The sixth person we know personally is about to lose their home. We know a lot of small business owners and they are being crushed out of existence between unmanageable debt and evaporating customers. How far they will go down, since the number of jobs employing their college educated skills is trending to zero, we do not know, but they are no longer property owners. This is bad for all of us.
One of the main arguments in the health care debate is that people who make money and have things shouldn’t pay for those who don’t. On the surface, it’s a fair argument. But in reality, the individuals who perfected this ideal in their own societies ended up with their heads on sticks.
Millions of people are slipping into financial oblivion. Whether they become homeless is irrelevant. They are cashless, credit less and out of the game. They aren’t drug dealers, or gangs or criminals. They’re everybody. Graphic artists and programmers. Loan originators, counter help, waitresses and millwrights. Everybody and anyone can get caught on the wrong side of this.
Is it a good idea that five to ten percent of our population is economically disenfranchised? Let’s leave out whether they owe the money, they’re lazy or whatever modifier that might be used to stop discussing this logically. Just think of ten or twenty million really pissed off people with nothing to lose. We’ve had real life experience with how powerful just nineteen people can be.
Peter Gabriel wrote in his song, ‘Back in New York City’:
Sitting in your comfort, you don’t believe I’m real
You cannot buy protection from the way that I feel
How long can we expect to have, while the have nots look through the window at our plenty, while they have been consigned, rightly or wrongly, to a life of privation? How are people, now facing foreclosure, bankruptcy or worse, simply for the crime of losing their livelihood, supposed to feel when lumped in with the lazy and shiftless?
The good news is the middle class isn’t under attack anymore. It’s been defeated, the economy that supported their lifestyles a smoking hole. The bad news: People are not stupid; they will connect the dots eventually. They will understand why they lost their homes, their savings, and their legacy. And they will be pissed. They are used to having, used to being included. They are educated and know how to organize. They won’t be marginalized like the perpetual poor.
For the first time in my life I’m hearing people seriously talking about revolution. Not Black Panthers or Communists but Republicans and Democrats. These are people who love their country and want it to succeed. So far, their anger has been controlled and used by the media, government and corporations to serve their own ends. Soon, no one will control it. That anger uncorked and free is a danger to us all.
A lot of people are using the rubric, ‘I don’t want to lose my America’. I wonder which America they mean. The one I grew up in, that was about helping your neighbor and looking out for everyone’s rights and protecting the most powerless among us, or the America that has become about property rights, profits and allowing others to slip off the grid? America has always been a work in progress. We decide what it will be.
Dispatches From The Front 
You’re telling me! Not owning a home, I want to jump in the market. Even though neither of us have had any indication of us being laid-off, we are afraid that any day, the hammer will come down. We can’t afford to take the chance even thinking about a mortgage.
And what gets me angry is that the banks are taking advantage of the people trying to do the right thing. My bank changed its rules which means I ended up with overdraft fees, which never would’ve occurred before. They changed the order of processing the debits from the account. So, as little money as I have, they dinged me $66 for only $27 of “overdraft”, because it was in two transactions. Of course they send you the privacy policies to read, but being a working mom, loving wife, and trying to start a new business, I didn’t have time to read it. Yes, it’s my fault, but who are the people yelling for transparency in these types of changes?