Kiss Up, Kick Down––April 2016 Edition

This week John Oliver takes his always funny approach to an investigation of credit agencies, those large slipshod corporations that tell potential employers and landlords that you are actually a different person with a criminal record. Why do they do this? Because employers and landlords––groups of people who are always richer and more secure than you are–– are worried that someone lower down on the food chain is going to rip them off when the proper order if things reserves the right to rip people off to folks like them. Besides, if they make mistakes about your credit history (and 25% of the time they do) it’s only happening to people poorer than they are, so who gives a damn? (A: apparently no one.)

What if poverty is actually profitable to rich people. It is, and this happens. Predatory capitalism prefers to prey on people too poor or too weak to put up a fight.

If you dare to fight back, if you dare to criticize the powerful, this sort of thing might happen. Some courageous citizen annoyed Florida Governor Rick Scott and he did this. By the way, has Experian or any of the other credit rating agencies ascertained that Governor Scott is not actually Bat Boy?

Why do rich people have such contempt for the poor? Maybe they have a warped view of reality. Maybe they think money grows on trees and some people are just too dumb and lazy to pick the fruit. Because for rich people money does grow on trees. For the rest of us that is just an expression. Evonomics takes a look at the perpetual money machine rich people live off of.

The Founding Principles of Kiss Up, Kick Down.

I came across an interesting article from the Economic Policy Institute. Look at the graph. 1. Reaganomics killed the middle class 2. Productivity rose by a greater percentage when workers were paid better.

The business end of the Reaganomics tool sees need and vulnerability as a business plan and profit opportunity, an opportunity to exploit people. The Washington Post describes ways hospitals exploit the uninsured by jacking up their costs.

That was the hospital/healthcare business, here’s how they exploit need in the judicial/penal business. John Oliver explains. (Funny and true as hell.)

The poster child for pure Reaganomics is the state of Kansas, where Governor Brownback hoped to prove lower taxes would increase revenue like Papa Reagan promised. I’ll let Doonesbury explain how well that works out...

And SLATE reports that if the Kansas courts rule against him, Brownback “has a way of shutting that whole thing down.”

If Reagan was the messiah, who wrote the gospels? (Ayn Rand. Here are some interesting conclusions we're meant to draw from Atlas Shrugged.)

A purer libertarian and Republican world functions on a mixture of wishful thinking and “I don’t have to if I don’t want to.” This one's from The Onion, which is nearly as hilarious as Ayn Rand herself.