America's Poverty Epidemic-- A Disease Of Global Banking, (Covid As Death Blow,) Media Won't Cover The Story—Obsessed With Race, Gender, Woke Blinders To Deflect From A Collapsing Society

“Entrapment is this society’s

—sole activity.”

—Ed Dorn

A few weeks ago, a video came up on my feed, and I watched it. Then the next video on the same theme came up and I watched that too. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and I had lost track of time. These two films took over all my usual thought and research patterns, displaced them. Especially the second one (“Two American Families”) I could not stop thinking about.

Both were about American poverty—a taboo subject.

I didn't watch them as somebody who sits above it all and feels pity. I watched them, and saw also elements of my own story, and my family’s, that had been obscured by our American Miracle belief systems. (As emigres to Sweden, who returned.)

I think you know how I have generally railed against socialism, communism and even social democracy in my native Sweden. I don’t disavow those antipathies, but I see that I was, through my mother who raised us alone, working three jobs, (in Sweden) very inclined to believe in The American Dream. I now see it’s a cynical mirage projected by dark global banks to keep Americans in the casino of “hope.” The entire design tilts downward in a spiral, desired for people to blame themselves all the way down. And to never stop thinking the lucky break is just around the bend.

We were always going to return to America when the custody wars (such as my mother imagined them) were mute, when my sister and I were both 18. All of us were going to get out if that dreamless socialist dystopia, return to America, and “make it,” to use my mother’s term.

When we did come back to the states, in the mid 1980s, my mother was unable to use her Swedish nursing degrees, and wound up as a live in housekeeper for the very wealthy, like Bernard Baruch, to cite one. She lived in an attic, in Forest Hills, Queens, and my heart ached. Because my estranged polyglot father had tumbled onto the airwaves in 1960, and interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. as his first ever on air interview, we somehow believed interesting-ness, or his lucky star, would carry us. My mother had aristocratic Swedish roots, and had been a Pan American stewardess in the late 50s. Before the age of 5, we lived a charmed life in a long gone America, in New York City, at that. The turn of the century Broadway building, with courtyard and fountains that we lived in served as a Potemkin village, tricking us into not confronting the hard realities of money. Or the hard realities of divorce, as a way to crash straight down through many levels of social class.

My own chronic financial struggles were reassigned exotic causes, such as being a target of Tony Fauci’s blights, and the resulting traumas and health challenges. Journalism was once a working class profession, but turned into an elite swamp filled with snooty liars by the 1990s. That’s another essay for another time.

I’m going to say things I normally would never say.

My first employment in journalism (at SPIN) paid $5 an hour. (1985.) My first salary was $12,000 a year. As a free lancer, in recent years even, the pay for a story, a feature story, was between $175 and $250—even if you spent three days writing it.

When I worked on a single story, for Harper’s over a period of two years, the pay was $11,000. I moved our family in with my father, during its final gestation—certain I was investing in my glorious future as a journalist. (I’d been at it for 20 years by then.)

My father instructed me never ever to let Harper’s know I was under water financially. One concealed those things. One was lucky to be in the game at all, and those who had the real jobs were from Ivy League backgrounds, and had trust funds.

To be clear, as Obama likes to say: Nobody asked me to do something so rarified and dangerous, nobody owed me “job security.” It was my compulsion, and my problem. When Arianna Huffington came along, she removed the entire pay structure of the profession and paid her writers in “access to the hive.” (I never wrote for HuffPo.) I coined the term “Tsarist media” for that era—starting circa 1999.

I concealed my broke-ness inside veils of self-recrimination, not knowing how to connect effort/toil/value with actual income, and always feeling guilty that my chosen profession was as “needed” as Venetian glass blowing. The phrase “starving writer” points to a pathology that holds that writers should not be paid because we are vainglorious, obsessive mules, and we are. Editors—they got paid.

Until I watched these two films below—and I acknowledge, I am not a wage slave—I didn’t realize there was a giant “worm” as I now call it, that was chasing me (and my family) my whole life, and it is the economic system put in place, if I have understood it right, by Alexander Hamilton, (who was a foreign agent who ensured we never left the Crown.) The Worm is the economic system itself, with all its hidden grinding gears, crushing functional life for what we call the “middle class.” (With nobody beneath them, so why are they “middle?”)

My father, Barry, was a radio broadcaster and interviewer for 60 years, and spoke his last words on air the night before he died, at 90. When he died, he was not in his home. We had to move him and his wife Sara out of his home (a New York City rent stabilized apartment) because of financial spiraling, and the cost of home care. For the last few years of his career, he was paid nothing. Radio networks, like magazines, say, with regret, like “we can’t pay,” and the guilt of the broadcaster, even at his level, turns inward. He always told me I was one gig away from being back in the game. I tried, in vain, to be hired for labor jobs, all the way to coat check jobs. An Austrian physician named Christian Fiala rescued me for years, helped me with rent, out of the blue. I have had angels—real angels, and some of them are reading this right now. I’m not complaining—I’m confessing.

