It's the economy, stupid...

I am having a hard time believing that one-twelfth of 2010 is almost gone... Just before Christmas I bought a used leather couch from someone who was moving, actually, a loveseat, in good condition, and I had an old, once wonderful couch that my two cats had shredded (not the couch per se but the arm rests) so I was trying to figure out how I would get the old couch out, and get rid of it. The landlord wants these broken up with an ax so they can fit into the garbage container... otherwise he gets charged for removal. Anyway, a young friend who heard me talking about it said he had a neighbor with a bunch of children and others living in her apartment, because people have been losing their jobs and moving in together, and he thought she could use the couch!

I felt good and bad about my couch going to someone else, because even though it had been a very good couch, the arm rests looked terrible, but within a half hour someone from the woman's apartment came over and they loaded the couch away, and were very happy because the people who were sleeping on the floor would now have a comfortable couch to sleep in! One woman's castoffs is another woman's treasure, particularly in this economy...

Now today a neighbor visited; I have been helping her with a problem with Bank of America (one of their new ways of stealing money from their depositors... they 'sell' life insurance to people who would never buy it, and deduct outrageous monthly fees directly from their depositors' accounts... no policy is ever sent to the depositor, and it's an automatic deduction so people don't always realize for a while that their money is being taken...) This particular woman earns a pittance, and when she found out that she had been paying for $100,000 in life insurance... she joked that had she known this she might have killed him for the insurance!. Today she wanted to know if I could help her file her tax return; she has a 7 month-old baby who was happily gurgling away while she explained the situation, and a 14 year-old, and last year her common-law husband and she made, between the two of them, before taxes, $19,000. So I wondered if any of the people I hear talking about the economy and complaining about Obama's 'outrageous' 'socialist' measures could survive, a whole family of four or five (there is another daughter also...) on $19,000 before taxes...

We are doing health care rallies to get health care reform approved, and I don't understand how anyone can argue about this! I haven't had health care since 1995. I go to a dentist in Mexico, and although I use mostly alternative health care (chiropractors and acupuncturists, juicing and vitamins and meditation) it's a bit of a time bomb, were something to happen...

Health care is a fundamental human right, no different from the right to food and shelter and speech. And we are the only industrialized nation that has no health care policy covering all its citizens.