If you think the middle-class has it bad, try being poor in this shitty time and place. Just admitting you are struggling is a huge risk for the suddenly poor, like painting yourself with a laser for teaparty smart bombs to get a fix on. It creates a convenient target for ragers and haters. As a nation, we love hating the poor so much that we end up blaming them for anything and everything.

I pass the hat every December. But this is my second Christmas of actually being dirt poor and literally begging for any holiday shekels you might have to pay basic bills like power or rent. If you can, my Paypal account is DarkSydOtheMoon -at- aol. I know I’ll make it out of this, but a fair question is how did a smart, college educated single guy end up here in the first place? I ask myself that a lot, at the risk of scaring people, it’s just luck. It was just a bad sequence of events packed close together. And not only could it happen to you, it probably will happen to you in some way, at some point in your life, if present trends continue unabated.

For me the long nightmarish slide started with the diagnosis of a painful, progressive, expensive autoimmune condition at the same time a brutal recession started over five years ago, a sudden and unexpected loss of someone dear to me made matters worse, then in the darkest depths of economic chaos, a desperate move a 1000 miles away from a dying neighborhood to take a job that didn’t pay much. But it was a freak heart attack out of the blue followed by persistent complications that exhausted me. This entire year has been spent fighting for every penny, juggling bills and doctors and a series of terrible, low paying contract tech support jobs with no future. I hope you never have to go through this, but statistically, some of you will.

HuffPo — The main culprit behind the languishing fortunes of America’s middle class is slow wage growth. After peaking in the early 1970s, real (inflation-adjusted) median earnings of full-time workers aged 25-64 stagnated, partly owing to a slowdown in productivity growth and partly because of a yawning gap between productivity and wage growth. Since 1980, average real hourly compensation has increased at an annual rate of 1 percent, or half the rate of productivity growth. Wage gains have also become considerably more unequal, with the biggest increases claimed by the top 10 percent of earners.

Want a scapegoat? Blame the poor! The Great Recession wasn’t a failure of conservative economic policies held sacred, or insatiable corporate greed and big money influence over lawmakers run amok. It wasn’t zillion dollar investment banks with every analytical tool and ivy league intellect at hand erecting shadowy, unsupervised secondary markets to trade confusing mortgage derivatives that blew up and nuked the financial landscape. Don’t blame CEOs and MBAs for the meltdown everyone predicted would occur, the meltdown they dismissed with a charming chuckle at our hopeless peasant naivete. Don’t blame giant corporations who brag 24/7 about how well they predict and manage every facet of risk for not predicting and managing their own risk.

No, but by all means, blame the painter down the street for buying a house at the peak of the real estate market, or that couple next door who scrimped and saved for years to own a modest rental property right before the bottom fell out. It has to be those brown people, their white trash friends, the pointy headed intellectuals, it has to be the gays and the feminists and the atheists. Bail out the helpless victimized banks and the innocent rich, because who could have possibly predicted this? But punish the peasants, harshly, for failing to predict how every distant economic twist and turn might affect them, who took on debt for their college age kids by ‘tapping their home equity,’ who didn’t perform an exhaustive in depth cost and risk analysis, who never properly hedged against global interest rate moves and fluctuating dollars and volatile energy prices in the option and futures markets.

It’s the bandwagon bully effect. Blame the poor, the powerless, those who can’t fight back. It’s way safer to blame the poor and struggling for the excesses of the super rich, it takes no courage, it takes no thought, it demands no solution, and besides they must deserve it: a loving God would never let bad things happen to good people.