Name: Ginny Gnadt
Age: 29
Hometown: Chesapeake, Va.
Occupation: High school teacher
I followed "the plan" to achieve the American dream and now I feel like I'm caught in a stagnant nightmare.

My husband now works for the Navy as a civilian and I am a high school teacher. We bought our two-bedroom townhouse nearly at the peak of the housing boom for $196,500. We're underwater on our mortgage with a high interest rate. I'm looking at having to stick with this house for eight, nine, 10 years.

I really would like to have two or three children, but I just don't think it's feasible to have that many children in this house. It's too small to have a family and it's not what I envisioned for myself when I followed the rules.

When my mom was my age, she was already living in a house where she would raise me and my three sisters. She had already achieved her American dream and I'm not able to do that.

All I want is to move forward and build a life like my parents had. Right now -- that is profoundly out of reach.



Name: David Seaman
Age: 33
Hometown: Lansford, Pa.
Occupation: Programming manager at a TV station
I have been working two or three jobs since college just to get by. My parents only had to have one job and they were raising a family too.

They grew up in a time when a college degree wasn't necessary. In today's society, that's not the case. With that education comes a pricetag. My student loan is about $30,000 and that's what's hurting me. I live in a rickety old house in a small town. I have a roommate to help out.

At 33, I never thought I'd be living the way I'm living due to college debt. The standard of living and the cost of living in the 1960s is different than it is today. The pay was lower, but everything was dirt cheap.



Name: Allison Pompey
Age: 32
Hometown: Baltimore
Occupation: Government contractor and doctoral student
We're originally from Guyana. My father moved here so we could get a better education. My dad bought a house and a car, sent us to school and all of those kinds of things.

Owning a house is not even an option for me.

I thought if I took certain steps ahead of the game to improve my career chances and earning potential, it would be a great idea. It seems that despite all of my hard work and credentials, I can't seem to get ahead financially. Although I believe that my skills and education will allow me to be as well off as my dad, if not better, I don't foresee reaching that point at the same age that he did.

In this country you have that mentality that if you work hard and do what you are supposed to, eventually the things you want, you are going to get. I still have that belief, but it is really frustrating. I've done the right thing my whole life. I'm not seeing the correlation between my efforts and sacrifices and the outcomes.





Name: Jay Magallanes
Age: 36
Hometown: Lynwood, Calif.
Occupation: Senior technician for an electrical adhesives company
I'm starting to see that I'm raising my daughter in totally different times than my parents. The economy sucks and jobs that once kept the middle class comfortable are now setting a huge dividing line between the wealthy and poor.

I can't even afford to get a one-bedroom apartment to put a roof over the head of my daughter and I. It's humiliating to be living at home.

I saw my father rent a three-bedroom apartment. They had two cars. My mom's family is from Cancun so we would always go to Cancun every summer. It seemed that money really wasn't that short.

I make more money now than my dad did in his time and it's just hard. It's very difficult to stay afloat.




Name: Edward Zarate
Age: 50
Hometown: Denver
Occupation: College graduation adviser
My father did not complete high school and with his lone salary in construction was able to provide for a family of four all the things necessary to live a happy, comfortable life. Nice five-bedroom, three-bath, 2,500-square-foot home in a middle-class neighborhood, two cars, a few TVs, a couple of trips.

My wife and I both work in higher education and are struggling, living check to check, to barely provide the same things for a family of four. Smaller home, nice neighborhood and two cars.

We have one child in college, the other will begin college in the fall. We must utilize student loans to pay for their college. A couple of years ago, I had to file bankruptcy to find economic relief.

It is much harder to provide the same things to an average family today than it was 50 years ago. I don't think I've achieved what they've achieved and I never will.




Name: Michael Sipes
Age: 44
Hometown: Long Beach, Calif.
Occupation: Accounting at a small non-profit
I'm definitely feeling like I'm falling out of the middle class since the Great Recession. But I am very thankful I currently have a job.

At this point, I'm not better off than my parents. I am definitely worse off than they are.

My dad makes more than I do. I just bought a condo in the last couple of years. They bought a house when they were 22 or 23. I would have loved to have a house, but it's just way out of our league right now.

I'm more concerned about retirement than they are. They are pretty close to being ready. I don't have very much at all. I feel like I'll have to work until I'm 80. Hopefully I will be able to.

