So apparently this piece of shit is making the rounds, and while it's two minutes you'll never get back, it's also instructive in how these useless cocksuckers really think, and one of the strategies they will surely use next year against whoever is going up against Grampa Walnuts.
Let's deconstruct this a little bit, shall we? First, it bears noting that Reason is part of a lib-con agitprop network funded in part by the Koch Family Foundation. There's a lot of irony baked in there, if you think about it: I'm listening to Zappa's We're Only In It for the Money as I type this, so you can guess my general thoughts on hippie generosity in general, and The Beatles' corporatized "all you need is love" ethos. However, it's a dead certainty that all four band members would be fully behind a student-loan debt jubilee.
So, irony to the nth degree: a stupid video produced by an agitprop "think tank" funded by a company founded by a scumbag who literally punched oil wells for Stalin and built a refinery for Hitler, pirating a song (no doubt without paying royalties or asking permission) that was written by people who would most likely be in profound disagreement with the sentiments expressed in the rewrite. I mean, the fucking balls on these people. Every goddamned time. They're impossible to parody.
But the meat of the "argument" is where the action is at, and where the Democratic candidate simply needs to craft a simple, direct message rebutting this wretched nonsense. The simple fact is that college costs have skyrocketed in recent decades (not just tuition costs, but textbooks as well), and the costs have risen eight times faster than wages. There are multiple reasons for this, but the biggest is the overt financialization of the higher education system, essentially getting state governments out of it and transforming the sector into a privatized industry.
And the bottom line is that, if you simply consider your educational investment as a product for which there should be commensurate value for what you're paying, the fact that wages don't even come close to tracking with costs mathematically proves that it's a ripoff. American students are getting soaked by Wall Street billionaires, pure and simple.
Remember that by definition, your debt is someone else's equity, whether it's a shareholder or a loan shark. That equity holder always, always has a built-in incentive to keep you hung on that debt hook for as long as possible, through the dark magic of interest rates. And the student loan debt problem is only getting worse. It's become a significant part of the American economy, and it's a serious fucking problem for the next generation, if we don't figure something out.
What the little Reason asshole with his stupid little videos fails to consider (along with what we've already covered above) is where the money comes from, where it goes, and where it would go if there was a partial or total debt jubilee. The $1.4 trillion of student loan debt is essentially money that gets removed from local economies. (Of course, that number itself is a bit of a trick, since some unknowable portion of that aggregate total will never be repaid.)
For younger borrowers, being under the thumb of this institutionalized usury has resulted in substantial societal effects. The older folks smugly complain about how these stupid kids are so slow when it comes to growing up, or "adulting" as they say nowadays. They're taking longer to move out of the house, they're getting married and having kids later, they're buying houses and cars later (if at all).
Could it be at all possible that at least part of the reason for all that is that they've gone $100k into debt to get a college education they were told they must have, only to get sprung into a world where all their peers got the same message, did the same thing, and so now you have a bunch of kids competing for the same few good jobs with their degree, and therefore having to settle for whatever's left. You try buying a fucking house and starting a family on fifteen bucks an hour.
For older borrowers, the challenge is getting the loan debt paid down with enough time left in your working life to save up at least a little bit for your retirement. This has a societal impact as well, as obviously many of those folks will have to supplement their fixed incomes with whatever public assistance is available.
In all cases, you have to think about where that money (which again is mostly interest anyway) is going, as opposed to where it would go after debt forgiveness. Again, look at the statistics: 42.9 million borrowers right now, owing almost one and a half trillion. One in every what, seven or eight Americans, owing roughly ten percent of GDP. So that's everywhere, all across the country, big cities and small towns.
They can either spend the next ten or twenty years of their lives sending checks across the country to faceless finance weasels who are just going to put it on top of a giant stack, or they can -- and definitely would! -- spend that money in their local economies, going to restaurants and clubs, hiring contractors and repair techs, buying cars and houses, supporting local businesses and therefore creating jobs and growing local economies. They would save some of it for their future, so they don't have to go on the dole in old age.
That little shithead with his fucking fake Beatles video -- you know, fuck those people right where they live. Fuck 'em right in their fucking greedy pencil necks. Taking money from impossibly wealthy people to bamboozle working people into blaming poor people for everything that wealthy people are actually guilty of. That little fucker should have to go out and find honest work, and see how that goes. "Conservative Weird Al" my ass. He poaches other people's work, does a sloppy ideological rewrite, like a teenage nerd in his bedroom figuring out what words rhyme with "masturbation" and plugging it into popular songs. No skill required for that. He'll be replaced by an AI algorithm in five to ten years. In the meantime, fuck him.
