leave a fiver in and amongst the roaches? Try it, it will brighten up your day!

I looked him up on Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lane_(journalist)

Her face was a delta, a map of time itself, and she could not bring herself to meet my eye.

for the always perceptive Will Pitt!

I missed that completely.

I have been un- or under-employed for five years, now. I keep applying for jobs, but I've not gotten an interview in more than a year.

My older sister (she's 71, I'm 56) has already warned me to 'get used to not working.' I told her that is NOT an option, since I must have an income to feed, clothe, and shelter myself.

I may have to return to school, and amass more debt I cannot repay. I cannot see any other option.

Any suggestions?

thinks I'm a little soft in the head but I returned to college as a part time student last semester. It's not easy because I have two jobs and kids in college also but I've decided to get another B.S. degree and change careers. I'm 54 now and will be 60 when I'm done. The only regret I have is that I didn't do this sooner. My semester starts next week! Never give up!

I went out one morning around 3:30 am because I forgot to put the trash out. I saw an old man with a banged up 80's car going from bin to bin collecting what he could. I told him to wait a second, that I had a couple of big bags left over of bottles & cans. He was slightly taken back that someone would be out at the hour when he was searching for mere nickles. You would have thought I was handing out gold dabloons. He was grateful and said he had a disabled son to take care of. I don't see him much but my 2 neighbors who have lots of bottles leave them on the side for him. I sometimes take some to the local redemption center and they are very busy with people young, old and very old of all races. I tell the boy behind the counter to add them to one of the redeemers totals. It has become a culture in itself people going from place to place with shopping carts filled to the brim.

A pro pollster was telling people on NPR in no uncertain pontificating(as humbly clouded it was by his own statistics) of the presumed division between generations. You almost didn't think about the poll at all because it was all about THE ASSUMPTION- not the numbers. In fact there is probably no division between between young workers and the old on the real issue.

Namely, that one's immediate and future livelihood is threatened(the media hardly ever likes to remind people of the why and who, just the Problem that the people must deal with and let pols decide for them). Young workers naturally are worried about long lives with a working career, ever shrinking and pinched for upper class profit. Retirees are worried about their pension and medicare supports. Those aren't entitlements either but worker investments so that there is a strong point of unity if you get beyond the immediate facile difference. One's money threatened. Retirees need the infrastructure and support of younger workers into the people's lifetime investments in "entitlements".

Those looting all the resources of living in this country re well served by this automatic divide and conquer by the frauds in the media. If this was arguable they would not descend so quickly to facile lies and mockery to make the blindsiding "argument" they want you to be divided impotently with. Issues that all Americans care about are in fact very clear when you think clearly about the facts. People want lives and when it comes to the economy it is pretty basic despite the memes and divisions enforced by media interpretation. Issues are grandly united not nitpicked into a broken mosaic.

EVERY time the people are united for getting money out of politics, stimulus and enforcement of the law, peace, the media acts as a blockade. "People have priorities more important than issue A" because the press realizes with terror that they would have to support the majority in actually doing something that could threaten their own sweet corporate jobs(ironically that puts them in the real selfish club over and against society and other social groupings).

These fraudulent journalists are the true obstruction to national unity. "People want everything and are unrealistic(hint: they don't want to sacrifice- which is exquisite considering the source)." And the nut jobs that the press allows because big money says they must are to be the anti-populist "heroic" arbiters who must make the people bear the brunt of the "medicinal" pain- and never- even incrementally- deal with the rather plain problems of law, corruption and runaway banksterism. While the world literally burns, people learn, are concerned and suppressed by stooges like these. People with big sophomoric mouths who should be tossed from the lifeboat not given more public time to waste.

article on Yahoo for the baldly false and boring equivalency meme we have seen actually many times since Bush/Dukakis. false equivalency serves the one who begins and dominates with the tar, as this article demonstrates more than any professional knowledge of history or good judgment about the actual presidential performance of any of the names he mentions.

Shapiro is yet another false flag "unbiased" journalist. If he believes himself otherwise he is his own first victim. He disses the campaign style of Obama with a total false equivalency display. Then we hear exactly(tone, substance, holier than thou pontificating) what we heard in 1988 and 2000. If you can't buy the GOP swill they will settle for they are both alike, unworthy, etc. Then the issue of "no choice" settled they work you over with other GOP crap that DOES work to create a false plurality through an election system getting to be as electronically rigged as the corporate media.

This has been done so much as to be grossly insulting in its current reincarnation. Identify the cliche, leave off the biased coloring and Shapiro would better serve politics in this country flogging himself in the dark of his bedchamber than putting his fingers to keyboard.

were stolen from the Social Security Trust Fund and who, now, doesn't want to pay back what he and others in his tax bracket took.

I have no idea how people can ignore such suffering among the frail and vulnerable.

up.

abhorrent.

This issue is too important. If I could rec this thread more I would.

kick

nt

I hope the Post runs them in the print version as well.

This issue is so much more important than what a lot of GD DU'er get in a twist over. I don't mean to be nasty, but damnit people, read this.

about how not very far in the future the GenXers are going to inherit fabulous wealth from their elders, the Baby Boomers as the Boomers themselves thoughtfully die off.

It is my casual observation, as a Boomer myself, that the Boomers who have reasonable wealth are likely to spend much of it in the first place. In the second place, and far more important, not that large a percentage of Boomers have wealth. I'm thinking of a number like 1%.

I think that the real danger is that people who are doing reasonably well, those in the upper 20 percent or so, don't fully get it that they are still better off than 80% of the population. Most of us live in neighborhoods that are segregated by income and wealth, and so we often feel is if almost everyone is just like us. That's especially dangerous if you came from a decent working class background, went to college, got a good job, and a good career path, and have done well. As Elizabeth Warren would say, "Well God Bless!" And there's no doubt in my mind that you deserve what you've earned.

Meanwhile, as all of us here on DU understand, those below the top 20% have been losing ground since at least 1980, and those at the bottom have lost the most. I seem to recall that by 1982 or so the numbers were out there clearly indicating that the working class had actually lost ground by the end of the '70's. It was somewhere around then that a male high school graduate was earning less in real money than his counterpart had earned 20 years before.

I wonder if in any other first world country the poor have to scavenge cans and bottles to get a little money.