Almost three years ago, I passed the CPA exam in hopes of bettering my chances to find a job with the possibility of upward mobility, some kind of retirement and better earning potential. I have been looking for a new job ever since because I need to fulfill the state-required "audit hours" in order to obtain the actual license. I'm older than most people trying to do this same thing...the jobs seem to be going to recent college grads.

Honeymoon?  We are well into the part of the marriage where the spouses are trying to kill each other.

The American dream was Mammon, simply put, and all these people stepped right into the trap.  The funny money that was thrown out there was not backed by anything, so it was all destined to crumble.  Some say the main problem was the creation of the Fed, others the "Nixon Shock," others the repeal of Glass-Steagall, others the phony housing bubble, but what is certain is that none of this helped.  It was like a series of huge, devastating explosions turning everything to rubble.  It is impossible to even conceive of more fiscal irresponsibility.

If you want to read a site where the posters have very detailed commentary about the crisis we're in, I recommend a local site called Dr. Housing Bubble about the Southern California housing crash which I am currently caught in.  It may be provincial, but it has farther-reaching insights.  There are just so many layers to this disaster.  

There is a kind of poetic justice to all of this.  Since people lived for money and for work, forgetting God -- or confusing God with Mammon like the Purpose-Driven Life Protestants -- now they find themselves, like Sisyphus, carrying an impossibly heavy load, having to work numerous jobs just to get by, laden with debt, noses to the grindstone, exhausted and brutalized.  And yet still all they think about is work and "When will the money come back?"  The answer is -- never.  

There is a prophecy about the Minor Chastisement that talks about how a huge number of people will go bonkers.  That is happening because they believed in an illusion, they thought reality was one way, they thought they were special, untouchable.  When things change, when they realize that reality wasn't like they thought, they will lose their minds, they don't have the resilience and humility that only God can give you.

I believe it.  If one has ever witnessed a middle-aged woman who is used to browbeating her family into submission to her whims react to being contradicted, I think the insanity you describe is easy to imagine.

  Agreed!

I think part I was posted elsewhere on Cath Info

Number CCXXXVIII (238)
    
4 February 2012

DELINQUENT FINANCE II
Delinquent   finance has today a religious significance because it is playing a major part in the enslaving of the entire world by the conscious or unconscious enemies of   God, the smartest of whom have to be well aware that their ultimate purpose is   to send every single soul down to Hell. However, before we present any other piece of their financial machinery, it is necessary to understand the full delinquency of fractional reserve banking, first introduced in the "Eleison Comments" of October 29, last year.

Fractional reserve banking means that a bank need only hold in reserve, ready to be paid   out to customers, a small fraction of the money they put into circulation. It arose in Europe in the late Middle Ages when bankers observed that if they took   in as deposits, say, 100 ounces of gold and gave out 100 slips of paper certifying that the owner of the certificate could claim so much gold from the bank, then almost never at any one time would more than, say, ten customers ever bring in a certificate to claim back a deposit of gold.  And as long as the people had confidence that the bank could and would always have gold to give in return for certificates, then these pieces of paper could happily serve as money, and as such they would circulate amongst the people.

However, the bankers realized meanwhile that in the normal run of business, they needed to hold in reserve only ten ounces of gold for 100 certificates, or, if they held 100 ounces of gold deposited with the bank, then they could issue 1000 paper   certificates. Of these, 900 would have nothing at the bank to back them. They would be "funny money", created by the bank out of thin air, but that would not matter so long as not more than a proportion of one customer out of ten wanted to cash in his paper for a piece of gold.

If they did, then the bank would not have the gold for all the certificates, and either it rapidly borrowed some gold from elsewhere to hand out, or the people risked realizing what a confidence trick had been played on them. If their confidence in the bank then vanished, everybody would want their money back at once – bank runs are only made possible by fractional reserve banking – and large numbers of customers would be left holding in their hands nothing but worthless pieces of paper. The bank would of course be bankrupt, and one could hope it would   disappear altogether.

Thus wherever there is fractional reserve banking, the bank is intrinsically fragile, and it is, ultimately, playing a confidence trick on its customers. Extrinsically, it may protect itself by having a guarantee of support in case of need from, often, a central bank, but that guarantee is only as sure as the guarantor, and   in the meantime it gives a dangerous power to any central bank. Thereby hangs another tale of financial delinquency, but that of compound interest must come first.

Power is at stake, and ultimately souls. Let nobody say these questions have nothing to do with religion. Think of the Golden Calf.

Kyrie eleison.