Slightly overcast this way-early Monday on California’s north coast, and a bit on the warm side as we begin without further delay, another freakin’ work week.
Work, work, toil and trouble — a money chase without real reason.

The aim of work in the US the last goodly-half century has been upward mobility, but, yipes! Life has become a bottom-dwelling achievement:

The researchers made a striking finding: The U.S. middle class, long the world’s embodiment of optimism and upward mobility, today is telling a very different story.
The chief preoccupation of middle-class Americans is not the dream of getting ahead, it is the fear of falling behind.

(Illustration found here).

Desire for that middle class status has been been the aim of the great American Dream (best understood/believed while asleep), which has driven passions for years and years, but life nowadays keeps kicking backwards. This level has been defined as people earning about $35,000 to $100,000 a year, but has been on a downward slope for nearly a generation — in the 1970s, middle-class peoples earned 62 percent of US national income, now it’s just 45 percent.
Now in my middle 60s, the landscape of Americana is way different than it appeared to my parents in the 1950s — the big surge in US monetary nationalism came after WWII and the arrival of us baby boomers. Fed on ‘Father Knows Best,’ and General Motors, we took it for granted the Dream of all Dreams was ours for the taking. Just fall forward and the those big cash-filled feet would catch us.
Wrong! And, Not!

Long ago the word ‘entitlement’ had a different meaning than today — now it’s Social Security, Medicare, etc., while days of yore, it was a right to a chunk of the American Dream.
Robert J. Samuelson at the Washington Post explains:

Bill Clinton has a pithier formulation: “If you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll have the freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams.”
That’s entitlement. “Responsible” Americans should be able to attain realistic ambitions.
No more.
Millions of Americans who have “played by the rules” are in distress or fear that they might be.
In a new Allstate-National Journal survey, 65 percent of respondents said today’s middle class has less “job and financial security” than their parents’ generation; 52 percent asserted there is less “opportunity to get ahead.”
The middle class is “more anxious than aspirational,” concluded the poll’s sponsors.
Similarly, the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that only 51 percent of workers are confident they’ll have enough money to retire comfortably, down from 70 percent in 2007.
…
The collision between present realities and past expectations helps explain the public’s extraordinary moodiness.
The pandering to the middle class by both parties (and much of the media) represents one crude attempt to muffle the disappointment, a false reassurance that the pleasing past can be reclaimed.
It can’t.
This does not mean the economy can’t improve.
Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic, suggests that when “millennials” end their delays in marrying, having children and buying homes, they will administer a welcome stimulus to growth.
The trouble is that today’s grievances transcend the economy.

And the slight now is the old folks — assholes like me. In a short while, I’ll be going on Social Security and try to “retire” on a quickly-dwindling monthly income, and the only end in sight is way down yonder. The politics of today is killing a shitload of people’s tomorrow.
And with a middle-class objective gone, it’s gonna get shitty — better dead than alive.
William Greider at The Nation:

At the start of his second term, events pushed President Obama to choose between the living and the dead.
He chose dead millionaires over elderly people living on Social Security.
The wealthy were given a most generous reduction in the estate taxes to be collected when they die.
Social Security beneficiaries were told to live with smaller benefit checks.
Instead of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, Obama went the other way.
I asked Robert McIntyre, the celebrated reformer at Citizens for Tax Justice, what he makes of this odd presidential twist.
“The Obama administration has mixed feelings about old people,” McIntyre dryly observed.
“Old people on Social Security deserve smaller benefits.
Old people who own estates worth tens of millions deserve smaller tax bills for their children.”
How could this have happened with a Democratic president in the White House?
In early January, under pressure to make a “fiscal cliff” deal with Republicans, the president signed a new estate tax law that delivered a gorgeous windfall for those with accumulated wealth — or, rather, for their children or others who inherit the family fortunes.
All rich people are now entitled to an estate-tax exemption of $5 million.
That is seven times larger than the exemption that existed in the last years of the Clinton administration ($670,000) and more than double George W. Bush’s ($2 million).

Us poors can’t win without losing first.
So off to work now, earning a future that’s as bleak as a crappy charcoal drawing — Monday we charge!