A Few Thoughts on Welfare

Should be for people. Not corporations.

The fact that unemployment insurance is tied to recent employment in the US is BULLSHIT. I worked my ass off 9 shifts a week for 9 months, saved up, moved into a car, and had myself a nice little vacation for the next 8 months. Then worked for 5 months... then got laid off. Turns out unemployment is based on the income you made for the first 4 of the last 5 financial quarters. So despite me paying thousands into the system over my life they were only going to give me about $100 a week.... but my employer then denied I had worked for them and someone in Georgia was stealing my identity and they just left me a voice mail saying they deleted the claim it took me 45 minutes on a computer to fill out.

The fuckers. It was easier to just find another job.

At the next job they illegally stole my tips and I requested help from the division of labor and they said I needed to hire a lawyer to get anything but the lawyers wanted to steal half of what they could win back for me and only getting like $500 then isn't really the hassle of a lawyer.

The government only cares about rich people, and helping them. If you have problems, like a drug problem, a poverty problem you try to resolve through crime, a bad employer problem, a laid off problem, or a medical problem... there are plenty of people making way more money than you who will make more money off your problem. Drug treatment class teachers get money, judges get money, cops get money, lawyers get money, prison guards get money, prison builders get money, pharmaceutical companies get money. Everyone gets money once you've hit down and out and started to sell weed to pay your bills.

But when you've worked for these corporations for years and you have hit hard times it comes to getting just a little help to keep the rent getting paid and food being bought until you can find another job, you are OUT on your ASS and the corporate government basically says fuck you. Instead of giving you back a few hundred or thousand of your own money to keep you alive they let you fall, and then spend thousandS or millionS to process the mess (but not really fix it up at all, mind you).


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"The problem, again, is when people abuse the privilege. I'm referring to capable people who lack ambition, common sense, and a sense of personal responsibility."

Like the good folks at Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Citigroup, AIG, Ford, GM, Chrystler, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America?

Or how about Lockheed-Martin, Blackwater, Haliburton, Bechtel, McDonald-Douglass, Armalite- or any of the other defense contractor gluttons making a killing in government handouts for their gracious role in the destruction of human lives and infrastructure? Maybe Monsanto, Dupont, or the other heavily subsidized agricultural giants? Or how about the goddamned ranchers growing their cows fat on the public lands? And I haven't even begin to talk about big Pharma... my entire 4 year college education was very graciously and freely provided by Uncle Sam's circuitous shuffling of Medicare funds into a fake non-profit healthcare company my family helped to start.

There is plenty of fat on the system. We need not fight each other over the appropriations of what crumbs are occasionally flung down to us.

THE FUCKING HORROR! SOMEONE IN A SHITTY CRACK DEALING GHETTO SHANTY HAS A TELEVISION SET THAT IS TOO LARGE! HOLY FUCK! HEAR BOUT THAT SHIT YOU'LL BE PISSED OFF ALL DAY THINKING HOW BAD YOUR TAXES ARE WASTED!!!

But... 45 BILLION dollars to bail out Bank of America? Your mind can't comprehend how much money that is. The entire US Department of Education had a budget of $59.2 billion in 2008. That took care of "56 million students attending some 98,000 public schools and 34,000 private schools.

So think for a second about public schools, how much times is devoted to thinking about them, talking about them, praising them, condemning them, and coming up with new ways to make them better, and elaborate schemes to put teachers under microscopes to assess their performance. Can I ask you how often do you think or talk about how the Bank of America is doing, or how their employees and executives should be carefully vetted?

We evolved from hunter gatherers. We have millions of years of being able to tell the difference between one banana or two bananas or many bananas. We can tell the difference between one deer or three deer or a herd of deer. We can imagine several herds of deer. We have very little experience imagining BILLIONS of deer. It's not something that our brains are very good at comprehending. So we dismiss it, and move on.

The scale of corporate looting of the public treasury is a mind boggling thing to try and comprehend. The powerlessness we feel to confront it makes it even less comfortable to dwell on or discuss. But ONE broke ass desperate drop out with no money and no skills and the wrong skin color and dead end future who has figured out some way to get an extra 100, or even 300 bucks a week or month outta whatever federal welfare program hasn't yet been completely dismantled by rich congressmen- and you are up in arms. You're bringing it up at work to talk about. You're mentioning it at the dinner table, or during the football game. This is outrageous! Someone needs to DO something!

Do you know what the biggest demographic of welfare recipients is? It's white children. But Ronald fucking Reagan has you so scared of a black lady with a functional car or a decent television set that you'd never in a million years, say, ask the Census Bureau or the GAO or the Department of Labor or Health and Human Services what their own, actual, carefully gathered data on the subject actually says.

Eugene debs had this great quote about the American justice system being like a magic net that only catches minnows while letting the sharks slip right through. The same principle applies. The bigger you are and the harder you fall the more likely there is to be a safety net to catch you. But if you're small, innocuous, forgettable, and the help you need is in the range of hundreds or thousands- rather than billions- of dollars... you will fall and you will keep falling and the only sirens you will ever hear coming to your rescue will be the wail of paramedics coming to scrape you off the pavement.