Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears

Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.

– Janwillem van de Wetering

Money doesn’t talk, it swears

-Bob Dylan

As the cancer that is looter capitalism continues to devour America in order to perpetuate it’s necessity to show continuous growth as we now enter the final monopoly stages it would be wise to realize that none of this were to have happened had our society not glorified the rich, condemned the poor and become damned by greed and lack of compassion. The zero sum game that is big time American capitalism (which is not to be confused with free enterprise) the decades of pillage and conquer abroad not nearly enough to feed the insatiable rapacious monster which is fueled by pure greed has come home to roost. I am often reminded of that old Stephen King story Survivor Type where the dude is marooned on a barren and deserted island with nothing but a gargantuan amount of heroin and has to amputate parts of his body to eat in order to survive. This is the late stage of capitalism, the one that those foul devils Karl Marx and Vlad Lenin as well as every influential thinker with any common sense warned about. This is the continuation of the vaunted ownership society….they own your ass!

Forget the mass hallucination that was George W. Bush’s ownership society, the miraculous run up in home prices where the average shmoe could dream of becoming a real live real estate kingpin like the noxious Donald Trump by flipping houses just like the big boys. With the glorious magic of ever increasing property values Americans could just take out huge home equity lines of credit and live beyond their wildest means, filling their McMansions with shit that they couldn’t afford using money that they didn’t have, all of which debt was then being packaged off into derivitives, what the exalted high priest of the temple of American mammon Warren Buffett aka the Oracle of Omaha once himself called financial weapons of mass destruction. The big banks couldn’t lend money fast enough, with shoddier standards or any foresight of what might happen were the party to stop, largely because the loans were being pureed and repackaged into mortgage backed paper (more like toilet paper) that was immediately sold to investors while the con artists who created it were also using credit default swaps to bet against it. The pigs were gorging themselves in an unprecedented orgy of greed, corporations were getting fat while using the relatively new practice of offshoring to divest themselves of jobs for Americans in favor of lower paid workers in India and other locales and manufacturing was being systematically dismantled in favor of using plants in China. All of it was great until the waning days of the Bush administration when the shit hit the fan and the whole thing blew up.

While phony conservative pundits foist off the blame for the economic collapse on the usual bogeyman black people for taking out loans that they couldn’t afford to pay back, a fake narrative that the racist white trash teabaggers gobbled up like frosted bullshit biscuits it was just another big lie. It would be far more accurate to point the finger at the pasty white social climbers who turned into wheeler dealers as they churned housing, taking out risky loans (which the Wall Street temples of avarice pumped out with full knowledge of their toxicity) to plunk down on skyrocketing properties which they briefly held before selling to the next schmuck. It was only a matter of time until the music stopped and a good many of the greedy bitches and bastards were left without chairs, any sane person could see that it wasn’t real. Then there were the TV addled dopes, the Boobus Americanus who actually bought their dream homes, mini-mansions in exurbia with polished marble countertops, more rooms that they needed and had to be furnished by maxing out the plastic and the two and three car garages in which they could park their SUVs. It was of course a massive disaster waiting to happen and when it all came crashing down former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (also former CEO of Goldman Sachs) went on bended knee to Congress to get a one of those nice taxpayer funded bailouts for all of his criminal buddies on Wall Street. Then came TARP (interesting acronym for something used to cover up a massive swindle) which both Bush and Obama signed off on and in layman’s terms dry-fucked millions of Americans in the ass so that the banksters could continue to get their bonuses and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street could keep spinning. Matt Taibbi has done a great job of muckraking journalism on the gross plunder and pillage that Wall Street, especially Goldman Sachs (or as I refer to them, the Great Satan) engaged in for Rolling Stone magazine. Taibbi’s work is must reading for those seeking to understand how viciously the anal rape of America by the big banks has been, see The Great American Bubble Machine or the book Griftopia for his writing on the crime of the century. 

For awhile though it actually looked like there could be systemic change, had Obama had any balls he would have ordered the nationalization of the big banks, the liquidation of all derivatives and appointed a Wall Street crime czar with endless resources, subpoena power and a mandate to thoroughly cleanse the system. Back in early 2009 the financial racketeers were on the ropes, AIG executives were besieged by protesters at their homes, CNBC con-artist Jim “Mad Money” Cramer was being publicly pilloried and left-gatekeeper Bill Maher went on HBO and suggested that hanging two randomly picked bankers by the big board at the New York Stock Exchange with their balls in their mouth would set a good example. Then something happened, the tide turned in favor of the big banking racketeers who had bamboozled Americans by the millions to buy their yachts, only in America could something this obscene happen, a land where cunning hatchetman CEO’s are treated as gods and decades of incessant propaganda have effectively brainwashed a population that while incapable of understanding the most basic concepts of incremental losing into actually thinking that one day they too can be rich!

The bankster pushback actually started with CNBC’s greasy little pimp Rick Santelli went off on camera in the much hyped rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that effectively co-opted the former libertarian tea party movement and brought it under Republican/Koch Brothers control. That would have serious implications later on with the mass counterattack by big business as they had in the blink of an eye with a big assist from FOX an army of angry, ignorant, racist fatties to mobilize as brownshirts against any sort of serious reform efforts. It has always amazed me (but not really) how so many could be so easily duped into action against their own economic self-interests, in a historical sense the Tea Party (just a rebranding of the die hard haters of the GOP base post-Bush) is on the side of the British Monarchy although rich in irony it is far beyond their comprehension. The next step of the bankster’s Battle of the Bulge was the ‘leaked’ internal memo by Citi’s Vikram ‘the bandit’ Pandit that things really aren’t that bad after all which put a floor on the stock market plunge. Then came the 60 Minutes appearance of Ben Bernanke, Obama’s re-appointed Bush holdover Fed Chairman that there were marvelous “GREEN SHOOTS” of an economic recovery already popping up, Bernanke’s jacking off of the public was followed by Tim Geithner’s obviously rigged stress tests of the banks. Lost in all of the hype and propaganda was another critical part of the effort to deceive the sheep into lining up for another shearing at the Wall Street casino tables, the Financial Standards Accounting Board (FASB) quietly changed the mark-to-market rules so that the worthless toilet paper mortgage backed securities could now be valued at whatever the pit bosses desired. The hustle had been pulled off, soon the media was focusing on the staged Tea Party bund rallies against Obamacare (really a massive giveaway to the insurance parasites) and Bernanke was crowned as Time’s Man of the Year (now changed to person of the year thanks to the political correctness Nazis).The greedheads got bailed out, the taxpayers got the shaft and the looting spree was back on. To borrow a great analogy from gadfly Webster Tarpley (which I paraphrase) in reference to the bailout – when Dracula is sucking the blood out of a victim the thing to do is to pull him off and drive a stake through his heart but the Obama administration is trying to save the victim by giving Dracula a blood transfusion and hoping that it would flow back into the victim or something along those lines, I don’t have the exact wording.

Now two years after the Santelli dog and pony show, the Citi memo and GREEN SHOOTS the economy is still a disaster, the dollar is in freefall, Bernanke has the printing presses set on ramming speed and there are widespread flareups of unrest largely thanks to food prices sent into the stratosphere by pigs who speculate in commodities. Look for matters to only get worse too, it’s now obvious that the Japanese government has been lying about the massive humanitarian catastrophe thanks to TEPCO’s Fukashima radioactive meltdown which I strongly suspect is motivated by the need to keep the global derivatives casino open for business and there is austerity coming to America along with a failed political system that has neither the will nor the desire to treat the rapidly metastasizing capitalist cancer. Food prices are about to explode her in Der Heimat thanks to gas prices well on the way to 4 bucks a gallon and yet another ruinous and expensive war. As Hunter S. Thompson once wrote: “In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely”.

Advertising signs they con

You into thinking you’re the one

That can do what’s never been done

That can win what’s never been won

Meantime life outside goes on

All around you

-Bob Dylan

A good while back at my local grocery store I noticed that there was a big sign with red letters taped to the front of the service desk that emphatically stated: WE NO LONGER ACCEPT ROLLED CHANGE. It was more than a bit sad to think that things were so bad with rising costs and declining incomes that people were having to pay for food using scavenged rolls of pennies but some enterprising genius was going around down here in the diseased penis of America formally known as Florida putting in these machines that converted such coinage to an easy to use debit card – for a fee of course. When I first saw this new phenomenon the big economic collapse of 2008 was still in the future, there was still much hot air in the housing bubble, the cruel practice of ruthless real estate developers buying up trailer parks and then kicking retirees off of them was in full swing as was the conversion of shitbox apartments to 120,000 + per unit condos. The retirees, a good many of the likely stunned at the sucker punch given that they had played by the rules all of their lives but now found themselves homeless and today quite possibly without their pensions as the looting spree escalates were early victims in the enormous fleecing of the past five years. Now, wherever these old folks may be and that is presuming that they are still alive the coming threats to Medicare and Social Security are just over the horizon. The politically connected criminals on Wall Street need the money to gamble with, the new wave of Koch Brothers backed fascist governors such as Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder and John Kasich have taken the class war to the next level and there are more wars coming, you can count on that.

There will be no help for anybody but the pigs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase coming from the Obama administration, face it people, the only change that the Pope of Hope really ever stood for was left cover for the gargantuan redistribution of wealth upwards. Obama is quite obviously even worse than Bush as the wars continue and mount in number (under the malarkey guise of humanitarian interventions), the torture never stops, the constitution continues to be disemboweled and the airports are filled with dooling thugs in TSA uniforms with the full blessing of the U.S. government to feel up pre-pubescent little boys and girls. Hell, Bush never could have gotten away with that one and when it comes to economic relief, Le Enfant Terrible did actually send people checks for $600. I always got a sardonic little kick out of the silly liberals who only made excuses for Obama (and still do) in that he was the chess master, or Michael Jordan just studying the opposing team’s defense and ready to explode at any moment into a whirling dervish of athletic daredeviltry as he broke down the formidable defense of the Bad Boys for the championship hardware. The truth, and it is as dark as the proverbial black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night is that Obama is the chessmaster, it’s checkmate for the working class and he is just like Michael Jordan, a greedy, amoral, selfish multimillionaire prick who once commented “Republicans buy sneakers too” rather than doing the right thing in using his global celebrity to promote progressive social change.For some reason Jordan’s famous quote conjures up one of Obama’s, the one where he proclaimed that if Americans were being denied their right to collectively bargain that he would put on his own pair of comfortable shoes and join them on the picket lines. This alas like so many other things (wars,closing Gitmo, renegotiating trade pacts etc) was just more of the same bullshit about hope and change marketed by Wall Street’s soon to be new bagman at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

People,at least those with jobs, are having to dig deeper these days, much deeper now that oil prices are setting records, food prices are spiking although the masses of asses don’t really get it yet because of the latest bit of trickery in hiding food costs in smaller containers and overinflated bags and the dollar is dropping like a bag of shit dropped from a tall building. Of course the official government line is that inflation is not a problem but most lies are of course comprised of half-truths mixed with outright lies and and one of the great lies is that core inflation doesn’t include either food or energy costs, it’s right up there with capitalism and democracy being interchangable.There is no real argument that can be made that financial sector hasn’t been gamed to the point of collapse by the economic chicanery of the same sort of scoundrels who George Washington once referred to as a “squadron of corrupt paper dealers” and Frankin D. Roosevelt called out the same unscrupulous bandits as “economic royalists”. There are of course other more profane things we can call them the pack of greed-headed traitors who sold out America for chump change like unscrupulous slumlords bleeding a depressed property before dumping it to find more suckers to leech off of but it was America’s delusional worship of such rapacious, monstrous psychopaths that allowed the grand fucking to occur.

For every fucker there must be at least one fuckee and in a country in which the idolization of money and wealth for the sake of the worship of false gods as Donald Trump, J.R. Ewing Jack Welch there is no shortage of either. With the rise of Reagan and the rolling out of that shining gold plated calf Americans lined up to suck it’s poisonous cock, maxing out the credit cards, being sucked into debt slavery by a sham system set up for that express purpose and by withdrawing into self-contained atmospheres of toxic greed and covetousness while ignoring those things that really and truly matter in order to pursue that cheap television electronic crack high of the pursuit of the mythical American dream. The greatest bait and switch in American history was that period after the Powell Memorandum laid out the game plan for the Reagan juggernaut that would destroy the unions, gut the regulatory agencies for fun and profit and produce a mutant generation that now believed that the path to success and prosperity came courtesy of the lottery and grotesquely insidious scams like winning it big on Who Wants to be A Millionaire or getting the chance to lick Donald Trump’s balls for a shot at the big time in The Apprentice rather than the unspoken traditional pact of loyalty and hard work between employee and employer mapped out a path to prosperity and created a middle class that was the envy of the world and made dreams possible of a unique national destiny to change the world for the better. Then the festering nest of fascist vipers that has always existed in this country hijacked that dream and turned it into a nightmare.

We are now reaping reaping the whirlwind for a quarter century of disastrously corrupt and fundamentally flawed economic philosophy rot from the demonic little gnome Milton Friedman and the amphetamine jacked goddess of greed Ayn Rand that rode in on Reagan’s coattails, or maybe it was the opposite but make no mistake, the average American will be the one left holding the proverbial flaming bag of dogshit while the looters have finished strip-mining the land and will laugh all the way to their offshore tax shelters and foreign banks. Americans have been indoctrinated to blame themselves for their lack of wealth and to view the poor as lazy lepers and the wealthy as superior human beings.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse Five:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American journalist Kin Hubbard “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying fom the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere believe that many things are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleanic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

When elevating the moneychangers to revered figures Americans have bought the disinformation funded by the plutocrats decades long spending spree on think tank ‘experts’, news manipulation and balls out bribery of public officials to rig the game for the rich. In a decomposing corpse of a once vibrant economy it is only natural that the biggest maggots eat the best. Donald Trump is a shining example, more visible than the rank and file crooks and robbers who don’t happen to be household names like Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, Ken Lewis and Jamie Dimon the mouthiest multi-millionaire in America is the one who is king. For all of his millions one would figure that a pathologically vain egomaniac like ‘The Donald’ could at least afford a decent rug to put on his head, so much for the beautiful rich. And now Trump is ready to make a presidential bid in 2012, he is already invoking the Birther bullshit to appeal to the peckerwoods and if he has any serious political sense soon will start dropping his g’s to appeal to the dumber than dogshit red state fascists. He will need someone with clout for V.P. though, likely the moonbat Michelle Bachman who can mobilize brigades of the fucked over by the system but too ignorant to blame it on anyone but the niggers and A-rabs of teabaggers. Sarah Palin has for the most part been kicked to the curb like yesterday’s garbage after her idiotic “blood libel” response to the Tuscon shooting where she portrayed herself as the real victim, not Congresswoman Gibson, a federal judge and a handful of others including a nine-year old girl who were murdered. Just imagine President Trump, Vice President Bachmann now that would be something for it would once and forever strip the veil of legitimacy from the gangster fascist state that is America and it’s population of fear-filled, overfed and undereducated nitwits, it would be there for the entire world to see.

I often reference the work of Chris Hedges, a man who I feel is the moral beacon of these heinous times. His latest piece, The Collapse of Globalization truly sums up the hopeless mess that is America in terminal decline and I excerpt the following below::

We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”

The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.

Where are the role models? Our history has been scrubbed and sanitized by the economic royalists and the fascists to eliminate any mention of true heroes of the working class and of a real democratic society. The vast majority of those compliant little consumers that have for too long been churned out by a starved for funds and battered into submission school public school system that has been turned into a nationwide network of drone factories (one of the only things that we mass produce in America anymore) have never heard of those who sacrificed for those things that came to be taken to granted to the point where they are now being taken away.

Where is there any mention given of Eugene Debs or of Joe Hill or of Saul Alinsky or of Mother Jones? What about General Smedley D . Butler who called out the blood barters with his tract War Is A Racket and his exposure of the Business Plot where wealthy traitors schemed about a coup against FDR? What is taught about Huey Long? I mean other than the widely accepted narrative of a power mad, corrupt tyrant instead of the man who scared the living shit out of the elitist establishment with his “Share Our Wealth” program that made the New Deal look like Reaganomics. Long stood up to entrenched interests and the moral rottenness of looter capitalism, he built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools as well as provided free textbooks and he even dared to take on the almighty Rockefellers and Standard Oil. Long railed against institutionalized corruption with his “every man a king” type of populism and he was making dangerous noises about running for president. The ending of the Huey Long story is all too predictable and familiar: he was of course assassinated.

