I Said, It should be illegal to send our jobs overseas. A week later I was fired. So I understand why Joe Stack flew a plane into an IRS building

Originally posted at AlterNet
8:29 am, February 20, 2010:

Just about everybody in America is angry right now. Stop off to buy milk, in a minute you will be in deep overlapping conversation with the cashier about taxes you had to pay last year while billionaires hire tax attorneys to avoid paying, or however else this great sell out of America has hurt you. When Joe Stack flew his plane into the IRS last Thursday morning, I knew why as soon as I heard about it, without having to read his “last words.” It’s the frustration of trying to deal with a government that stopped paying attention decades ago.

Thursday afternoon in fact found me in deep conversation with a guy I just met in the shop minutes earlier, we stood for twenty minutes on a Hollywood Boulevard corner talking about the Medical mess the country is in.

“My friend, they were letting him die,” Harry said. At an East L.A. hospital, his friend finally checked himself out as all they would do is run tests and more tests.

Harry said, “The insurance companies were killing him, spending time on diagnostic tests, he was dying. “He checked out and got a ride to Tijuana, and a doctor there performed the surgery right away, saved his life.”

Often in L.A. we hear stories about how much better medical care you can get in Mexico.

My own Catch 22 is so bad that when I heard Joe Stack flew his plane into the IRS building, I thought immediately of how for more than a year I was So Angry at Social Security. Here is my Catch 22. I lost my job when they sent it to the Philippines. Two weeks later my health insurance was gone. Now I am sick but can’t get on SS Disability, because a doctor who is treating you has to fill out the forms.

See the Catch 22? I can’t get disability because I don’t have a doctor to fill out the forms. Uh, that also means I’m sick and have no medical care. Oh and it also means I still have to work or I will not be able to pay my rent. So to pay the rent I roll out of bed to my computer every day and knock out as many pages of transcription as I can get assigned to me. I have to earn at least $1700 a month to meet my rent and bills and just the basics, no movies, no new clothes. At $1.50 a page, that’s a lot of pages, the pay per page has not gone up since 1998.

Oh, right, one more. Then I get taxed as a self employed person, so it’s a higher rate than if I had a job.

Before I lost that job, I had to be working right on the same floor as the woman who they hired to send our jobs overseas. She was this wealthy damme from Burbank, who in her size 2 suits, would warble into the coffee room to freshen her tea and announce, “Oh I went to the most wonderful fundraiser for the A-a-hmaanso-o-onn last night.” Then she’d waltz back to her desk and in that same loud voice continue her work at selling our jobs to the Philippines, over the phone cold calling like a West Side fundraiser and selling all of us out.

One day in that same coffee room, while everyone else was seething sitting in tension around the table, I walked in and announced, “It should be illegal to send our jobs overseas. I’m a mom, I have a kid about to enter college. I seved in the Naval Reserves.”

A week later I did not have that job anymore.

Everywhere you go today, Americans are angry. I hope others don’t feel the only place to turn to is violence.
I suggest people blog it. Put it all on line, tell your stories. Blog it.

By Kay Ebeling,
Originally posted at AlterNet on SoapBox

Click headline here to go to original post at AlterNet:
I Said, It should be illegal to send our jobs overseas. A week later I was fired. So I understand why Joe Stack flew a plane into an IRS building

Oh I forgot, there's one more Catch 22. That money I earn by typing basically to keep a roof over my head is the other reason I get turned down for Disability. I'm paying my rent working on this treadmill, so I must not be disabled. It's not just one thing, it's lots and lots and lots of things that are broken in this country.
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