How long is it polite to sit at a coffee shop for an espresso drink and muffin?

When a bottom-feeding employer can play off good employees and solid citizens against each other to keep hours, wages and demands low, then something is seriously fucked in the Capitalist-worker bargain.  This is where we find ourselves after 29 years of Reactionary rule.  Good middle class citizens fighting it out for minimum wage work.  When you go shopping this week, wherever you go, look around at the people you see working there.  They are probably making less than $10 an hour.  If you're in a chain store, the store manager is probably making shockingly piss-poor money.  Like less than a plumber.  And he's top dog in the local store.

That's what our economy has produced.  The American Dream reduced to $10/hour and living with your parents or children.  You know what?  I got no problem with the latter part, because rebuilding our extended families would be a good thing for the country.  But it shouldn't be done this way, by devaluing all labor to the point where fewer and fewer people can afford their own place even though they work full time.

It's our own fault.  We've rolled over and let them fuck us.  As a result, they have gleefully fucked us harder and faster as each year has gone by, each legislative session, each presidential administration, each bullshit business cycle.  They plan to wear us out even more, because as with all other deviancies, theirs is a progressive addiction.

I keep reading about the collapse of the world financial system.  What collapse?  That was the global ponzi scheme that collapsed, the financial system is alive and well.  Frankly, this latest recession was probably no worse than any other, except that for the first time the rich lost a lot of money too.  They lost half their wealth in a hurry.  Damn, some probably even had to sell the fourth or fifth house and delay buying the eighth car.  No, for us it is the same as every other recession.  But now that the portfolios of the wealthy are rising again, we hear that it is a recovery.  Yeah, well, unemployment is not coming down and we are told it is going to be a jobless recovery.

That's no recovery.  Do not let them bullshit you.  Forget recession and recovery.  What we are in is a regression.  The Great Regression of the Late American Era, 1981-.  The statistics that matter for the people that matter -- the People -- have been consistently dismal for almost thirty years.  It has been a sustained regression, coincidentally beginning at the same time Ronald Reagan took over and busted the unions.  The political history of America from 1981 to the present has been about the Destruction of Labor.  It is time to end that story and begin a new one, the one where the People rise up.