The Rebate Scam; More Betting Advice

How are you going to spend your $600? The poorest: the unemployed, those who don’t make enough to file, those on Social Security as well as certain veterans won’t get anything. The really poor will get $300, individuals $600 and couples $1200 with $300 per dependent. Piddly, even if it weren’t a scam.

The aim, and this is always their “solution” to economic crises, is to give tax money to capitalists. This time it will go through the circuitous path of your checking account…briefly. Three hundred dollars is, at best, a couple of trips to the grocery store for a family or a single credit card payment. Or maybe a fun night on the town with your friends, but not much more than that.

A lot of people I know already have that money spent whether in bills or rent. They’re relying on it in these tough times, so it will hardly count as disposable spending money as the government hopes. People are too in the hole to save it. The hope is that everyone will fill up the tank and go to the mall with it. Some will do just that since it’s hardly enough to be real debt relief for folks. The hole everyone is in will get no shallower.

Yeah, that’s the solution. Give everybody a little money to buy more shit they don’t need feeding the problem in the first place; the same old falling rate of profit and overcapacity endemic in a system based on commodity production. The crisis in banking and the finance sector in general adds depth to this crisis. Workers the world over are getting it from all sides these days.

Boom, bust, boom, bust, boom, bust. We’ve been here before. For some people that’s exactly what this little money will be in their pockets; a brief boom followed by a bust. A sugar rush of spending infusion into the economy. For many people it’s already gone to pay down bills, part of the rent, their taxes or the booze they’re going to buy so they can get smashed for a month straight (and who doesn’t need to with all these worries?).

Mine is going to rent. In the meantime my debt gets bigger and my income gets smaller. The economic crisis is based on bigger contradictions than these fools know. The UN putting down food riots (because of prices, not scarcity) in Haiti is the shape of things to come.

“You’re hungry and so are your children. You may even starve to death, but don’t touch that food, it’s private property!” That’s capitalism for hungry people; it throws you in jail for feeding yourself when you have no money. If any more proof was needed that the United Nations’ main role is the defense of the wretched status quo of the imperialist system then Haiti should answer it. If not, write me and I’ll give you several thousands more examples.

The government hopes this will shock the country out of recession. Don’t use your check to bet on it.