On his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher (embed below), Maher was talking about the massive income disparity perpetuated by the American economy.
Say 100 Americans get together and order a 100 slice pizza. The pizza arrives, they open the box, and the first guy takes 80 slices….
And if someone suggests, “Why don’t you just take 79 slices?”
“THAT’S SOCIALISM!”
Bill’s panel guest tea partier Dana Loesch interjected, “But he earned those 80 slices!”
Ah…not exactly.
In today’s America
- 1% Man used his first hard-earned million (or never-touched-by-tax inherited family fortune) to buy a baker’s dozen congressmen with millions in campaign pizza and the promise of pizzaria management positions and side dibs on pizza bus-girls (or boys) between stints in office.
- 1% Man’s lobbyists helped 1% Man’s Congress write regulations blocking competitors from entering the pizza business.
- 3 of the Bottom 99 sat around drinking beer while the other 96 cleaned up, giving Fox News pundits cover to claim that 1% Man deserved at least 80 slices, because the Bottom 99 were all lazy, uncreative, unambitious freeloaders. In fact they should give 1% Man all the slices and just eat the box.
- Waterloo Jim DeMint declared that any talk of spreading the pizza would cause God to forsake America.
- 1% Man moved his pizza bakeries to abandoned drywall factories in China, sold pizza duty-free to the Bottom 99 Americans, and stashed the profits tax-free in a P.O. Box corporation in the Cayman Islands.
- 1% Man’s Congress slashed the Pizza Import Inspection Bureau’s budget to the point that they could only inspect 1 pizza per million, between industry-funded junkets to snort coke from the navels of pizza bus-girls (or boys).
- Glenn Beck’s chalk board speculated that God unleashed the tsunami on Japan because “the Japs don’t like pizza all that much.”
- When 1% Man’s TBTF Bank lost on a $2 trillion gamble on papier mache pizza, President George W. Bush handed him 870 billion taxpayer pizzas and Ben Bernanke followed with 13 trillion in interest-free pizza loans, which TBTF Bank used to buy US Treasuries paying 3%, rather than loaning it to the Bottom 99 to start their own pizzarias.
- In exchange for the bailouts and interest-free loans, 1% Man’s TBTF Bank delivered an undisclosed amount of toxic sub-prime pizza powder to the Fed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
- Sharon Angel screeched that sharia law had taken over independent pizza parlors in Bat Cave, North Carolina.
- President Obama, who’d campaigned on fixing the historic pizza distribution disparity, ordered Timothy Geithner to send 1% Man’s TBTF Bank 1 trillion more pizzas with a stern note: “Pretty please, guys, won’t you please lend the Bottom 99 a couple of slices?“
- In Wisconsin, Scott Walker and the Republican legislature stripped pizza delivery workers’ access to delivery fleet scooters. They’ll have to walk now.
- Republican governors and legislatures across the country slashed assistance to children, the elderly and the working poor, so that they could give 1% Man’s pizza business and TBTF Bank tax breaks to create more jobs – for slaves in Chinese
drywallpizza factories. - When the Bottom 20 had trouble stretching their 3.4/100th slice month-to-month, 1%Man’s
Loan SharkingPayDay Lending business offered micro loans at 42 slices APR. 1% Man’s Congress and state legislators had recently made it much harder for people (but not bankers, hedge fund managers or corporations!) to default on such loans. In fact, 30 American states now allow people (but not bankers!) to be JAILED for small loan defaults. [Seriously, folks, DEBTOR'S PRISON in the USA 2011. WHAT THE FUCK? Is Dickens' England the GOP's idea of Nirvana?] - 1% Man’s Congress exempted the “end result” of 1% Man’s pizza binge from environmental regulations.
- Mitt Romney’s hair was perfect.
iTunes Podcast of Real Time with Bill Maher
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