Punkonomics (@DearBalak)

Punkonomics2013-6-24

Jesse and I chatted about some of the exciting things happening lately. Here are the notes i mentioned having on the show… which we didn’t exactly follow of course ;)

• I mentioned my post (June 21st) where I spewed the following witticism in response to this whole drug tests for welfare recipients BS which is so pathetically petty, hateful, and beside the point that it makes me very angry! …well, i admit that lots of things make me angry ;)

If bankers had to take a drug test before getting THEIR welfare (bailouts, tax cuts and loopholes, etc etc) we would not be in a deficit >:/

• The good old American tradition of hating on the poor
• 25% of children in the US today live in poverty (currently $23,050 total yearly income for a family of four!)
• This also has a racist dimension: what people like Paula Dean and several Supreme Court justices would call “lazy poor n___”. man this shite makes me even angrier!
• Latest salvo from the class-wars: Student loans are set to double next month to 6%
  • Hurrah! Fear not! Conservatives have a wonderful solution to the cost of education and opportunity that hearkens back to those good-old-days of the 18th and 19th centuries: Rich people (the 1%) will pay the educational expenses of selected regular people (the %99) in exchange for owning a share of their future income! YES YOU HEARD RIGHT! Indentured slavery is back!
• On the bright side:
  • Some people are NOT taking this shite like we do (taking our happy pills and watching mind-numbing TV and superhero movies), THEY are out on the streets raising hell by the millions against socially-conservative corporate kleptocratic crony-capitalism in Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, and other places.
  • They are rallying against the destructive class-war fake economic idea of budget cutting when the economy is down and millions are unemployed with little or no economic opportunities: aka austerity that has already destroyed the Greek economy (even the IMF all but admitted it).
  • This is especially criminal when vast amounts have been transferred from the public to the %1 since they crashed the economy in 2008. The total numbers are many times larger than the budget deficit all the fake hysteria is about: $6-12,000,000,000,000 that’s $6-12 trillion.
• Finally: Edward Snowden the young america hero who sacrificed his ticket to joining the 1% and became a political refugee in order to tell the American people what their government is really doing in the digital frontier. This is critical since too few people realize how in a big data world, control over information is tantamount to control over our bodies: slavery!