I used to work a dead-end job. It kept a roof over my head but it didn't give me a shot at a good future. If I missed a day of work or got sick or lost my job the only way to survive would be to go into debt or do without, and no matter how hard you work you can never catch up. I know what poverty is like and it isn't economic freedom. Poverty is hell.
A year ago I was struggling to pay the rent while frantically searching for another dead end job. I'm still up to my neck in debt. If you go directly into the workforce when you get out of school you will start at the bottom of the wage scale. You simply can not survive on your own in America at minimum wage, so you lean on your parents if you are lucky enough to have parents to lean on. I did not. I had no real family to lean on, they were just as poor as me, so I did exactly what the "Very Important People" in society often suggest, I worked my ass off, and it got me nowhere. I am the working poor, I worked all day just to barely survive, no savings, no security, paycheck to paycheck. No future, and if you make one mistake you get a late fee in your bills or you overdraw your checking account and your screwed, and you go even deeper into the hole. It's a trap. It's a scam. Your poverty is another man's profit, and this system is designed to keep you working poor, voiceless and misinformed.
I have a problem. I read. All day. I hate television. I would have never thought that I would be on television one day. Most of my life I have not been able to afford cable, books were always cheaper and easily available, so I read. Reading is an act of rebellion at this point in my life, it has always been, and in an age of corporate lies to read an honest word lifts up my heart, so I am going to tell you the honest truth that you will never hear or see on television or in the corporate media; poverty is a motherfucker. It's a trap.
For fun, let's assume that you aren't born rich. You get old enough where you have a choice, stay in school and continue your education or enter the workforce. If you enter the workforce with no skills and no experience you will end up working for poverty wages, you will become the working poor and you will go into debt. The banksters win. If you pursue education and go up to your neck in student loans, in today's economy you are not promised a good paying job, in fact, the majority of the jobs that have been created since the 08 Wall street disaster pay significantly less than they did 5 years ago, so you go into debt. The banksters win. Now, let's look at each person, the person who doesn't go to school (like me) and the person who does go to school (also like me). If you are not lucky enough to be born into wealth you will go into debt, and that is when you cease to be free. Poverty is not freedom. Poverty is slavery, and no slave is so hopelessly lost as the slave who has no idea that he is not free at all.
So you go into the workforce, no job security, no experience, low wages, and you look at your basic expenses, a place to live, food, utilities and transportation. Let's forget about phones and media, communications, which are essential nowadays but extraneous for this conversation, just file that under shit you can't afford right now, and along with it you can toss in a savings account, health and dental care, a retirement and entertainment, because you can't afford entertainment. You're broke, son. You don't go on vacation. You don't pay a cent in capital gains taxes. You earn a dollar or two more than minimum wage, your take home is about enough to pay for rent, food, getting back and forth to work and keeping the lights on at home. Now, tell me how much freedom this man has? Or this woman, who will likely earn even less for the same work as punishment for having a vagina in the labor market. Funny how they don't use that word, the labor market. It sounds like a slave auction, a place to buy labor, indeed, a slave auction is very much in line with a totally unregulated free market, but we don't like to talk about the slave auctions we used to have in the free market, back when slavery was permitted, hell, there were states willing to go to war and turn it's back on our founding fathers to preserve those slave markets and expand them into new territories, they believed that states alone had the right to permit and regulate slave markets, and those states today are the very worst states in the nation for labor rights and civil liberties, is it no surprise? So you work your dead-end job if you are lucky enough to have one, if not, you seek support among your friends and family if you have them and they try to make due, but what if they are poor and struggling too? What if everyone you know is poor and struggling? What becomes of your community then? We know. Your community falls apart, crime goes up, crime is a symptom of poverty and poverty is a symptom of a broken system, as system designed not to empower people with freedom but to exploit their work, so that every utility you use, every transaction you initiate is meant not to benefit you but to become a profit center for another man. Welcome to working class hell.
