Dear Hillary

[dreamnightwind]

18. I dunno, they look like a reasonable slice of Americana to me

I have absolute faith in the Hillary team's marketing skills, they will do a great job of honing her image. Her announcement made reference to some progressive causes, she's got the Scooby van, their web site has the cute family Duck photo for their 404 page not found error, Hillary's picture was beautiful, they're showing her speaking and interacting with everyday people in cafes and shops, very well done IMO.

But I see the whole thing as a Hollywood movie set of an old western town, a facade of main street business fronts, hollowed out, the shop owners long ago moved away due to the big box stores taking their business, the phony store-fronts polished up for photo ops. It's a well-thought-out and executed bit of theater, using money from the people who put the main street businesses out of business to produce slick marketing material and speeches designed to get the vote of those abandoned people, and it will probably work, because they are the good cops, not as bad as the bad cops, all by design.

I don't see one drop of policy that will actually address the problems we are facing, quite the opposite. Myself, I used to be pretty well off, computer programmer, wife, kid, home-owner, money in the bank, nothing much but I was never worried about money. Now I am long-term unemployed, house value crashed to less than 30% of what it was worth at peak and still after some recovery only 70% of what I paid for it so I can't really sell and relocate without being foreclosed upon, my wife had a good job and left the sinking ship (after she refused to allow me to sell the house before the collapse because she thought I was being an alarmist and the crash would never come), and there are many like me or worse that aren't getting any help anytime soon from the mainstream of either political party.

On the macro level, the cause of it all can be traced directly to the Clinton-Gingrich-Gramm deregulation in the 90's, H1-B's to bring in cheap Indian programmers rather than train or even just pay qualified workers here, massively leveraged financial pozi schemes, police state for the unfortunates, not to mention the post-9/11 war orgy the same people led the nation into. On the personal level, there were things I could have done differently and better to avoid some of the problems I am facing, I suspect it is always so for anyone who goes through this.

This stuff sounds like petty pony demands to the comfortable, but to many, it is about ruined lives, unimaginable psychic pain on top of the more quantifiable pain of not having what you need to get by, and environmentally, we face a climate challenge we can't even get our heads around it's so immediate and critical, there are no words to do it justice. We've been down this road way too long, one party drives a little faster than the other but they're on the same road and it's straight up a road to ruin. It's insanity to go on supporting it.