America, you EEEDIOT!!!

Today, I had my benefits meeting with our overworked HR person, who I shall herein call Person(elle), as she is female, (heroic,) and does the job of 10 all by herself. Person(elle) manages to be, somehow, calm, polite, and bright-eyed at all times, despite the fact that she’s constantly hounded by others. I was hired on over two weeks ago, and this was the first chance she got to go over benefits with me, just to give you an idea of how booked the poor dear usually is. My head is still swimming that I somehow have to make ends meet, and still pay for these damned benefits, whether they do come out pre or post tax! The scary part is, according to her, my place of employment is paying upwards of 80% of the true cost of the plans. If this is the case, and I’m paying about $90/month for insurance, which is WAY better than the plan at my last job, they’re floating me here for about $400/month of true cost, as a single individual. That doesn’t include what they’re kicking back into my “retirement” plan, which, admittedly, is a far less generous figure.

It’s little wonder that nobody pays pop squat in salary, anymore. With large employers forced to provide expensive health plans (which still don’t cover some very basic crap, mind you), they can’t afford to give ground-level workers a real salary, even when forcing folks who live hand to mouth in the first place to pony up for (said) crappy coverage. We’ll leave out, for the moment, that this is the fault of money-grubbing moral misfits who couldn’t adequately manage anything other than balance sheets being at the top of the corporate pile... After all, who wants to fault the people RUNNING companies for draining millions from the coffers while running business into the ground. No, entry level workers, whose willingness to cry nightly over bills while staring at zero balances in their bank accounts are clearly the ones who must suffer. And now Hillary wants everybody to buy into PRIVATIZED healthcare, ostensibly because it will make things cheaper for all? Ignoring the fact that it’s just going to provide an excuse for even more outlandish corporate excesses in the insurance industry, I have one thing to say.

@#$% that shit. It’s time for this country to take care of its’ people adequately. That means several things, the first of which is that we have to dispel the American misconception that government = evil automatically. Worse yet, linked to that particular feat of historically impossible legerdemain, we have to convince them that BIG businesses are, intrinsically, not to be trusted. Don’t get me wrong here… I’m not talking the chairman of the board lunching with Satan, batshit-crazy-evil or anything. No. It’s more like, if a company is so large that it doesn’t have to give a fig about, say, losing 100,000 customers because its’ services stink, then it’s not a people-friendly company, AND YOU SHOULDN’T DO BUSINESS WITH IT. Some insurance companies already look like this… Imagine the bloat with all those extra subscribers! Imagine the fat piles of cash the piggy executives will be rutting in, and all because the government attempted to make all the idiots happy by abrogating the responsibilities of good government. These people are getting elected for ABROGATING THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES. Unfortunately, despite the last eight years, we do still have one of the better open and fair election systems anywhere, so the real onus is on the American people. Wake up you ignorant dumb-asses.

It took most of my restraint not to leap over Person(elle)’s desk and throttle her to death… And this is one of the nicest, calmest, best co-workers I have, mind you… Just because corporate America is winning the war with the consumer, and making us like it. I hate the Protestant Work Ethic. It’s almost as stupid a ruse as “The Purfuit of Happineff” (‘cause all the s-es look like f-s). We’re living in a society based on the idea of the pursuit of PROPERTY ueber alles, children. Watch out. We’re about to get steam-rolled.