The working poor make great victims. They are often trusting and financially unsophisticated, and with wages stagnant, they’re desperate for cash. These folks hold jobs, so they have a money stream and possibly equity in their homes - all ripe for plunder.
Corporate America has decided there’s gold in draining the low-income masses of what little they have. Loan sharks and con artists once dominated this territory, but big businesses have moved in and are proving to be far smoother than the mugs who break legs. Their legal fine print can trap the uneducated in outrageous debt contracts without rousing the authorities...
Dump a few of these loans on the working poor and see them spiral downward. Preying on vulnerable people is a disgusting business model. Does anyone in Washington have a conscience?
“Does anyone in Washington have a conscience?”
No.
Runaway unregulated Reaganite corporate capitalism is ALWAYS about screwing the little guy. Every piece of legislation related to business and commerce in the past 25 years has been anti-labor and anti-American. Now we have a majority of corporate fascists on the supreme court to knock down individual’s rights at the expense of the corporate “person” for the next quarter-century. Working Americans, with no electoral choices, have no way to stop it. Ultimately, the wealth gap will get so wide that the revolution the filthy rich fear and plan for will come to pass, their own self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, they’ll control the guns and the money…In the meantime they’ll connive the poor whites into thinking their problems are caused by welfare Cadillac blacks and illegal Mexicans taking away their jobs and their country. How else could they convince a majority of the populace to vote for their own destruction?
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/09/1766/
They're an appalling institution, he muttered, his head suddenly full of poison as he battled the disgusting bureaucracies that strangled Australia. He was just another male. A father, God forbid. The women who ran these bureaucracies, stalking down corridors with their f... you glasses and their clipboards, in and out of their endless useless meetings, treated him like the enemy. The truth was irrelevant to these people, just as it had been for almost every single government and judicial figure he had dealt with since the dramas began more than a decade ago.
It was a curdling and cruel commitment. Assassination wasn't in the works. If it spurred him on with fury, it was equally an appalling waste of time and energy. These monolithic bureaucracies had no heart, no conscience, and he was dumped in the salmon swarm along with everybody else. The country was strangling in red tape. A disappointing government was spiralling from one disappointment to the next. $70 million gifted to Toyota, one of the richest companies in the world, to develop a low emission car that they were already about to release. Mind boggling stuff.
And it was these small resentments that came up most often in conversation. They were craven and crazy and there was no way forward. The grinding poisonous blood that pumped through him would make no difference in the long run; their brief life span making almost everything inconsequential. They bleated about fairness, equity, transparency, thinking outside the square, caring for the most vulnerable, and didn't mean a word of it. Ruled by multi-miilionaires with heads full of trendy left ideas which had seemed so marvellous around their dinner tables, they were all due for a reality check.
There was only so much that could be done in an ordinary day. By an ordinary person. The great impassive authorities that he tried to fight steam rolled their way across the populace. The self serving arseholes justified themselves with reference to noble causes. More than anything he wanted to escape. City living had become almost impossible. The great great climb to a better place, he was being crucified by summary execution. The debts just mounted. The money never came. They had all become the working poor.
The millionaires that ruled them had no idea of how difficult it was to survive on a normal wage. In their presentations, prepared by public servants all on astonishingly high salaries by any normal standards, they spoke of people on the average wage, now around $50,000, as if they were some odd species of insect. He was fed up with the battle, faced no choice. All the lyricism died in a blanket despair.
Once, once he had been asked to save the world. Once he had felt the vigour course through his veins. They were party to a blatantly wrong discourse. They had not been victim, more perpetrator, determined to make the world a different place, to do good, to leave a positive trail. That wasn't likely to happen now. The bitterness had crept up and he needed to pray; for a different life, for a different mind frame. It was fighting communism, they were impossible to beat. You could bear your soul for only so long, fight the good fight for so many days, before you yourself were defeated. He smiled, or tried to smile, a crooked smile in a bent world. He had tried to change everything; and in the end the forces of evil had changed him. No wonder he had sought so often a different path, high in the mountains, away from it all. Away from the bastards who now ruled the world, mindless bureaucrats with noble causes, the useful fools, their hands clenched around their clipboards in the corridors of power.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/cut-fuel-price-say-voters/2008/06/15/1213468240452.html
ALMOST 80 per cent of voters want direct Government intervention to cut petrol prices, the latest Herald/Nielsen poll finds.
Among those demanding action, three times as many support a cut in fuel excise, as proposed by the Opposition, than support the Government's FuelWatch price information scheme.
But with skyrocketing petrol prices a global phenomenon, the poll finds that Labor is slightly more trusted than the Coalition to handle the crisis, although most voters are dissatisfied with the job Kevin Rudd has done so far.
Amid riots and strikes over petrol prices in other countries, Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, said that it plans to increase its output next month to its highest ever level.
As it becomes increasingly nervous about the global political and economic effect of high prices, King Abdullah told the United Nations chief, Ban Ki-moon, that they were "abnormally high" and he was willing to do whatever he could to bring them down.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23891593-1248,00.html
THE mother accused of killing and torturing her 18-month-old twins in Brisbane's south had documented the nightmare she lived trying to raise her young family.
"I would like to know how other parents of large families cope from morning to night," the mother wrote on the Bubhub website.
"I find that I am drowning since I had the twins. I just can't get everything flowing nicely any more in a routine, it is just do whatever, and at the moment it is killing me.
"I put on 30kgs while pregnant with them and haven't lost a thing since having them. It is all just blah.
"I started crying last night when I wanted to go out because in the legs I was fine, it was all the top half, it was all just out there and it looked awful."
http://www.skynews.com.au/news/article.aspx?id=242578
The mother and father of twin toddlers found dead in their Brisbane home will now face murder and torture charges.
Police found the decomposing bodies of the 18-month-old boy and girl on Monday night in the cot they shared in a rented house in Sunnybank Hills.
They had been dead for up to nine days.
Prosecutors added the new charges of two counts each of murder and torture when the twins' 30-year-old mother and 28-year-old father sought bail in Brisbane Magistrates Court.
The couple will still face the original charges of failing to provide the necessities of life.
The pair were remanded in custody.
They are expected to remain in custody until a court mention on August 4, but could seek Supreme Court bail before then.
The new charges were laid following autopsies on the bodies of the toddlers.
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