And what of Hellen Keller? The little girl who overcame blindness and deafness and whose struggles with her handicaps are taught to American children as an example of how to overcome adversity as they are indoctrinated to the lies of a society that demands sacrifice and backbreaking work from the lesser classes as unquestioning slaves to the whims of the modern pharaohs on Wall Street. She has been sanitized, turned into a Horatio Alger version of the little engine that could while her later life as a social activist goes ignored. Hellen Keller would grow up to be a champion of women’s suffrage, she would join the Industrial Workers of the World and to help to found the American Civil Liberties Union. She was a socialist who dared to speak out against the power base and their exploitation and for that sin her life has been through revisionist history turned into a perverse fairy tale and yet another myth to bolster the system that would make slaves of us all. The little engine that could was very quickly uncoupled from the rest of the train once the narrative switched tracks from one of inspirational value to one of social justice.

And there are others, there are many others who risked all to end child labor, to fight for equality and the forty-hour work week and unemployment protection and workers rights, workplace safety and a right to basic human decency but they go largely unheard of. A good and easy to read book about the working class American labor movements that I recommend is Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire because let’s face it, it is a hell of a rock that has to be rolled up that hill and education is necessary in order for the  deprogramming to occur. Official history is always written by the victors rather than the vanquished and because most of lying is through omission the banishment of American progressives from our history is a calculated and cynical effort to distort and distract until the final goal of a massive redistribution of wealth upwards and offshore has been completed and the country has been bankrupted and beggared by the economic royalists. Then the looters will either retreat behind the walls of their gated communities, hire private security firms for protection from the unwashed masses or flee this goddamned husk of a once great economic power altogether, their loyalty has always been to green and gold rather than red, white and blue.

With the American elevation of greed to a virtue and pigs like Trump and his ilk given adulation and honor instead of the shunning that they would receive by a sane society it is evident that the situation that we currently find ourselves in is in fact a prolonged, self-inflicted suicide.

Just my two cents

EE

Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears

Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.

– Janwillem van de Wetering

Money doesn’t talk, it swears

-Bob Dylan

As the cancer that is looter capitalism continues to devour America in order to perpetuate it’s necessity to show continuous growth as we now enter the final monopoly stages it would be wise to realize that none of this were to have happened had our society not glorified the rich, condemned the poor and become damned by greed and lack of compassion. The zero sum game that is big time American capitalism (which is not to be confused with free enterprise) the decades of pillage and conquer abroad not nearly enough to feed the insatiable rapacious monster which is fueled by pure greed has come home to roost. I am often reminded of that old Stephen King story Survivor Type where the dude is marooned on a barren and deserted island with nothing but a gargantuan amount of heroin and has to amputate parts of his body to eat in order to survive. This is the late stage of capitalism, the one that those foul devils Karl Marx and Vlad Lenin as well as every influential thinker with any common sense warned about. This is the continuation of the vaunted ownership society….they own your ass!

Forget the mass hallucination that was George W. Bush’s ownership society, the miraculous run up in home prices where the average shmoe could dream of becoming a real live real estate kingpin like the noxious Donald Trump by flipping houses just like the big boys. With the glorious magic of ever increasing property values Americans could just take out huge home equity lines of credit and live beyond their wildest means, filling their McMansions with shit that they couldn’t afford using money that they didn’t have, all of which debt was then being packaged off into derivitives, what the exalted high priest of the temple of American mammon Warren Buffett aka the Oracle of Omaha once himself called financial weapons of mass destruction. The big banks couldn’t lend money fast enough, with shoddier standards or any foresight of what might happen were the party to stop, largely because the loans were being pureed and repackaged into mortgage backed paper (more like toilet paper) that was immediately sold to investors while the con artists who created it were also using credit default swaps to bet against it. The pigs were gorging themselves in an unprecedented orgy of greed, corporations were getting fat while using the relatively new practice of offshoring to divest themselves of jobs for Americans in favor of lower paid workers in India and other locales and manufacturing was being systematically dismantled in favor of using plants in China. All of it was great until the waning days of the Bush administration when the shit hit the fan and the whole thing blew up.

While phony conservative pundits foist off the blame for the economic collapse on the usual bogeyman black people for taking out loans that they couldn’t afford to pay back, a fake narrative that the racist white trash teabaggers gobbled up like frosted bullshit biscuits it was just another big lie. It would be far more accurate to point the finger at the pasty white social climbers who turned into wheeler dealers as they churned housing, taking out risky loans (which the Wall Street temples of avarice pumped out with full knowledge of their toxicity) to plunk down on skyrocketing properties which they briefly held before selling to the next schmuck. It was only a matter of time until the music stopped and a good many of the greedy bitches and bastards were left without chairs, any sane person could see that it wasn’t real. Then there were the TV addled dopes, the Boobus Americanus who actually bought their dream homes, mini-mansions in exurbia with polished marble countertops, more rooms that they needed and had to be furnished by maxing out the plastic and the two and three car garages in which they could park their SUVs. It was of course a massive disaster waiting to happen and when it all came crashing down former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (also former CEO of Goldman Sachs) went on bended knee to Congress to get a one of those nice taxpayer funded bailouts for all of his criminal buddies on Wall Street. Then came TARP (interesting acronym for something used to cover up a massive swindle) which both Bush and Obama signed off on and in layman’s terms dry-fucked millions of Americans in the ass so that the banksters could continue to get their bonuses and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street could keep spinning. Matt Taibbi has done a great job of muckraking journalism on the gross plunder and pillage that Wall Street, especially Goldman Sachs (or as I refer to them, the Great Satan) engaged in for Rolling Stone magazine. Taibbi’s work is must reading for those seeking to understand how viciously the anal rape of America by the big banks has been, see The Great American Bubble Machine or the book Griftopia for his writing on the crime of the century.

For awhile though it actually looked like there could be systemic change, had Obama had any balls he would have ordered the nationalization of the big banks, the liquidation of all derivatives and appointed a Wall Street crime czar with endless resources, subpoena power and a mandate to thoroughly cleanse the system. Back in early 2009 the financial racketeers were on the ropes, AIG executives were besieged by protesters at their homes, CNBC con-artist Jim “Mad Money” Cramer was being publicly pilloried and left-gatekeeper Bill Maher went on HBO and suggested that hanging two randomly picked bankers by the big board at the New York Stock Exchange with their balls in their mouth would set a good example. Then something happened, the tide turned in favor of the big banking racketeers who had bamboozled Americans by the millions to buy their yachts, only in America could something this obscene happen, a land where cunning hatchetman CEO’s are treated as gods and decades of incessant propaganda have effectively brainwashed a population that while incapable of understanding the most basic concepts of incremental losing into actually thinking that one day they too can be rich!

The bankster pushback actually started with CNBC’s greasy little pimp Rick Santelli went off on camera in the much hyped rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that effectively co-opted the former libertarian tea party movement and brought it under Republican/Koch Brothers control. That would have serious implications later on with the mass counterattack by big business as they had in the blink of an eye with a big assist from FOX an army of angry, ignorant, racist fatties to mobilize as brownshirts against any sort of serious reform efforts. It has always amazed me (but not really) how so many could be so easily duped into action against their own economic self-interests, in a historical sense the Tea Party (just a rebranding of the die hard haters of the GOP base post-Bush) is on the side of the British Monarchy although rich in irony it is far beyond their comprehension. The next step of the bankster’s Battle of the Bulge was the ‘leaked’ internal memo by Citi’s Vikram ‘the bandit’ Pandit that things really aren’t that bad after all which put a floor on the stock market plunge. Then came the 60 Minutes appearance of Ben Bernanke, Obama’s re-appointed Bush holdover Fed Chairman that there were marvelous “GREEN SHOOTS” of an economic recovery already popping up, Bernanke’s jacking off of the public was followed by Tim Geithner’s obviously rigged stress tests of the banks. Lost in all of the hype and propaganda was another critical part of the effort to deceive the sheep into lining up for another shearing at the Wall Street casino tables, the Financial Standards Accounting Board (FASB) quietly changed the mark-to-market rules so that the worthless toilet paper mortgage backed securities could now be valued at whatever the pit bosses desired. The hustle had been pulled off, soon the media was focusing on the staged Tea Party bund rallies against Obamacare (really a massive giveaway to the insurance parasites) and Bernanke was crowned as Time’s Man of the Year (now changed to person of the year thanks to the political correctness Nazis).The greedheads got bailed out, the taxpayers got the shaft and the looting spree was back on. To borrow a great analogy from gadfly Webster Tarpley (which I paraphrase) in reference to the bailout – when Dracula is sucking the blood out of a victim the thing to do is to pull him off and drive a stake through his heart but the Obama administration is trying to save the victim by giving Dracula a blood transfusion and hoping that it would flow back into the victim or something along those lines, I don’t have the exact wording.

Now two years after the Santelli dog and pony show, the Citi memo and GREEN SHOOTS the economy is still a disaster, the dollar is in freefall, Bernanke has the printing presses set on ramming speed and there are widespread flareups of unrest largely thanks to food prices sent into the stratosphere by pigs who speculate in commodities. Look for matters to only get worse too, it’s now obvious that the Japanese government has been lying about the massive humanitarian catastrophe thanks to TEPCO’s Fukashima radioactive meltdown which I strongly suspect is motivated by the need to keep the global derivatives casino open for business and there is austerity coming to America along with a failed political system that has neither the will nor the desire to treat the rapidly metastasizing capitalist cancer. Food prices are about to explode her in Der Heimat thanks to gas prices well on the way to 4 bucks a gallon and yet another ruinous and expensive war. As Hunter S. Thompson once wrote: “In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely”.

Advertising signs they con

You into thinking you’re the one

That can do what’s never been done

That can win what’s never been won

Meantime life outside goes on

All around you

-Bob Dylan

A good while back at my local grocery store I noticed that there was a big sign with red letters taped to the front of the service desk that emphatically stated: WE NO LONGER ACCEPT ROLLED CHANGE. It was more than a bit sad to think that things were so bad with rising costs and declining incomes that people were having to pay for food using scavenged rolls of pennies but some enterprising genius was going around down here in the diseased penis of America formally known as Florida putting in these machines that converted such coinage to an easy to use debit card – for a fee of course. When I first saw this new phenomenon the big economic collapse of 2008 was still in the future, there was still much hot air in the housing bubble, the cruel practice of ruthless real estate developers buying up trailer parks and then kicking retirees off of them was in full swing as was the conversion of shitbox apartments to 120,000 + per unit condos. The retirees, a good many of the likely stunned at the sucker punch given that they had played by the rules all of their lives but now found themselves homeless and today quite possibly without their pensions as the looting spree escalates were early victims in the enormous fleecing of the past five years. Now, wherever these old folks may be and that is presuming that they are still alive the coming threats to Medicare and Social Security are just over the horizon. The politically connected criminals on Wall Street need the money to gamble with, the new wave of Koch Brothers backed fascist governors such as Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder and John Kasich have taken the class war to the next level and there are more wars coming, you can count on that.

There will be no help for anybody but the pigs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase coming from the Obama administration, face it people, the only change that the Pope of Hope really ever stood for was left cover for the gargantuan redistribution of wealth upwards. Obama is quite obviously even worse than Bush as the wars continue and mount in number (under the malarkey guise of humanitarian interventions), the torture never stops, the constitution continues to be disemboweled and the airports are filled with dooling thugs in TSA uniforms with the full blessing of the U.S. government to feel up prepubescent little boys and girls. Hell, Bush never could have gotten away with that one and when it comes to economic relief, Le Enfant Terrible did actually send people checks for $600. I always got a sardonic little kick out of the silly liberals who only made excuses for Obama (and still do) in that he was the chess master, or Michael Jordan just studying the opposing team’s defense and ready to explode at any moment into a whirling dervish of athletic daredeviltry as he broke down the formidable defense of the Bad Boys for the championship hardware. The truth, and it is as dark as the proverbial black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night is that Obama is the chess master, it’s checkmate for the working class and he is just like Michael Jordan, a greedy, amoral, selfish multimillionaire prick who once commented “Republicans buy sneakers too” rather than doing the right thing in using his global celebrity to promote progressive social change.For some reason Jordan’s famous quote conjures up one of Obama’s, the one where he proclaimed that if Americans were being denied their right to collectively bargain that he would put on his own pair of comfortable shoes and join them on the picket lines. This alas like so many other things (wars,closing Gitmo, renegotiating trade pacts etc) was just more of the same bullshit about hope and change marketed by Wall Street’s soon to be new bagman at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

People,at least those with jobs, are having to dig deeper these days, much deeper now that oil prices are setting records, food prices are spiking although the masses of asses don’t really get it yet because of the latest bit of trickery in hiding food costs in smaller containers and overinflated bags and the dollar is dropping like a bag of shit dropped from a tall building. Of course the official government line is that inflation is not a problem but most lies are of course comprised of half-truths mixed with outright lies and and one of the great lies is that core inflation doesn’t include either food or energy costs, it’s right up there with capitalism and democracy being interchangable.There is no real argument that can be made that financial sector hasn’t been gamed to the point of collapse by the economic chicanery of the same sort of scoundrels who George Washington once referred to as a “squadron of corrupt paper dealers” and Frankin D. Roosevelt called out the same unscrupulous bandits as “economic royalists”. There are of course other more profane things we can call them the pack of greed-headed traitors who sold out America for chump change like unscrupulous slumlords bleeding a depressed property before dumping it to find more suckers to leech off of but it was America’s delusional worship of such rapacious, monstrous psychopaths that allowed the grand fucking to occur.

For every fucker there must be at least one fuckee and in a country in which the idolization of money and wealth for the sake of the worship of false gods as Donald Trump, J.R. Ewing Jack Welch there is no shortage of either. With the rise of Reagan and the rolling out of that shining gold plated calf Americans lined up to suck it’s poisonous cock, maxing out the credit cards, being sucked into debt slavery by a sham system set up for that express purpose and by withdrawing into self-contained atmospheres of toxic greed and covetousness while ignoring those things that really and truly matter in order to pursue that cheap television electronic crack high of the pursuit of the mythical American dream. The greatest bait and switch in American history was that period after the Powell Memorandum laid out the game plan for the Reagan juggernaut that would destroy the unions, gut the regulatory agencies for fun and profit and produce a mutant generation that now believed that the path to success and prosperity came courtesy of the lottery and grotesquely insidious scams like winning it big on Who Wants to be A Millionaire or getting the chance to lick Donald Trump’s balls for a shot at the big time in The Apprentice rather than the unspoken traditional pact of loyalty and hard work between employee and employer mapped out a path to prosperity and created a middle class that was the envy of the world and made dreams possible of a unique national destiny to change the world for the better. Then the festering nest of fascist vipers that has always existed in this country hijacked that dream and turned it into a nightmare.

