Usurious Bastards

The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.

-Carroll Quigley

As the conventional wisdom goes, the stock market is predicated on trust and as a crusty old uncle of mine once said to a young and impressionable teenager with zero knowledge of the way that the world really worked: “trust me is just another two letter word that means the same as fuck you.” Old Uncle Harvey’s words of wisdom came home to roost on this Monday morning in America when the finance oligarchs were able to use their inside juice to pull off the grandest and most audacious heist yet in this season of sleazy swindles. Obama Treasury Secretary and Wall Street fixer Timothy Geithner delivered the bacon for the bankers, gave the crack ho stock market a wonderful and intoxicating fix that sent the Dow screaming up by nearly 7 percent in a matter of hours and locked in the losses for the great grandchildren of every poor schmuck with the misfortune to be living through this period of plunder and wealth consolidation.

In phase two of the ongoing SPLURGE (any similarity to the con-game called the surge that allowed us to become winners in Iraq is fully intentioned), on Tuesday night, our very own national Teflon coated bullshit salesman, President Barack Obama, the banker’s gofer and shill for the new generation began to sell it to the saps and a marvelous job he is doing. This man my friends is no new Roosevelt, he is the devil in disguise and he (as many progressives had warned) is in the bag for the establishment. What we really have is a by proxy continuation of the Clinton administration, of course Hillary was to have been the one but in the waning days of the ruinous Bush-Cheney neocon war on America it was just too tough to pimp another dynasty so the crooks who run the system found another pitchman. I cannot possibly articulate the sense of disgust and betrayal that I am experiencing as I write this, it is very difficult to restrain my gag reflex and keep from vomiting on my keyboard because once again the scum wins again and Americans have been played for chumps. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman(another Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz decried its “perverse incentives”) and columnist for the damned liberal New York Times put it best in his Monday column Financial Policy Despair:

Over the weekend The Times and other newspapers reported leaked details about the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan, which is to be officially released this week. If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the “cash for trash” plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.
Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

This isn’t likely to win Krugman any friends in the Obama White House, especially with a sleazy little political gangster like Rahm Emanuel who I predict will eventually make even the Great Satan Karl Rove look like an amateur running the show and protecting the interests of his investment banker buddies. While Barack Obama may be the friendly Fozzie Bear face of this latest hostile takeover of the White House the real example of how things are really done is in this incredible NYT piece from back in January:

Early this month, Barack Obama was meeting with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and other lawmakers when Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, began nervously cracking a knuckle.

Mr. Obama then turned to complain to Mr. Emanuel about his noisy habit.

At which point, Mr. Emanuel held the offending knuckle up to Mr. Obama’s left ear and, like an annoying little brother, snapped off a few special cracks.

The venomous cobra that is Emanuel is of course Mr. Obama’s minder and handler, note that he was the first announced member of the new administration, the first of a reoccupation of Washington by Clintonistas. The promised change, at least to this point has been strictly cosmetic, the wars still continue, more troops are headed to Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires past, Gitmo is still open, the new administration is engaging in Clintonian language manipulation regarding ‘torture’ that invokes memories of “it depends on what the meaning of is is”, the military is getting ready to be sent to the Mexican border and there has been no serious discussion of reigning in the run amok police state and the Stasi style high tech domestic spying operations. Yep, change has come to America alright, just like “the check’s in the mail”, “this won’t hurt a bit”, “I love you” and “I promise not to come in your mouth”…and it was all wrapped up in a big bundle of stinking dogshit with a $ sign on it and parked on the doorsteps of Americans and set afire by the Geithner-Bernanke-Paulson triad with the unarguable message that you are either cops or little people. Webster Tarpley had a good one that I heard that saving the banks is like trying to save one of Count Dracula’s victims by giving the blood transfusion to the victim through the vampire when the real remedy is to just pull him off and drive a stake through his heart.

Now that it has become pretty apparent that Obama is just more of the same and like Bush has his own legions of cultlike devotees and apologists we can all just take Bobby Knight’s advice that if rape is intevitable relax and enjoy it because really what choice do we really have? Before it even really started the revolution has been hijacked, progressives are still getting the shaft, the Employee Free Choice Act is going to be dead on arrival, there is NO antiwar movement if the media refuses to acknowledge that there is a fucking war and even the Ron Paul movement libertarians have been marginalized by the old fool’s proclivity to keep showing up at Nazi bund meetings like CPAC and regularly appearing on FOX. The oligarchy has it’s shit together, this is their homefield, they own the refs and there is no replay booth. Welcome to chumpland, when a show like HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher features Keith Olbermann as a guest and they both mock the very real detention camps by conflating their existence with the weeping, at the edge of sanity fascist basket case Glenn Beck it’s a done deal that the agents have seized control of all phones and the only way out of the matrix will be in a body bag.

Despite the rear guard cover that the corporate media is giving to the ongoing looting spree by laying poison bait for maxed-out marks and rubes to get back into the casino and start spending their money at usurious interest rates by rapacious banks that are fast approaching the same sort of deal that you can score at pay day lenders there are those who really get it, too bad that their observations are drowned out by Dancing With the Stars, American Idol and the rest of the standard bread and circuses that placate the masses of asses. Some very excellent work has been done for those with an inclination for the truth by alternative media types and dissenting with the official state line experts who have been consistently right about this catastrophic clusterfuck from the outset.

The gold standard in calling out the great robbery and financier’s coup d’etat has to go to Matt Taibbi whose piece in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine entitled The Big Takeover is a must read. I excerpt a few pieces of this long but brilliant expose:

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

And

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

And

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That’s the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers’ credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren’t much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don’t know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word “zero coupon bond” in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize “toxic” risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

In addition to Taibbi’s magnum opus on the greedy pigs who have destroyed the economy I would also recommend Thomas Georghegan’s treatise on the legalization of usury in the latest Harper’s entitled Infinite Debt: How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed the Economy, the same April issue has Daniel Brook’s article on the payday lending industry Usury Country, a piece in Washington Monthly by James K. Galbraith that calls bullshit on the ‘the worst is over’ folderol being foisted upon us by the high-rollers, the looters and the banksters where he speaks the forbidden heresy of No Return to Normal:

The most likely scenario, should the Geithner plan go through, is a combination of looting, fraud, and a renewed speculation in volatile commodity markets such as oil. Ultimately the losses fall on the public anyway, since deposits are largely insured. There is no chance that the banks will simply resume normal long-term lending. To whom would they lend? For what? Against what collateral? And if banks are recapitalized without changing their management, why should we expect them to change the behavior that caused the insolvency in the first place?

The oddest thing about the Geithner program is its failure to act as though the financial crisis is a true crisis—an integrated, long-term economic threat—rather than merely a couple of related but temporary problems, one in banking and the other in jobs. In banking, the dominant metaphor is of plumbing: there is a blockage to be cleared. Take a plunger to the toxic assets, it is said, and credit conditions will return to normal. This, then, will make the recession essentially normal, validating the stimulus package. Solve these two problems, and the crisis will end. That’s the thinking.

But the plumbing metaphor is misleading. Credit is not a flow. It is not something that can be forced downstream by clearing a pipe. Credit is a contract. It requires a borrower as well as a lender, a customer as well as a bank. And the borrower must meet two conditions. One is creditworthiness, meaning a secure income and, usually, a house with equity in it. Asset prices therefore matter. With a chronic oversupply of houses, prices fall, collateral disappears, and even if borrowers are willing they can’t qualify for loans. The other requirement is a willingness to borrow, motivated by what Keynes called the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a slump, such optimism is scarce. Even if people have collateral, they want the security of cash. And it is precisely because they want cash that they will not deplete their reserves by plunking down a payment on a new car.

The aforementioned pieces by Taibbi, Geoghegan and Brooks all merited appearances on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now the past three days but perhaps the greatest statement of all was made by former Reagan administration Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts who in his latest column, Is the Bailout Plan Breeding a Bigger Crisis? is coming very close to actually endorsing – GASP – Socialism! Roberts mentions that ugly little story that flew below the radar that our number one creditor China is starting to make noises about dumping the dollar as the world reserve currency:

Rome eventually understood that its imperial frontiers exceeded its resources and pulled back. This realization has yet to dawn on Washington.

More budget savings could come from a different approach to the financial crisis. The entire question of bailing out private financial institutions needs rethinking. The probability is that the bailouts are not over. The commercial real estate defaults are yet to present themselves.

Would it be cheaper for government to buy the shares of the banks and AIG at the current low prices than to pour trillions of taxpayers’ dollars into them in an effort to drive up private share prices with public money? The Bush/Paulson bailout plan of approximately $800 billion has been followed a few months later by the Obama/Geithner stimulus-bailout plan of another approximately $800 billion. Together it adds to $1.6 trillion in new Treasury debt, much of which might have to be monetized.

Could this massive debt issue be avoided if the government took over the banks and netted out the losses between the constituent parts? A staid socialized financial sector run by civil servants is preferable to the gambling casino of greed-driven, innovative, unregulated capitalism operated by banksters who have caused crisis throughout the world.

Perhaps the Federal Reserve should be socialized as well. The notion of an independent, privately-owned Federal Reserve system was never more than a ruse to get a national bank into place. Once the central bank is part of the state-owned banking system, the government can create money without having to accumulate a massive public debt that saddles taxpayers’ and future budgets with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual interest payments.

Roberts has been ahead of the curve since his early realization that the Republican party had been taken over by drooling brownshirts in the early years of the Bush-Cheney nightmare and he consistently serves as a reminder of that bygone era when some conservatives actually had principles, ideas and a respect for intellectualism way back back before Joe the Plumber became the man.

The DOW was up 174 today, it’s morning in America again, time to pull yerself up by those good ole star-spangled bootstraps, go shopping… but if you look around you will notice that gas prices are creeping up again too since speculation is back in vogue, it could crack 8000 tomorrow when Barack Obama goes to give a progress report (grovel) to his banker bosses.

But that’s not important, hey, didja hear the one about the Michigan dude who just got 90 days for being caught with his dick in a car wash vacuum cleaner?

Move Along, Nothing to See Here…

Inviting the Sheep for Another Shearing

What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.

-Pink Floyd (sheep)

In the ongoing madness of an America in terminal decline, the great Surge II is now underway. This one has nothing to do with mass brainwashing that all is ell in Iraq and that we are indeed winning thanks to our shining medal festooned superstar quarterback otherwise known as General God (aka David Petraeus) to divert the flocks attention away from a doomed imperialist crusade. Nope, this one hits closer to home, it started last Monday with a sly piece of internal propaganda from Citigroup’s CEO Vikram Pandit having its best quarter since 2007 which triggered a sucker rally in the Wall Street casinos that dictate to the inhabitants of chumpland. The pocket media once again did their job, selling this latest call for the sheep to come and be sheared with all the effectiveness that they pimped the murderous lies of George W. Bush, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Things – ARE getting better you see, the gloom-gloomers, the glass is half-empty pessimists, the neurotic nervous nellies and the naysaying Eyores are all wrong, it’s a disease, in their heads, the economy is rocketing its way back to robustitude. The most incredible example of just how thoroughly corrupt that the corporatist media has become is the pernicious cover story of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine that has a picture of good ole Uncle Sam saying that he wants YOU to START SPENDING!… YOU need to INVEST in America – before it’s too late.

The Newsweek story, by Daniel Gross which inside is even more insidious in that it beats the reader over the head with STOP SAVING NOW! – in all caps and taking up the better part of page 27, page 26 is a picture of a squirrel (a cartoon representation of those greedy pigs who dare to save their own money rather than gamble in the Wall Street casinos who holding onto a backload of acorns has caused the branch of the tree to CRAK! Jesus fucking Christ, this is propaganda at its finest, even a cynic like me is astounded by the dastardly nature of this banker swill in one of the nation’s premier ‘news’ magazines.

A more sophisticated version of Mad Money Cramer, Gross goes on to say:

Saving cash and building up reserves is a necessary first step to recovery. But eventually the mountain of cash has to be put to work. Last week’s sharp market rally was certainly a sign—however fleeting it may turn out to be—that investors are putting money to work again. Retail sales in February provided another hint that purse strings may be loosening. But there’s much more work to be done. Ironically, post-bubble periods are frequently great times to start new ventures. The best time to start a dotcom wasn’t in 1999 when the IPO market was raging, it was in 2002, when the price of everything associated with the business—office space, programming talent—had plummeted. When Allied Corp. in the late 1980s didn’t want to pursue the development of consumer products based on global-positioning-satellite technology, Gary Burrell left, raised $4 million and formed Garmin, which today employs about 7,000 people.

Great solution, just trust Wall Street with that money, think long term, be patriotic even if the malefactors of great wealth do not and are more than happy to wallow in international troughs and then come back to shit on America. Gross, a highly-paid, high profile stooge is just playing his part in the ongoing relaunch project to save Wall Street looters and protect their plunder. We have seen this story already, Americans with dollar signs in their eyes and cash register bells going off in their heads like some bizarre real life Uncle Scrooge cartoon, duped into thinking that they can actually become rich and powerful themselves just like The Donald line up to be fleeced by the flim-flam men with the political juice and insider knowledge as they seek to cash out one more time. Perhaps a final time before the country impoldes inward upon itself. All aided and abetted by the media, the Wall Street cadre occupying Barack Obama’s White House, guys like Lawrence Summers and the conniving little twit Tim Geithner whose announcement as the new treasury secretary was greeted by a 6.5 % spike in the DOW, the crack-ho economy got a mainline spike into the arm and knew that the paper pusher inside the administration would ensure them that the game would go on and on. In the end of course, all has been enabled by the bewildered herd of sheeple themselves, brainwashed from birth into the bastardized capitalist system that is already drooling over being able to suck the blood from their grandchildren on account of their greed, stupidity and folly.

As a counter to the mainstream drivel that Gross and Newsweek are peddling as pearls of infinite wisdom I counter with an excerpt from a piece from his month’s Harpers. Infinite Debt by Thomas Georghegan discusses the ruinous and usurious effects of the debt based economy and its victims The same ones that Gross and his fellow pocket media hacks are now trying to swindle out of whatever little they may now have in their piggy banks having been badly burned by the existing system that has beggared them and cast them out of jobs and homes in addition to destroying their pensions and 401k retirement plans. From the Harper’s piece (which I will be addressing at length in my coming post Usurious Bastards):

Which is why the middle class is shrinking. Basically, we’re all waiters now; we’re bowing and scraping and working for the banks. Look closely at any American, and it’s even odds that he or she, directly or indirectly, is somehow employed by the “financial services sector,” which covers insurance and real estate and financial instruments of any kind. As brokers, lawyers, loan collectors, loan consolidators, secretaries at big investment firms, chauffeurs of private limousines, or even the high-tech types who exist solely to service banks — all of us, millions of us, are part of it, living off it in some way, as three generations ago we lived off manufacturers.

The game is rigged people, and the hit job done on America by the rotten fuckers on Wall Street and their institutionalized system of debt slavery is all that is left, and STILL the banksters on the street and the gangsters in D.C. are doint everything that they can to continue to bleed the silly and naive masses of asses by doing all that is possible to get the debt/consumerism bubble reinflated. In a rare piece of sanity that slipped by the censors and minders of the memory hole a Reuters story, More debt: a curious solution to a credit crisis dared to utter the heresy that:

Indeed, a huge part of the Treasury’s economic rescue plan is based on reviving securitization. This is the process by which everything from real estate and auto loans to credit cards and student debt gets repackaged into bonds and is then sold on to investors in a secondary market.


Given this history, Wray, also a senior fellow at the Levy Economics Institute, said asset-backed bonds are the problem, not the solution. “We need to kill off securitization and go back to banking — loan officers and underwriting.”

Wall Street is a con game, it depends on confidence in order for the moneychangers to book their fees and peddle their bad paper, given the Surge II it’s apparent that the entrenched elitists are determined to wage war against any sort of change that Obama may have in mind. Given the first two months of the administration and while being mindful that it’s still early, despite some initial guarded optimism I am becoming more and more certain that nothing is changing except the management of the whorehouse. I now find myself in agreement more or less with those progressives who were wary of Obama from the onset, with his government packed with recycled Clinton era swine, the usual assortment of Wall Street and Federal Reserve grifters running fiscal policy and his still stinging kick in the balls from the Israel lobby over the Freeman resignation it only looks like more of the same shit but in a different package. Helicopter Ben’s announcement that the Fed would now be buying American debt to save their fucking system, the dollar immediately took a shit and with the coming wave of hyperinflationi as a result of this latest idiocy this story should send a cold chill up the spine of all who are onto what has really been going on as America has been gutted: The US is Facing a Weimar Moment. Read it if you dare.

As Orwell once wrote in the literary classic Animal Farm:

“All animals are equal, some are just more equal than others”

Republican ‘free marketers’ are unscrupulous and pathologically greedy, they also delight in the trafficking of human misery for profit. It makes them feel empowered. They are like the S.O.B. sitting at the Monopoly table who is not content in owning Boardwalk and Park Place as well as all of the utilities and railroads but also buys Baltic and Mediterranean and loads them up with houses and hotels then squeals with childlike glee when some poor bastard lands on one of them and is driven into bankruptcy. The game of Monopoly is very relevant to life itself in laissez-faire hell, where the rich are able to accumulate property on a rapidly escalating scale and as wealth rapidly increases the less fortunate are driven into bankruptcy with the winner being the monopolists.

This is Laissez-Faire ‘free market’ Capitalism in its ultimate form, the ‘free market’ is only truly advantageous and ‘free’ to those who have the most cash and assets and they are gathered at the expense of the poor who eventually are the losers but hey, that’s what it’s all about isn’t it in the Wall Street Journal’s perfect world. Now that the rape of the system has nearly been completed how long is it going to take until there is a realization of just how thoroughly the free market fanatics have cannibalized the country in pursuit of profit? And the denial needs to stop immediately, the existing system has already failed and failed miserably.

Capitalism is eating itself. Like a python slowly trying to digest it’s own tail, the economic master plan, the Shock Doctrine has come home now and the sheep are being prepped for yet another shearing, soon they will served up with a side of mint jelly.

It is important to understand that a distinction needs to be made when it comes to capitalism between that which is regulated and the ‘free market’ aka Lassez Faire strain that the road to hell is paved with. The end result of unregulated capitalism is monopoly of the most extreme sort as well as the redistribution of wealth to those at the top of the class system, I wonder why nobody has ever dubbed this as ‘trickle up economics’ which is of course exactly what it is. One of history’s most important and enduring lessons is that hundreds of thousands must toil in the muck in order to allow one rotten, greedy son of a bitch to have his face displayed on a sphinx. The American middle class are the ones who are forced by their Wall Street pharaohs to build the bricks for the monuments to the super wealthy under increasingly hostile conditions in increasingly dangerous work environments with an increasingly smaller amount of straw.

The establishment after all has a vested interest in the existence of a huge and desperate underclass. The accompanying crime and urban rot helps to breed the necessary fear that justifies increased police powers and surveillance so as to keep the interests of the elite safe and sound while they sleep behind the walls of their gated communities each night. We were swindled by the free market pimps and deregulation pushers, all that it all did was create conditions for monopolies and trusts and consumer gouging. Take an honest look at yourself, are you truly better off today than you were yesterday? Or the day before? Or five years ago?

Well understand one thing…..today is as good as you are going to have it for the rest of your life under this existing rotten system.

We Are All Losers: The system itself is designed to make losers of us all except that extreme few with the means to purchase influence and therefore protection.

Under this system we all lose, mainly our losses are incremental.

We lose our lives through an increasing amount of time spent on a job locked in a struggle of diminishing gains to even survive.

We lose our health

We lose time with our children and families, this is the most tragic loss of all in most instances as it perpetuates the cycle of the decline in human relationships and destroys the family. Despite what the establishment propagandists and their phony religious wars with their insipid ‘pro family’ sloganeering it is not the loss of morality in through cultural changes in society that is causing the degradation of the family but the greed of an unfettered and monstrous capitalist system that demands more and more in order to slake its bloodsucking appetite for profits. It is the pursuit of these profits at the expense of our humanity that has laid waste to the family, and our values and every day that we are forced to prostitute ourselves in order for the wealthiest of the greed mongers to further entrench themselves is one more day closer to the day that we will ultimately die in vain for their sins.

And in buying into the legitimacy of this lie of a system we ultimately lose our souls.

In a system that is designed to ultimately make losers out of all but the very few who are able to parlay their inordinate influence into being able to utilize it as a weapon of exclusion I found the following from the late, great Hunter S. Thompson to be words of wisdom, this in reference to the ultimate outsiders The Hells Angels:

Let’s just hope that there are still some outlaws left out there amongst the sheeple, they are all that we have when it comes down to whatever hope there may be left in an increasingly hopeless and hostile world.

There is an important difference between a ‘loser’ and an ‘outlaw’ . One is passive and the other is active and the main reasons that the Angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the daydreams of millions of losers who don’t wear any defiant insignia and who don’t know how to be outlaws.”

The Angels don’t like being called losers but they have learned to live with it. “Yeah, I guess I am” said one “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out”

This worked wonders during the boom of the past couple of decades, leading to rapid capital formation that underpinned a huge rise in lending. But when the music stopped, many investors were left looking for an empty chair as these products of financial “innovation” proved ruinously difficult to value.

What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it’s just the banks.

The hum of ambient noise in midtown Manhattan is several decibels lower than it was a year ago. Fewer black Town Cars idle outside the investment-bank offices on Park Avenue. The aisles of the flagship Saks Fifth Avenue are so quiet you’d think you were in a library. The restaurants and shops at Rockefeller Center are open as usual, but they seem oddly depopulated. Where are all the tourists and office workers, the hordes of junior analysts lining up in Starbucks?

Something less tangible is also absent: the spirit of caffeinated, heedless risk taking. For a generation, risk has been the adrenaline of the nation’s economy, the substance that made us all—from the denizens of midtown Manhattan to the residents of Manhattan, Kans.—run a little faster and stay up a little later. Now, with the economy in its 16th month of recession and the markets scythed in half, it seems we’ve all either switched to decaf or simply lost the taste for risk.

And

As consumers hibernate and investors hoard cash, the economy is withering. This new age of thrift is understandable. But for a recovery to take hold, Americans will need to start taking risks again.

And

Blue Horseshoe Loves Anacot Steel

Wake up, will ya pal? If you’re not inside, you’re outside, OK? And I’m not talking a $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable, I’m talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars buddy. A player, or nothing.

-Gordon Gekko

In the movie that would serve as a blueprint for the future lives of young turks shat out of the womb of 1980s Reagan eat the poor capitalism a young broker named Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen) engages in a bit of trickery to manipulate stock prices by invoking the magic words “Blue Horeshoe loves Anacot Steel” over the phone to players and media hacks. The movie was Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and the young Fox was in the process of selling his soul to the canny devil in suspenders who would become an iconic cultural figure. The seducer was big time corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) whose amorality and worldview rooted in the dogma that “greed is good” would serve as the role model for the very large scale looters, charlatans, thugs, hedge fund hyenas and money grubbing sociopaths who are responsible for the global financial collapse. Through their avarice, their blood-sucking vampirism and their relentless pursuit of zero sum game, fuck you capitalism they have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, beggared millions and first built and then destroyed trillions of dollars in fairy tale wealth that never existed in the first place other than in numbers in a computer. The smart ones cashed out and put their money into real assets, gold, real estate, commodities, off-shore bank accounts that would allow the chiselers to evade taxes on their ill-gotten gains.

The reason that I invoke “Blue Horseshoe Loves Anacot Steel” is largely inspired by a very interesting and provocative website that I was informed of called Deep Capture which examines a concerted and widespread effort by Wall Street parasites and their many accomplices in the media to influence the markets by spreading disinformation and engaging in short selling to create nonexistent stock and making money by driving down share prices from which they would profit. To put it in pop culture terms that are more easily understandable to the layman than all of that four-flushing Wall Street bullshit jargon, short selling is what Billy Ray Valentine and Louis Winthorpe did to bring down Randolph and Mortimer Duke by busting their racket to corner the orange juice market at the end of the movie Trading Places. The story put forth on Deep Capture is an exposure of a grand theft perpetrated against legitimate businesses, non-connected investors and America itself by a fiendish cadre of jackals working together to suck the marrow from the bones of not only the USA but the entire interconnected global economy that is currently on the precipice of ruination and the cause of widespread unrest that will soon be coming home to roost.

Now I am certainly no expert when it comes to the high-flying world of financial chicanery which is deliberately confusing and opaque so as to discourage close scrutiny and I am not even going to attempt to get into trying to explain this crap but even to a working shmoe like myself this sets off the alarms for fraud and criminality, the effects of which actually do trickle down (unlike the horseshit ‘free market’ deregulated predatory environment) and affect the lives of millions of victims. These are the poor people who lose their homes after being duped into taking out adjustable rate mortgages by the pimps peddling the mythical America dream, they slyly and misleadingly call it the ownership society (they own your ass) and then having those mortgages sliced, diced and packaged into complex financial instruments that are derivatives. The derivatives – the one word that is taboo in discussing the entire economic fiasco (kudos to Keith Olbermann who in his March 9th show invoked the D-word close to twenty times) for the simple reason is that it would be the accelerator to the smoldering anger and resentment already working its way through the populace and threatening civil unrest over the ongoing efforts by our wonderful government to continue to pump taxpayer money into a corrupt, rotting and diseased system to just keep the game going a bit longer to let the well connected high rollers cash out.

Note the failure of the Obama administration to do what is necessary and nationalize the banks, wipe out the gamblers and fire the management to pull these leeches off of our backs, that is rooted in an ongoing occupation of Washington by insiders. The key with any sort of real rescue of the financial system is with the devil in the details, it is imperative that the bad bank or whatever other Orwellian name that is assigned to the clearinghouse where the poisonous paper of the treacherous banksters be set up so that they can launder their money and saddle the next three generations with the bill. The rush is on too because the looming cataclysm of a tidal wave of mass commercial property defaults is near and the moneychangers know this.

Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do…

Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders..
…and then the kerosene

Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

-Bob Dylan: Desolation Row

The victims of the plague of foreclosures wrought by the Ponzi schemes of mortgage backed securitization (DERIVATIVES) are despite the best efforts of the shills and payroll propaganda parrots like the usual right-wing scum along with useful idiots such as CNBC’s Rick Santelli to paint them as losers and resort to the bread and butter tactic of ‘blaming the niggers’ are growing by the day in number. The courts are clogged, there are millions being forced out of the homes that they were tricked into buying by con men and carpetbaggers bearing ‘exotic’ mortgage schemes to game the system, falsely inflate real estate prices (now dropping like a rock subject to Newton’s law of gravity) and then book their commissions and fees fully knowing that when the music stopped they would ensure that there would be a chair under their mangy asses. The music did stop when the systemic rot could no longer be spackled over and the grossly overinflated markets began to crash under the weight of their own toxic bullshit like the houses of cards that they always have been. The economic diaspora cast adrift in a sea of hopelessness filled with ravenous sharks grows in number by the day. The best efforts of the Barack Obama administration to mediate the fiasco are hamstrung from their inception since he is as his predecessors were surrounded by same gaggle of financial wizards from Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve who will always be first and foremost interested in self-preservation and protecting their cronies.

But I digress…

Tuesday’s massive stock rally (the Dow was up nearly 400 pts) was largely the result of the buzz that the besieged monstrosity Citigroup was according to inside info sent into the media spin machine by CEO Vikram Pandit having it’s best quarter since 2007. Now considering that Citigroup is on bailout number fucking THREE I would certainly hope that they are having improved results but the news of this was disseminated early and the desired effect, to give another shot in the arm to the crack ho markets was a rousing success. Now it should be no hidden secret that Wall Street’s interests are diametrically opposed to those of the majority of Americans, those who are generally referred to by the talking heads and political whores of the oligarchy as “Main Street” As the financial sector has risen to a level of dominance in this country opposed only by the military-security industrial complex and to these powerful interests, everyone and everything else is simply collateral damage. By the way, this week’s Citigroup inspired sucker rally is now in the third day as the get rich quick rubes are ready to roll over and pay to grab a mouthful of pillow for the inevitable ass-fucking that they will be getting after this latest pump and dumb scam plays out. The seal of approval of the latest laying of poison bait was given by judas goat Cramer on Mad Money on Thurday – This Rally is Real!

The influencing of the markets and the complicity of certain media figures in pushing the lies of Wall Street thieves has gotten some rare attention as of late with the brilliant and ongoing attack on CNBC’s Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. CNBC is nothing other than a FOX News style propaganda network that works for the voracious Wall Street piranhas instead of the neoNazi, fascist Republican party. Both are nothing but disinformation factories that churn out public relations pieces like link sausage made with tainted skunk meat. Cramer is a big player in the collapse and the massive fraud, he is not just some bug-eyed babbling baboon on crystal meth as he appears, the preening court jester of looter capitalism. No, what Jim Cramer is is a Harvard educated connected man, a former hedge fund manager and business associate of vitriolic neocon Marty Peretz, formerly of the DLC democrat rag The New Republic and an Israel Lobby kahuna still hung over from the orgy of blood drinking that resulted in the brutal takedown of Charles Freeman this week.

Mad Money Cramer has had increased visibility this week due to the Stewart videos that have gone viral on YouTube and appeared on websites and blogs aplenty (including this one) and his admitted complicity in rigging the markets back in 2006. Now even a former Republican congressman, Tom Davis is suggesting that Cramer be made to testify on his knowledge of the hedge fund manipulation. It is also of my personal opinion that Cramer should be hauled into court and forced to spill his guts on his role in manipulation of the markets. He is an arrogant and volatile ass clown, a fucking sociopath and a a flim flam man without peer. Dig this little nugget from the Deep Capture website entitled: Jim Cramer is a Complicated Man.

In 1994 Cramer hired Nicholas Maier as a favor to Marty Peretz, who was close with the Maier family. Maier worked for Cramer until 1998, then left and wrote a tell-all book about his years with Cramer: Trading with the Enemy: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer’s Wall Street (New York: HarperCollins, 2002) It contained detailed description of Cramer’s manic and abusive style. For example, Maier recounted the following scene after a trader at Cramer’s firm, Mark Kantor, executed a buy order at a price one-quarter point higher than what Cramer had expected, a total difference of $625:

“‘The broker fucked us, big time!’

“‘The eighth offering was fading when we called,’ Mark explained.

“Jim bit down on his lower lip as his hands clench into fists. He leaned forward to get closer to Mark, and started banging on the top of his monitors. The crown of his balding skull reddened as he yelled at the top of his lungs in a high-pitched whine.

“‘I told you they fucked us! Fucked us, fucked us, fucked us!’

“‘Listen to me.’ With piercing eyes Jim scanned our sober faces. ‘This is not some fucking joke!’ he screamed, spit flying from his mouth. ‘We are at war. We are in a foxhole.’ He flung out his hands. ‘Everyone out there is the enemy!’

“Mark nodded to show Jim that he understood. That wasn’t what Jim wanted. He started smashing his phone over and over on the desk in front of him. He lifted a monitor and heaved it like a shot put. After flying several feet, it shattered on the floor.”

Maier also described Cramer’s questionable trading ethics. One passage noted a brush with naked short selling:

Jim turns toward his head trader. “Mark, sell ten thousand Bristol Myers.”

“We never bought any Bristol Myers,” Mark replies.

“We own the calls,” Jim corrects Mark impatiently, aggravated by the delay.

“So sell it short?” Mark asks for clarification. Mark knows that according to the SEC rule book, selling stock you don’t already own (even if you do own the call options) must be marked and executed as a short sale.

“You are confusing me with someone who gives a shit. Just sell it! I said hit the fucking bid!” adds Jim, not interested in wasting time over petty semantics. Skirting the “plus tick” rule in this case won’t necessarily make us a lot of extra money, but in Jim’s eyes, the rule is still an unenforceable annoyance. “And don’t ever ask me that again!”

Even more hilarious is that Cramer claimed to be the inspiration for Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox character, I shit you not. It’s like that other egotistical horses ass NFL agent Drew Rosenhaus claiming that he was the inspiration for Jerry Maguire. These guys have no fucking shame at all.

In the coming days Cramer willl be a source of much amusement, that much is as certain. In his much hyped Godzilla vs. King Kong steel cage death match with Jon Stewart last night the consensus is that Cramer got his ass handed to him, and justifiably so. Hey, what this guy is a part of is racketeering and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the man is a con artist and the only real difference between him and those predators who fleece grandma and grandpa out of their retirement money by high pressure selling them to buy into shitty time share scams on the Okeefenokee Swamp is that he has a propaganda network behind him. He belongs on some late night cable television infomercial selling the newest version of the juicemaster or hawking penis enlargement devices.

Since his career as some kind of oracle of instant wealth is now on the downside he had best avoid the latter gig…..his future cellmate may be a customer.

Crack Ho Economics

Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gates – Wall Street is the enemy of America. These financial terrorists continue to ravage the country, yesterday’s announcement of February job losses of nearly 700,000 brought a spike in stock prices, another mainline hit to the crack ho economy. With the misery mounting the Obama administration and the entrenched Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve bandits who really run the system are mounting a withering counter attack on any plans to dismantle the existing system of avarice by watering down the stimulus (an ass fucking with a reacharound) package and calling in the markers with all of their whores in Congress and the media to preserve the existing spoils system. When the sock puppet occupant of the White House, our shining new Jesus even emerges as a shill for Wall Street you can rest assured that the fix is in and the only change that you will be getting is chump change.

It now appears that the naysayers were right. While the new frontman and his gaggle of recycled Clintonistas and Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve moneychangers are asking for austerity from everyone else but the pigs on Wall Street continue to have their piggie troughs filled with more and more stolen loot. I have heard a lot of stuff on how this is just another opportunity for the oligarchy to bust everyone else and then consolidate. This sadly seems to be the case and once the entire middle class has been butt-fucked into bankruptcy the malefactors of great wealth are going to swoop in to buy up everything for pennies on the dollar.

Some people are saying that this is only another step towards the ‘one world government’ that has always been discussed by the paranoid elements of the far right as a communist or socialist takeover. They are wrong though, the driving force behind this would be financial kingpins of capitalism and the one world system would be corporate fascism.

The Obama administration is not going to reign in either the bankers (who really run this system) or to stop the wars of imperialism, the population will be beggared and the police state brought in to put down the rabble so that the big con goes on.

I don’t know if anyone has ever ever heard of Carroll Quigley but you need to check out what he says on finance capitalism and global banker control – it’s too complex to go into at lenght right now but is worthwhile background information. A good read is a post by blogger Tocque Deville entitled History: How the U.S. Government Was Overthrown in Three Easy Steps.

There is no intention of providing Americans with anything even remotely resembling real choices in their political system, ‘leaders’ and government and this was stated by Professor Quigley in his outstanding and largely obscure book Tragedy and Hope which revealed the way that the system really worked in regards to the financial elite and the secretive round table groups who represent the puppeteers for the easily blackmailed, controlled and greedheaded arrogant buffoons who are the political actors who are trotted out for public consumption. Quigley in the extensive research that he did on the global elite states:

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.

And…

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.

And…

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.

So the game is rigged already, it is supposed to be rigged and the only question is whether this financial catastrophe was set up or was being set up and was then triggered prematurely through greed, incompetence and the entire monstrosity just becoming unsustainable.

And the one-eyed idiot, Gordon Brown has just appeared before Congress to continue to push for the globalist dominination, the shock doctrine writ large, the grandest robbery in history. His editorial for the London Times on March 1st shows that the future is global consolidation and a new feudalism.

They Hanged Julius Streicher Didn’t They?

Editor’s Note – I would like to take an opportunity to recommend a piece from a friend of mine, William Cormier who has written today on the complicity of the mouthpieces in the fascist propaganda machine in the crimes that they so eagerly encourage. Such an essay is especially important to bring awareness to with the $40 million a year ‘populist’ spokesman for the anti-American virulent Republican party form of dead-ender fascism that is the last bastion of scoundrels trying to save their think tank paymasters, the malefactors of great wealth who have subsidized their careers and purchased the media from which they belch their hate and bile. Now with the paymasters of the extremist right in The Homeland doing their damn level best to incite violence, revolution and a crusade against the hated libruls, brown-skinned devils, commies, gays and every other scapegoat that could be invoked at the snakepit of sin and stupidity that was this week’s CPAC bund conference it is imperative that we ask the forbidden question.

How complicit are the establishment hatemongers in the crimes that they have done so much to endorse and in many cases encourage? In my personal opinion, and I have brought this up recently in my own writings – the propagandists and the whores in the media should no longer be able to cower behind the defense of free-speech as a shield as they and the oligarchy that employs their sordid services use the First Amendment as a shield from behind which they can use their money as ‘free speech’ while seeking to destroy the rights of everybody else.

So without further adieu, I present the following with the request that it be taken into account just how complicit that the purveyors of hatred are in the crimes of those that they encourage to commit.

Denial is no excuse, not any longer, not when the stakes are this high. The smell from those smokestacks downwind from Auschwitz wasn’t from freshly baked apple pie.

Nuremberg Trials Provide Legal Precedent For Prosecuting Purveyors Of Hate

By William Cormier

During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II when Julius Streicher was convicted and subsequently hung for “Jew Baiting” we were provided with the legal precedent for prosecuting those that incite others to violence. I have been contemplating this essay for quite some time, but today I read a revealing article on Op-Ed News that provides direct proof that purveyors of hate can and are directly responsible for the deaths of innocent Americans! Those who agitate and constantly spew their hate and prejudice in print and on America’s airwaves constantly hide behind “Freedom of Speech.” However, it is already an established rule of law that if you yell “fire” in a crowded theater, Free Speech can and will not protect those who abuse this right which results in the harm of innocent civilians. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia which details the trial of Julius Streicher, and please remember the circumstances of his conviction as you read the remainder of this essay:

Trial and execution

Julius Streicher was not a member of the military and did not take part in planning the Holocaust, or the invasion of other nations. Yet his pivotal role in inciting the extermination of Jews was significant enough, in the prosecutors’ judgment, to include him in the indictment of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal – which sat, ironically, in Nuremberg, where Streicher had once been an unchallenged authority.

During the trial, Gustave Gilbert, an American Army psychologist, was allowed to examine the Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg for war crimes. Among other tests, a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test was administered. Julius Streicher scored 106, the lowest among the Nazi leaders tested.

During his trial, Streicher displayed for the last time the flair for courtroom theatrics that had made him famous in the 1920s. He answered questions from his own defense attorney with diatribes against Jews, the Allies, and the court itself, and was frequently silenced by the court officers. Streicher was largely shunned by all of the other Nuremberg defendants, who thought him a vulgar, despicable man (Göering’s hostility toward him was well-established). He also peppered his testimony with references to passages of Jewish texts he had so often carefully selected and inserted (invariably out of context) into the pages of Der Stürmer.

Streicher was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and sentenced to death on October 1, 1946.[13] The judgment against him read, in part:

“…For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as ‘Jew-Baiter Number One.’ In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution… Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.”

Streicher was hanged in the early hours of October 16, 1946, along with the nine other condemned defendants from the first Nuremberg trial (Göering, Streicher’s nemesis, committed suicide only hours earlier). Streicher’s was the most melodramatic of the hangings carried out that night. At the bottom of the scaffold he cried out “Heil Hitler!” When he mounted the platform, he delivered his last sneering reference to Jewish scripture, snapping “Purim-Fest 1946!” The Jewish holiday Purim celebrates the escape by the Jews from extermination at the hands of Haman, an ancient Persian government official. At the end of the Purim story, Haman is hanged.[14] [15] Streicher’s final declaration before the hood went over his head was, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!” MORE

Below is an excerpt from an excellent article authored by Rady Ananda. Please note the similarities, and in this instance, we can directly correlate the murder of innocent Americans based on the publication authored by Bernie Goldberg:

O’Reilly’s Hate Factor: ‘Venom Boys’ Blamed for Shooting Spree

The right wing hate machine fails to recognize its own hypocrisy. Even worse, its hate speech has been directly linked to a mass shooting.

Bernie Goldberg’s list of fans includes Jim David Adkisson, the nutjob who last year shot up a liberal church during a children’s musical. The killing was “symbolic” because he really wants to kill everyone mentioned in Goldberg’s Screwing up America book. I can’t imagine writing something that would inspire murder, but the right wing hatemongers do it all the time. Knoxville News Sentinel published the full manifesto, excerpted below:

“Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals…. This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book.”

Sara Robinson provided this analysis, noting that “police searched Adkisson’s apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.”

She goes on to say: “Nicely done, Messrs. Hannity, Goldberg, Limbaugh, Savage and O’Reilly — and all your lesser brethren who keep the hate speech spewing 24/7/365 across every field and into every shop in the country. There is no more debate to be had, no more doubt about it: What you did in the name of ‘entertainment,’ and for the sake of the almighty ratings, raised and animated a monster like Jim Adkisson, gave him a list of targets … and was directly responsible for the deaths of two brave and decent people. Adkisson was clearly angry and crazy — but his ‘manifesto’ draws the clearest, brightest line possible between the media he consumed and his actions that terrible Sunday morning.” MUCH MORE

Furthermore, we must not forget the case of Matthew Shepard and other gays that have been beaten and murdered, often incited by America’s chief “hate purveyors, and sadly, that includes some of our most radical Evangelicals:”

10 Years After His Death, Matthew Shepard’s Mother Fights On

Ten years ago this month, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was severely beaten, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming. He died only a few days later from his injuries on October 12, 1998. His attackers, Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney are now serving consecutive life sentences. But although Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, says justice was served against her son’s killers, she still continues to fight on to protect the gay sons and daughters of other parents across the nation.

Matthew Shepard, son of Judy Shepard and Dennis Shepard, was a political science major at the University of Wyoming in October of 1998. On the night of October 6, Shepard accepted a ride from Russell Arthur Henderson and Aardon James McKinney, whom he had met in a local bar. McKinney and Henderson drove Shepard to a remote area, where he was beaten, tortured, robbed and finally tied to a fence and left to die. A passing cyclist discovered Shepard still tied to the fence 18 hours later. On October 12, Shepard was pronounced dead, never having awakened from a coma.

During the trial against McKinney and Henderson, both defendants attempted to claim a “gay panic” defense, claiming they had acted under “temporary insanity” in killing Shepard. They alleged that Shepard had made sexual advances toward them and they had reacted by killing him. However, their stories were inconsistent and the men’s girlfriends testified under oath that Henderson and McKinney had previously plotted to rob a ‘gay man.’ The prosecutor in the case claimed that McKinney and Henderson had pretended to be gay in order to lure Shepard into their car to be robbed. MORE

How many gays have been murdered or severely beaten because of the constant hate being espoused by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and rabid right-wing Evangelicals? We have laws against “hate crimes” and I am asserting that those who constantly “gay-bait” their respective audiences are complicit in the subsequent crimes that occur directly because of their public venting of their hatred and loathing of the Gay Community. I wrote an Op-Ed which was extremely popular titled: “Evidence Supports Reverend Wright’s Claim That AIDS Was Created By The Government.” I wrote this article for informational purposes, and then received comments that Justanothercoverup was a “Gay Site” and that I was also gay. I’m heterosexual, but to be honest, I really don’t care what people think – and if I were gay, I’d say so.

