It really upsets me how basically the entire country seems oblivious to people who are struggling to get by, in essence, people who have jobs, or who work, but don’t make much money. It seems to confound many people that there are people who live day to day who don’t have cable television or a phone line or an IPOD or many of the other things modern consumer culture has convinced everyone that nobody can live without.

In fact, the only film I can think of to address this in any way no matter how slight was “The Wrestler” where Mickey Roarke’s character lives in a rundown rented trailer and makes ends meet working at a supermarket through the week and independent wrasslin’ shows on weekends and barely gets by.

It's funny that the "Mainstream" mass media is now jumping on the economy issue, because the current economic mess affecting so many places and so many people has been a long time a-comin' and it started over a decade ago when big multinational corporations decided to get their buddies in Washington to make life easier for them vis a vis disastrous "Free trade agreements" which cost thousands of Americans their jobs which were "outsourced" overseas and which cost America it's own manufacturing base.

One big reason so many West Virginia steel plants closed was because these agreements, which were became a reality under the Clinton-Gore administration flooded the market with cheap steel from China. Nothing good came from these "free trade" agreements like NAFTA, GAT, CAFTA and the rest.

None of the promises made about how it would help our poor neighbor countries came true either.

Currently America is FLOODED with illegal aliens from Mexico, who would rather work for $5 an hour under the table here doing menial labor than working in a car factory in Mexico for fifty cents a day.

Washington truly sold us down the river on behalf of Big Business

President Obama and Congress can dance around the issue all they want, but until they admit WHY we are in a recession — “Free Trade” scams and job outsourcing — nothing will solve it.

Back in the 1980s we started seeing the rich start abusing the system for their own spoils... Most people forget Michael Moore’s first documentary, “Roger and Me” about how GM was shutting down factories in Flint Michigan and opening identical factories in Mexico to screw workers out of a decent living for that low-wage slave labor south of the border.

In the 1990s, with Clinton and NAFTA we saw the middle class start getting shafted out of their manufacturing jobs. Add to that the invasion of illegals who were promptly swept up and exploited by the super rich to keep wages down and then protected by the super rich who told the politicians “hands off” — soon all that will be left is left is the super rich and the super poor because our own government has had a hand in eliminating the middle class.

History is clear on one thing — you can’t have a healthy economy without a middle class. You can’t have a healthy economy without competition and upward mobility. Low slave labor wages “under the table” doesn’t make things competitive. Outsourcing jobs doesn’t make things competitive.

Our politicians have in effect sacrificed a stable economy and a healthy working class for a fast, cheap buck.

Free Trade is a Ponzi Scam and when it collapses it will take the entire global economy down with it.

People think it’s bad? Let them look at places like Somalia and some of the former Soviet countries.

That is where we are headed, too, thanks to our politicians who have sold us down the river.