links for 2009-09-10

Yesverywellbut, say those comfortably removed from the economic margins, such fees can be avoided through responsible account management. And the supercilious and dim yesbuts raising this objection will go on to point out that they, personally, have never had to pay such a fee. And they will take this as evidence of their own superior responsibility and their oh-so-superior superiority too all of those stupid working class people stuck at the margins for whom one flat tire or one sick child or one unanticipated $10 expense can incur a cascading series of late fees and overdraft charges and other forms of emergency short-term credit that can easily exceed the $150 that Wal-mart graciously offers to extract from their paychecks each year.

It mostly seems like a slightly superior incarnation of The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, a record that (ironically) came out seven months after this one. Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel between the Beatles and the Stones catalogue—it often seems as if every interesting thing The Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this, of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the Beatles to The Rolling Stones?