(a)Musings: The Working Poor

This post won't be as ranty and stream-of-consciousness as the others (and I doubt anyone has actually read those); this time I have a concise, specific point to make. Also, I'll balance it out by making the next post about frozen yogurt :D

When the unemployment rate went back up to 9.1% recently, I took a closer look at the statistics, which you can find here. Predictably, people with less than a high school education have a high rate of unemployment, which gradually decreases as the education level increases. Regardless of how many lazy upper middle class philosophy and general art majors (yep, I went there. I call it like I see it.) who have just graduated and don't want to work for a living in our soulless and nightmarish corporate system whine and complain, the unemployment rate for college graduates is just 4.5%. And this is "the worst job market since the Great Depression", mind you. Well, apparently it wasn't (or was, I guess) all that great if you managed to get a B.A. or B.S.

I'm really fucking sick of the 24/7 conservative media onslaught against the current administration. More than that, I'm sick of the fact that it's worked so well. You can't avoid it, just like any widespread propaganda campaign. People who should be liberals and progressives hate Obama but can't tell you why. It doesn't take a fancy education and an abnormally increased capacity for cognitive reasoning to get past this and spend 5 minutes Googling for the truth.

So, this is what it boils down to:

1. The government intentionally provides us with a substandard education. Most people I talk to are unaware of the fact that their votes do not elect the president. They don't even understand the most basic things about how our system works; let's not get into deductive reasoning, basic math and science.

2. A higher education requires so much investment and dedication that it's unattainable for most. About a third of the population earns at least a bachelor's degree; I have a feeling that, after several more years of Boomer spawn failing to do so, that number will fall to closer to 1/4 of the population.

3. The uneducated masses are the ones who tend toward conservatism, and buy into the propaganda machine. Now their votes go to the conservative politicians, who primarily appeal to the completely irrelevant and outdated moral scruples of simple-minded people to win them over, and are bought off by the top 0.01% of society in order to further their personal agendas. Since I mentioned Googling, starting with something like "Koch brothers Tea Party" is probably a good idea.

4. The bottom 60% or so of society, or the working poor, now supports that top 0.01%, the mega-rich corporate CEO's and heirs. The same CEO's and elites who lay off the workers and ship their jobs overseas to bolster their own bottom line, and then talk about how the current administration isn't doing anything to reduce unemployment. The same people who want to simply dispose of social security, welfare, food stamps, unemployment and disability benefits, etc. The same Republicans who ensure that public education is either sufficiently ignored or insufficient to the point of regression. These people are not going to be happy until everyone who isn't a heterosexual white man is considered subhuman property with no rights and works a vast plantation. That's why capitalism and democracy don't go together and why they're no better than communism.

5. head+desk