One thing is certain; I’m an American and believe in equal protection under the law, and that includes everyone, Black, Brown, Gay, Lesbian, you name it! People have a right to choose their own lifestyles, and regardless of whatever the purveyors of hate may say – if you support the rule of Law and our Constitution, then all people, no matter what their lifestyle is, as long as it’s legal, have the right to worship as they choose, and someone’s sex life is no one’s business except for that individual. In the same breath, we don’t have to approve of another individual’s lifestyle; however, when that disapproval becomes public and incites violence against any segment of our population, I believe that it’s an actionable crime against humanity.

One of the most shocking instances of fear-mongering and inciting people to violence was a segment on Fox News by Glenn Beck. Read it yourself and you be the judge; do we need this type of propaganda that incites people to violence? We do not need a civil war or a “revolution” to bring forth change – and in my opinion, Fox News is advocating revolution in America which will supply the Neo-conservatives with the violent actions they seem to advocate that will usher in martial law in the United States:

FOX News Suggests America is Doomed, Civil War May Be Justified

by News Hound Ellen Brodsky

Those “we like America” folks at FOX News sure have a funny way of showing their esteem sometimes. Take, for example, Glenn Beck’s February 20, 2009 show in which he did his darnedest to scare viewers into thinking that the country is on the road to Apocalypse. In a paranoid fantasy spun out over several segments, Beck and a series of guests set forth a number of dire “worst-case scenarios” for the United States in 2014. During each segment, Beck gave viewers the disclaimer that the apocalyptic visions he and his guests presented were not predictions of what would happen but merely what could happen. And yet Beck and his guests spoke as though the doomsday scenarios, including civil war, were a likelihood, if not a fait accompli.

In “Worst-Case Scenario” No. 1, Beck and his experts imagined the impact of a complete financial meltdown. In this scenario, as Beck described it, all the banks were nationalized, the Dow was at 2800, unemployment at 12%, the commericial real estate market collapsed, the USA’s credit rating was downgraded and government and unions control most businesses.

Again, the guests bumped up “maybe” to “likely.” Former CIA officer Bob Baer described the “probability” scenarios as “prolonged depression,” and warned of trouble with Iran. According to Baer, the Gulf countries would suffer and Iran therefore would “move into the Gulf and take it. We have a hostile regime in control of our resources. That is not that far away (my emphasis).” A MUST READ ARTICLE!

Fox News is the propaganda arm of the GOP, and now that we know Republicans that have crossed the line to vote in favor of President Obama’s stimulus package are being punished by their own party, it is obvious that the Republicans in Congress are attempting to sabotage the Obama administration and are acting like a gang of criminals rather than responsible members of Congress. It is vital for the American public to remember that it was the Republican Congress that allowed the Bush administration to rob America blind – and now that their “Criminal in Chief” is out of office, they are stating that the stimulus was irresponsible; at best they are hypocrites – at worst, they are co-conspirators in helping to destroy the economy of the United States and allowed their corporate banking cronies to indulge themselves in the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the United States:

GOP punishing members who cross party lines

by Rachel Oswald

Determined to enforce the party line, the GOP has taken new steps to punish those members who have crossed the aisle in recent weeks to vote in support of the federal stimulus package and to send the message to any party moderates – turncoats will not be tolerated.

In a Monday interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele said he was open to primary challenges to the three Republican senators who voted in favor of the federal stimulus package –Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania and the two senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Spector is up for re-election in 2010.

“My retribution is the retribution of the voters in their state. They’re going to have to go through a primary in their state,” Steele said, adding that the RNC would follow the lead of the state parties in choosing which Republicans to back with campaign money. “When the state party says we’re going to endorse a candidate, the RNC is behind them. When the state party says we have a problem with them, so does the RNC.” <a href="http://rawstory.com/news/2008

/GOP_punishing_members_who_cross_party_0224.html”>MUCH MORE

There is a difference between free speech and inciting people to violence. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Riley are prime examples of those who constantly agitate and promote hate in print and on our national airwaves. There are also several rabid “Evangelicals” who also promote hate and actually promote war in the Middle-East to bring forth the second coming of Christ so they can be “raptured” while the rest of us are “Left Behind.” Their religious beliefs are OK with me; however, some of these Evangelicals promote the violent takeover of the United States if they cannot achieve it through politics – and in my book, that’s treason! LINK LINK LINK LINK LINK

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, or an Independent; if you promote violence and hate and attempt to incite violence in these United States, in my opinion, you’re committing an actionable crime, and hiding under “Free Speech” should not be allowed! I vividly remember several statements made by Ann Coulter, and the article below lays-out another legal strategy and cites laws that are already on our books to prosecute those who promote violence; I am only posting a brief part of the article, however, it is excellent, and demonstrates why we need to stop the hate purveyors in our country before they can incite more violence and as Fox News seems to advocate, a civil war:

The True THREAT Of Ann Coulter And Her Ilk

by thepen

Judging intent in a criminal case often turns on a pattern of behavior. And here the record is not friendly to Ms. Coulter’s stance. She has a HISTORY of such statements, having previously cracked these other “jokes”, targeted at those she disagrees with politically:

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee.”

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

“We need to execute people like (John Walker Lindh) in order to physically intimidate liberals.”

The last quote is especially significant in the climate of fear which has deliberately been inflamed by the Cheney administration and the vast right wing echo chamber that the corporate media has become. We are constantly bullied with name-calling of the most offensive sort, for the sin of having a differing political opinions. And people like Coulter well know that their physical threats are a form of intimidation. ANOTHER MUST READ ARTICLE

I don’t want to sound like a broken-record. However, I cannot emphasize enough that violence is counter-productive to America in general, and falling into that trap is a guarantee of the Obama administration being forced to declare Martial Law. That act alone will guarantee that Americans will never again enjoy their personal freedom or liberties as guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

-William Cormier

http://justanothercoverup.com/

I am nothing more than a patriotic American that is doing whatever I can to further the cause of democracy, the rule of law, and am absolutely outraged on how the Bush administration is defying our Congress, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights! (more…)