We are now reaping reaping the whirlwind for a quarter century of disastrously corrupt and fundamentally flawed economic philosophy rot from the demonic little gnome Milton Friedman and the amphetamine jacked goddess of greed Ayn Rand that rode in on Reagan’s coattails, or maybe it was the opposite but make no mistake, the average American will be the one left holding the proverbial flaming bag of dogshit while the looters have finished strip-mining the land and will laugh all the way to their offshore tax shelters and foreign banks. Americans have been indoctrinated to blame themselves for their lack of wealth and to view the poor as lazy lepers and the wealthy as superior human beings.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse Five:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American journalist Kin Hubbard “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying fom the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere believe that many things are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleanic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

When elevating the moneychangers to revered figures Americans have bought the disinformation funded by the plutocrats decades long spending spree on think tank ‘experts’, news manipulation and balls out bribery of public officials to rig the game for the rich. In a decomposing corpse of a once vibrant economy it is only natural that the biggest maggots eat the best. Donald Trump is a shining example, more visible than the rank and file crooks and robbers who don’t happen to be household names like Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, Ken Lewis and Jamie Dimon the mouthiest multi-millionaire in America is the one who is king. For all of his millions one would figure that a pathologically vain egomaniac like ‘The Donald’ could at least afford a decent rug to put on his head, so much for the beautiful rich. And now Trump is ready to make a presidential bid in 2012, he is already invoking the Birther bullshit to appeal to the peckerwoods and if he has any serious political sense soon will start dropping his g’s to appeal to the dumber than dogshit red state fascists. He will need someone with clout for V.P. though, likely the moonbat Michelle Bachman who can mobilize brigades of the fucked over by the system but too ignorant to blame it on anyone but the niggers and A-rabs of teabaggers. Sarah Palin has for the most part been kicked to the curb like yesterday’s garbage after her idiotic “blood libel” response to the Tuscon shooting where she portrayed herself as the real victim, not Congresswoman Gibson, a federal judge and a handful of others including a nine-year old girl who were murdered. Just imagine President Trump, Vice President Bachmann now that would be something for it would once and forever strip the veil of legitimacy from the gangster fascist state that is America and it’s population of fear-filled, overfed and undereducated nitwits, it would be there for the entire world to see.

I often reference the work of Chris Hedges, a man who I feel is the moral beacon of these heinous times. His latest piece, The Collapse of Globalization truly sums up the hopeless mess that is America in terminal decline and I excerpt the following below::

We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”

The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.

Where are the role models? Our history has been scrubbed and sanitized by the economic royalists and the fascists to eliminate any mention of true heroes of the working class and of a real democratic society. The vast majority of those compliant little consumers that have for too long been churned out by a starved for funds and battered into submission school public school system that has been turned into a nationwide network of drone factories (one of the only things that we mass produce in America anymore) have never heard of those who sacrificed for those things that came to be taken to granted to the point where they are now being taken away.

Where is there any mention given of Eugene Debs or of Joe Hill or of Saul Alinsky or of Mother Jones? What about General Smedley D . Butler who called out the blood barters with his tract War Is A Racket and his exposure of the Business Plot where wealthy traitors schemed about a coup against FDR? What is taught about Huey Long? I mean other than the widely accepted narrative of a power mad, corrupt tyrant instead of the man who scared the living shit out of the elitist establishment with his “Share Our Wealth” program that made the New Deal look like Reaganomics. Long stood up to entrenched interests and the moral rottenness of looter capitalism, he built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools as well as provided free textbooks and he even dared to take on the almighty Rockefellers and Standard Oil. Long railed against institutionalized corruption with his “every man a king” type of populism and he was making dangerous noises about running for president. The ending of the Huey Long story is all too predictable and familiar: he was of course assassinated.

And what of Hellen Keller? The little girl who overcame blindness and deafness and whose struggles with her handicaps are taught to American children as an example of how to overcome adversity as they are indoctrinated to the lies of a society that demands sacrifice and backbreaking work from the lesser classes as unquestioning slaves to the whims of the modern pharaohs on Wall Street. She has been sanitized, turned into a Horatio Alger version of the little engine that could while her later life as a social activist goes ignored. Hellen Keller would grow up to be a champion of women’s suffrage, she would join the Industrial Workers of the World and to help to found the American Civil Liberties Union. She was a socialist who dared to speak out against the power base and their exploitation and for that sin her life has been through revisionist history turned into a perverse fairy tale and yet another myth to bolster the system that would make slaves of us all. The little engine that could was very quickly uncoupled from the rest of the train once the narrative switched tracks from one of inspirational value to one of social justice.

And there are others, there are many others who risked all to end child labor, to fight for equality and the forty-hour work week and unemployment protection and workers rights, workplace safety and a right to basic human decency but they go largely unheard of. A good and easy to read book about the working class American labor movements that I recommend is Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire because let’s face it, it is a hell of a rock that has to be rolled up that hill and education is necessary in order for the  deprogramming to occur. Official history is always written by the victors rather than the vanquished and because most of lying is through omission the banishment of American progressives from our history is a calculated and cynical effort to distort and distract until the final goal of a massive redistribution of wealth upwards and offshore has been completed and the country has been bankrupted and beggared by the economic royalists. Then the looters will either retreat behind the walls of their gated communities, hire private security firms for protection from the unwashed masses or flee this goddamned husk of a once great economic power altogether, their loyalty has always been to green and gold rather than red, white and blue.

With the American elevation of greed to a virtue and pigs like Trump and his ilk given adulation and honor instead of the shunning that they would receive by a sane society it is evident that the situation that we currently find ourselves in is in fact a prolonged, self-inflicted suicide.

 

Dancing With The Corpses

“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose”

-Charles Bukowski

Kirstie Alley glided across the dance floor, shaking her stuff, her gracefulness belied her girth and made her the early favorite to become the new avatar of all that is right in America, Dancing With the Stars is finally back. ABC, learning a lesson after last season’s near fiasco when waves of Teabagger activists stormed the online polls and nearly voted Bristol Palin America’s as favorite dancing queen, potentially alienating millions of non-Sarah Palin worshippers. The redultant big ratings turd that would have been floated in the punchbowl had the less talented teenage birther of bastards been allowed to steal the title. Opting for a lineup of less politically divisive ‘stars’ this time around DWTS gave Americans just the sort of sweet, sweet spike of mental morphine delivered digitally through the electronic crackpipe. The two-minute hate directed at whore-mongering cokehead Charlie Sheen has abetted for at least the time being, Obama’s new war and the nuclear travesty in Japan stealing most of the airplay. Americans love this stuff, it’s one hell of a distraction, I am waiting for some savvy entrepreneur to contract out to the oligarchy and start manufacturing giant balloons of Sheen’s head to fill with helium and fly in front of gas station price signs. Such is life on the big star spangled lemming farm , where the inhabitants graze away placidly in front of their big screen living room gods while awaiting the big culling of the herd. 

Ordinary Americans you see can’t be bothered with the reality of the corporate wars waged under the big lie of spreading democracy and taking the fight to those who hate us for our freedoms and way of life. Truth is that we really aren’t as free as advertised (just take a good look around someday) nor is U.S. democracy any other thing than what H.L. Mencken once remarked as that “every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”. Democracy in Der Heimat today is voting on American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, the real elections are nothing other than a Hobson’s choice between two compromised, corrupted and amoral charlatans who were chosen precisely because of these traits by the oligarchy. Elections in American you see are a win-win situation for the pigs that run the system, given a false sense of legitimacy by a naive, childlike belief that change can still be realized at the ballot box/electronic voting machine when the entire democratic process is an illusion in itself. Sure there are the standard cultural populist issues that pollute the ballot and ensure that the most enormously stupid and hateful among us show up in sufficient numbers so as to make it a good show but when it all comes down to it there is no substantial difference between America’s two rotten and irredeemably debased and venal political parties. There is really no substantive differences in the policies of the state itself no matter which party ‘wins’ control over the spoils system, the corporate giveaways only accelerate, impoverishing millions in the process, the police state continues to metastasize as the cancer on a once much more free society that it is and most importantly of all …the wars continue. Not that Americans want to hear about them rather than the standard idiotic jingoist hogwash smothered in patriotic bullshit, there are dancing and talent contests to watch, ballgames to enjoy and the daily Vulcan style mind meld with their beloved telescreens to continue uninterrupted by any sort of reality lest their exoskeleton of denial be punctured. 

Death Came From The Skies: In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five the author uses the books of a fictional science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout to insert social commentary into his overall story. One of ‘Trout’s’ tales addressed the strange contradictions of a society that will accept with open arms one who kills civilians with state sanction during wartime while ostracizing one for silly, superficial reasons:

This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.

Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.

Vonnegut was actually present at Dresden on the night that allied bombers laid waste to the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, a historic city as well as a non-military target with little or no air defense system that was packed with refugees and prisoners and was targeted by bombers that incinerated over one hundred thousand civilians. Vonnegut spoke of seeing the boiled bodies of schoolgirls floating in a water tower through his character Billy Pilgrim and also of being forced to dig through the wreckage in the aftermath to find “corpse mines” and described the odor of the bodies:

“They didn’t smell bad at first…but then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas”

He also spoke of a character, another soldier who died of the dry heaves from having to go down into a corpse mine and being overcome by the stench:

“He tore himself to pieces, throwing up and throwing up”

Dresden doesn’t get much mention when it comes to the history of the ‘good war’, neither does the decimation of the Japanese homeland by the fire-bombing of civilian areas. Before Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima the land of the rising sun had been brought to it’s knees by a long-running series of B-29 incendiary bombings led by General Curtis LeMay a ruthless efficiency obsessed madman with the nickname of “Bombs Away LeMay”. LeMay led a withering series of bombings on 64 Japanese cities with the worst being the flaming hell from the skies unleashed on Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945 when nearly one hundred thousand human beings were incinerated. So intense was that bombing that according to one writer, Nicholas Von Hoffman, that the heat “boiled the water in lakes and ponds, cooking those who fled to safety there like human lobsters”. LeMay once said that “killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”. The murderous actions of the U.S. government against the non-caucasian enemy du jour in any of our great imperialist wars and conflicts including Barack Obama’s humanitarian bombardment of Libya as well as the financial windfall that the destruction of lives and infrastructure reap for the moneychangers and blood barters rarely if ever intrude on the consciousness of the masses of asses who couldn’t be bothered with the slaughter that is carried out on their taxpayer dime. Kilgore Trout’s’ The Gutless Wonder is a perfect metaphor for the apathetic and dumbed-down  philistines who allow for the murder of innocents to take place in their name as long as the reality doesn’t intrude upon their futile pursuit of happiness. I know people who regularly flock to local air shows when they take place every year to marvel at the military planes, drool over the displays of armaments, eat, drink and be merry with that one big disconnect from reality ensuring their pleasure. Aerial bombardment and cruise missiles are not only extraordinarily expensive but also representative of the sanitized killing and innate gutlessness of modern drone warfare where airstrikes can be launched from a distance in the comfort of air conditioned command centers by men with video screens and joysticks. Roger Waters accurately described it as the Bravery of Being out of Range:

In something more contemporary than World War II atrocities one needs only to read Chris Hedges’ latest gut-wrenching essay The Body Baggers of Iraq. In the piece, Hedges who is the preeminent moral voice in this feculent cadaver of a republic pulls back the red, white and blue bunting on the blessed glory of war that is revered by armchair patriots. He details the story of Jess Goodell, a worker in the Marine Corps Mortuary Affairs unit whose job was to “collect and catalog” the corpses and possessions of those poor, fucked-over “heroes” who paid the ultimate price so that Americans could remain free to be decadent, slothful, timorous, self-obsessed nitwits whose only Earthly purpose is to be ready to bare their jugulars whenever the monsters that are the corporate vampire class are ready to feed. The piece is not for anyone possessing either a weak stomach nor an animal instinct to remain in denial about the glamorous and noble nature of war that they have been sold through movies and television. War is a vile, stinking morass of human misery, blood, vomit, dead babies, shattered lives and those who have gotten obscenely wealthy and powerful in turning the filth, fury and soul-sucking degradation into just more revenue flows that they use to gamble in the markets on more defense stocks that feed the demon that can never be full enough of the gore and gold upon which it feeds. To once again quote the late, great Hunter S. Thompson..”All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.” It has worked wonders for the psychotics who run this place now and while that precious nugget of real truth is an even bigger bout of skull-fuckery that is best left to the hard core truth-seekers and cynics…

But I digress….

The Body Baggers of Iraq is just awesome in it’s sustained intensity and you will never see anything even remotely resembling something like this in even the most ‘liberal’ bastions of the corporate propaganda system that serves as the media here in Fortress USA. I excerpt the following from that piece:

The unit processed about half a dozen suicides. The suicide notes, she said, almost always cited hazing. Women, she said, were constantly harassed, especially sexually, but it often did not match the systematic punishment and humiliation meted out to men who were deemed to be inadequate Marines. She said that Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” The harassed Marines would be assigned to other individual Marines and become their slaves. They would be sent on punishing runs in which many of them vomited. They would be forced to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching down like a baseball catcher and then standing up again—followed by a series of other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.

“They make these Marines do what they call ‘bitch’ work,” Goodell said. “They are assigned to be someone else’s ‘bitch’ for the day. We had a guy in our platoon, not in Iraq but in California, and he was overweight. He was on remedial PT, which meant he went to extra physical training. When he came to work he was rotated. One day he was with this corporal or this sergeant. One day he was sent to me. I had him for an hour. I remember sending him outside and making him carry things. It was very common for them to dig a hole and fill it back up with sand or carry sand bags up to the top of a hill and then carry them down again.”

The unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves, usually by putting rifles under their chins and pulling the trigger.

“We had a Marine who was in a port-a-john when he blew his face off,” she said. “We had another Marine who shot himself through the neck. Often they would do it in the corner of a bunker or an abandoned building. We had a couple that did it in port-a-johns. We had to go in and peel and pull off chunks of flesh and brain tissue that had sprayed the walls. Those were the most frustrating bodies to get. On those bodies we were also on cleanup crew. It was gross. We sent the suicide notes home with the bodies.”

—

“One of the first convoys we went to was one where the Army had been traveling over a bridge and an IED had exploded,” she said. “It had literally shot a seven-ton truck over the side and down into a ravine. Marines were already going down into the ravine. We were just getting out of our vehicles. We were putting on our gloves and putting coverings over our boots. I was with a Marine named Pineda. I was coming around the Humvee and there was a spot on the ground that was a circle. I looked at it and thought something must have exploded here or near here. I went over to look at it. I looked in and saw a boot. Then I noticed the boot had a foot in it. I almost lost my lunch.”

“In the seven-ton truck the [body of the] assistant driver, who was in the passenger seat, was trapped in the vehicle,” she said. “All of his body was in the vehicle. We had to crawl in there to get it out. It was charred. Pineda and I pulled the burnt upper torso from the truck. Then we removed a leg. Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting out hands together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso but you need to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was very common to have body bags that when you picked them up they would sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh. The contents did not resemble a human body.”

The members of the mortuary unit were shunned by the other Marines. The stench of dead flesh clung to their uniforms, hair, skin and fingers. Two members of the mortuary unit began to disintegrate psychologically. One began to take a box of Nyquil tablets every day and drink large quantities of cold medicine. He was eventually medevaced out of Iraq.

“Our cammies would be stained with blood or with brains,” she said. “When you scoop up the meat it often would get on the cuffs of our shirts. You could smell it, even after you took off your gloves. We weren’t washing our cammies everyday. Your cuff comes to your face when you eat. Physically we were stained with remains. We had a constant smell like rotten meat, which I guess is what it was since often the bodies had been in the sun and the heat for a long time. The flesh had gone bad. The skin on a body in the hot sun slides off. The skin detaches itself from the layer beneath and slides around on itself.”

—

Her unit once had to recover two Marines who had drowned in a lake. It appeared one had leapt in to save the other. The bodies, which were recovered after a couple of days by Navy divers, were grotesquely swollen. One of the Marines was so bloated and misshapened that the body was difficult to carry on a litter.

“His neck was as wide as his bloated head, and his stomach jutted out like a barrel,” she writes in the book. “His testicles were the size of cantaloupes. His face was white and puffy and thick. Not fat, but thick. It was unreal. He looked like a movie prop, with thick, gray, waxy skin and the thick purple lips. We couldn’t stop looking at these bodies because they were so out of proportion and so disfigured and because, still, they looked like us.”

It was hardest to look into the faces of the dead. She and the other members of the mortuary unit swiftly covered the faces when they worked on the bodies. They avoided looking at the eyes of the corpses.

Once, the unit had to process seven Marines killed in an explosion. Seven or eight body bags were delivered to the bunker.

“We had clean body bags set up so we could sort the flesh,” she said. “Sometimes things come in with nametags. Or sometimes one is Hispanic and you could tell who was Hispanic and who was the white guy. We tried separating flesh. It was ridiculous. We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We were trying to do the best we could sorting it out. We had the last body bag come in. We opened up the body bag and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us. We got used to a lot of it. But the heads worked the other way. They affected us more strongly as time passed. We saw on the heads the expressions of fright and horror. It made us wonder what we were doing here.”

