A Thanksgiving Note From Dan...

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for:

• Every person in the workforce doing the work of two or three people and shoring up the economy and paying their taxes and giving to charities despite not getting a REAL raise in almost 40 years as compared to inflation. You are the last of the last through a long, long run of cruel and heartless layoffs, and if many more of you fail or are laid off, the entire corporate economy will come crashing down like the house of cards it has been made into. You all know the spread sheets can't include every thing that can go wrong and complicate your work, especially with so few people to help, despite the insane propaganda from Manglement that says you can do everything in X.5 hours according to the test labs in Asia. You do it still, despite the exhaustion, sleep deprivation, burnout, ruined holidays, and the cliff of depression just before your tired feet.
• Every person still looking for work despite the endless string of layoffs and rejection letters and collection notices and threatening letters from the banks.
• All the people trying to lower the nearly 1/1 ratio of homeless persons to foreclosed, vacant homes around the country.
• All the people spending hours and hours of their precious "free" time trying to document the failures, faults, frauds, and vulnerabilities in our election systems, and trying to push our government to make them right. I know you are doing it for every American, regardless of their politics.
• All the people running for the most basic, unpaid, unloved, unrecognized basic offices of our government and actually trying to do right by your fellow citizens.
• Everyone who is unemployed, and facing hard, lonely circumstances, yet holds hope for something better yet to come, and shares that spirit with your fellow citizens.

You are the sane among us, the caring among us, the ones who are holding up the net for the rest of our fellow citizens that have been brutalized by the insane form of capitalism that is being practiced  in America today, and have fallen from the thin perch those of us left are standing on. I know all of you are holding out hope for change, for real and honest caring to finally come into being in our society. You are NOT alone.

A few other things I am thankful for:

• Every dollar in a CEO, Executive, Politician, Billionaire, or hedge fund Manager's bank accounts, foreign or domestic - because I know that some day, some way, the pendulum will swing back, and all of those dollars will again start flowing through the economy, giving honest labor back a decent life.
• The thought of how many middle class Americans could be employed for $50-70k per year out of the hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and extreme pay you are squirreling away for "someday."
• The fact that when a game of Monopoly gets to the point that one person has all the money, the game stops because no one else has the money to buy anything, so everyone just starts a NEW game. That tells me that the new game has to be close to starting.
• The understanding that a world based on competition instead of compassion crashes over, and over, and over again being driven into the mass consciousness of global society despite the best efforts of a cruel and greedy few to hide it through waiting for the experienced to die off and controlling the "official" media and education.
• The new-found ability of regular people all over the globe to speak directly to each other, and come to the above-mentioned understanding, and to the understanding that most of the divisions between people all over the planet are artificially created by those same few to foster their "winning" of the game, so that when the new game starts, it can have truly compassionate rules.
• That NOTHING, ANYWHERE, EVER AGAIN of evil can remain hidden for more than a few days - because if you can find evil, you can correct it.

So, happy Thanksgiving, America, and yes, the rest of the world.  Because of the sane and compassionate people all over it, there is hope, and despite the fact it will take a lot of time and a lot of work, the new game will be better, without all the violence and cruelty and greed.

Dan