinks all the booze and then tells everyone it's terrible how much they drink. The Battle of Britain is raging now. It is across the ocean and like the last World War it seems distant and not our affair. But we better wake up before another December 7th jolts us out of our complacency. Or those burning buildings will be our own.

Rocket Man Paperback

Rocket Man Kindle

Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

Watch the documentary: The One Percent

Four hundred families own more wealth than fifty one percent of the country. That would be 155 million people have less than four hundred families. Chew on that one. Or one percent of our population has more wealth than ninety percent of the rest of the population. And of course it is getting worse. The faucet you hear getting shut off is the last trickles of any hopes of stimulus that would help people get back on their feet. Political winds have eliminated that. We are now truly on our own.

The documentary The One Percent made by the one of the scions of the Johnson and Johnson family is interesting in that he manages to interview his own family about this vast inequity of wealth that has put us back to a Nineteenth Century footing of robber barons and serfs. We are serfs now. You  just don't know it yet. But you will. Social Darwinism is about survival of the fittest and it has been applied to the middle class. The earlier tenants of Social Darwinism said that the rich should survive and the poor should be cast out. This will keep the poor from having more children.

In the one percent the average income is ten  million dollars a year. The average income for all other Americans is 35,000. What is interesting in the film is the interview with Milton Freidman who gets disgusted and ends the interview at the end. He is Mr. Trickle Down. Support the rich and they will create jobs for everyone else. This has certainly proven to not be true. Nothing trickles down and few jobs are created. Maybe you just  heard General Electric just paid no tax. Nada. None. The average American pays more tax than the those in the one percent.

In the Progressive Era of the last century America had huge disparities in wealth that brought about reform: social security, medicaid, medicare, the graduated income tax. What has happened is we are back to that tipping point again except we are not in Progressive era. We are in the era of Retribution. Revenge of the Trickle Downs who believe the Middle Class did this to themselves. We have seen the protests in Wisconsin. Watching the documentary The One Percent, you get the feeling that is just the beginning.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off on April 26th

Amnesty for the Middle Class--Whats Good for the Goose...

We need amnesty for the middle class. We are going through the closest thing we have to the Great Depression and it has torched middle class credit. Forget the millions who have lost their homes or the people who have declared bankruptcy. They will be effectively shut out of the credit market for years. But you now have millions of people whose FICO scores have fallen below the magic number of 620 which is the minimum for a government loan--or FHA. These people have now been shut of the credit market as well.

What does this mean? It means that the recovery will not come. People have to be able to secure credit to buy homes again and if they can't then supply will outstrip demand and the values will continue to fall. Credit is the lifeblood of the economy. Because someone is late on a credit card payment or cannot pay a medical bill does not mean they should be denied credit for buying a home. If we go with the assumption that these are extraordinary times then there must be an extraordinary remedy--middle class amnesty.

We did it for the banks and the car companies and the insurance companies. The rational there was yes they made bonehead decisions but these are extraordinary times and for the common good they must be bailed out. So we did. We basically forgave their very bad creditworthy decisions and gave them billions to get their house in order. Isn't that what we should do now for the middle class? Forgive their bad decisions under the umbrella of extraordinary times?

Look at in a selfish way. We must have amnesty for the common good. We need to get the economic engine going again and you cannot have that if you are locking people out because they got behind. If people have to make a decision between paying a medical bill or their mortgage then they will pay their mortgage. Of course incomes are down. Of course people have been laid off. We are in a near Depression and there has been carnage across the board.

So we must have an amnesty for the middle class. This will get people back in the credit market. We cannot give the banks and corporations a bye and then stick it to the middle class. They have been victims too. What is good for the goose...is good for the gander as well.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Road Not Taken--Rocket Man

Hair of the dog.

