Saturday, November 19, 2011

What's a person gotta do to get arrested in this joint?

Apparently, break the entire world economy = get a fat bailout from the Fed.

But be a poor single mom with a drug conviction and lie to get food stamps for your 2 little kids (cause bad druggies don't get food stamps, fyi) and you get 3 years in jail. Oh and lose you kids.

A quick googling and minimal math skills tells me that the maximum amount of food stamps she could have gotten if she received them for an entire year is $6312 (The max allotment for a family of 3 is $526 multiplied by 12).

Here's the thing- even if she received 10 times that amount, shit one hundred times that amount, and sold whatever she didn't use, she still wouldn't be fucking over anyone. Food stamps aren't even cash. They are an imaginary currency unit created by the government to restrict the spending of the poorest of the poor to pay only for food. The fed makes money. The fed makes food stamps. But unlike when Wall Street banksters take fed money and pocket it, food stamps go right back into the economy. They pay for grocery stores (and the clerks that work in them) and farms and factories (and the laborers who pick, pack and process the food).

So you've gotta wonder, what exactly are the government's priorities when they prosecute a poor person for surviving while bailing out a rich person who needs no help putting food on the table?

Monday, November 14, 2011

TRIGGER WARNING: About that unpleasantness at Penn State

TRIGGER WARNING: (child rape, extreme entitlement, rampant stupidity)

There are lots of things you can say about the unpleasant news from Penn State.

This, in my not-so-frigging humble-opinion, is the most appropriate. (There are plenty of extremely close runners-up. Like this. And this.)

If I hear one more tearful student or alum or bigshot talking about Penn State's healing, I'm going to make Hothead Paisan look like a genteel grandmother in a Victorian parlour. The victims come first, second, third, ad infinitum, bitches.