She processed one Marine whose face was twisted at the moment of death by rage. The face of this Marine began to haunt her.

“I had this feeling that something awful had occurred,” she said. “The way he had come in and stiffened he had this look to his face that made my stomach curl. It looked angry. Often expressions on bodies would look fearful and hurt. The faces looked as though they had received death. But this face looked like he had given death.”

She and the other members of the unit became convinced they could feel and hear the souls of the dead Marines they had processed and housed in their reefers.

The pernicious nature of war not only destroys flesh and buildings, it destroys lives of those who survive and then must cope with the horrific and immoral acts that their government has ordered them to participate in. Those with a conscience like Goodell are haunted by the experience and are able to channel it into some sort of action that is redemptive, such as speaking out with the truth. Others, take for example Army Specialist Jeremy Morelock of Wasila, Alaska (how ironic) and the “Kill Team” who was just sentenced to 24 years in prison for his murdering for fun of Afghan civilians. While Morelock becomes the example and the sacrificial lamb for the ongoing carnage in America’s wars. How many other Jeremy Morelocks are not going to be brought up on charges and will return home one day, trained killers with sociopathic personality disorders and who will be absorbed into the police state apparatus as law enforcement personnel? Food for thought isn’t it?

Outback’s Shameless Corporate War Profiteering

To borrow from the Marine Corps vernacular referenced in the Hedges’ piece one could accurately peg the majority of Americans as “shit bags”, “fat nasties”, “money fuckers” and “slaves” so worthless and pathetic they have been during the rise of the fascist state. More of the lemmings here in God’s chosen land of plenty pour our their emotions in acts of lunacy like mourning the death of multi-millionaire movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor, a woman who lived the good life and through her the inhabitants of idiot nation lived vicariously, just as they do when it comes to all of the false idols that they sanctimoniously deify while the wallow in the shame, cowardice and willful ignorance that passes for their pitiful little lives. I remember back in the days after the prior vainglorious Emperor George W. Bush unleashed the full fury of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq back in 2003, at that time gas was still cheap, the grand fraud of the Wall Street housing bubble was years from reaching critical mass and piggish and still traumatized by the ‘terrorist’ attacks on 9/11 were braying for blood. The roads were filled with mega-sizes SUV’s and goddammit if there wasn’t one of those idiotic fucking yellow ribbon magnets on the ass end of each one. It was futile trying to convince the average American dumbass that their over-consumption of the precious black gold was what our heroic military ‘heroes’ were being sent into the meat-grinder to kill, be maimed for life or die for. Back in that day those who dared to question were shouted down as “traitors”, “terrorist-appeasers”, “enemies of the state” and the worst of all pejoratives…”unpatriotic” back when it was scary to dissent against Bush’s maniac crusades for neocon doctrine. Those were disturbing times for those of us who were only starting to come to the realization (as with me) that it was all bullshit, before the early internet insurgents….after years of relative ‘peace’ it was a total war of civilizations. Eventually though the truth became to seep out, the internet gave many of us a place to organize and educate ourselves and the always greed-crazed corporate carnivores latched onto the wars as another marketing tool. 


The wars have not only not been televised to Americans but are now shamelessly used by corporations who equate patriotic fervor with profits. The participation of national restaurant chains like Outback Steakhouse in Operation Homefront are cynically used to sell steaks and blooming onions to blooming idiots (I wonder how that meat would taste if Chris Hedges’ piece were slipped into the menus), Wal-Marts are festooned in the red-white and blue despite an inventory of poorly constructed garbage made in China and “support the troops” has become a guaranteed money maker to lure consumers. The worst offenders of course is FOX and nothing is more indicative of their cheerleading for murder than the NFL coverage, take for example the use of Veterans Day weekend in 2009 to promote the ‘patriotism’ of the foreign pig Rupert Murdoch. FOX’s pregame show was held on a set in Afghanistan (see Militarist Masturbation) where ex jocks and grinning shit salesmen like Howie Long and Terry Bradshaw immersed the FOX brand in the sort of glorification of the war machine that would do Leni Riefenstahl proud. There is no important football game that doesn’t feature a tax dollar wasting flyover and this year’s Super Bowl in Jerry Jone’s gauche Texas temple of avarice was vomit inducing so soaked in red-meat flag waving and war worshipping hyperbole was it. It goes over real well with those who in the true modern American way love to park their fat asses on their couches in front of their big screen televisions and cheer for others to die just as long as they don’t have to do the fighting.


I will close with this excerpt from the classic antiwar book by Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun:

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.

Hmmmm..

But what do the dead say?

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say that I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die.

So it goes…

Let Them Eat War: Mr. Obama Joins the Club

The moment the first explosions rocked Libya I knew that Barack Obama had just locked down another four years in the White House. This was his initiation, his right of passage, just like laying in a mock coffin and sucking off upperclassmen in the Skull and Bones tomb. By definition every U.S. President is a war criminal and our very own proud owner of the Nobel Peace Prize finally has that most precious of things, a war that he can claim as his own. Not that Afghanistan and Iraq which continue to burn, bankrupt and morally pollute didn’t qualify Obama for the exalted title of war criminal in chief but they are really Bush’s wars, now the Pope of Hope has pissed his name into the snow. Of course there is all of the happy horseshit about the international seal of approval including that of the United Nations but ultimately is is more war for a nation that remains to become weary of such bloody and ultimately futile adventures. The national credit card was long ago maxed out on wars of choice, the monstrous sword of Damocles that is the national debt hangs over the heads of every American currently alive and whomever happens to be born here over the next fifty years but there is always more support for America’s favorite pastime – killing brown people.  

Eight years to the day after the abortion that was George W. Bush dialed up the attack on Iraq Mr.Obama took time off from his NCAA tournament bracket and green-lighted the attack on the devil Col. Gadhafi who like the earlier version of the “New Hitler”, Saddam Hussein is killing his own people. Now there is change that you can believe in! Never mind the blatant hypocrisy of not launching a similar attack in support of those seeking ‘democracy’ in Bahrain courtesy of our great friends in the House of Saud (the irony that 15 of the alleged 19 September 11th ‘hijackers came from Saudi Arabia is lost on the American sheeple) seeking to preserve their tyrannical and corrupt regime. Now that the warfare state has become the preeminent power in America, only nosing out the genocidal Wall Street speculators whose taste for rotting flesh that they can pick for their daily sustenance and who right now are in an orgy of mania on the level of hardened pederasts as they rut with each other in the commodities pits placing futures bets on crude. The D.J.I.A. (Dick Jammed In Ass) was up 178 points today despite the lack of positive real economic news that benefits the ordinary fucked-over schmuck who is now left to contemplate the coming of five-dollar a gallon gasoline and has yet to get a handle on the accompanying hyper-spike in food prices that will follow like a category five blast of an economic hurricane after the initial tidal surge. In a bit of news that I find both somewhat encouraging for a bizarre reason and terrifying the first signs of violence and rage connected to double digit food inflation manifested itself at a San Antonio, Texas area Taco Bell where a customer named Ricardo Jones went batshit over a price hike on his bag of Beefy Crunch Burritos and engaged in a potentially deadly standoff with local police after he fired an assault rifle at police. Such incidents are to be expected in a culture where gun violence is revered but somehow it seems to be crossing a line when an extra 3.50 tacked onto a bag of burritos could lead to a Heat style shootout with the blue boys.

Think that Obama is going to save you from the rapacious looter capitalist flesh-eaters? Think again, not only is the Pope of Hope now a real live War President but he got the message from the 2010 elections that anything other than boot-licking obedience to the banksters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce outsourcing pimps and the rest of the corporate pigs will not be tolerated. Look for Obama to assume the traditional position for commander in chief when it comes to the finance oligarchs, assume the position of footstool and don’t ever think of fucking with them again and they will be very kind to his reelection campaign. Barry O. is assured of another term for his willingness to have all of America take a haircut so that the Wall Street casinos can have plenty of comp chips to gamble with. Not even Wall Street and the Chamber are insane enough to tolerate even in moments of amusement the possibility of a Sarah Palin presidency leaving the rapidly fading star of the scumbaggers to embark on some sort of world tour to pitch the virtues of entrenched American stupidity, gross ignorance and xenophobia, today’s stop will be in Israel where she will do Wasilla style crack-ho style lapdances for Bibi Netanyahu who likely only is going to spare the time wasted in bothering with her out of some sense of honor among thieves and a gift to his most reliable fifth-columnist William Kristol. Hell, Bibi entertained Fred Fucking Thompson in the run-up to the 2007-2008 GOP primaries so maybe hosting Palin is for sheer entertainment value, it has to be more exciting than trying to converse with a cadaver like that marble-mouthed lug of a bad actor.

CRUISE MISSILE LIBERALS LOVE WAR TOO!

The most disgusting thing of all regarding Obama and his wars, both in terms of military ordnance dropped on civilians and the ongoing war on civil liberties at home is just how down with it all that the liberals are with it all. Liberals, especially liberal Democrats LOVE war, as long as it can be wrapped up in some sort of a self-righteous humanitarian guise.The Libyan adventure gives them one that they can line up and salute for. It has been a long and sad regression on the ‘left’ since Rahm Emanuel and the conniving Democrats were able to successfully ostracize the anti-war movement back in the run-up to the Pelosi-Reid majority in 2006. Not only was impeachment of the Bushreich war criminals off the table but the law was laid down that any such criticism of the wars was taboo. Afghanistan was embraced by the Democrats as ‘the good war’ while the Iraq debacle was chained to Bush’s neck like an albatross. Cindy Sheehan was excommunicated after she served her purpose to the corrupt and cynical DLC/Corporatist Democrats, MoveOn.org was bitch-slapped after they dared to question the motivations of the great General Petraeus and the assemblage of sycophants and travelers the likes of Ariana Huffington, Cyber Stalin Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and their ilk all fell into line and for the sake of political (and lucrative career enhancing) expedience all learned how to just stop worrying and love the bomb. Obama was elected in a landslide, reneged on his implied promises to close Guantanamo Bay, restore accountability and the rule of law and draw the wars down and the useful idiots on the ‘left’ all got onboard. Whether it was the silence over matters that would have in years past had them screaming for Bush’s head on a pike or a rethinking of antiwar stances to now make supporting the obviously neocon ginned up Iran Green Revolution or biting on the bait of Time Magazine’s cover of the Afghan woman with her nose cut off (see above picture) the once pacifist ‘left’ became apologists for Obama’s murderous actions. Even Code Pink renounced their principles and whored out to the war machine once their guy had the keys.

And today as the bombs and cruise missiles continue to rain down on Libya there is more of the same sort of fatheaded liberal apologists, whether it be the insipid Bill Press who is on Sirius/XM morning drive time radio with the daily DNC talking points or the windbag Juan Cole on Antiwar.com Radio the support for this latest filthy, anti-constitutional attack on a country that didn’t do one goddamned thing to threaten America was as vomitous as it was definitive as to the true character of the state worshipping hypocrites that they are. Chris Hedges pegged the liberals dead on for the cheese-eaters that they have become, first in his savage and dead bang diatribe Liberals are Useless and later on in his book The Death of the Liberal Class. Hedges, who has come to be the moral voice of these most immoral and diseased of times hits it spot on again in his recent piece Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand that speaks to the abject failure of American liberal institutions as they have been subverted with nary a whimper by a decades running coordinated and now unstoppable fascist/militarist element juggernaut:

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Why is it that there is never any money to find socially beneficial programs, education, the rebuilding of a crumbling infrastructure, renewable energy programs or anything that is useful to actual human beings in America but there is always money for war? This speaks to a deep cancer in our society, our precious green and camouflage clad ‘heroes’ have been glorified through movies, television shows, print media, toys and video games that worship war. Ike knew what the hell he was taking about when he warned of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the accompanying costs to a society that at the time was filled with wonderful capability, economic and scientific advantage and a gold plated reputation coming out of World War II that was only beginning to be tarnished by the rise of the CIA, the brutal public murder of President Kennedy and the subsequent Vietnam War. Something went terribly awry in America around the time of the JFK killing and the same institutional elements behind that coup d’etat are still calling the shots. All else is subservient to the agenda of the American war machine,

As if any more confirmation that Obama was just a lightweight version of  Lyndon Baines Johnson without the social programs was needed the attack on Libya makes any more argument on that one moot. Mr. Obama was nowhere to be seen in Madison during the mass protests that none of the corporate media deemed worthy of coverage, choosing instead to focus on created news like a few dozen or so geriatrics, losers and deluded and easily duped freaks flying Gadsen flags and wearing those faggy Revolutionary War style wigs and tri-color hats descending on town hall meetings to vent their frustration at the mythical death panels that in real life reside inside insurance claims departments. He will however be seen pimping his manhood over the ongoing attacks on Libyan civilians. Hey, Bill Clinton bombed the shit out of Belgrade and contributed to the starvation and misery of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with his bombings and sanctions, cruelty that his own Secretary of State Madeline Albright went on 60 Minutes to obscenely justify as acceptable.

I have to agree with Chris Hedges, Liberals ARE Useless….take my word for it, I ran with the pack for long enough before I was shunned as a leper for daring to say the obvious that if it was wrong under Bush, then it is also wrong under Obama. But being excommunicated from the world of the dueling cults of the jackass and the elephant is just fine with me. 

Meet the New Nazis, Same as the Old Nazis

The corporate media on Sunday sought to play on both the gullibility, the emotions and the misplaced sense of patriotism of the public when launching this bullshit biscuit into the lemming feeding trough. Gadhafi said the strikes were a confrontation between the Libyan people and “the new Nazis,” and promised “a long-drawn war.”

“You have proven to the world that you are not civilized, that you are terrorists — animals attacking a safe nation that did nothing against you,” Gadhafi said in a televised speech.

The Colonel might just be onto something there. The Homeland (formerly the USA) is currently engaged in an endless series of wars of conquest, employs a blitzkrieg style of attack strategy (shock and awe) in the initial attacks of target countries, is currently engaging in a campaign of ruthless persecution of a religious minority (the anti-Muslim hysteria), runs a gulag of secret prisons and torture facilities, has a government that not only spies on ordinary citizens but encourages them to spy on each other and rat out disloyal or bad citizen type behavior, employs a kangaroo court justice system in which ordinary citizens can be brought up on vague charges (terrorism) or just disappeared (the stripping of Habeas Corpus) and disappeared. All of this is facilitated by a pack of vicious thugs who worship state power (teabaggers and Christian Zionists) and was set into motion by a modern day Reichstag Fire (9/11). Then there is that magnificently efficient system of state propaganda in the corporate media that Herr Goebbels would have been proud of. In Der Heimat versus Hitler’s Nazi regime though at least the trains ran on time and the German infrastructure was the advanced envy of the world, so much that Eisenhower modeled the intrastate highway system after it. Today, in 2011 the roads are pocked with automobile chewing potholes and other defective surfaces, the bridges are crumbling and even when the government tries to do something to shore it up and look to the future as in the national high-speed rail initiatives American Nazi apparatchik in waiting like Florida Governor Rick Scott turns town the money in order to nurture the hatred of his own personal S.A. the teabaggers. Make no mistake, with the coming wave of hyperinflation and dollar devaluation there is going to be plenty of opportunity for the real goons to assert themselves after Obama’s piss-warm and utterly feckless regime which has failed to change anything falls and then the pogroms will begin.

When taking into consideration the OSS/CIA (Wall Street’s enforcement arm) post-WW II assimilation of thousands of Nazis, including serious war criminals into the service of American finance capitalism under the guise of waging the Cold War it’s apparent that the Third Reich didn’t really lose the war, it just changed venues.

Just my two cents

EE

Alex Jones: Conspiracy Crank or Captain America?