Another pernicious concept built into this thing is the why should I have to pay for it? bullshit. Well, fuck you, pal. Why should I have to pay into the $28 billion and counting to bail out dipshit farmers who were dumb enough to fall for a fucking game-show host who doesn't know how tariffs work, and who they'll probably vote for again? Why do I have to pay that fat fuck to play golf on his own fucking courses? Why do my tax dollars get sent to ass-backward states who do nothing but talk shit about the hands that feed them? No person supports every single thing that is done with their tax dollars. That's life. That's compromise. The economic and societal benefit to everyone easily outweighs the puling whinges of these cheap fucks.
We'll leave with a shining example of how this country unconscionably coddles wealthy people at the direct expense of working-class and poor people. Take the Walton family (please!): these scions of the leisure class, all of whom either inherited or married into their fortune, are collectively worth $191 billion, up $39 billion from last summer. Again, none of them earned this money. They just collect it as it comes in. They did not work for it.
Walmart's employment policies of short hours and unpredictable schedule changes (which prevent many workers from getting a second job to supplement their income) result in their workers having to obtain public assistance, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. According to Walmart's own figures, they employ 1.5 million Americans.
So let's do a little basic math: 1.5 million employees multiplied by 2,000 work hours per year equals $3 billion cost per dollar-per-hour wage increase. The Waltons "earned" (collected) $39 billion last year, to add to their already massive fortune, which even an asshole like Kanye West couldn't blow through in fifty lifetimes.
They could have given every single employee, top to bottom, $3.00/hour more, which surely would have kept some of the fish on the bottom from having to go on the dole, and still would have taken in $30 billion last year, free and clear. They could give part-timers more hours, even if that means cutting some people loose. They could just pay their taxes, and be thankful every day that virtually every other person on the planet would trade places in a heartbeat, even if it meant a 50% tax rate. But we live in a country where it is sincerely believed that greed is good. There is no such thing as enough.
Now, here's where late-stage capitalism ends up squirreling things a bit. Because Walmart is a publicly traded corporation, they are legally obligated to seek the greatest return for shareholders. They have a fiduciary responsibility which is legally binding -- they can literally be sued and/or prosecuted for failing to maximize shareholder return. And if that means they can screw over their workers in a variety of ways, make the taxpayers cover the difference, and suck up all the profits, pushing it to people who literally could never spend it all if they had to -- well, that's capitalism.
Except it isn't; no decent economist at any point has ever indicated that hoarding and hyper-accumulation and ludicrous wealth inequity was anything but an overall societal harm. It's not trickling down anymore. Are we all not shareholders in the going concern known as the United States of America -- you, me, the homeless guy sleeping under the bridge, the owners, workers, and customers of Walmart and every other company? Why aren't the corporate officers legally bound to maximize the return of all shareholders, not just the select few who can afford to rent the corporate officers? What the fuck kind of country or company do you have when people die because they can't afford basic medications like insulin?
To the smug little propaganda twerp, who collects a nice check from his insect overlords for using other people's work for evil, it doesn't matter. That sucker chose to die from not being able to afford insulin. He could have moved to Canada. He could have gotten a better job with better insurance and/or better wages. He could have gotten that better job if he had, you know, stayed in college and got on that debt hook for another decade, spend another chunk of his life living someone else's dream.
All that matters is throwing the next handful of poisonous seeds into the dirt of social media, where it can fester and germinate among an increasingly dulled audience, people who have clearly given up, who have no use for critical thinking, who have no real-life experience and spend most of their time jabbering inside their self-reinforcing bubble with like-minded individuals.
You can take action any time, you know. Anybody can, regardless of their circumstances. I mean, it's great to see people protesting for climate change and all, but there are steps anyone can take -- should have been taking already -- to curb that. Breed less. Consume less. Eat less meat. Drive less. Drive smaller and more efficient. Fucking read a book once in a while and pay attention to the world around you. Doesn't cost you a dime; in fact, you'll save money. Just about every single person can do those things, right now. Some of us have been doing them for years. It's really not that difficult, and it really isn't asking that much.
Except for some people it is, apparently. They can't be bothered with it. It's all a hoax, and the good lord will provide anyway, in his mysterious ways. Well, let them learn to swim then, and maybe they'll start to believe in science again. Countless people have been poisoned by this shit for decades now, and now they believe it in full. They look at the doofy Fake Beatles video and chortle at how the stoopid libturds have been pwned yet again by the WINNING of the elites, uninterested in the hypocrisy baked into the very item of propaganda being deployed, uncaring that the facts are all bullshit anyway.
