So one credit card (not debit, which is money you do have, but credit which for some reason is money you DON’T have, God they’ve screwed up the English language) offers a 5% cash rebate for up $300 a quarter (I think) in purchases. Or, $15 back. Which another card issuer, Chase, as in Salmon P Chase, the fellow on the non-circulating $1000 bill and Lincoln’s Secretary of Treasury, but Chase is offering the same deal up to $1500 dollars, and points out that it’s 5 times as much, you can get $75 back… on a much bigger credit card debt. As the RepubliCan’t Party points out, as though it’s the Poor being freeloaders, more than half of Americans don’t make enough money to owe taxes. $20,000 a year for a family of four. So you go into debt for approximately a months wages + a few bux, and get $75 back. And some really steep fees for as long as you’re paying that one debt off.
And while they’re screaming on FOX that the Poorer People are irresponsible and can’t do math (yeah, right! Like FOX still believing that selling bonds for ten percent annually wouldn’t double the War Debt in ten years as opposed to simply funding it through higher taxes at the start) and Wall Street, you remember them, Chase used to use the word Manhattan in it’s name… Wall Street in other words… they’re selling massive debt to those who can least afford it, and to people who really CAN’T do math and you can tell because the targets are told that a $75 rebate on what’s more than 2 grand worth of debt (they’re hoping that people don’t know what the term “interest” means) is a special deal.
Then they’re bundling the debts…
They’re bundling them and selling them the same way they bundled and sold mortgages. They marketed the original Product the same way, telling people in Seminars and Books-on-Tape and Infomercials for all of those get rich quick WITH GOV’T GUARANTEES of payment. What they didn’t tell the people, that you get a Fanny Mae Freddy Mack loan to buy a house with “little or no money down”, do some cheap cosmetic repairs and resell it for enough of a profit to settle your part of the FM/FM mortgage, buy two more houses the same way and the Government meaning, the American People would be required to back you up in case anything went wrong.
Well, a LOT went wrong. The people you’d end up selling to would be people who were investing in Real Estate to try to get out from under a massive debt load, that load coming from working at wages that were less than what it cost you to produce your labor. Again, a top-down, Trickled Down Reaganomics decision. So you’re in hock, left holding the bag when the GreedHeads manipulating the entire scam manage to tank the economy of the whole world, and you discover that YOUR investment isn’t the one that’s “backed by Federal Government Guarantees”… It’s the banks, like Chase, Morgan-Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bank of America etc… who got the money from the Taxpayers… after investing what amounts to less than nothing in the scam. The only people who actually invested were whatever people they could convince to bankroll their scam until it inevitably folded.
Like the stupid bastards who backed the ReagBush-Oh, NO!-mics and actually believed that when Bush sold twice as much Taxpayer Debt, merely deferred for a decade, and BECAUSE it was deferred, to finance a war that was blatantly a gift to the richest people in the world.
How Much, for instance, do you believe Erik Prince of Blackwater or Richard Cheney of Halliburton, invested of their OWN money into the war? Even though they got paid handsomely for it. Helps, too, that the Richest Corporation in the world had their CEO as Vice President of the United States giving blank-check, open-ended no-bid contracts to his own company? But the people who still believe in their stupid little brains that it’s the POOR people who crashed the economy worldwide believe that the deal was actually “No Tax Increase”. In a way it was, No Tax Increase for THEM.
The EuroZone economy crumbling, was it indeed from Socialized Medicine and subsidized tuition as the Right Wing Retards wish we were stupid enough to believe? How about their costs (since so many of them were also in NATO and in the Koalition of the Killing) that Their Taxpayers had to pony up to support the War? But we’re not supposed to ever mention that. Convenient, for the Thieves.
Example, Britain became a debtor nation right after WW ONE… actually during, and at a time when their empire ruled “the sun never sets on our empire” worth of the World. Yeah. BEFORE they gave up Hong Kong, or India, or even world war 2, BUT… more than 3 decades BEFORE National Health Care went into effect, while Child Labor laws weren’t yet instituted, before “the Dole”, before Women Got The Vote, before the end of the Gold Standard, Before Every Single MuFU event the Right Wing Propagandists declare to be the turning point in British and American Economic History
There’s a long string of lies that get unraveled by that last statement. Anybody who still believes anything the Right Wing in any incarnation tells, shame on you for being stupid and shame on your parents for not insisting on getting you educated BEFORE you were legally old enough to sign contracts or make political decisions that effect everybody else.
Meanwhile, Chase is creating more debt which is being bundled, and sold, like it was real cash, by the same Federally Guaranteed “Too Big To Fail” fatcat Wall Street bankers. Car loans too. Got too much car debt, like so many do? Sell the fucker for scrap metal and SCREW the Repo-man and the Banksters.
They’ve done it to us. For that matter, Bank fixin’ to foreclose on your house? Burn the fucker to the ground.
Or, in an alternative plan, Occupy! in the fullest sense of the word. Park your cars in the middle of the street and walk away, take those Hoff & Leigh signs that are everywhere around town, on mostly foreclosed homes and businesses, and SQUAT. There’s some in every neighborhood of the city (Colorado Springs, but I bet you readers in other cities have the same issue) and enough that those suddenly struggling to get a “legitimate” home after being turned out of their fomer, Take The Houses, Take The Business Buildings. Pull up the lawns and plant vegetable gardens.
Think it’s not possible or sustainable? There’s communities created like that all over Spain which have existed since the Spanish Civil War began and which have withstood 9 decades worth of official repression. It’s one of the two most likely ways the Bankster Theft Problem will be resolved, the other is absolute fealty to a Corporate State.