A lot of people are angry about McDonald’s new financial advice website for employees, an ill-conceived project which drips with “let them eat cake” insouciance. “Every dollar makes a difference,” McDonald’s lectures its struggling and often impoverished workers.

But it’s time to ditch the resentment and offer McDonald’s a word of thanks. It has just performed an invaluable service for campaigns like Raise the Minimum Wage, petitions like this one, and July 24′s National Day of Action by serving up a timely and exhaustively researched brief on their behalf. This new website provides invaluable data for a living-wage “McManifesto.”

You want fries with that?

Golden archness.

As a number of ticked-off writers have observed, McDonald’s also pretty much advises its employees not to clothe themselves, heat their homes, seek educational advancement, or pay more than $600 in rent and $20 in health insurance premiums per month. (AsDaniel Gross notes, that would pay for about two days of coverage.)

And, as if that’s not enough, there isn’t even any money for food in the McDonald’s sample budget. Apparently for McDonald’s employees the phrase “Happy Meal” means you’re happy whenever you’re lucky enough to scrounge a meal.

People were seething at the website’s arch touches, which include interactive games like “Financial Football” and “Road Trip to Savings,” and were thunderstruck by the lordly obliviousness behind pronouncements like “Knowing where your money goes and how to budget it is the key to your financial freedom.”

(Not when there’s not enough of it, Sir Ronald.)

Peter S. Goodman notes that McDonald’s receives a fortune in “corporate welfare.”  In fact, government policies help most of the country’s underpaying mega-corporations keep expanding through a series of tax breaks and other concessions.

Economically, we’re super-sizing them.

Heart of the matter.

Many McDonald’s workers need public assistance to survive, which often includes Medicaid. That’s right: The public is even subsidizing McDonald’s low wages and lousy benefits when it comes to health care.

Subsidize McDonald’s? For health care? With that food it should be hit with a surcharge.

Fun fact: McDonald’s says it serves nine million pounds of French fries globally every day. Since slightly more than half its franchises are in the US, that means Americans presumably consume between four and five million pounds of this lard-laden, massively space-time curving starchy mass every 24 hours.

Each McDonald’s French fry is a tiny, fat-drenched drone missile aimed directly at the American cardiovascular system.   One can only imagine how much of our nation’s runaway health care costs are traceable to this one corporation alone.

And we’re subsidizing its health care, rather than the other way around.

Gross profits.

In 2012 McDonald’s had gross profit of more than $10 billion on annual revenues of $27 billion. That’s up more than 12 percent from 2010.  The lard business is good.

Visa, which for some reason has been spared most of this week’s online fury, deserves its own share of negative attention. As the financial half of this website team, Visa presumably provided the handiwork which reminds struggling fast-food employees that “every day and every dollar make a difference.”

Visa, like McDonald’s, is a coddled corporation. A government less corrupted by Big Money would have broken up this monopolistic enterprise long ago, especially given its tendency to abuse its marketplace dominance.

Visa was originally created by one fraud-ridden and bailed out megabank, Bank of America, and continues to enrich another. And, as CNN Money reported, its 2008 IPO “created a nice windfall for its owners, including its largest shareholder JPMorgan … about $1.3 billion on its 29 million shares.”

JPM made the headlines with yet another major fraud just this morning, adding piquancy to the knowledge that it bleeds us a little every time we swipe a credit card or debit card.  And yet these two corporate anti-heroes have performed a great service by making the case so beautifully:

Americans can’t live on today’s minimum wage.