In this economy

I may be lucky, I have friends from all strata of life, from highly educated and super successful to high school drop out and working minimum wage. I have always seemed to fit somewhere in between, not the dimmest bulb in the socket, not the lowest paid worker on the line.

I got a call yesterday from a friend who has often been in the same boat as myself. Working, making some money, sometimes more, sometimes less. Now he is making nothing. Laid off a month ago, he was convinced his skills, both technical and people, would land him something, quickly. That has not been the case.

What do you do when you are closer in age to retirement than college? It is a question more and more people seem to be making. It seems that we have entered a new phase of economics, where the most skilled, the most talented and being passed over for the cheapest worker, no matter what it is they bring to the table. Mind you, I have hired people before, and sometimes the only option is to hire the person willing to work for the lowest wage. Maybe that is the case with most jobs now.

My sense is that most businesses are as nervous as most workers when it comes to the future of America. This has nothing to do with who the president is, but more likely, who the president was. In my opinion, and I had a very heated argument during a dinner in Philadelphia this past week, George Bush is the worst president of my lifetime, and this is a lifetime that includes Richard Nixon. In some ways, Bush has been a brilliant manipulator of economics and fear. He was able to get huge tax breaks for the richest Americans and get the rest of us so worried about the next terror attack that very few of us bothered to look at the evidence that Iraq was conspiring to actually attack, or do much of anything else.

You do those two things, lower taxes in a time of war and lie a country into a war that has no end plan, and you doom a generation to bewilderment and cynicism. To do this while talking a good game of bipartisanship, all the while loading the supreme court with the most conservative judges in recent history is another milestone that will not soon be forgotten. Juggling these missteps would be enough for most presidents trying to ruin our country, but instead and sitting back in the Texas ranch and thinking he had really thrown a wrench into the American system of equality and capitalism, Bush borrowed and spent like a bimbo with a gold card. His debts, his spending, his growth of government, use of torture and other war crimes will certainly lead many to name his worst president ever, but what he also seems to have done is leave the country in such a funk that there does not appear to be an easy way out.

Generally, over the past 20 years or so, the economy has found a new bubble to inflate. Investors could not throw enough money at the internet bubble in the 90's. The housing market followed when internet stocks went from thousands to pennies. The housing market, again in part thanks to George Bush and his economic policies, burst big time, we were left with trillions of dollars of bad investments. What to do those mega millionaire investors who hover over Wall Street must have been saying. Where is the next bubble?

What if we are out of bubbles? Having sent many regular manufacturing jobs into slave labor camps in third world countries, many people in America are finding it impossible to find a regular job. President Obama seems preoccupied with silliness and accepting bills that are so watered down as to be meaningless, other leaders, like the Palins and Gingriches, have no new ideas and resort to, imagine this, more tax cuts for the wealthy. A country at drift, fighting two endless wars, having been lied to and bankrupted by a president with no vision, and now, alone in supremacy and deeply in debt to other countries, we must find a way to not only create a stable economy, but actually nurture and grow one.

My job searching friend is looking everywhere, way beyond our borders even, not for a well paying job with outlandish benefits, but for work that pays. I wished him the best and offered a room just in case. How did we get here and how do we get back?