Are there no workhouses for the ninety nine?

The one percent, a covetous, crotchety old one percent bent over his figures with only a candle for warmth while the ninety nine sits out in the tank scrounging for coal. Please sir may I have an extension of me unemployment benefits or me payroll tax for the holiday. Tis only happens once a year and we would like to make a little merry. The one percent rose up over his candle and looked over. And a fine thing for picking  me pocket with your social security and your medicaid and your unemployment. No. Not another scrap for you ninety nine.

And at that two men came in with their hats off and asked the one percent if they might tax him a bit to help the poor. Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? There are sir and they are full of the ninety nine we are sad to say. Oh. I thought something might have put them out of their usual vigor. No. No. You will get no tax from me for those lazy beggars who haven't the gumption to do something for themselves. But sir, it is Christmas and the ninety nine already pay the tax and many will soon die from hunger. Then let them do it and decrease the surplus population! Be  gone you ninety nine scoundrels and leave me to my business!

At that his nephew approached. Uncle One Percent. What is it you ninety nine. I suppose you have your hand out too? I have come from Wall Street to wish you the one percent a merry Christmas. Why? Why? Would you do that? Because uncle, we are but fellow journeyers to the grave and there is nothing you can do for that. Then why are you happy? Why not uncle? I am young and poor and you are rich and old. One day you will die and decrease the surplus population. Then the world will change.

Bah Humbug!
So a Merry Christmas to you one percent!
Bah Humbug!
And a happy new year!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Great Secret of the Suburbs

I was was talking to a friend the other day who said his kid had lost their food card. I stared at him and said your food card? He shrugged and said yeah. Our food card. We’ve had it for a couple years now. And then it hit me. Food stamps. This friend lives in a comfortable five hundred thousand dollar suburban home but his kids are on food stamps and he is on medicaid. He had been a realtor and basically lost his job. But then it go me to thinking, how many other people in the land of wide lawns are on food stamps?


It turns out a lot. Forty six million people or fourteen percent of the population is now on food stamps. That is an amazing amount of people depending on the government so they wont go hungry. And here is the kicker, half of them are in the suburbs. The suburbs are no longer the place where people go to raise their kids. For a lot of people it is where they went to go into debt and lose their homes. And what has happened now is we have created a huge subclass of people living under the radar.

This type of family is probably your neighbor or lives down the street. They drive old cars because they can’t afford the payment of a new one. They are on food stamps because they need every nickel to pay utilities and keep their kids in clothes. They are on medicaid because there is no health care when you are broke in America. They might or might not be in foreclosure or in a loan modification. They are living in a twilight land of the American nightmare.

It now takes years to get someone out of their home. If they know how to file in court they can stretch it out indefinitely. This is exactly what is happening. There are now squatters in their own homes. The American Dream depends on a vision if not a mirage and this must remain intact for the kids and the neighbors. And outwardly everything seems normal. The lawn may not get cut and the cars may be old but it is all stitched together with rubber bands and paperclips. One catastrophe can bring the whole thing down.

Yet there are millions of families living this way. We have a huge underbelly of people who have fallen out of the middle class but like a ship that refuses to sink, they can keep pumping out just enough water to keep the mirage in place. But eventually they will take water. Once the banks catch up with them or someone slashes entitlements then it is game over.

Until then, the dirty little secret of the suburbs remains just that.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one mans struggle to find the American Dream

Does Capitalism Work for the Many?

Should one human have a billion dollars at their disposal? It would seem an indictment of capitalism that such things can occur. But they do and now we have lots of billionaires. That kind of concentration of wealth into the hands of the few is unsustainable. Should an Oprah have billions and billions of dollars?Should a Bill Gates? Some would say the good provided is worth the payout,but in our wired world of five billion people and three and a half billion jobs, it just doesn't make sense.

Behind the OWS movement is a basic proposition: capitalism favors the few at the expense of the many. The few are people who game the system and make the billions. And why shouldn't they? They are smart enough to do that. But we are all on the same planet and just because one person can have the intelligence or luck to make a billion dollars should society permit that kind of inequity?

The problem is people don't share. Even if the President proposed a tax on billionaires it would never pass the congress because the billionaires can buy the congressmen. Even this rarefied world of billionaires could cry class warfare and say people are taking from them unjustly. We would like think that a sort of mega philanthropy would kick in for people at this leve,l but money has a nasty habit of staying in the same circles.

Capitalism allows anyone to become a billionaire in theory. But becoming a billionaire is largely a fluke in a system that allows one individual to prosper at the expense of the many. It would seem the many are starting to wake up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Occupy Chicago's rag tag band in the rain

Rain is hard in Chicago. It is a brooding dark city in the South loop anyway and when it rains in October and the people have gone away then you really feel that old Nelson Algren metropolis that seems so much like Gotham. Maybe it's because Chicago is a northern city that has to get through the long winters. But South Loop has always been strange and deserted at night and Lasalle Street is even more deserted with the closed up CBOT and the giant pillars of the Federal Reserve. And then in all that rain and dreariness is a small group of people with soggy signs and plastic slickers. They stand there on one corner looking like homeless people: Occupy Chicago.

You can't beat them up too much. Protesting in the modern age like everything else is derivative. I remember the huge parade of people going down Michigan Avenue when the Iraq war broke out. The first one. A lone black man said to me we goin to war. And then they marched down Congress and that was a large protest, but they too were swallowed up by indifference. The war happened anyway. What is interesting is that the Occupy movement is pretty small or so it seems and they are getting media coverage. But this too is on a time limit.

My buddy and I huddled in the CBOT doorway out of the rain and watched the protester's. One woman held up a sign: WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT. A few people honked as they went by. The rain came down even harder. The rest of the protester's talked as if at a really bad concert waiting for the next band. Somebody hit a giant drum. But other than that there was just the marble edifices of modern finance and the small motley crew of people. A cop pulled up and sat in his car, staring at the ad hoc tent of plastic someone had set up over boxes. Hooverville of the Depression comes to mind.

And then there was really not much to do. We were in the middle of the night in the middle of  a rainstorm watching people get soaked with a few soggy signs. No change it would seem here. It was almost embarrassing to watch. Maybe all movements start like this but television certainly glamorizes because this was just small and dismal. So we moved on and found a bar.

It was a yuppie bar on Michigan Avenue with a strange feel of 1985 for yuppies. But no one had told these people the party was over. Men in suits and women in designer dresses. Martinis all around. A wealthy man with long grey hair just down the bar. We order up and sit among the if not one percent then certainly the up and coming ten percent. Who knows. We were a long way from that ragged band of soaked people on a street corner.

So it is with all revolutions.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/