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance

-Hunter S. Thompson

Let me get this out of the way right out of the gate, I am personally very ambivalent towards the work of talk radio firebrand and documentary filmmaker Alex Jones. I have followed his work on and off for a good number of years now and am still not completely sure of what drives him, who backs him and what his true motivations are. His radio show and films are a mixture of contradictory ideas that while highly informative too often rely on standard Bircher style anti-United Nations conspiracies, illegal alien (translation: Mexican) bashing diatribes, global warming denial and wild-assed tirades against fluoride in water, chem.-trails in the sky and pseudo-religious hogwash not to mention the tolerance of idiotic Birther nonsense. Jones also was one of the earliest promoters of the Obama ‘Joker’ minstrel show poster which he of course denies as being racist despite it’s obvious intention to resonate with a certain black-hating, southern-fried, white-power element. Too bad, because there is much great information mixed in as well, a borderline anarchist view of a society that truly deserves rebelling against and spot on attacks on the loss of civil liberties that were it not for the inclusion of the aforementioned dubious material would surely garner the Austin, TX flamethrower one hell of a lot of crossover appeal. While I am but an armchair quarterback when it comes to these things, I consider much of the work of Alex Jones to be cutting-edge and brilliant but just as much to be counter-productive.  I admit that Jones is first and foremost one hell of a showman, his rants are volcanic and put other hosts to shame. While pigs like Rush Limbaugh and stone-greedy charlatans like Glenn Beck fill their diatribes with standard Republican party establishment tripe, dog whistle terms, cynical glorification of the system that made them into millionaires, dumb it down for the easily duped cretins and wrap it all up in a big star, spangled package of pure unadulterated horseshit, Jones dares to be intellectual in a country that is increasingly hostile to thinkers. Not that I would compare Alex Jones to the less than dynamic duo frontmen for the cult of angry white dittohead dopes, he is far too anti-establishment in his denunciations of the rapidly closing iron fist that is the American police state, neocons, the dumbing-down of society, endless war and other things that are held so dear by the sanctioned propaganda mouthpieces for the establishment.

Alex Jones is now becoming more prominent thanks to not only the hosting of the now infamous interview with America’s public enemy number one Charlie Sheen but also in appearing in the snakepit that is the  popular women’s talk show The View that has an audience of millions. During the appearance, much to the chagrin of has-been Whoopi Goldberg, never-will be Elizabeth Hasselbeck and the queen herself Barbara Walters (who looked like she was about to have an aneurysm) Jones was wonderfully off subject. He defended Sheen but continued to plug his website www.infowars.com and interject relevant comments about the police state, George W. Bush’s by proxy murder of millions in his illegal wars, WTC7 and the TSA goons whose state-sanctioned sexual molestation is a brilliant example of just how far America has fallen. Jones also was featured in a recent Rolling Stone piece by Alexander Zaitchik entitled The Most Paranoid Man in America which despite the typical corporate media smear tactics, straw men and innuendo wasn’t nearly as vicious as the normally expected knee-capping of one who dares to ask the forbidden questions.  Jones himself commented on the article during a fairly recent show and while not praising the piece didn’t condemn it either. Of course the article resorts to the standard mockery and denunciation of crazy “conspiracy crank” ideas but so it goes in a nation of sheep where the truth is a horrifying thing that is deserving of shunning and were we living in either a more primitive or advanced society Jones would have his tongue cut out by the high priests of the temple. 

Jones can preach it though, like an apocalyptic prophet with doomsday rolling in, the day of reckoning for the sins of elite, the moneychangers and the war pimps for which we all will be bathed in the blood tide for, if not for our own moral shortcomings but for our collective failure to stop any of it. Launching into darkly funny rants invoking pop culture, history, political theory, scientific terminology, fire, brimstone and extrapolation his style isn’t for everyone, especially not for the squeamish or politically correct. The problem with Jones is that he does want to tie it all together into one gigantic global conspiracy and that makes him susceptible to being less logical and more biased in building the case to support his own research and conclusions. That is why the globalists, right-wing bogeymen like the deep-pocketed George Soros and the even more reviled Al Gore are such key pieces in the puzzle that Jones is assembling, their purported involvement in the use of the carbon taxes to enslave humanity conveniently ignores real scientific evidence of global warming in favor of a Koch Brothers friendly plan to keep their energy businesses running in full profit mode. Jones, while he doesn’t overtly use the Bircher’s grand global Communist conspiracy terminology directly often parrots the language, features far too many Council For National Policy (CNP) friendly guests and lays off serious criticism of big Texas oil and energy, the latter possibly being the prudent thing to do if based in Austin and within easy reach of the Texas mafia.

Not that there isn’t a massive global conspiracy…it’s just not a monolithic entity and is far more attributed to the ongoing evolution of capitalism into the final, cannibalistic and authoritarian manifestation where a global cabal of ultra-wealthy elitists will back the fascist corporate takeover of the entire planet – that is if they don’t destroy it first. Capitalism, not communism or socialism as the Birchers have long and loudly insisted is the most dangerous system in human history as is evident in 2011 as the world reaps the whirlwind of rigged markets, neo-liberal destruction of entire countries and the resultant unrest, genocidal and unstoppable financial speculation including in commodities such as oil and food that will combine to starve more people than Mao, Stalin and every other dictator in history combined. Goldman Sachs will bring down plagues of misery, famine, pestilence and suffering all in the name of global finance capitalism. In what has to be one of the grossest obscenities in contemporary history (and they are legion) the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Japan, a deadly trifecta of earthquakes, tsunami and now nuclear meltdown are in the American corporate media secondary to how the mass displacement, death and looming radiation poisoning of tens of thousands of innocent people will affect the fucking stock markets. To his credit Jones has been covering the Japan disaster extensively as of late and dare I say comes across as very left-wing in his criticism of the dangers of nuclear power.


Where the Birchers and others on the intellectual (versus the delusional neocon) spectrum of the right get it wrong is that they misinterpret the work of the influential historian Carroll Quigley , especially in the seminal Tragedy and Hope. In the book, his masterpiece Quigley writes of the behind the scenes power elite behind the curtain influence of ’round table’ groups that gather in secret and exert their influence over the publicly visible elements of the state. The Birchers and Cleon Skoussen, who is an idol of Glenn Beck (who pimps Skoussen’s manifesto The Five Thousand Year Leap) get it wrong with Quigley in interpreting the work as referring to global communism and socialism as the New World Order when in fact the groups that Quigley wrote about were primarily agents of global finance capital, the same global bankers that Jones so often condemns. Quigley himself disputed the interpretation of Tragedy and Hope by Skoussen who incidentally was an early member of the Council For National Policy. The problem with these types of analyses is that they too often focus on the influence of the old Eastern establishment, transnational types, particularly the Rockefellers, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission but at the same time pay no mind to the influential role of the powerful interests that rose out of the western states and the sunbelt, primarily big energy and defense, the new money. While I agree with them to some extent about the dangers of the rising police state bent on human enslavement through debt, global government (although corporate is conveniently omitted) and in the case of the Rockefellers and the other big wheels, the creation of a system of control that as Jones and others extrapolate to include embedded microchips (this is coming folks) and a taste for eugenics (Hitler got his ideas from the American elite) and ultimately a massive culling that will lead to the depopulation of the planet. What I take issue with is the idea that the threat from the “globalists” pales in comparison to that posed by their U.S. counterparts, particularly emanating out of the Council For National Policy and the predominant influence of powerful Evangelical Christians who have slowly and largely off the radar hijacked the American political system and to a good extent elements of the military. Not a good thing when a cancerous anti-Muslim/Islam bent is eating the country from within as a cancer, when bankrupting wars of imperial conquest are ongoing in Muslim countries and the crusader mentality is encouraged. The war of civilizations plays directly into the ideology of tens of millions of American Evangelicals hellbent on seeing the apocalypse in their lifetime so that they can be Raptured up to sit at the foot of God’s throne while the rest of us eat each other. This is very scary stuff and whenever any of it seeps out as to the religious motivations behind the wars the messenger must instantly be discredited, note the brutal pillorying of Seymour Hersh over a recent speech when he spoke of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), the Knights of Malta and the deeply entrenched Christian crusader mentality in the military. But Jones doesn’t go there which is one very serious problem that I have with him, he is not covering the BIG picture only selective elements, all of which are compatible with the Council For National Policy agenda.


Zaitchik’s Rolling Stone piece references the influence of the John Birch Society on a young Alex Jones:

Home life was intellectual, but not overtly political. “My parents were careful not to give me political views almost as an experiment to see what I’d turn into,” he says. “The closest thing to a childhood political training was some neighbors who were members of the John Birch Society. They’d come over for dinner and I’d be exposed to those ideas, starting at around age two.”

And

The most enduring influence, though, was a 1971 bestseller he found on his father’s bookshelf: None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Authored by Gary Allen, a spokesman for the John Birch Society, the book provided the cornerstone for New World Order conspiracies. According to None Dare, the federal income tax is nothing but a plot by a cabal of megarich “insiders” who work to suck the middle class dry and transfer its wealth to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. As a teenager, Jones read the book twice. “It’s still the easiest-to-read primer to the New World Order,” he says.

Hey, it’s not that the Birchers are bad people; they are for the most part loudly pro-American patriots, they just have a different view on many things but to ignore the fact that despite their more outrageous histrionics there is much common ground on a good many issues of great importance. I have myself on several occasions worked jointly with the organization on issues of agreement and unlike say MoveOn.org or other political action groups, I always get a return letter from my so-called Congressional representatives when using the JBS activism tools. Like all organizations, they continue to evolve but their focus on communism as the ultimate menace was and is wrong and is reflective of the formation of the JBS during the Cold War era when paranoia first became a virtue in America although of life as it is post 9/11 . For the record though, the JBS in it’s current incarnation is far more outspoken and progressive on civil liberties issues than either the Bush or Obama administrations. It is just that they are misguided and far too overly concerned with the external threats than those that are internal and have overwhelmed the traditional, reality-based conservatism of the past.


As for civil liberties this is where Alex Jones is the most effective, in attacking the vile transformation of what used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave into some bastardized version of Oceania, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany called The Homeland.There is no more of a passionate and ardent defender of American civil liberties on air than Alex Jones, and truthfully that sucks because it is due to problematic and uncompromising stances on such issues as illegal immigration  abortion (Jones is against it), failing to denounce the Tea Party movement after it had obviously been infiltrated and compromised by Neocon Republicans, Koch Brothers style global warming denial and a certain dark xenophobia relating to Mexicans (he accused Grindhouse spin-off flick Machete director Robert Rodriguez of fomenting a race war) he would have such crossover appeal that he would become a very dangerous man to the oligarchy. The one thing that this pathetically impotent, broken down and busted out lemming colony desperately needs (absent a functional political system) is a libertarian – progressive-green alliance that could find enough common ground to pose a serious and highly motivated threat to the current corrupt system. Jones, a libertarian who is a huge supporter of the former insurgent Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, a man whose anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties, anti-torture, anti-Federal Reserve and pro-America views make him anathema to the Neocon controlled GOP has gained much clout with thinking progressives for his principled stance on what ails America. Paul recently joined with the hated bogeyman of establishment Democrats, Ralph Nader in an alliance against the corporate warfare state so there is potential. Were Jones to reign in his tirades in order to appeal to a wider audience and using his skills as a showman and filmmaker he would be formidable indeed.


The Rolling Stone piece is actually about as fair a bit of writing about a guy with the controversial nature of Alex Jones is going to get in a major American publication. Certainly not a cowardly knee-capping, the article portrays Jones’ family life as being very normal, he “dotes” on his wife and children, “cracks jokes with his young staff” and is according to the author “shockingly sincere” in everything that he says. And the article makes it a point to emphasize that Jones has no tolerance for racism (Obama Joker posters and unruly Meskins [sic] aside) and is against the sort of anti-Semitism that is exemplified in many of the more extreme elements of the far-right. With any attacks on the Neocons and their insatiable bloodlust for global hegemony often resulting in knee-jerk and libelous accusations of anti-Semitism from the normal William Kristol, Israel Lobby and Alan Dershowitz influenced winged-monkeys it is important that one be wary of being accused as being nothing more than a ‘Jew hater’. Zaitchik’s piece makes a point of mentioning that Jones’ wife is of Jewish descent and I have on occasion when listening to his show often heard him respond to callers (more than a few so over the top that they are likely some of those paid actors who read scripts on radio shows) denouncing Jews in a harsh manner, this is good currency to have considering the highly coordinated activist presence of movement conservatives. And as for the ultra-slick, multi-millionaire, fish-belly white faux populist spokesman for the corrupted beyond redemption Tea Party that is Glenn Beck, a followup bit on how Beck has stolen from Jones, changed the message to one of partisan politics and deception and helped to build a proto-fascist army of American brownshirts who with the help of the vast right-wing conspiracy network of think tanks, front groups and local bunds of haters that can be bussed in to any hotspots, like they were to Madison, Wisconsin during the rebellion against Governor Scott Walker.


Zaitchik (and likely the editors) does make more than a few of the standard tricks and tactics used to discredit those who dare to ask the forbidden questions as wingnut ‘tin foil hatters’. For instance the sly references to the diseased little monster Jared Loughner, Loughner is said to have been a fan of the 9/11 Truth film Loose Change, as if that sort of guilt by association with a film that dares to examine the American Reichstag Fire hasn’t been now viewed by tens of millions of people who don’t go on kill crazy rampages. Jones is mocked for daring to question the official story and to ponder whether the Arizona shootings were in fact a “government mind control operation”. There is of course no reference to the longtime involvement of the CIA and military in mind control experiments such as MKULTRA, the obsession with trying to create ‘Manchurian Candidate’ style assassins (reference the work of a Colonel Thomas Narut found in the out of print Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart), there is one hell of a lot of money that is spent on mind control and Jones understands that, even if the sheeple don’t. Also the article seems to state that Jones’ belief in FEMA camps, total government tracking and fusion centers is absurd. Of course there is no mention is given to the ACLU’s report on the fusion centers that are hidden in plain sight just about everywhere now, Oliver North’s REX 84, Continuity of Government or the existence of these bizarre sort of detention facilities in America. This stuff is real and people had better get it though whatever may remain of their television lobotomized brains that they are there for a reason, and it’s not going to be a good reason. Of course such facilities must be downplayed, the blockbuster episode of TruTv’s hit show Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura dealing with the fusion centers, detention camps and police state (which Jones contributed to) was yanked off of the air and flushed down the memory hole by the an oligarchy hellbent on concealing the truth for as long as possible while the police state or as Jones refers to it, “the global, Stasi,Borg state” can be fully completed.


Zaitchik also writes:

To Jones, what matters most is the “continuity of agenda at the top. When I called Clinton a Wall Street puppet, they called me a right-wing extremist. When I said the same about George W. Bush, they called me an anti-war communist. Now that I’m against Obama for the same reasons, mainline conservatives embrace me. When I attack the next right-wing ‘savior,’ they’re gonna call me a communist again.”

On the spiritual cancer of modern capitalism, Jones sounds more like Ralph Nader than a Fox Business channel libertarian. “Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives,” Jones says. “The globalists are smart and tell us sin is fun, sin is a red-­devil cheerleader. No — sin is cheating other people, it’s sending troops to die in illegal wars, it’s keeping people dumb so you can control, exploit and kill them.”

While in recent years Alex Jones has disproportionally focused his energy on attacking Obama, who has now proven that he really isn’t the second coming of anything other than the Bushreich, only a smoother, better packaged version of it (as I write this the teflon-coated bullshit salesman is preening and prepping for his very own war on Libya) – he was critical of Bush as well. While some of his newest films The Obama Deception and The Fall of the Republic are denounced by the pathetic excuse for the left as sinister propaganda it would be a nice bit of context were an earlier Jones film also be referenced. In 9/11: The Road to Tyranny there is an extended segment on the Bush Family Nazi history, bizarre ceremonies at Bohemian Grove , an annual gathering for the elite located in the northern California forest and covered the Nuremberg style rally in 2004 New York City that was the Republican Party convention. So Jones does denounce the entire rotten system despite the earlier mentioned policy omissions, he also regularly ridicules the idiotic notion that Osama bin Laden and al-CIAda have become convenient bogeymen to be dragged out to justify every Draconian assault on civil liberties and war crime committed by the empire. It was Alex Jones who correctly called the 9/11 ‘terrorist’ attacks before they took place and on July 25th, 2001 and according to Zaitchik “became the only radio host in America to begin his September 11th broadcast with a tirade against the U.S. government”, now that’s chutzpah! 

