the economy

Yes, I am scared. I have a relatively secure job, but you just never know. I listen to the Nightly News every night, and I wonder if this is what the beginning of the Great Depression would have sounded like if had been broadcast every second of the day. That whole frog in the boiling water thing may be happenening precisely because we see every second of this unfolding each time we open a paper or turn on the television. Yes, it is frustrating that all of our taxpayer money was thrown at these banks with no accountability. Citibank just used a whole bunch of it to buy a corporate jet. You can understand this sentiment, then:


One of my credit card companies just raised my fixed 9.9% interest rate to 22.9%. When I contacted them, they told me they had slipped an "opt out" notice in my statement in November. I pay my bills online and hadn't opened the statement. I spoke with a supervisor, and she was a bitch to me, and she told me there was nothing I could do, that I couldn't go back in time. This cruel voice on the other end of the line is probably just another person wondering about the security of her own employment, a person who has been told to be as bitchy as possible, to keep as much interest flowing into that company as she can. I know it isn't her fault. It's the people we rarely see, the rich guy at the top who thinks nothing of buying a jet with taxpayer money, who thinks corporate jets are just the way people get around, who has no idea what it means to cut coupons, to scrounge up what you have and sell it on ebay, to wonder how you will pay to have the sewer line repaired on your home, even as this sewage has backed up into your yard for the 2nd time. To those on the top, I echo this sentiment. Why don't you just jump?