I’m describing something—something. What exactly remains to be revealed.

When my father was a producer for Tex McCrary in the 1960s, he and my mother moved in to a 7 room apartment in New York City with a rent around $360 a month.

”Back then we called it “communications,” he once told me.

People always asked me to bring him to various radio events at which he would be honored as a legend. “He’s a legend without a job,” I would whisper silently to myself, imagining I said it to the organizers, the radio community—but I wouldn't dare. It was taboo to speak of money.

He was privileged, and always said so, and I am too. And Substack (you) have given me my first defense in 20 years against The Worm.

The two films are not about a radio broadcaster and his anti-Pharma black sheep daughter in New York City, whose monetary struggles the people in the two films would give their right arm to have. The two films are about the majority of Americans, who get called “middle class” but for some reason, are never called what they are, which is working class. Wage slaves.

The first one—a recent documentary made by a foreign crew— is about Americans who live in their vehicles, or occasionally, motels. The second is even more devastating, as it covers a very long span of time: A PBS documentary that follows two American working class families for almost 20 years. It’s called “Two American Families,” and, being PBS, they try to hang it on one family being black, one being white. Race mattered, however, not at all, but rather, the white family lost their home first. Both families had outstanding work ethics, both families had strong family values, and were strong Christians. The old me was resistant to these narratives, as I believed they were covertly socialist, or in some way challenging my own inner faith in the ghost we call “The American Dream.” Hands overhead—I surrender. I was blind. I was always telling myself stories about how soon I would Houdini my way up and out.

My sister Bibi made sure I read “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich, around 2018 when I was living in Texas and trying again to “start over” by working as a waitress, which I worked as for many years before and during college. I got hired by Denneys but only ever worked as a hostess because my brain fog made it too hard to master the cash register. (That place has a crazy menu, with literally dozens of desert/ice cream/toppings etc options.) Denneys was the first place to hire me at my age and with my strange resume, so I appreciate them a lot. I made vanishingly little money, and felt awkward. Eventually, I was needed by my father and stepmother back in New York and returned. I told my sister Barbara Ehrenreich didn't quite understand that there is a Holy Spirit in America that is more than numbers.

How insensitive. I was arguing for some kind of…magic…that would take care of things?

But Barbara Ehrenreich was correct—American workers getting minimum wage can not live, certainly can not save, and now…are moving into their vehicles by the tens of thousands, telling themselves their poverty is their fault, something or other they didn't do right. The American Dream is the driving Psy Op of the land. Americans believe their money problems are their own, unique to them. French people hit the streets when they can’t pay their utility bills.

And with my childhood friends in Sweden, who were very much what Swedes call “arbetare” (working class,) I noticed, when I managed to visit them over the years, that they lived better and better, and of course, took at least one vacation a year to a place like Dubrovnik or Mallorca. Find me an American worker who has even been to Canada. Or Niagara Falls.

I just recalled a detail: My first job in Sweden was at an ESSO truck stop, where I ran the cafeteria, an early morning shift. Part of the job was to boil about 200 soft boiled and 200 hard boiled eggs, and put out the Smörgåsbord for the truckers. The memory that stands out is this: The workers were fed actual home cooked food. They ate…eggs? And meat. No junk food. Hence: They were able to work because their bodies were not maimed by chemical laden “food.” This was around 1980-1981.

One time my childhood Swedish friend Anneli, her husband Lars and their son came to New York City (there’s another working class Swedish trip no American will ever take in the opposite direction) and we were walking to the restaurant in Greenwich Village. Lars had seen something on the street that shocked him. At dinner, he was lost in thought. “Lars, what’s wrong?” I asked.

(Lars was, by the way, the first boy Anneli and I ever giggled about as teenagers. They’re still happily married.)

Lars said: “Those builders, they were sitting having food on the rig. They had no safety gear. Where is their safety gear?”

My American friend who was present, John, looked at me like: “What’s he talking about?”

I translated: “In Sweden, workers have safety gear…um..it’s just really different.”

Lars mentioned all the immense fines a Swedish foreman would be saddled with if his workers were unprotected like that. I chalked it down to Swedish working class expectations, but continued to think we Americans had the better system. (Those workers were probably illegal immigrants.)

