Streams Of Consciousness: TORY SCUM! TORY SCUM!

Tonight I arrived from London at a riad-- a traditional Moroccan town home-- that I'm renting in Marrakech for the month with some friends. At Heathrow passengers had been clustered around the TV sets watching the demonstrations against the move by the right-wing Conservative/Lib-Dem government to raise the cost of university tuition in the name of "austerity," the term the servants of the wealthy use instead of "concentrating the nation's wealth in fewer and fewer hands." I kept hoping the students would really go for it and spark a worldwide uprising against the international ruling elites. By the time we had to board our plane, they hadn't.

The property manager manager brought us up to the third floor to marvel at our beautiful rooftop terrace. On one side was a magnificent unobstructed view of the peaks of the Haute Atlas Mountains. On the other side was the king's palace. He was in town for the 10th Annual Marrakech Film Festival. She asked us to please not point any cameras in the direction of the palace.

I noticed in the news that an irate British student, recognizing that the Conservative and Lib-Dem politicians are merely window dressing-- a veneer of "democracy"-- for the monarchy and the other rich cocksuckers who own the U.K., didn't point a camera at so-called "Prince" Charles and the whore he runs around with, but a stick instead, right through the window of their Rolls.

With Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders into his sixth hour of filibustering the Obama-McConnell tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, perhaps America can count on pissed-off drag queens to have the balls more Americans don't have when it comes to standing up against the authorities, the way they did at Stonewall, not over taxes for the rich but because of attendant tyranny by the elites who most benefit by social discord among the masses.

While the British royals were being shaken up and discomfited a bit as the tuition fees are heading for implementation, complacent Missouri and Illinois students... scratched their asses in bewilderment.

And... Rep. Raúl Grijalva called for a significant increase in government regulators’ ability to levy financial and other penalties against oil companies that violate safety and environmental standards in the wake of a Wall Street Journal article highlighting numerous “close calls” at rigs that barely avoided disasters. An Interior Department oversight board found in September that current penalties are not sufficient to change industry behavior. According to a recent CNBC article headlined “Offshore Drilling Penalties Are Toothless, Panel Says”:

In an environment where many companies pay between $500,000 and $1 million daily to run an offshore facility a potential fine of no more than $35,000, even in the case of a worker’s death, is not an effective tool to enforce safety regulations, the panel said.

For all of last year, the Interior Department collected a total of $919,000 in civil penalties for offshore drilling violations, which is equal to the cost of shutting down a large drilling facility for just one day.

Higher penalties was one of more than 50 recommendations Salazar said he would consider to improve how offshore drilling is regulated.

“If thirty-five thousand dollars a day is pocket change, then why would a company make the decision to improve its behavior?” Grijalva said. “The Interior Department should review these rules and make a decision as soon as possible how to better protect coastal communities and the wider economy from another catastrophe.”
But the media seems more hopped up over the temerity of students who discomforted the British royals, than over what the ruling elites are doing to the rest of us.