The Rolling Stone piece describes an incident from Jones’s youth when he realized that corrupt local police were involved in drug dealing which made a serious impression on him and would influence his life’s work:

It was in high school that Jones discovered a corrupt, Blue Velvet underbelly to his town. At weekend parties, he watched as off-duty cops dealt pot, Ecstasy and cocaine to his friends. “A truck would appear, sometimes with a guy still in uniform inside,” Jones recalls. “Then, on Monday, they’d have D.A.R.E. and drug-test us for football.” Jones, a young var­sity lineman, did not appreciate the irony. “I was like, ‘You want to drug-test me, when I know you’re selling the stuff?’ I called them the mafia to their face. At the time, I didn’t know anything about CIA drug-dealing.”
Things came to a head during Jones’ sophomore year, when he was pulled over while driving without a license, a six-pack of beer under the passenger seat. Jones told the cop he was corrupt and had no right to enforce laws. “They brought me to jail,” Jones says. “Afterward, one of the cops told me to wise up, or they’d frame me and send me away.” The following week, his father was so spooked that he sold his dental practice and moved the family to Austin. A few months later, Rockwall County’s sheriff was indicted on organized-crime charges.

As one who regularly researches “conspiracies” and other manifestations of the deep state it is very easy to become cynical once exposed to the established patterns of gross amorality, cloak and dagger operations and raw corruption as is embodied in the global elite but especially in the ruling oligarchy here in the U.S.A. That being said, once one really gets it about the way that things truly work, has been exposured to the darkest  aspects of all of the dirty little secrets of how elements of the U.S. government operate, the sordid alliances with mobsters, drug dealers, dictators and stone crazy maniacs it takes a certain type to not openly reject it all as lunacy, that is how successful that the indoctrination is. It is just way too much of a mindfuck for the average American to understand such grotesque perversions of the white-picket fence illusions of virtue and decency. America is always the good guy, a God kissed land of greatness, opportunity and righteousness, the global cop and the blessed spreader of that great myth that is democracy for that is the narrative that they have been weaned upon since their earliest days of cognition. When the curtain is pulled back exposing the horrors of imperialist exploitation, big financial cartel monetary chicanery, arms and drugs trafficking to fund off the books black operations, the destabilization of legitimate foreign governments, assassinations, death squads, CIA mind control experiments, false flag terror attacks, propaganda, mind controlled assassins, ginned up wars for profit, institutional corruption and a myriad of other gross transgressions by the powerful against the powerless is truly understood. When one realizes that conspiracies are the normal way of doing business then the indoctrination is broken and the mind freed from it’s red, white and blue chains. Not everyone can do it, it takes courage, an understanding that one will be forever shunned by those stills staring at the shadows on the wall of the cave and the fortitude to not give a damn. That is one hell of a big rock to roll in a society where critical thinking is discourage, conformity is demanded and those who dare to not fall in line will become pariahs. You see, once one gets a true glimpse behind the façade of our Potemkin Village on the primrose path to perdition then it is virtually impossible to look at anything the same way ever again. That is way too much for a people mesmerized by falsehoods spewed from the pocket media on their big screen electronic crackpipes that feed them the steady methadone of celebrity, reality tv, nonsensical millionaire worship, desensitizing faux murders on ultra-violent cop worshipping epics, lurid sex, war glorification, meaningless sports contests, potty humor that infantilizes the mind and other rot that has replaced reality in 2011. Simply put, there are alternate realities in post 9/11 America, only one of which is real and that one is Jones’ “global Stasi Borg state”

In my own opinion, Jones comes across as a true patriot albeit one who should lay off the caffeine and take a more methodical and reasonable approach. Rather than try to tie it up in one big long-term global plot by ruthlessly efficient, eugenics obsessed elite that spans centuries and is in the final stages of their “Endgame” he should focus with laser precision on all that has gone so horribly wrong in America and has flipped the country fascist and about three moves shy of being branded, yoked and sold to the man. I really prefer to look at how author Peter Dale Scott describes it in his foreword the 2008 update of his book The War Conspiracy:

“Thus I looked at these repeated-rule breakings together under the rubric “war conspiracy,” a clumsy term which in retrospect could have been improved on. At the time I made it clear that I was not pointing to some single group of guilty plotters, but to a “syndrome” of sustained collusion and deceit. I likened the process to a “floating crap game”, in which the players (and dealers) change, but not the motive of gain. This analogy in retrospect seems absurdly linear. I had stumbled, almost by accident, on a far more pervasive process of subversion of public order. Today I talk instead of a dominant mindset, one found in various power centers: the military, intelligence agencies, the media, and even universities.

No doubt my analogy of a floating crap game could be characterized as an example of what Richard Hofstadter called “the conspiratorial mentally or ‘paranoid’ style – for which important events in public life are best understood as the product of hidden, malevolent forces in history. But what shall we say of those people, usually in privileged stations of the Establishment, for whom “conspiracy theory”, as Murray Rothbard once observed, is “quite beyond the pale of correct thinking and permissible discourse?” Is their preference for non-conspiratorial explanations not really a psychological tendency? “Lone-nutism,” the Establishment’s answer to “conspiracism” in the case of the Kennedy assassination, can be carried to spectacular lengths, as when Allen Dulles in the Warren Commission applied it to the simultaneous shootings accompanying the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The obvious failing of comprehensive conspiracy theories which invoke a single “invisible government” is their tendency to attribute a wide spectrum of unrelated events to a single controller or group. Just consider the list of controllers that various authors have suggested: the Pinay Circle, the Safari Club, the Round Table, the Bilderberts, the Knights of Malta, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Jesuits, Skull and Bones, the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission, the American Security Council, the Mafia, to name only some. One ingenious writer has claimed that a Jesuit Freemason member of the Round Table inspired the Bilderberger meetings, where in turn David Rockefeller “broached the idea of a Trilateral Commission.” But even such a synoptic hypothesis will not begin to cover the disparate evidence of plural hidden forces at work.

What all the aforementioned groups have in common is some degree of connection to what I call the global overworld – that fraction of the few hundred superrich (whose combined wealth is estimated by U.N. sources to nearly equal the annual income of the poorer half of the world’s population), and their representatives who also use wealth to exert political influence.

In the end it all comes down to money and power, when in doubt always refer to the Golden Rule which is that those who have the gold make the rules. As the system itself which is unsustainable deteriorates by the minute, the dollar being devalued by a cabal of genocidal fanatics led by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and uncontrollable commodities speculation that is driving a wave of global insurrection it is imperative for those who are able to see it for what it is can come together. It may already be too late to salvage anything, but there is a certain intrinsic value in the dignity of the fight against that which is unjust. Make no mistake, the FEMA camps and police state that Alex Jones rails about are real and they will soon be occupied by those who dare to question the raw fascism of the new American century. No matter how flawed that his message may be at times there is no question that Jones is influential, has a dedicated following and is the antidote to the whores and charlatans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who work for big money in order to distract, divide and hijack the revolution. It is going to take a unified effort to fight that which is coming, thanks to the internet and those who use it to expose the great lies there are millions who already awake and somewhere in the back of the minds of those who are not there is a gnawing feeling that things have gone horribly wrong, the right message with crossover appeal could be the spark that ignites the powder keg that the oligarchy is sitting upon but time is running out. 

Alex Jones is many things to many people, a veritable Rorschach test, but truly what he remains is an enigma.

by Ed Encho 

King Turd

Let The Inquisitions Begin! Apologist for I.R.A. Murder Grabs A Gavel

Let’s not deal with the formalities, why not cut to the chase right away and say the obvious, that Republican Congressman Peter King is not only a world class son of a bitch, a shameless demagogue and a terrorist supporting hypocrite (as long as they’re Irish and NOT Muslim) but a brilliant example of the ongoing moral rot that has eaten away at America from within. Another of the fascist fifth columnists that have since the end of World War Two deeply embedded themselves into our now terminally unhinged society, an element of die hard bigots, haters and Nazi worshippers, flag-wrapped goons and God kissed gauleiters that have with the ascent of this diseased vermin risen to prominence in Der Heimat. The propaganda mills are churning and dumping their blood-soaked flotsam and jetsam into the public consciousness as Herr King prepares his dirty little pack of rat-fuckers for their magnum opus of institutionalized hatred that are the anti-Muslim inquisitions, the serendipitous ‘discovery’ of NEW 9/11 footage sounds the arena horn for the grand poobah’s parade of incandescent, distilled into a potent toxin relaunch of right-wing icon Senator Joseph McCarthy, revamped and updated for the modern media era. That King has a massive bureaucratic fascist monstrosity like The Department of Homeland Security providing the police power for his roundup of dirty brown skinned devils and white al Qaeda sympathizers causes nary a twitching among the sheep as they blissfully and contentedly shuffle off towards the steel chutes.

King will bray like King Kong, that much is assured, his fat face shaking like an arsenic laced jello mold as his Bushmill’s and  cabbage reeking breath will pollute the chamber like acid rain from the smokestacks of a Koch Industries environmental hazard as he holds his kangaroo court. The hearings which begun Thursday are already being given a deserved amount of scorn as a new McCarthyism, at least by any of those who have any decency. The spin-machine is of course set on high, churning out a plethora of polls that produce the typical “most Americans” are in favor of hauling some damned dirty A-rabs up in front of a state sanctioned tribunal for the sole purpose of creating scapegoats. The babbling asses of the right-wing echo chamber of highly paid shills are engaged in typical bigotry, demagoguery and fear-mongering as they peddle their nonsensical horseshit to the types of half-wits who actually (according to another poll) that whites are a persecuted majority! That unbelievable little story is so completely detached from reality that when really taking it in you have to be terrified that on any given day that one is surrounded by these types. The poll, by something called the Public Religion Research Institute and hyped by both CNN and Stormfront is a serious example of just how close the lumpen Republican scumbagger swine are to being ready to don their red, white and blue uniforms that will be provided once the fascist right manages to find that charismatic leader who will lead the battle to take their country back.The haters eat it up though, and to the true believers, the ongoing wave of anti-Muslim hatred that is drowning America is like a piece of Heaven on Earth. Hell, I bet that Brigitte Gabriel’s pussy hasn’t been this wet since the IDF was unleashed on Gaza to stomp on the heads of infants.

While they wait for their future Führer to rise to prominence there will be no shortage of self-interested pigs like Peter King to define the enemy, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to smash the unions (which Hitler was doing before he got down to the serious business of rounding up Jews) and FOX to spread the propaganda and dehumanize opponents. I often catch hell for comparing the modern day Republican party to the German Nazis but come on now, one would have to be fucking blind to NOT see the similarities, it’s not like they are being done covertly, the rise of these jack-booted, perverted, snake-mean slobs is straight out of Hitler 101. Now with that said, history may always repeat itself but never in exactly the same manner. As former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison once said:

“In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line.”

If anything, the new American Reich will be a less ostentatious one than the cruder German prototype, the parallels have been evident for quite some time now. The new Gestapo is already here in Homeland Security, the economic crisis that continues to ravage unabated despite the constant reassurances of the corrupt, in bed with Wall Street media that things are getting better, rights are being eroded, torture has become acceptable and in many cases revered, war and militarism are so deeply embedded within the American psyche by now that they are practically genetic traits, the large segment of the populace has been brainwashed to believe that supporting right-wing thugs will result in a return of American exceptionalism, the churches have been co-opted and on it goes. Never underestimate the use of religion as a unifying factor that provides moral cover and justification from on high for savagery and bloodletting, after all, the German Army had belt buckles inscribed with Gott Mit Uns or “God is with us”, the Republicans have brilliantly used this particular factor in their war on America. Continuing the comparisons with Weimar/Nazi Germany there is a feckless and easily cowed opposition in the Democrats, any real ideological opposition to fascism was eradicated when King’s role-model Joseph McCarthy and his Commie fighting minions like the filthy bastard Ronald Reagan for all intents and purposes destroyed whatever remained of the real Socialist, hard-fighting left that escaped the earlier government led purges during the great wars. There is the corporate and industrialist support of the movement because such thuggery is good for the bottom line and there is even a flush with cash backer of it all, Hitler had Fritz Thyssen and the Republicans have the Koch Brothers. Regular Americans themselves are now ready to be reeled in since the low-hanging fruit of the Tea Party is already on board. In a nation of the type that demonized professor Ward Churchill once referred to as “Little Eichmanns” perhaps it’s fitting to crib a bit from Hannah Arendt who studied Eichmann himself and the banality of evil:


The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Right about now if I were a Muslim I would be seriously thinking about getting the fuck out of America. 

Allen West: Tea House Negro

You have to give it to the Republican hijacking of the Tea Party Movement, from an original pro-American, pro-civil liberties, anti-interventionist grass roots uprising that coalesced around Ron Paul and the libertarian vision for America…they have their bases masterfully covered. When that greasy little pig Rick Santelli, a CNBC Republican shill went into a carefully choreographed rant against the evil black Muslim devil Obama back in early 2009 it activated an American Gladio style network of right-wing dead-enders, the dregs of Karl Rove’s GOP base and gravy trainers looking to hitch a ride on the war wagon. You have to give it to Allen West when it comes to shameless, self-centered, stars-in-the-eyes cynical opportunism that puts even Sarah Palin to shame, the rising star and one of the few blacks admitted into the carnival of perversion of the GOP big tent this is one motherfucker that has the act down, a real Uncle Tom cum flag-wrapped Uncle Sam and as the Reggie Hammond once remarked…””You know what I am? I’m your worst fucken’ nightmare, man. I’m a nigger with a badge, that mean I got permission to kick your fuckin’ ass”!!!!

West has become the blackfaced minstrel of the Tea Party freak show, a tough as nails Iraq war veteran who meshes nicely with the 2012 strategy of turning American Muslims into the Juden of the 21st century here in Der Heimat. West earned points when during a February town hall meeting he responded to a question about just were in the Quran showing where Muslims were formally mandated by Allah “to carry out attacks against Americans and innocent people.” West, in typical GOP Nazi defense mode did not answer the question but rather snarled “don’t try to blow sunshine up my butt”, Christ forbid that anything might dislodge the stick that is embedded there. West, not a minority who would be bothered by the vagaries of not calling the kettle black mocked fellow House member Keith Ellison, the Muslim from Minnesota as one who is “the antithesis of the principles upon which this country was established.” West, like all Republicans seems to be a bit fuzzy on the actual historical details and conveniently ignores slavery as one of those founding principles. It’s all talking points to these moronic miscreants though, after all, it’s not like the low hanging fruit of the GOP base that has been magically rebranded as the suddenly patriotic and anti-government (hands off my Medicare and Social Security you fucking Socialists!) Tea Party.

The Tea Party, as I have repeatedly emphasized is as phony as Allen West and thanks to legions of low information voters and a corrupt corporate media that has turned the Dick Armey of Darkness into some sort of faux populist insurgency it has been a masterful snow job…not that it takes much at all to fool the average, trembling with fear, American sheep these days. The original Tea Party was began in the waning days of the Bush administration and counter to the new narrative was actually against costly foreign wars (even against those damned dirty sand nigger Muslims who hate us for our freedom), was against the parasitic tool of the finance oligarchs that is the Federal Reserve and in a real contradiction to the current Palinazi version was PRO CIVIL LIBERTIES not obsessed with using the law to strip a demonized minority group of their rights and to torture the hell out of anyone who dares to complain. That’s the thing with the authoritarian minded, jackbooted jellyfish of the now thoroughly hijacked and rotten to the core Tea Party, they absolutely love their sadism and when that sadism is sado-sexual, well it just tickles their fancy all the more. Look at Abu Ghraib prison, the entire Tea Party movement and their token toadies like West are ALL peckerwood princess Lynndie Englund dragging dirty nasty nekkid Muslim men around on a leash, or demented good ole boy Charles Graner kicking the living shit out of those gut-dammed A-rabs.