So gas prices go up, health care costs go up, the rent goes up, the credit card rates skyrocket and your pay stays stagnant. What do you do? You go deeper in debt. Is it not obvious that we are a people who own nothing for ourselves? We have a richness in entertainment, media and communication but we are dirt poor in land and property, who among you reading this can say that they own a piece of property that you know will be passed down throughout your family for the next 5 generations? Or three or two? And not a bauble or heirloom or some memorable keepsake, but land or a childhood home? We are becoming an underclass, a permanent underclass of intergenerationally uneducated poor people, 50 million Americans in debt, trapped in a broken system, three generations living under the same roof, and all so David Koch can have his fucking tax breaks.
Now add to these 50 million Americans the millions of once middle class Americans who bought their houses, than lost their jobs and houses and shirts and are now placing downward pressure on every one else, and then think of their children in college who are buried under debt, and all of the children too young to work and the elderly and sick who can not work whom they must support, and think of the pressure forcing down on them with high unemployment, stagnant and shrinking wages and ever-rising costs. That isn't a bubble you hear bursting, it is a dam about to break. The dam will break, and the greed that refuses to invest in infrastructure, education or anything else other than the wants and the needs of the super rich shall be what unleashes the dam, for their fates are tied to ours.
Now you have the 50 million poor and border line poor Americans, plus the countless millions of Americans who are one trip to the hospital, one unemployed spouse or missed mortgage payment away from poverty, one more hole in the safety net, and how will the free market protect them? It will not. The free market will foreclose on their house, it will deny them health care, it will not pay them good wages, it will take away their 401K's. A poor man or woman, child or grandparent has as much power within the free market as a cow has in a slaughterhouse. Money is power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So you go without health care, you struggle to go on, you pay for the gasoline and the car insurance, and endless siphon of your resources, you pay the rent and own nothing or you buy the house and then the bank fraudulently forecloses on you, or you miss a payment, or you lose your job and you miss a payment, or you get sick and miss a payment, and then you are homeless until you buy or rent again. You own nothing but debt and a few technological trinkets, you can afford neither health care nor education, neither retirement nor some inheritance to pass onto your children when the need to own gold becomes less than the need to buy food, and yet you work every day for another person's enrichment, and they struggle too so that the man above him can live better, and so on and so on until you get to the very top, the 1% of the 1%, and that man has absolute power and has no need for democracy, he has no need for the education of his fellow man, in fact, he hopes for their lack of education, he is counting on it. If the millions of Americans who suffer everyday so that the 1% of the 1% could live in heaven on earth knew just how bad they were getting screwed, watching their family die young uninsured, watching their children live uneducated and die young, watching their parents work until they have nothing left and then denied health care, working our whole lives away so that this rich bastard could whine about having to pay his taxes, it has thus far been a miracle that these millions upon millions of Americans have not yet risen up to cast off these implacable vultures who feast on our misery. If I were a greedy Oligarch I would be praying to the god of whiny rich assholes that the working class in America never figures out how we got sold into this misery, and sold we were.
This rich man knows that if we ever figure out his scam he is screwed, so he gives us the one thing we can afford, entertainment, eh gives us our news as entertainment, and mark those words, the rich man gives us our news, that is why they are hell bent on dominating the internet as well, we can't have the peasants talking about the obvious class war with the other peasants now, can we? And thus they lull to sleep millions who went to underfunded schools and never learned to read, these folks are honest, they watch tv and every day they are bombarded with corporatist propaganda and consumerism, we are taught on tv that wealth is a virtue and poverty is a shameful thing, when I distinctly remember this guy who once said that the meek shall inherit the earth and a rich man has a better chance at getting into heaven than a camel has at trying to fit through the eye of a needle, but then, the wealthy man who gives you your entertainment and news, no matter how many channels on Jesus he runs, will never remind you of that bit of information.
