Easy Money

I feel the pain in my forehead again, the result of reading too much news and listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. Did the abysmal US Congress – that pathetic body of whores – actually allow federal student loan rates to double to 6.8%?

Big banks borrow money from the government at 0.75%.

6.8% for students, 0.75% for banks.

If this travesty is not emblematic of everything wrong with the United States of America in 2013, I don’t know what is.

Do you need any more evidence that this nation is ruled by the finance industry? We may as well anoint Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase King of America and jam a fork in our democracy, once and for all. Fuck this corporate takeover of every facet of American life by dibs and dabs, just kill us quick and get it over with.

The pain is growing more intense, as if the jaws of a vice are closing; my eardrums feel as if they will burst.

Even Democrats have the austerity virus and tell us the nation simply can’t afford to help our students. We can, however, afford fighter jets and Hellfire missiles and drones and cruise missiles; we can afford to piss away billions of dollars chasing evil terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; we can afford to transform the US-Mexican border into one of the most militarized in the entire world, rivaling that of North and South Korea; we can afford to give resource extractors like Exxon-Mobil millions of dollars in subsidies…

And the list goes on and the pain in my head worsens, and the greedy motherfuckers who rule this nation don’t even go through the motions of pretending they give a rat’s ass about the great unwashed masses. They know they have nothing to fear from Americans – this isn’t Egypt or Brazil or Tunisia, places where people get pissed off and flood the streets to demand redress of their grievances. Americans watch TV and stuff their faces with potato chips, and go right on believing in the red, white and blue, go right on electing pinheads, pederasts, and pissants to public office, where they rape us over and over. 

Maybe we deserve to be turned into paupers or serfs, since, after all, we vote for the gangsters who rob us blind, take what was public and make it private, for profit, for those who can pay; nothing is sacred, everything can be reduced to a commodity, valued in the marketplace, traded, bought, sold: education, health care, drinking water, crude oil, soybeans, corn, houses, manufacturing jobs, condoms, cow shit, horse shit and pig shit.

Remember how free trade and free markets were going to set us all free, make us rich? Remember Ronnie Reagan when he intoned that government was the problem? You still believe that bullshit?

0.75% for banks, 6.8% for students.

Nothing but easy money for the rich and this searing pain in the center of my working class forehead.