They plant the seeds, but we all have the choice not to reap what they sow. Do your duty, America -- flush twice on these assholes, and vote every damned day with your wallet and your attention.
Let's deconstruct this a little bit, shall we? First, it bears noting that Reason is part of a lib-con agitprop network funded in part by the Koch Family Foundation. There's a lot of irony baked in there, if you think about it: I'm listening to Zappa's We're Only In It for the Money as I type this, so you can guess my general thoughts on hippie generosity in general, and The Beatles' corporatized "all you need is love" ethos. However, it's a dead certainty that all four band members would be fully behind a student-loan debt jubilee.
So, irony to the nth degree: a stupid video produced by an agitprop "think tank" funded by a company founded by a scumbag who literally punched oil wells for Stalin and built a refinery for Hitler, pirating a song (no doubt without paying royalties or asking permission) that was written by people who would most likely be in profound disagreement with the sentiments expressed in the rewrite. I mean, the fucking balls on these people. Every goddamned time. They're impossible to parody.
But the meat of the "argument" is where the action is at, and where the Democratic candidate simply needs to craft a simple, direct message rebutting this wretched nonsense. The simple fact is that college costs have skyrocketed in recent decades (not just tuition costs, but textbooks as well), and the costs have risen eight times faster than wages. There are multiple reasons for this, but the biggest is the overt financialization of the higher education system, essentially getting state governments out of it and transforming the sector into a privatized industry.
And the bottom line is that, if you simply consider your educational investment as a product for which there should be commensurate value for what you're paying, the fact that wages don't even come close to tracking with costs mathematically proves that it's a ripoff. American students are getting soaked by Wall Street billionaires, pure and simple.
Remember that by definition, your debt is someone else's equity, whether it's a shareholder or a loan shark. That equity holder always, always has a built-in incentive to keep you hung on that debt hook for as long as possible, through the dark magic of interest rates. And the student loan debt problem is only getting worse. It's become a significant part of the American economy, and it's a serious fucking problem for the next generation, if we don't figure something out.
What the little Reason asshole with his stupid little videos fails to consider (along with what we've already covered above) is where the money comes from, where it goes, and where it would go if there was a partial or total debt jubilee. The $1.4 trillion of student loan debt is essentially money that gets removed from local economies. (Of course, that number itself is a bit of a trick, since some unknowable portion of that aggregate total will never be repaid.)
For younger borrowers, being under the thumb of this institutionalized usury has resulted in substantial societal effects. The older folks smugly complain about how these stupid kids are so slow when it comes to growing up, or "adulting" as they say nowadays. They're taking longer to move out of the house, they're getting married and having kids later, they're buying houses and cars later (if at all).
Could it be at all possible that at least part of the reason for all that is that they've gone $100k into debt to get a college education they were told they must have, only to get sprung into a world where all their peers got the same message, did the same thing, and so now you have a bunch of kids competing for the same few good jobs with their degree, and therefore having to settle for whatever's left. You try buying a fucking house and starting a family on fifteen bucks an hour.
For older borrowers, the challenge is getting the loan debt paid down with enough time left in your working life to save up at least a little bit for your retirement. This has a societal impact as well, as obviously many of those folks will have to supplement their fixed incomes with whatever public assistance is available.
In all cases, you have to think about where that money (which again is mostly interest anyway) is going, as opposed to where it would go after debt forgiveness. Again, look at the statistics: 42.9 million borrowers right now, owing almost one and a half trillion. One in every what, seven or eight Americans, owing roughly ten percent of GDP. So that's everywhere, all across the country, big cities and small towns.
They can either spend the next ten or twenty years of their lives sending checks across the country to faceless finance weasels who are just going to put it on top of a giant stack, or they can -- and definitely would! -- spend that money in their local economies, going to restaurants and clubs, hiring contractors and repair techs, buying cars and houses, supporting local businesses and therefore creating jobs and growing local economies. They would save some of it for their future, so they don't have to go on the dole in old age.
That little shithead with his fucking fake Beatles video -- you know, fuck those people right where they live. Fuck 'em right in their fucking greedy pencil necks. Taking money from impossibly wealthy people to bamboozle working people into blaming poor people for everything that wealthy people are actually guilty of. That little fucker should have to go out and find honest work, and see how that goes. "Conservative Weird Al" my ass. He poaches other people's work, does a sloppy ideological rewrite, like a teenage nerd in his bedroom figuring out what words rhyme with "masturbation" and plugging it into popular songs. No skill required for that. He'll be replaced by an AI algorithm in five to ten years. In the meantime, fuck him.