There is an ownership society. You're just not part of it. No, you're part of the unwashed masses, and their job is to keep you divided by race, sex, religion, sexuality, nation of origin, political affiliation, whatever, divide and conquer, and you have been conquered, most of us don't even know it. There is a class war. We lost the first one, we fought back a bit after the Great Depression but the moneyed interest have woven a net of technology and distraction around us, laced with division and cursed with a message of hate, hate thy neighbor, covet his goods, when what we really need is simple, we need good paying wages for meaningful work, we need labor rights, we need consumer rights, we need rights for people, not corporations. We need to end the war profiteering and only use our military to defend our nation, not send our armies overseas in an ever expanding empire of military spending and permanent bases that drain away lives and resources from our nation, we need to invest in education for the fucking love of god, invest in infrastructure and health care and retirements for our elderly, and if the rich man at the top will not let us have that we should be marching in the streets, at the very least we should be marching in the streets.
little more below the fold . . .
I used to work a dead end job. Now I am a fully committed activist. I'm still struggling to pay the rent, I never pursued writing or activism with the hopes of getting rich, that's not the point, I knew that getting into this. My show will be starting soon, it will pay a little bit, but not much, and that is cool with me, I'm not a very materialistic person, I think if I ever got rich I would donate to charity or something, at the very least I would pay good wages if I were able to, when I imagine winning the jackpot in the lottery there is not much I can think of doing with all that money, frankly I don't need it, and that makes me realize that most people don't expect to get rich, they dream of it, but they should expect to live decent meaningful lives unburdened by debt and poverty, they shouldn't have to dream of climbing out of poverty, we shouldn't have to dream of merely surviving. For all of my life I have survived, I have gotten by somehow, I have worked hard and pulled myself up by the bootstraps, and when I mention that my pay has been stagnant and my bootstraps are more expensive then they used to be they call me a socialist, an anarchist and a revolutionary. Well fuck it then, I guess I am a revolutionary for saying that I reject this Ramen Noodle pittance you call a wage, I reject this debt-slavery and this bribery based politics, I reject the war-profiteering and war on our civil rights, I reject all of it and I plan on fighting tooth and nail for a true democracy of We The People for the People, NOT for the Corporations and the wealthiest 1% of the 1%.
I'm certain that if I was selling you a bunch of happy horseshit about how great free markets are and how government is the source of all of our problems I would have a big fancy show on some corporate news network, I would have a book deal with a big publishing house and I would be like all of the other corporatist talking heads who will gladly tell you why if anyone is to blame it certainly isn't a bunch of old wealthy white men. They will never tell you that money equals power and you have neither. They will never tell you that absolute power corrupts absolutely, because in all but a few cases most of the people who have a voice in our broken system exist only to serve as the handmaidens of power. I am going to encourage you to challenge power when it is corrupt. The free market doesn't happily reward such behavior, nor would I accept such rewards.
My activism is made possible by donations. I know I have been promising my donors a copy of my book for a long time now, I apologize for the delay, frankly I need to be better organized, my life is crazy busy as you can probably imagine and every time someone suggests that I get an intern I reply that I'm broke and wish I could hire someone, but it is hard just getting by myself. I speak on panels among experts in their fields and I may have a hundred dollars or so to my name, and you know what? I don't care, not as long as I can survive and work my ass off for something I believe in. I believe in Democracy. I believe that when we empower people, when people can earn good wages, when people have job security and affordable education and health care, when people can retire at a decent age and enjoy good health, I think it is obvious that it is better for all of us, for our families, for our communities and for our nation. Poverty is a motherfucker. It's a trap. I don't want to defeat poverty just for myself, I want to defeat it for all of my friends and loved ones, every one I meet, I want to be my brother's keeper, and I believe that at this point in American history we must challenge the wealthy to hold up their end of the social contract and do the same, for their fate is tied to ours as a nation. This is what I fight for. These truths I hold as self evident. If you feel the same, I could use your support.
You can purchase your copy of "Americana: By Jesse LaGreca" by making a contribution of your choice to me with Paypal
Note: To those who have been waiting, I am hoping to go to an editor very soon to pursue publication of this book, any help and/or advice you may have is very appreciated . . .
Peace and love to one and all,
Jesse LaGreca