The vodka is fighting the tomato juice, but it does the trick, and I mitigate the vagaries of selling popcorn at the Kane County Fair with ten screaming Cub Scouts, Bloody Mary firmly in hand, shades firmly affixed. The margaritas from the night before are a headache I’d rather be doing without, but osmosis and a little old-fashioned self medicating has gotten me to the point where I can drive Cub Scouts and be the charming father of two, husband of one. But I have to make a decision. We are constantly presented with rules that we can either choose to follow or break. Does one go through the unmanned toll? Does one pay for the case of water in the bottom of the shopping cart that no one sees? They are small, middle class rules, but rules all the same. My choice is simple. Do I take the time to hang a big looping U-turn and return to the highway for the Dairy Queen I missed … or do I cut into the McDonald’s parking lot and plow across an excavated field of old pipes and earth movers, past the surveyor posts flapping like markers of the road not taken?These are the choices of our lives now. The big choices are mostly behind us by middle age, and we are reduced to schoolboys trying to whisper when the teacher’s back is turned.
What the hell.

http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

Hummers and the Fashion of Frugality

They say Hummers are toast. No more. Arnold Schwarzenegger's fifty thousand dollar toy has hit the ash heap of conspicuous consumption as another relic of our old economy. Soccer moms pasting on eye liner up in their dark command vehicle will not be the defining image of the Obama era. Excess is out. Ring the bells. Even if you can afford it you don't want to be tooling around anymore in your Porche or your monstrous SUV. These gas guzzlers are dinosaurs of our age gone by. Move over for bug like electric cars and lots of Hyundai's. The Hummer craze was our age at it's most disgusting. Middle class people tooling around in a billboards that said I got it all...top of the Mountain baby. You could not ignore those black military vehicles that took up all of their lane and some of yours. They literally could push your car out of the way. The people inside said it all, staring out of tinted windows at the poor middle class hordes who could not afford bulletproof luxury. This was crass consumerism at it's worst. They even came out with a middle class Hummer that kept the tag around a cool fifty thousand and didn't' hit the seventy K price tag of those early beasts that were the domain of rock stars and action heroes. But they have quit making them. You can see them in the car lots now. The Hummers broke from basic black with a yellow Hummer, a red Hummer, a Hummer for every family in America. Can there be any bigger statement as to what went wrong with the American Dream when the signpost of material success was a military vehicle designed for desert climates? Little Johnny and Susie will no longer spill out from combat ready command ships, ready to secure the perimeter of the schoolyard. I hear tell there is a new station wagon on the drawing boards of not a few companies. The new fashion in middle class transportation will be green and if you can't afford green then it will be modest. Station wagons could be the new benchmark in the rush to be just middle class again. The Hummer will go back to being a military vehicle as the roads fill with Girly men driving cars they can afford. RIP Arnie.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

http://pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

Best Book of 2008 San Antonio Express

What's Good For the Goose

Alright, so the banks get a get out of jail free card. And the automakers. And the airlines. And Amtrack. And the retailers (in the works). And whoever else in Corporate America who can find a friend in Washington. So how about the middle class? Radical. You cannot give money to the people...they might riot, tear the clothes off, not spend it...right. Sure, fine, ok, so you don't want to give money to the people. So lets not give money to the people...let's give them amnesty instead. Here's the deal. All the people slipping into foreclosure (up 81percent last month over a million a month) and declaring bankruptcy and not able to pay their bills, medical bills, credit card bills...they will all be knocked out of our economy. Why? Because their credit will be in tatters. FICO scores rule the day and if you declare bankruptcy or are late on a couple of credit card payments, can't pay your mortgage, your phone, electric, gas, then...(unlike the banks and the automakers and everyone else in greed land) you get a ding on on your credit. So, what happens? You get no credit. That's right. Out of the game. Millions and millions of people will not be able to buy a hut in the swamplands of Florida much less a house. They won't be able to buy a washing machine, fridge, car (durable goods you've heard of them) and so guess what, the very people you want to get back in there and start buying won't be able too. We could take the attitude of that is their fault. Fine. Then tell the banks and automakers and retailers and anyone else getting bailout dollars it's their fault too. What's good for the goose... is good for the gander.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com