Another pernicious concept built into this thing is the why should I have to pay for it? bullshit. Well, fuck you, pal. Why should I have to pay into the $28 billion and counting to bail out dipshit farmers who were dumb enough to fall for a fucking game-show host who doesn't know how tariffs work, and who they'll probably vote for again? Why do I have to pay that fat fuck to play golf on his own fucking courses? Why do my tax dollars get sent to ass-backward states who do nothing but talk shit about the hands that feed them? No person supports every single thing that is done with their tax dollars. That's life. That's compromise. The economic and societal benefit to everyone easily outweighs the puling whinges of these cheap fucks.
We'll leave with a shining example of how this country unconscionably coddles wealthy people at the direct expense of working-class and poor people. Take the Walton family (please!): these scions of the leisure class, all of whom either inherited or married into their fortune, are collectively worth $191 billion, up $39 billion from last summer. Again, none of them earned this money. They just collect it as it comes in. They did not work for it.
Walmart's employment policies of short hours and unpredictable schedule changes (which prevent many workers from getting a second job to supplement their income) result in their workers having to obtain public assistance, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. According to Walmart's own figures, they employ 1.5 million Americans.
So let's do a little basic math: 1.5 million employees multiplied by 2,000 work hours per year equals $3 billion cost per dollar-per-hour wage increase. The Waltons "earned" (collected) $39 billion last year, to add to their already massive fortune, which even an asshole like Kanye West couldn't blow through in fifty lifetimes.
They could have given every single employee, top to bottom, $3.00/hour more, which surely would have kept some of the fish on the bottom from having to go on the dole, and still would have taken in $30 billion last year, free and clear. They could give part-timers more hours, even if that means cutting some people loose. They could just pay their taxes, and be thankful every day that virtually every other person on the planet would trade places in a heartbeat, even if it meant a 50% tax rate. But we live in a country where it is sincerely believed that greed is good. There is no such thing as enough.
Now, here's where late-stage capitalism ends up squirreling things a bit. Because Walmart is a publicly traded corporation, they are legally obligated to seek the greatest return for shareholders. They have a fiduciary responsibility which is legally binding -- they can literally be sued and/or prosecuted for failing to maximize shareholder return. And if that means they can screw over their workers in a variety of ways, make the taxpayers cover the difference, and suck up all the profits, pushing it to people who literally could never spend it all if they had to -- well, that's capitalism.
Except it isn't; no decent economist at any point has ever indicated that hoarding and hyper-accumulation and ludicrous wealth inequity was anything but an overall societal harm. It's not trickling down anymore. Are we all not shareholders in the going concern known as the United States of America -- you, me, the homeless guy sleeping under the bridge, the owners, workers, and customers of Walmart and every other company? Why aren't the corporate officers legally bound to maximize the return of all shareholders, not just the select few who can afford to rent the corporate officers? What the fuck kind of country or company do you have when people die because they can't afford basic medications like insulin?
To the smug little propaganda twerp, who collects a nice check from his insect overlords for using other people's work for evil, it doesn't matter. That sucker chose to die from not being able to afford insulin. He could have moved to Canada. He could have gotten a better job with better insurance and/or better wages. He could have gotten that better job if he had, you know, stayed in college and got on that debt hook for another decade, spend another chunk of his life living someone else's dream.
All that matters is throwing the next handful of poisonous seeds into the dirt of social media, where it can fester and germinate among an increasingly dulled audience, people who have clearly given up, who have no use for critical thinking, who have no real-life experience and spend most of their time jabbering inside their self-reinforcing bubble with like-minded individuals.
You can take action any time, you know. Anybody can, regardless of their circumstances. I mean, it's great to see people protesting for climate change and all, but there are steps anyone can take -- should have been taking already -- to curb that. Breed less. Consume less. Eat less meat. Drive less. Drive smaller and more efficient. Fucking read a book once in a while and pay attention to the world around you. Doesn't cost you a dime; in fact, you'll save money. Just about every single person can do those things, right now. Some of us have been doing them for years. It's really not that difficult, and it really isn't asking that much.
Except for some people it is, apparently. They can't be bothered with it. It's all a hoax, and the good lord will provide anyway, in his mysterious ways. Well, let them learn to swim then, and maybe they'll start to believe in science again. Countless people have been poisoned by this shit for decades now, and now they believe it in full. They look at the doofy Fake Beatles video and chortle at how the stoopid libturds have been pwned yet again by the WINNING of the elites, uninterested in the hypocrisy baked into the very item of propaganda being deployed, uncaring that the facts are all bullshit anyway.
They plant the seeds, but we all have the choice not to reap what they sow. Do your duty, America -- flush twice on these assholes, and vote every damned day with your wallet and your attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment