eat the average

p.j. o'rourke once wrote a book called Eat the Rich. I read it, back when I was a moderately uninformed moron, which is just the kind of audience that is o'rourke's conservative kitsch niche. Ultimately, the point was, as every conservative dipshit wanker advocates: leave the rich alone! They're nuttin' but good.  he was all freaked out that america was eating the rich, and ol' peejay had to do what he could to stop it.

looking back on it now, fuck, what a howler.

Because I don't see that. I don't see high-frequency trading America eating the rich. At all. Nor, I suspect, does anyone else.

What we do see is the "average American," being eaten. And not necessarily metaphorically speaking. They are being eaten -- not all in one big gulp -- by the American establishment.

Imagine an enormous shark tank. The tank, observed from specially selected observer boxes secretly housed in secured confines deep within Goldman Sach, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanely, etc., show Americans in the water, desperately treading the medium to stay afloat. Sharks are circling below.

Various species of shark are circling: the wall street shark, the health insurance shark, the war shark, the oil shark, well, you get the picture. For some time now, various expressions of these species have been nibbling away at the dangling, twitching limbs of "average" Americans treading in that gummy pool of costs, debt, interest, taxes, and fees.

So, we've watch the wall street sharks take a big chunk. "health insurance" companies have been chewing on a meaty limb for awhile, and are about to get a new bone. Everyone out there has got teeth in the body of American citizens.

The latest is true for another shark bite from an heretofore unheard of species, the "foreclosure mill" shark, an organism dedicated to booting people out of their homes for the handsome fee of one thousand dollars. The more you boot, the more you make!

Yes, if you exhibit tendencies toward cutthroat shyster lawyerism, you too can succeed handsomely as a foreclosure shark by illegally churning out foreclosures at a grand a pop. You'll live your life in an abandoned strip mall, but, hey, anything for a bite. Such is the addiction to human flesh.