Chucky and Lynndie: Just Good Ole Teabaggers Kickin Muslim Ass

Allen West has recently toured the shrine of worship for the new Republican reich that is Guantanamo Bay, a heinous blight on what America used to be back in the days before the Neocon’s “New Pearl Harbor”. In another of the broken promises that multiply like little white trash redneck babies in some Alabama trailer park, the feckless wonder Barack Obama reneged on his campaign promise to close the house of horrors. Of course that is NEVER going to happen, Gitmo is so symbolic of the new era of American fascism that it’s only a matter of time until it replaces the U.S. Treasury on the back of currency notes. It was a fitting stage on which a preening pig like West could strut across that filthy home of brutality, human experimentation and the cruelest sort of advanced torture attacks that put Hitler and Stalin’s goons seem like rank amateurs. On his return from the anti-American hellhole of legal limbo for those damned dirty brown skinned devils (and soon the white al Qaeda liberals, gays and other dissenters who will inevitably take up residence there) West gave his blessing and even boasted of seeing  “one very popular individual” (no mention was given of whether he then retreated into a private area and masturbated) which will surely make him an even bigger hero to the dregs of American society that populate the Tea Party.

That Allen West holds office in Florida, the diseased penis of America is only natural. This state is a low wage haven for carpetbaggers, greed heads on the lam seeking to take advantage of the generous homestead law protecting their mansions, religious fanatics, hot-headed Cuban itching to support a Republican Bay of Pigs II against the hated Castro, stone-crazy freaks, hardened racists and charlatans looking to get into the business of politics. It is a state that recently elected as Governor (under the Tea Party banner of course) a ghoulish, skin-headed flim-flam man named Rick Scott who while running Columbia/HCA was a part of the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. History. Scott, who left HCA engulfed in a plague of scandal used his personal fortune to run some of the dirtiest ads in Florida campaign history, some accounts say as much as $78 million and to laughably sell himself as some sort of outsider whose ace corporate management skills and experience would make him a natural to restore the rapidly setting Sunshine State to some of it’s former glory and bring in JOBS JOBS JOBS!. Scott did bring JOBS, snow jobs and blow jobs and in his capacity of the big time CEO and his no-nonsense approach to state business promptly told that dirty, birth certificate challenged black man in the WHITE House to stick a 2.4 billion grant for high-speed rail up his Muslim asshole. That really created jobs alright, likely in California or any of the other states who are lined up for the money now that Scott has shown that he is all about business…HIS business and the business of right wing sugar daddies like the Koch Brothers.

Florida is an ugly place right now, with obvious charlatans like West and Scott being the high-profile reps while the opportunistic little Jeb Bush protege Senator Marco Rubio wisely lays low, likely laughing his slimy little back-waxed ass off at how easy it was to hornswoggle the scumbaggers into punching his ticket, the right-wing fascist nonsense is only beginning, now we have some peckerwood legislators pushing to have a law passed that would ban Sharia law, the newest model of the bogeyman and slam dunk vote getter to roll off of the Neocon propaganda shop production line. It all meshes very nicely with the ongoing campaign to use Muslims as some sort of national scapegoat for all of the misery that the Republican doomsday machine has wrought (a good deal of credit goes to their Democratic collaborators too) as America descends into a shit pool of a banana republic third world dictatorship. One giant plantation/gulag with a hardened perimeter of Tea Party thugs to guard the massah’s quarters, and Allen West has certainly earned his place within.

 

Charlie Sheen Killed Natalee Holloway

“The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked..”.

 -George Orwell

But of course he didn’t, although that is about the only fucking thing that the parasites in the corporate media haven’t accused him of, at least not yet anyway. Americans love nothing better than wallow in the sleaze of the lurid sort of celebrity scandals that are a fixation to a doomed people as they slowly rot from the inside out. Nothing sells in America like scandal and celebrity scandal is even better. Celebrity, you see is the coin of the realm on this planetary blight of a lemming colony. Despite global political uprisings, gas prices on the way towards $5 a gallon, food prices similarly skyrocketing thanks to the greed crazed speculators on Wall Street and in the commodities trading pits, wars without end, the ongoing eradication of our civil liberties, a political system that has miserably and completely failed, a shameful poverty rate, a mockery of a health care system and a burgeoning police state the really important thing is the two-minute hate over Charlie Sheen, fallen star. The vultures in the pocket media haven’t had this much fun since they picked the diseased flesh from Mel Gibson’s bones, fucked the bleached corpse of Michael Jackson, bathed in the toxic offal of the circus maximus of the O.J. Simpson industry or salivated over the semen stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. 

The troubled Sheen, whose recent personal problems landed him in the hospital and led to the debacle where he was subsequently entered into rehab (hey, Sheen is a party monster but isn’t that his business?) which placed his megahit sitcom Two and a Half Men in limbo officially became public enemy number one when he appeared on the Alex Jones Show on February 24th. The interview, during which the actor babbled insanely in a nonsensical manner about absurdities (it was like Michelle Bachmann on raw tequila and crack cocaine) alternately blasting his one of his fuck bunny “goddesses”, the entire system, the show, the paparazzi vultures who feed off the carcasses of fallen stars and peppering the interview with movie quotes, notably Colonel Kurtz from his father’s Apocalypse Now. The interview was of course picked up nationally and affixed to Sheen’s head like a crown of thorns, a scourging of biblical proportions would ensue as he was driven to the cross by the lazy scum corporate carrion mockingbirds, taking advantage of the prurient nature of Boobus Americanus for more fodder for their daily mental masturbation. The interview was painful to listen to but Sheen had his money shots, he launched one out of the park when he referred to the TV honchos who judged him for his lifestyle but”… lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and just look at their loser lives”, not that must have hurt. The wide ranging rant had Sheen jabbering self-references to doing “strafing runs in his underwear”, being a “Vatican assassin” and calling Thomas Jefferson a “pussy” and nicely calling out the magnet for the terminally fucked that is Alcoholics Anonymous but the final straw was when he referred to producer Chuck Lorre who is Jewish by his Hebrew name “Chaim Levine”. Now it was war.

Despite Lorre’s own references to “Chaim Levine” on one of his stupid little vanity cards the firestorm of ugly denouncements rained down like the air strike on Colonel Kurtz’s compound at the end of Apocalypse Now. Unsurprisingly the overly shrill and always self-serving Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League was all too quick to throw his yarmulke into the ring. Guys like Foxman and his ilk are truly putrid in that their constant knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism only serve to minimize REAL anti-Semitism, so useful has that particular little nasty pejorative been in stigmatizing those who run afoul of the Israel Lobby octopus that it actually began to use some of its effectiveness as of late. Perhaps it was the ongoing vilification of poor old Jimmy Carter who dared to compare the ongoing Israeli oppression of the Palestinians to South Afrincan Apartheid, the overkill of the savage pack bludgeoning of 89 year old Helen Thomas for practicing her right to free speech or more recently the attacks on former Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters whose recent tour to perform The Wall was attacked for purportedly anti-Semitic imagery but the term has been overused to the point of rendering it a mockery. And there is nothing that the bullies of Israel’s U.S. fifth column and their on call Nazis hate more than someone standing up and pushing back, I am sure that Waters who recently gave a great interview to Al Jazeera and has now announced plans to promote a musicians against Israel boycott will be next in line to be marched up the hill at Golgotha.The line will be long too as the haters try to regroup after Hillary Clinton’s surprising admission that Al Jazeera was beating that shit out of the lying, propaganda machine of the U.S. corporate media. Capitalizing on Hillary’s endorsement and the news that thinking Americans are tired of celebrity bullshit, lies and war mongering demagogy Al Jazeera has posted a link to implore American cable providers to add their network. Click Here. This is going to get that three-chinned Irish terrorist worshipping toad Peter King all hot and bothered as he gins up his anti-Muslim tribunals, I will be addressing this filthy sack of fascist horseshit in my upcoming piece, the very appropriately titled “King Turd”.

But I digress…

The 9/11 Truth Movement has for a good time been a high-value target for the Israel Lobby smear merchants and perhaps at least some of the relentlessly nasty animosity towards Sheen stems from the matter of his being associated with it. The role of the American Neoconservatives and Israel in what occurred on that game changing day when the reset button was hit on any sort of definition of American civil liberties and freedom by traditional means has always been a serious mystery. Not to go whole hog and accuse elements of the state of Israel in participating in the American Reichstag Fire but there are legitimate questions and no better way to leave them unanswered is a torrent of abuse and anti-Semitic diatribes, of course percolated through the sewer of the American corporate media system. I strongly suspect that a good deal of the cannonade of ugly vitriol is being hurled at Mr. Sheen for his unabashed views on the false flag terror attacks that were pulled off with devastating precision by forces unknown and have since served as blanket justification for planetary warfare, an increasingly iron-fisted domestic fascist police state serving the financial oligarchs, the corporatists and the blood barters at the Pentagon who are hellbent at enslaving a once free people. Sheen is a good buddy with big time radio personality Alex Jones who has had such rats nests as the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law Center (always looking for demons just like the National Security State) and left-gate keepers and neocon spear carriers to boot. The very idea of the audaciousness of a public figure questioning what really happened puts a serious burr up the asses of those who control the establishment both here in Der Heimat and abroad with our ‘friends’ in The Kingdom and in the occupied territories. Sure as hell can’t give the black sheep in the flock any ideas now can we? They may start asking some very serious questions, like just what the fuck was up with those Israeli art students?

Again I digress…..

So the scarlet letter of anti-Semitism had to be carved into Sheen’s head as well as the indignity of having to be fed into the tabloid money machine, Hell, look at what O.J. did for all of the bottom-feeding, ambitious shits who couldn’t get a real job….like the insipid harpy Greta Van Susteren to pick a prime example of the sort of travelers who cashed in on the masses of the fucked, cheated and electronically lobotomized as they chased their dreams hitched behind a white Ford Bronco. Charlie Sheen ran across this type of a dirty pack of rat-fucking pigs and dared to fight back, not only against the blood-sucking leeches of the cult of celebrity, the cheese pimps like TMZ, Entertainment Weekly and every other magnet for losers without lives but against the power of the Lobby, a thing that would have once been unthinkable in the not so long ago halcyon days before the one-two punch of the Mearshimer/Walt expose and their own over the top ridiculousness as they descended upon Carter like a plague of locusts and had a collective orgasm when that reprobate pig Alan Dershowitz successfully scalped a good man like Norman Finkelstein and paraded about with the once tenured professor’s bloody scalp on a stick. The truly shameful thing about the Sheen takedown that just really pisses me off is the anti-Semitic slander, if only because I have seen that movie too many times before. It only pisses off those pit vipers more too now that they have been somewhat neutered,  depleted, mocked by people with any decency or common sense as scoundrels and swine abusing the 6 million dead Jews of the Holocaust for their own shameless benefits and a shadow of it’s former self the Lobby still has some clout. Just ask Julian Assange, despite an increasingly ugly and difficult U.S. travesty of international kidnapping that will possibly end in a CIA hit the Wikileaks frontman has recently been hit with the Jew Hater label as well. Shit, the entire anti-Semitic defamatory circus is as ridiculous as it has been dastardly, perhaps one of their victims will just do the right thing and sue the motherfuckers for slander, libel, defamation of character and every other rotten violation of basic decency that they have long represented. Fuck them all, there would be nothing like a carpet bombing of libel and slander lawsuits against the agents of The Lobby, let’s hope that Sheen finds a place to squeeze them in when he starts suing motherfuckers. 

Hell, I am not even a fan of Charlie Sheen, I loved Platoon, Wall Street and that underrated flick No Man’s Land where Sheen was running a chop shop for stolen Porsches but I quite honestly hate regular TV. Not only do I hate TV (other than pro football which is my one serious jones) but I hold the stupid and mockingly moronic sitcoms like Two and a Half Men in special contempt, just above that heinous, high-profit margin product reality television. Word has now come that CBS (Corporate BullShit) has officially fired Sheen from the Chaim Levine money machine, early buzz is that they are looking for a former brat-packer with a better image and that Rob Lowe may be the man, been awhile since that ugly sex video scandal and Robert Downey Jr. is even money to end up in rehab on any given week, but he probably wouldn’t insult the arrogant, vindictive Hollywood Jew with ugly wives and borderline retarded kid bastards like Chuck Lorre, especially after this mess. Who gives a fuck anyway? CBS has already committed far too many mortal sins to have any credibility, there was the feeding of the great Dan Rather into the wood-chipper over the blatant Karl Rove setup over George W. Bush’s military records, the failure to land the NFC NFL broadcasting rights by getting outbid by that foreign pigfucker Rupert Murdoch that then allowed FOX to become legitimate and the foisting off of that silly, kewpie doll bitch Katie Couric as if she were some sort of legitimate news figure deserving of sitting in the anchor seat previously occupied by titans of journalism like Rather, Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow have put a bigger dent in the CBS eye than Sheen ever could hope to do. As the great American social critic George Carlin remarked: “When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show, when you’re born in America you get a front row seat.”

So Charlie Sheen should just say fuck you to all of the judgmental TV addicted celebrity sucklers, the hard-core professional haters and the rest of the idiot nation by just upping the ante and screwing on the full-blown freakitude. Think Dennis Rodman dude, just take out that freak flag and let the fucker fly. Go and snort dunes of coke off of the tits of legions of hookers and porn starlets, engage in orgies of gross depravity guaran-fucking-teed to offend the snotty, phony moralists. Shit, they have a serious problem with how you spend YOUR money because your behavior is obscene, yet they revel in their dumbness, anger and wear their willful ignorance upon their holier than thou chests as though they were gold-plated medals of honor. Yet they are NOT offended in the least by the stench of the decaying flesh of the war dead, of the deformed, disfigured and sad children whose mothers were either raped and tortured to death or had Uncle Sam’s (or Israeli for that matter) munitions dropped on them by our “blessed heroes” fiddling with their drone guidance joysticks from thousands of miles away as if they were their flaccid penises. There is nothing quite as American in 2011 as the bravery of being out of range now is there?  

Then there is a certain carcinogenic idea of the reverence of anti-intellectualism that has eaten through this society over the last three decades or so that is so poisonous, so dangerous and so destabilizing that there are no longer enough souls to feed into the machine. So much fuel does it need while it devours perpetually, like some giant sucking black hole of monstrous stupidity and we are all on the Rapture bus with the pedal to the medal as it careens driverless towards the event horizon. And as a horrified witness to the coming of one of humanity’s darkest historical periods and who fully understands the ramifications of this all-consuming cannibalistic ignorance I must say that I sure as fuck sucks to be trapped on that bus. 

Just my two cents

EE

A Defense of the Reverend Fred Phelps (sort of)…

In a blast-furnace hot ruling on Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church preserving their right to hold ugly protests at military funerals. The church (a Satanic den of iniquity and ignorance in my opinion) is headed by the infamous Reverend Fred Phelps who rocketed to stardom and adulation on the fascist Religious Right for his original protesting of the funerals of dead homosexuals, notably victims of AIDS. Phelps, a real piece of work, a fire-breathing demagogue of the highest order who once referred to our star-spangled, armed to the teeth and massively dysfunctional lemming colony as “a sodomite nation of flag-worshipping idolators”, a former civil rights attorney and a Democrat for God’s sake revels in the contempt hurled at him and his church. The ruling by an 8-1 margin that not included three of the four RATS (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia) but the so-called moderates must feel like a sucker punch to weepy, self-centered liberals and their holy crusade to institutionalize gay marriage throughout the land rather than focus their activism on more important matters, say stopping the fascist police state, ending the wars or throwing the Wall Street pigs who destroyed the economy into a Supermax prison. The one dissenting opinion, rendered by the newest RAT Samuel Alito, the little twerp whose public display of disrespect at Obama’s 2010 state of the union address earned the scorn of the victorious Phelps who commented:

“The only surprise is that Justice Alito did not feel compelled to follow his oath…. We read the law. We follow the law. The only way for a different ruling is to shred the First Amendment.”

Now let me be clear on one thing, free speech issues aside, Phelps and his rancid rat pack of psychotic thugs are the scum of the earth, were there anyone with any decency or balls left in America they would go old school on the whole bunch of them the next time that they show up waving their silly signs. What they represent is reprehensible, hateful, a distrotion of anything preached by Jesus Christ (this puts him in good company with the thousands of other charlatans posing as preachers to spew their hateful bile) and a publicity seeking monster who resembles a fat toad in a cowboy hat. The man is a reprobate, a moral degenerate and a menace to society but as long as the smoking ruins of what used to be America still maintains some sort of watered down pretense of being a constitutional republic he and his droogs are at least theoretically entitled to the right of free speech. The political correctness Nazis must be grinding their pointy little teet down into nubs today over this ruling but as is typical they are incapable of grasping onto larger issues that venture outside their little bubble worlds where dueling identity based groups jockey for preferential positioning to attempt to force the state to bestow special protections to sate their own selfish needs for attention. The SCOTUS ruling in Snyder v. Phelps protecting the protests of military funerals by Westboro Baptist is far more than the simplified sanctioning of anti-gay hate speech, it is a blow to the glorification of American militarism that has thoroughly corrupted and poisoned society since before the last shot was fired in WW II.