When I visited Lars and Anneli in Örebro, our home town, around 2017, Lars came home for lunch wearing all kinds of yellow neon safety gear—I saw what he meant. And their floors were heated. And they had a sun room. And a beautiful townhouse. Vacation photos…Great food. When we were kids, Anneli’s mom cleaned houses and her father, on permanent disability, laid on his back listening to “police radio.” Anneli lived in the closet so as not to have to share a room with her brother and sister. Lars never went to what we would call “college” but always worked, at stable jobs, in factories, and rose through the ranks. I heard about all their latest vacations, and Anneli showed me to my room. As she stood up she said, “Trump? Neej,” and crinkled her nose. I felt defensive, as I had voted for him. I thought: “Well, he’s the only guy our working classes have so I don’t understand your snobbery. Sorry, he’s not Olof Palme. You don’t understand America.”

Nobody does.

Anneli was always very beautiful and very opinionated. She was the first child who tried to speak to me in English in the snow-covered playground in Örebro, in 1977.

Our friendship was always challenged by my anti-socialism, (from our communist-youth party indoctrination early days) never mind voting for the monster Trump.

But Trump was peddling American “greatness” instead of American decency.

Always, we have to be spellbound by irrelevant heroica, while minimum wage remains un-liveable, while corporations offer woke symbolism and propaganda as worker’s rights. Americans who live in their cars speak of how comfortable their car actually is, compared to what they thought. And I myself am eyeing my car…as we pack up Doug’s house, going on the market this week; We pulled out 60 years of family stuff, these last few months. Doug is retired, worked his life as a school custodian, and can’t keep up with property taxes in Connecticut. Selling the house is what Americans do, these days. The car is the new house. We re-invent ourselves as “nomads,” and declare we really want to see Yellowstone National Park. Always, we narrate and trip like this. Because we’re not…poor.

I want to reassure you all I am not morphing into a socialist.

I want what they have, not in Sweden necessarily, but how about Spain? People don’t make much money but they all live good lives and there is no WORM chasing them. They work, they rest. They go to the ocean with sturdy canvas beach umbrellas, in small stick shift cars, they have terraces, they celebrate all holidays and birthdays and anniversaries—and all across Spain, a cafe con leche is the same one 1.30 Euros. No more no less, if you’re at the finest hotel, the Alhambra cafe, or you’re at a bus stop cafe. THAT’S what I noticed and that’s what I want. A spirit in the land that does not jack up the price of a cup of coffee because it would be unseemly and it’s just not done. When I brought a sick kitten (the kitten story I still owe you) to a vet in Almūnécar, she didn’t charge for the exam because, as she said, I was saving this small life. The medications were a few Euros. How do we achieve a nation that doesn’t charge what it can get away with, but what the Medievals called “the right price?”

I’ve told you—when my son had a climbing accident and smashed his leg in Spain, in 2018, and needed three surgeries and months of rehabilitation, the bill was 0.00. Because he had a $250 student insurance policy. I fell into worship of Spain and its medical system, whether you want to call it “socialism” or just something Spanish and decent. I don’t know the inner workings.

That was the beginning of me coming out of my own brainwashing about The American Dream and “capitalism.”

Also: when I got to my son’s hospital room the night I arrived, from New York, around 11 pm…the window was open. They brought me sheets, pillow and blanket, and the next morning, the best instant coffee with milk I ever had. No worm. No insane rules. No being treated like prisoners. No fear of air, or open windows. Real food—even avocado and fresh tomatoes, on the tray each day.

The EU has not yet ruined all of Europe.

With these two films, I embark on what is for me a new theme, a new subject: Life in America, poverty in America, and the real lives of the America’s working class. Why do we say “middle class?” What is that exactly?

I’m saying “working class.” Where I grew up, the “arbetare” were the special class—the ones everything revolved around. Doctors and white collar professionals were hated—factory workers revered.

And yeah, my Swedish “red” roots, (age 12-14) are emerging, to my surprise. I may have to call Anneli and admit I was wrong about some things, and open a small part of my belligerent, anti-Communist heart to those old Social Democrats, who ruled my young mind, and who I cast off in protest so long ago. Who needed them? We were headed for bigger things…the American Dream.

It’s not false, it’s not a mirage, but it’s also not something to rely upon—it’s a PSY OP, essentially. Same as the casino, always rigged for the house.

I can hear my mother saying, in her Swedish accent: “We’re gonna make it, girls.”

Sometimes I wonder if we should have stayed.

But then, we wouldn’t be here, talking to each other. So maybe there is something to it after all, this American dreamer spirit.

Also, as a bonus clip, a Senate hearing from 3 months ago that should have been big news, with Bernie Sanders grilling Starbucks founder Schultz about his persecutions of employees who wanted to Unionize. He denies all legit and proven charges, under oath, and waxes about how his corporation values the workers, in their “green aprons.”

I found to my amazement that I agree with every word Bernie Sanders says, and nothing Rand Paul says.

Rand Paul speaks of “capitalism” in a way that literally sounds like Jonestown to me, (now, today) in light of what you are about to see, if you watch these two documentaries.

#Kennedy24.