Lucky them.                                                        The rest of us.

Great news everybody! The NYSE closed at over 10,000 for the first time in over a year. Who said the bailout isn’t working? I’d say it’s working like a charm. What’s good for the stock market is good for America, right? After all, if the fat cats are making money then the left over crumbs from the feeding frenzy will filter down and create jobs for all the little people like you and me, right?

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t feel all warm and fuzzy about Wall Street’s rebound and resounding success story. It’s recently been reported that many of the too big to fail firms that we bailed out with our taxpayer money are now set to pay out more in bonuses (think averages over $700,000) than they did the year before the big crash. That’s some nice work if you can get it.

 With Congress in their pockets passing laws that only benefit them, how can they lose? They are up to doing exactly what collapsed the market in the first place and they know that we will be forced to bail them out again if we have to. Sure they had a bad year, but look at them now. Talk about prosperity!

But this isn’t about them. It’s about me. It's about me and it's about you. While they had one bad year, my personal worth has gone down the crapper. How are you doing?

I’ve spent a lifetime in the construction industry and I’ve always enjoyed it. Being able to build thing and stand back at the end of the day and actually see your work always held a certain fascination and pride for me. Call me a simple man. I'm fine with that. In many ways I do hold high value for simple things, but that doesn’t make me simple.I know. It's complicated.

After all these years, I’m afraid that my own value in the industry that I've loved is approaching zero. I've come to realize that there is simply no future in construction for me.

In Florida we have three major industries. Agriculture, tourism and development. Agriculture is doing fine, though it is at the mercy and whims of mother nature. It's very mechanized, but there is low paying work for a few weeks during harvests. We had plenty of rain this year, but droughts or lengthy frosts can wreak havoc on crop productions.

Tourism, which includes the restaurant or hospitality industry is also at the mercy of the economic health of the rest of the nation. With staycations becoming the norm for families that are struggling to get by, tourism and hospitalities has suffered mightily.

But, development or construction has suffered the most of the three during this recession. I won’t get into the stories I‘ve heard, but I assure you they are dismal and I don’t see the industry rebounding anytime soon. That leaves me in a bit of a dilemma for an income.

People who work construction are used to project completions or other reasons for leaving a job. We rely heavily on a word of mouth network to find new work. That network has served many of us well for many years, but that network is now in total collapse.

Almost no one I know is working construction and if they are it's very sparingly. This puts more stress on other industries to pick up the slack in the labor market. A glut in the labor market, along with businesses collapsing at an alarming rate, only further forces or allows (depending on their stability) companies that do hire anyone to offer far lower than market wages as the economic death spiral continues.

I live on the boarder of two counties that have been growing for over fifty years. The unemployment rate in the county I live in is 11.6% while the other is at 12.1%. The next county over is above 13%. Not very promising for anyone living here.

Though real estate has bottomed out and sales are being made, most are at or below market value. New home sales are stagnant and those mostly include very high dollar houses for those in the upper income range who are were far less effected by the economy.

Statewide there are other issues. People used to migrate to Florida for cheap property and low taxes, though this is no longer true. National foreclosure numbers were up 5% in the past quarter. In Florida one in five homes is in some degree of foreclosure, so I don’t see us building many new homes anytime soon. If by the time the industry does recover, I will likely be too old to participate in the physical nature of the industry.

So the industry that I love is basically dead to me and many others. Since migrating to Florida some 27 years ago, I've seen a few recessions, but I can honestly say that I’ve never been out of work. During all that time, I’ve often wondered why those in power haven’t considered luring other industries to insure that we remain fiscally sound as a state. They are just now beginning to talk about diversity in Tallahassee. Way to stay ahead of the game, guys. Of course, I live in a Red Bubba state, so sucking the life blood from it’s less fortunate citizenry, all in the name of a quick buck, is a Congressional pass time. Long term stability is the folly of Democrats.

In Washington, the House recently passed a bill to the Senate that would extend unemployment benefits another 13 to 20 weeks to states that have unemployment rates higher than 8.5%. I need that money desperately, though I’d much rather be working. That money and a few crumbs from a side job here or there and I might be able to survive for a few more weeks. Republicans in the Senate blocked the bill claiming they wanted to look into extending benefits to states that fall below the 8.5% threshold.

I want to publicly thank them for that. Could they have possibly took that issue up at another time rather than allowing more Americans to be forced from their homes? A few weeks and a few dollars can be a sink or swim situation for many families. Nationally, things aren’t going much better.

Wall Street and Congress aren’t allowing anything to trickle down tot eh people. Nationally we've lost 96 small banks so far this year and there are over four hundred more in trouble. Many are only a few million dollars in the red, not billions. Small local banks lend money to grow small businesses which are the backbone of the economy. Where is their bailout? (I'll discuss government contracts that are aimed at small businesses that are finding their way into the hands of Fortune 500 companies in another post.You'll love that one.)

When these small banks fail, they are bought up by the already too large to fail banks, making them that much more too large to fail. One million homes will go into foreclosure this year. Over sixty percent of those caused by the rising cost of healthcare, yet those in Congress continue to fight reform.

It's my feeling that the American people are the most generous people on the planet, but few have the means to donate to domestic food banks anymore much less give to overseas charities. Over one billion people worldwide are now living on one meal a day or less. Across the planet, a child dies of starvation every six seconds , many of them right here on our own soil.

All the while, Wall Street continues to devours even more of the financial pie with what seems like complete impunity while the rest of us struggle for the ever shrinking crumbs that remains. It’s been over a year since the collapse and Congress has done little, if anything, to change the way Wall Street operates.

So I hope you will excuse me if I don’t celebrate the NYSE closing with over ten thousand shares traded, because I don’t see them sharing anything with anyone but themselves.