“Far out man. I’m on a stamp.”

I agree; I read it late in high school when I started to get into hipper, more literary fiction. After I finished, and had laughed just a few times, it left me with a “meh” feeling. Perhaps there’s something to it that makes the book so great, but I just can’t see it.

“Whoa I don’t want anybody else, when I think about you I touch myself…”

“Everything’s coming up Milhouse!”

“Welcome to Cash Plane, the tv game show where you answer questions while we fly to your destination. Be careful though, three strikes and we toss you out of the plane!”

BasketFALL

The Liberal government in QC is simply implementing what most governments have over the last 3 years: austerity measures that will hit the working and lower middle classes with what are essentially wage freezes and higher taxation. It is interesting Old Man Fatima, that you mentioned that “we cannot raise corporate taxes” because then corporations would flee – which is the same rationale given for not raising income tax rates on the rich – they will flee. While statistics never, ever bear this out, it is fear-mongering plain and simple, it is a mantra these days. The market is allowed to have its undemocratic say on democratic life, but apparently this is ok. All of those things you mention: public housing, the health care program, and education, are intimately connected to the neoliberal dismantling of the state and progressive taxation system that sustained them across the world. As a college professor I’ve seen this here in the States, too. If you believe that social programs will be funded once the student strike is defeated, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. What is likely to happen is more austerity and corporate handouts, not less. If you want fully funded social programs, you should be out in the streets marching in solidarity with the students. Unfortunately the bounds of capitalist rationality often blind us to these facts.

Here in NY, tuition rates have been going up and the government is attempting to de-couple public tuition at colleges from the Legislature’s purview to those of school bureaucrats, after decades of neglecting funding of higher education. When those of us point out that by simply collecting (instead of rebating) the financial transactions tax on Wall St. that remains on the books, and raising income tax rates back to where they were 30 years ago, we’d have a $16-$20 billion surplus and be able to fully fund all public education, we are ignored or shot down because it doesn’t serve the capitalist paymasters.

In the short run the students are right: this is all connected. Does the working class bear the burden or the ruling class? Students in QC are refusing to get involved with the student loan system that plagues the United States, and they are right to do so. A lot of the anger against them seems to come from “we had to do it so you should too” mentality. Why not, instead, demand free higher education, instead of a system that is simply a money-laundering scheme for central banks (http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2012/04/the-student-loan-tax.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+creditslips%2Ffeed+%28Credit+Slips%29) or how most corporations barely pay taxes and this is why the West is in such a crunch (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?_r=1&hp)? Apparently we are trained to accept government bullshit when it comes from pro-capitalist stooges like the Liberals in QC, but when someone on the left demands programs designed for the working class it is either spit on as too expensive or utopian.

Yea! First time back on the Monsters Ball in a long time! Whooo go #4 go!

Costco, did you write this? If not, here ya go:

A whole pizza, oh, Facetaco. At least it isn’t a Failure Pile in a Sadness Bowl.

What no one saw was the sunflower, in the corner, with a gun, silently urging them to keep dancing…

Are you sure it wasn’t Frank Grimes?

“Get in there, you big furry oaf! I don’t care what you smell!”