Ready for some unstructured time

I don't know, maybe it's my age or the fact that I have been working at the same job for close on 30 years now, but I am so ready to retire that I am probably going to do so next year when I finally hit the 30 year mark on the job. What makes me nervous is that every time I stand in grocery store check out lines and read the magazines while waiting for customers in front of me, I find myself scanning the articles on retirement and every one of them insists that you must have at least a million dollars in savings on which to retire. I have nothing, no IRA, no annuity, no 401(K), nothing of the kind. I've been following Wall Street for too long now and just Friday, the Dow Jones fell so low that it wiped out the entire year's worth of gains. Now, it will probably rebound within a week or so, depending on the news and such, but they say that you should not gamble your money in investments unless you have money to lose, which I do not. I know that I should have saved for retirement all these years, but being a casual student of Wall Street via listening to NPR for all these years, I have grown leery of putting my money in what feels like a giant casino game. So I have thus far avoided opening a retirement account because I am not sure that there is such a thing as a safe investment anymore. But I find myself worrying about the idea of living on two thirds of my already meager salary that I barely survive on now, so that seems to indicate that I had better prepare to find at least a part time job to supplement my income. But I am weary as hell of working for someone else and having to put my life in their control, as in, what I make, when I can take time off and more.

The weak economy in the past decade or so has drastically impacted public sector, tax supported jobs like what I have. My salary has basically remained flat for the better part of a decade or so and it has impacted my ability to save for retirement, as in, I haven't been able to do so. I have needed every dollar I make just to pay bills and survive with a few hundred dollars in the bank at month's end as a tiny safety cushion. The huge financial crash a few years back has worsened what was already a bad economy because of the dot-com crash. Financial bubbles have wreaked havoc on the economy for quite some time now and it does not help that we have a Congress in place right now that has made it Job One to destroy our current President by refusing to pass any bills that will help the economy to grow because it might make him look good. This is a sign of how dysfunctional Washington has become. It's hard to find any enthusiasm for any political candidate anymore because of the huge wash of special interest cash that basically governs who wins what elections anymore. It's very disheartening and it makes me feel like my vote, my money, do not matter anymore. I attended the kick off campaign rally for the Obama campaign in Columbus a few weeks back and found the entire experience to be a terrible disappointment. As campaign volunteers, we were supposed to have priority seating close to the President, but our carload got there just as the doors were closing, so we had to make a mad dash to get into the building before they prevented anyone else from coming in. Well, this was a 30,000 seat venue at Ohio State University, and the place was less than half full by the time the President actually came to speak. We were so far up in the nosebleed section that we could neither see nor hear the President speak, so it was rather pointless to be there. We were told to sit behind the President so that we could be seen on TV, but when I watched the speech at home, we could not even be seen, so it really did not matter that we were sitting there. That the hall was less than half full when four years ago it would have been standing room only was a disappointing sign that there is a definite enthusiasm gap for Obama that may well lose him the election. In fact, I am predicting that Romney will win by a 52 to 48 percent margin. Even though there are sectors of the Republican Party that do not like him, they will turn out to vote just to get rid of Obama and will hold their noses and vote for someone they dislike just to be rid of someone they dislike even more. I predict a GOP tsunami this fall because of the Citizens United ruling that basically will allow billionaires to buy this election for their candidates. Their goal is to make this a one party country and to make the Democrats irrelevant, and sadly, our party is very good at doing that to themselves. So far, they have not managed to win back the support of disgruntled Obama supporters who worked and voted for him four years ago, and I don't think that they will be successful in so doing,

The very weak May jobs report of only 69,000 jobs created, which bumped the unemployment rate back up to 8.2% does not bode well for the Dems in the fall. If the economy continues to weaken over the summer, hello President Romney, goodbye President Obama. And we'd better find us a good strong candidate for 2016 to win back the White House. I say, let's nominate Hillary. She has overwhelming support right now and I almost wish that she would be on the ticket with Obama, but it would look bad for him to jettison Biden and replace him with Hillary. Still.......I wish he'd do it, but I know he won't. So I say, Hillary 2016! We can pretty much kiss this election goodbye, because if the economy doesn't rebound this summer, the election is effectively over. And sadly, I do not think it will. We always seem to have a strong winter recovery followed by a weak summer and fall that dampens spirits. And if an article I read in the paper this morning is any indication, businesses are not going to hire anytime soon because of the uncertain atmosphere surrounding the economy, practically guaranteeing that the weak economy will continue past summer and well into the fall, thereby handing the keys to the White House to Romney. I just hope that I am wrong and that things bounce back soon, but I seriously doubt it. We may well be headed for another summer of our discontent, unfortunately, which will, in turn, change the momentum of the fall election in favor of the GOP. Oh, goody, just what we need, forward, into the past.......back to policies that favor the rich and leave the rest of us behind. So much for progress.........and the very people who tend to vote for these candidates are among the poorest and least educated and tend to vote against their own economic interests, just the kind of people that the TEA Party tends to target to vote their agenda. Well, since they are being funded by a pair of billionaire brothers whose agenda is to favor the wealthiest of the wealthy, the TEA Party will no doubt become the dominant political player in this country for many decades to come since they can tap into unlimited money, and at the end of the day, money speaks, and to hell with the rest of us, sadly. So maybe I won't be able to retire next year after all. I may end up having to work until they push me out dead on a gurney. But I hope not. I'm ready to retire now, not fifteen or twenty years from now, but now. I just want my life back, that's all, and while I am young enough and healthy enough to truly enjoy it.