If you are currently unemployed, or have been unemployed for much of the last 2-3 years,  carefully calculate when the starting quarters of eligibility for SS benefits began and when you will have accrued enough AGAIN (forget your 20+ years of prior employment cause the clock has restarted), and what quarter you plan to retire.  If you are 45+  odds are that unless you start a new job TOMORROW and never again are unemployed, you will not qualify for SS ever, at any age of retirement.  So if you don't have an IRA, 401(K) or a generous pension, you are probably facing an old age of poverty.  Even with them, you may be.

You see, I suspect the holding jobs hostage goes way beyond the petty partisan "I wanna get what I want and screw you."  It is about ensuring that there will be no "SS burden" from baby-boomers by wholesale disqualifying them, about ripping up the wealth building avenues for minorities that scare the upper scum, uh crust -- through taking your home, your bank account (through fees), your income stream, and forcing you to spend all the assets you have just to eat today.  The REVOLUTION has started.  The rest of us have revolted people like the KOCH brothers and the MURDOCHS of this nation by actually wanting to participate in our democracy, uh republic, uh society, uhm NATIONAL DIALOGUE.

The ultra wealthy started it.  It is class warfare,  If you don't belong to that privileged class (and Herman Cain, you do NOT as they pat you on your head and send you out to do their battles), you are its target..  You're the worm for these big fish.  Do not dream you matter to them.  

God Bless the USA, may she rest in peace.  She died while you were frittering your life away on idle entertainment, passionate religious distractions (from What would Jesus Do to anti-abortion rallies), petty daily concerns of your family, popular fiction about werewolves and vampires instead of thought-provoking essays and non-fiction, and silly Madison Avenue-stoked insecurities about having the "latest" fashion name on your clothes, shoes, car, etc.  I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU, but YOUR CHILDREN WILL INHERIT THE SCORCHED EARTH YOU HAVE PISSED AWAY!

The other thing that happened yesterday was that I got a call from the SSI office regarding my (forced) application for financial assistance.  I say forced because when I was hospitalized in May, I awoke on the 19th, after having arrived about 5 pm, being admitted at about 6:45 pm, lain in the "holding area" of the county hospital until about 4 am and then put in a 5 bed ward, to find a cheery young woman telling me that I had to apply for SSDI before they could honor Gold Card Status and pay the bills for me.    So we filled out the forms to the best of my groggy, lacking all the back up documents for the application, condition.

The way this works is that they submit the apllication for RSDI (Retirement, survivors, Disability Income).  This is what the old Social Security for retirees, dependent (minor) survivors of a deceased person and the disabled used to apply for, all rolled into one.  I already knew I would be rejected because when I applied in the mid-1990s for Disability due to my lupus, I was denied on the grounds that as an educated person I should be able to work.  Sure, and when you find an employer who likes employees who miss random numbers of days when the pain and fatigue are simply overwhelming, and who sometimes gets up feeling good but within a few hours starts nodding off at their desk without the help of heroin or other illegal drugs (or even legal soporifics for that matter), let me know.  I haven't worked since, so now, although I worked from age 15 to 40-something, sometimes 2-3 jobs, I no longer have enough qualifying quarters within the past 10 years (DUH!), so they again declined SSDI.  I SHOULD have gotten it before.

After about 10 minutes of questions, the woman told me she was terminating the interview because I was ineligible.  Why?  I have more than $2000 in my savings, checking, CD's, and IRA and my husband's 401K.  Why didn't they ask that question firs,t I wonder?  Could have saved us both the time, and the taxpayer money.  Second, I don't work, my husband (age 49) started his third year of unemployment just after Labor Day. without much interest, even for part-time work (7 offers in the three years, all within the 2nd & this new third year.  I have more than $2000 because I inherited about $10,000 from my mother's insurance policies, and the estate was only recently settled.  Oh he was offered a temp job last week -- 1.5 hours one way from our house, and about an hour's worth of the pay at the job per day in gas required to get there (no bus service available which would get him there without several hours of travel each way and a long walk from the stop to the job site). 

What is the purpose of making me spend all of that money when I may need it to live on next year.  Rebuilding a life would be a lot easier if I got  a little help NOW despite that money,, instead of waiting until I have no assets.  If I spend it, and my husband doesn't ever get another job making enough to support us and get him to a job, I'll need help until I die paying for medical expenses, care-taking while he's at work, and part of our normal expenses, since $10 an hour (much less than he was making before) will not cover the basic expenses in Houston.  My husband's prior salary barely did, when you figure in the cost of clothing, gasoline, maintenance on the car my brother lets us use, medicines, food, etc. etc.  In fact, a home health care worker for 4 hours a day would eat up his entire take home.  The guy across the street has MS, and he has someone who comes in to help him, and his wife told me his entire income of about $40,000 a year barely covers that, his health insurance and medications.  Do the math.

As to the 401(K), if we take it out we pay a substantial penalty, and if they raise retirement age in Congress, it's likely neither of us will be alive to collect it, or Social Security we both paid into.  Which means either my older brother will inherit it, which is ok because he's paying all our bills and expenses now, or if he's gone, it will go to charity.  We have discussed this, and our charity of choice is one which helps orphans and foster children who are "aging out" of the system get established in college, careers, and life  (See http://www.cwla.org/programs/fostercare/agingoutresources.htm  for data on the 20,000-25,000 of these kids per year and their problems, and just think about how much help YOU got from your parents during your years from 18 - 25 or so and imagine facing life without that help.)   In this economic climate, these kids face daunting challenges as jobs and contributions are thin on the ground.  Why can't Congress remove the penalty for long-term unemployed, people losing their homes, people like myself who are denied SSDI because we have been disabled but denied and lack the qualifying quarters.

I know WHY it is.  Some people are so afraid SOMEONE might get a penny of THEIR money.  It's still insane policy to force people all the way down the road into abject poverty and then expect them to climb out without any assets to work with.  It would be insane policy to TAX them into it, like Cain's 9-9-9 would as well. 

Tomorrow I have to deal with the county clinic doctor who has been billing FULL PRICE (instead of my Gold Card price I was eligible for as of the date of the visit) until the RSDI/SSI decision came down, and has already turned me over to a collection agency.  Not only did I not have the money to pay full price ($320 for an office visit -- my private rheumatologist doesn't charge me that much for a visit AND the inhouse lab work!)  --  I was reluctant to do so because I was afraid I'd never get back my overpayment.  The Physicians Group refused to even tell me what the Gold Card fee would be or to negotiate for me to pay that amount until this process was settled.  Now that it has been, I wonder what they will come up with as an excuse for not billing me the Gold Card price.  To top it all off, the last correspondence I have seems to say that this clinic, run by the Harris County Hospital District "does not deal with Ben Taub Hospital" (where I was hospitalized) and will not even call them to discuss my eligibility.  All the clinics and the hospitals are run by Harris County Hospital District, so what's that deal?  They told me to call LBJ Hospital (where I have only been once in my life, and not as a patient, but to visit my Little Sister in the 70s when she had her baby there) to "get your records straightened out."  They also seemed to suggest that since I didn't use LBJ, I should be going to another (more distant) clinic.  However, their email was rambling and unclear, so I might have misunderstood them. ;)

So happy days in