There is an old saying in poker: “If you look around the table and you don’t see the pigeon, the pigeon is you.”
Well, I’m looking around the table and everything looks fishy. The deal is rotten and the cards are marked. I think everyone is trying to trick us.
It starts with the economy. Corporations, which are fictional persons, aren’t allowed to go broke if they’re too big. The Fed bails them out. People, who are small actual persons, are not only allowed to go broke and lose the house when they’re trapped in the downdraft caused by those corporations, they’re actively encouraged to, usually by the sheriff.
The only bailing out they do is when they’re halfway to Hawaii and their airline runs out of gas, and the Fed doesn’t provide the parachute.
The U.S. Mint hasn’t been playing straight with us either. Our currency is a total joke. It costs two cents to make a penny and seven to make a nickel. That makes no sense at all.
It only costs eight cents to print a dollar, but that’s about what it’s worth, as anyone who has been overseas lately can tell you. Even the Canadian dollar is worth more than ours, and they just went off the beaver standard last year.
Our whole health care system is a bad joke, and we’re the punchline. The federal government does provide us with universal health care. But there’s a nasty 65 year deductible.
The pharmaceutical companies trick us all the time. They put out a drug, hype the hell out of it so they can price it like platinum, we take it anyway, then two years later we find out it doesn’t work and may kill us. That’s exactly what’s happened with some of the latest cholesterol “miracle drugs.” Turns out we should eat salmon, a fish high in heart-healthy omega-3, instead.
This just in: There will be no salmon this year. They’re all fished out. Feel like an April Fool yet?
How about the latest sick joke in higher education. Tuition in state schools, where most middle-class kids get their diplomas, is skyrocketing. College for the masses is becoming an unaffordable luxury. That nice girl who teaches your child’s second grade class is staggering under a debt load that her $40K salary might pay off before she’s ready to collect Social Security—but there’s a catch. By then Social Security will be as broke as she is.
Meanwhile tuition at Ivy League campuses is plummeting, all the way to zero in some cases. Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, they’re all part of this trend. Nothing wrong with this, but giving future Masters of the Universe a free ride while loading the ordinary pigeons who will work for them with backbreaking debt for the privilege?
I think Johnny Rotten put it best: “Did you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
In a touching display of patriotic appreciation for the country that made them obscenely rich, our billionaires are responding to the recession by demanding drastic property tax reductions on their plantations.
In Larry “I Got Mine, Jack” Ellison’s case, that amounts to three million dollars—petty cash for him, but serious money to the county.
Meanwhile, in the public schools those taxes support, the kids get to read 25-year-old textbooks on the Joy of Capitalism.
Feeling like a pigeon yet, Tweety?
Even the good news is conspiring to fool us. For a brief, shining moment, it looked like the wolverine had returned to California, giving us all hope that our environment was finally turning the corner. But it turned out not to be a California wolverine after all; it was an invasive wolverine somebody trucked in to play a trick on us.
It might not even be a wolverine. Hillary’s people are spreading the rumor that it’s Obama’s pastor in a coonskin cap. Think maybe they’re trying to play the race card on us again?
Look around the table, people. Do you see the pigeon?
“Coo … coo …coo….”