Reverend Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church really weren’t seen in much of a threatening light as long as they stuck to harassing the friends and relatives at the funerals of gay people, that was just fine with the status quo. It wasn’t until Phelps escalated and started dragging his bund of freaks to the funerals of our blessed heroes who were slaughtered for our freedoms (GAG) in the never-ending corporate wars that he became a threat. You see, hectoring gays and toting rainbow colored signs proclaiming that “God Hates Fags” serve the interests of the system, especially when that system, in this case, the Bush administration’s neocon agenda to conquer the planet and damn the consequences. Hell, were it not for the calculating and cynical gay baiting of Karl Rove (who according to some seedy internet rumors likes to swallow the pork sword on occasion himself) and the manipulation of the fucked over, embittered slugs of the Religious right to even get Bush into office (with a big assist from the SCOTUS and brother Jeb of course) in the first place a guy like Phelps, were he not so gauche would have normally have been honored with a White House visit and a night in the Lincoln bedroom. Now when Westboro Baptist wasn’t getting enough attention for their crazed, hate-fueled superstitions they started showing up when our hallowed little green army men were being planted with signs like “Thank God for 9/11”, “God Hates America”, “Thank God For Dead Soldiers” and other similar slogans it was just too much for Bush and Cheney’s bloodthirsty militarism. In 2006 as the bodies burned in the streets of Iraq, their flesh being piced at by feral dogs the cowards in the U.S. Congress passed the vomit inducing Respect For America’s Fallen Heroes Act which Bush signed into law as a counter to Phelps. No wonder that the Jesus freaks and the hard core right-wing freaks felt so betrayed by Dubya, in typical cynical Republican fashion they used the dumbest of the dumb to gain power and then cast them out like the snakes that they always were. See the ongoing dissing of the useful idiots of the Tea Party for a perfect example of this.

Anyway, it’s not like I am in any way down with the Reverend Phelps and his mob, personally I think that the local authorities should turn the firehoses on the scum and wash them all back into the sewers where they belong, then weld the lids shut to keep them there. What I AM down witih is any sort of serious protest of these ruinous, immoral and illegal fucking wars that have destroyed the country and with an incursion into Libya in the works will only continue to eradicate any sort of meaningful social reforms, not that any of the sheep in Der Homeland really give a fuck though, they are too busy doing the two-minute hate whenever the mug of Charlie Sheen, Public Enemy Numero Uno is flashed upon the screens of the electronic crackpipe.

Basking in their victory, Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church are now boasting of quadrupling their protests of military funerals, Christ knows there will be no shortage of them as corporate wars continue to pay off big time for defense contractors, the blood barters who speculate on death and a once proud and vibrant nation that only produces death and fraudulent financial instruments.

While Phelps and his clan may not the the best spokespeople for the antiwar movement at least they are out there raising some hell and not sitting in front of their televisions and computer monitors sucking their thumbs while the war machine eats America.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Just a clarification as I have been admonished for not demonizing Phelps and the Westboro Den of Satan.

While Phelps and his minions are not driven by an anti war philosophy but rather one of bigotry and biblical ignorance their actions in protesting and carrying signs  like GOD HATES DEAD SOLDIERS, THANK GOD FOR 9/11 and THANK GOD FOR IEDS and the like to the funerals of U.S. Soldiers who were killed in the corporate wars are representative of a political statement that is decidedly antiwar.

I am fully cognizant of what Phelps represents but in this pathetic and rabidly militaristic country anything that draws attention to an antiwar message is welcome. Phelps is not an ally but neither is the self-righteous and deluded mass of goo that is the American ‘left’.

Shit, were the silly-assed liberals to get it together and start protesting the goddamn wars instead of waging a holy crusade to institutionalize gay marriage (which incidentally I have no problem with other than it is not a top priority) which only serves to fuel the divisiveness that allows the wars, bailouts, violations of civil liberties and raw tyranny to continue then a cheap substitute like the WBC would be overwhelmed and largely ignored.

Sad isn’t it that this is what passes for antiwar protesting, Hell I remember back in 2003-2005 when there WAS an antiwar movement but the conniving Democrats led by Rahm Emanuel splintered it, co-opted easily bamboozled groups and eradicated any mass movement entirely. Nothing was quite so illustrative of the Democrat’s corruption than in first turning on Cindy Sheehan and then turning her into a pariah, choosing instead to manipulate well intentioned but whimsically thinking morons into mobilizing behind idiotic culture war issues instead of the real wars and the class war.

So if Phelps and his clan bring attention to the illegal wars in this way more power to them.

And no matter how rotten that speech may be in theory such speech should be protected.

All Hail General Petraeus!

That the great American General David Petraeus is an five-star bullshit artist comes as so real revelation to those of us who have been watching him operate for years. The SURGE was the most successful piece of propaganda in modern American history, turning a brutal and costly sucking-black hole of blood and chaos in Iraq into a golden-hued triumph and then gone flickering into the recesses of the collective American mindset as they turned their channels. The SURGE was so brilliant that Helicopter Ben Bernanke used a similar strategy in pimping a devastated economy, ruined by degenerate Wall Street gamblers and on permanant taxpayer life-support into the near miraculous GREEN SHOOTS of recovery. Well, nearly two years after Chairman Ben’s vaunted 60 Minutes infomercial the economy is still in ruins, inflation is skyrocketing and food costs driven into the proverbial stratosphere are rapidly destabilizing the globe. So when I read the recent Rolling Stone piece by Michael Hastings entitled King David’s War I was not one bit fazed when it was revealed that the man on the white horse was utilizing propaganda and perception management to keep his war in Afghanistan in it’s rightful place in the line at for funding priorities. Only in America could a country that is unravelling as quickly as this one is, infrastructure crumbling, jobs fleeing to cheap labor Meccas, a failed political system and a crusing debt to China could such ruinous wars of choice continue to drain the nation’s coffers.

Despite the legend erected around him by Republican syscophants like the McCain-Lieberman-Graham three-headed monster and his own oversized ego and crackerjack public relations team Petraeus has always been less miracle worker than he is a product. The high water mark for King David came in early 2009 when he goose-stepped out to the middle of the NFL logo in full dress regalia to flip the coin at Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa. A national television audience, a massive display of militarism with the thundering flyover barely drowning out the roar of the crowd for the American Caesar (or General James Mattoon Scott) and the loving adoration of a nation braying for the blood of brown skinned Muslim devils reveled in the near orgasmic release of energy of that moment. Petraeus was also riding high after the SURGE PR campaign that convinced millions that their hero had finally won the Iraq war and brought some degree of revenge for that damned Saddam Hussein’s support of the 9/11 ‘terrorist’ attacks. Petraeus was in another of those cheap, warmed over versions of real American history honored like the second coming of Eisenhower, a welcome comparison for a man with long-term political aspirations. Only a few years ago, he had been dissed in an ugly public manner by his former boss Admiral William Fallon as an “ass-kissing little chickenshit”. Fallon of course paid the price for his candor, being sent packing by the Bushreich high-command, the final straw being an interview that he did for Esquire magazine back in 2008.

The legend of General Petraeus continued to grow in stature with the successful SURGE that has been touted by every self-interested politically connected asshole in order to present the illusion of not being defeated in Iraq because as Christ knows, America WINS wars. Or at least America WINS wars when the war effort isn’t being undermined at home by a liberal fifth column, a Commie liberal media and dope-smoking draft dodgers, long-haired stinky hippies and black militants rioting on the nation’s cities, so the myth goes. The war machine DID learn one hugely important lesson from the Vietnam debacle and that it was imperative that the perception of the public had to be managed in order to gin up support for future imperialist ventures. With the reinstatement of the draft being political suicide in that it would immediately result in a mass antiwar movement when hundreds of thousands could be plucked from their living room sofas and transported into a real live war zone and therefore being out of the question the public had to be convinced to support or even better forget about ongoing military occupations to plunder on behalf of corporations. Reagan hit paydirt with the Blitzkrieg of global military power Grenada, Poppy Bush kicked ass on former CIA asset and big time narcotics trafficker Manuel Noriega and the first Gulf War was a spectacular masterpiece of stage managed propaganda brought into the living rooms of millions courtesy of CNN. Add to that a decade of high profile ass-whupping propaganda films such as Rambo, the Chuck Norris Missing in Action series and other sordid lesser movie franchises that re-fought the Vietnam war and the seeds had been planted, the bitter taste of defeat washed from our mouths.

Then of course came the granddaddy of them all, the lynchpin upon which the reset button could be hit on the entire society and justify an Orwellian future of never ending wars – 9/11. Before the bodies had even been pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center the Bush-Cheney junta was already plotting the new world order as exemplified by The Project For The New American Century or PNAC.  The alleged ‘terrorist’ attacks” (attacks pulled off with something like a super military style precision that would seem to be beyond that which a bunch of guys in caves could hope to pull off) would launch the expansion of the U.S. global empire. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played off of Junior Bush’s Oedipal complex to goad him into invading Iraq to finish the old man’s job. First though, there would have to be the strike against the land where the supposed 9/11 materminds had plotted the attacks from and were presiding over a network of terror camps (note the stock footage of the masked men and the monkey bars) from – Afghanistan. Never mind that Afghanistan is historically famous for having chewed up empires like the Brits and the Soviets, we Americans would never repeat the mistakes taught by history and get bogged down in a brutal and primitive quagmire. A quagmire that nearly ten years later would require the genius of the brilliant General Petraeus to save us from but more on that in a little while. With Afghanistan attacked first and the public’s blood boiling after the 9/11 attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act rammed through Congress like shit through the proverbial goose and any influential road blocks being eliminated when the anthrax letters started being received by key members of the Democratic party Senate leadership and news anchors the game was on.

The ramping up of the apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to the attack on Iraq was like a loundening drumbeat of the tom tom’s at some sort of bizarre island ritual where the natives get jacked up on some sort of magical hallucinogenic concoction and then go and slaughter animals as tribute to their gods. In our case, here in the new American HOMELAND our god was and always has been war. The entire country went through some sort of strange and inexplicable phase of indoctrination by propaganda and intimidation by the now common denunciations of “traitor”, “unpatriotic” and “terrorist sympathizer” to tamp down the opposition to phase two of the American conquest of the Middle East and Eurasia. When the deal was done, Colin Powell’s lies at the United Nations enshrined as truth and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction ready to be loosed upon our preciously innocent American children while they slumbered in their comfortable beds the order was given and the Baghdad lit up like the Fourth of July with a sustained Shock And Awe display of  U.S. taxpayer dollars. And of course it was all on television….and the lemmings ate it up as usual.

Fast forward to early 2011, Iraq has largely  been relegated to the memory hole with much thanks to the miraculous SURGE. George W. Bush’s wars have become Barack Obama’s wars and the situation in Afghanistan, while predictably forgotten by most Americans and erased from the corporate media in favor of the latest Charlie Sheen update is continuing to deteriorate. This even after King David Petraeus found himself plucked from his posh post at CENTCOM in Tampa and sent off to work his magic in the land where empires go do die. When Rolling Stone published an article that portrayed General Stanley McChrystal, the four star clown then running the Afghan circus in a very nasty light of insubordination and disrespect it was the final straw for even the jelly-spined Obama who summoned him to Washington and ‘accepted his retirement’. The article, The Runaway General was written by Michael Hastings who won the coveted Polk Award for his efforts. King David’s War is his followup and can’t have made the great man Petraeus very happy, unconfirmed anonymous reports allege that the puckering of his asshole could be heard all the way from Kandahar. The piece brilliantly lays out the levels to which Petraeus will plumb in order to cynically ensure that his media polished halo continue to glow. The great general, acting on behalf of Boobus Americanus to preserve our precious way of life cajoles, bribes, threatens, grandstands and allies himself with bloodthirsty, illiterate murderous, drug trafficking thugs like Col. Abdul Razzik to keep the war effort going. If the U.S. is relying on a guy Razzik, a real nasty piece of work by anyone’s standards to ‘win’ the war then it is further evidence of the damnation of America’s soul. Not that it troubles King David, who the Hastings piece brilliantly sums up in this statement:

A better nickname for Petraeus might be the Godfather: He is relying on a network of warlords and drug runners that he himself once called a “criminal syndicate”.

I suppose that Petraeus, like Colonel Kurtz was winning the war ‘his way’, and another Hastings piece that is actually succeeding in finally putting a weed up the asses of the right people, again for Rolling Stone and entitled Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators may be the one that seals the deal for Petraeus. Of course the general with a true idea on the value of propaganda, P.R. and other little white lies, half-truths and prevarications has ordered an investigation, it will predictably be about as credible as Tony Soprano and Silvio Dante doing an internal audit of the Bada Bing Club blooks. Could it be that General Petraeus is about to reap the whirlwind of his own bullshit? With the Rolling Stone articles pissing on his presidential parade after it was already seriously damaged by Obama’s exile of Petraeus to Afghanistan. The King David piece speaks of tensions between Gen P. and Obama who allegedly felt had been bent over (what a surprise) and butt-fucked by the Pentagon and it’s agents in escalating the conflict which according to unnamed sources were becoming increasingly wary about a potential Petraeus 2012 bid and were seeing him “..as a general on his white horse”, according to an unnamed senior U.S. military official. With his medal bedrecked showboating for the media Petraeus would have been a big hit with the right-wingers who are now desperately in search of a new champion since the political career of Sarah Palin went down in a blaze of idiocy, violent rhetoric and the televised murder of animals that proved too much for even cable TV diehards to take. The GOP is now, at least being exposed as the pack of sleazy, opportunistic jackals primarily interested in wresting control of the lead position at the golden trough shorn of their most visible leader Palin. The glue that keeps the nutjobs, war freaks, Raptureheads, nationalists, Birthers and brokedick peckerwood Jesus freak base together has been a charismatic cult leader and let’s face it, Newt Gingrich is not that man (the Birchers HATE him) and Michelle Bachmann is just a more deranged version of Palin and an embarassment. The exposure of Petraeus as a pathological and cynical con artist is a devastating blow to the Republican party as a whole and to the rest of America in that it practically ensures a second term of Obama’s Bush Lite.

Hasting’s first article displays the arrogance of King David when he is quoted as telling his spokesman that the White House was “fucking with the wrong guy”. Then came the McChrystal debacle and the assignment of Petraeus to what might as well have been the Aleutians. When Obama summoned the recalcitrant Stanley McChrystal back to D.C. and then in an unexpected whirlwind turn of events accepted his “resignation” it sent shockwaves through the administration’s war council. So sudden had the shitcanning been and so contrary to the positive lobbying on his behalf despite his obvious disregard for civilian authority that the perpetually conniving Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bush appointee Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen were not expecting Obama’s decision. Even more surprising was the annoitment of the great General Petraeus, his superior to replace him because as stated in the piece, “If Petraeus can’t do it, the thinking went, then no one can – and no one back home could blame Obama for losing with Petraeus in charge.” It was a political master stroke for Obama, at once hanging the war that the neocons and Petraeus had so long propagandized in favor of like a millstone around his neck and taking out his most potentially dangerous political opponent at once. It is one of those extremely rare instances when the mythical Obama as the cool and collected mastermind, like Michael Jordan just sizing up the opposition before systematically thrusting the dagger through their hearts and shredding the defense like so much Reagan surplus cheese actually can be seen and the O-Bots and apologists momentarily vindicated. Then of course Obama continues to do what he does best, cut deals with fascists, redistribute wealth upwards to his Wall Street  benefactors, screw the poor and push through increasingly obscene violations of civil liberties that Bush never could have dreamed of getting away with.

Now that Petraeus, up to his ass in alligators in the Afghan swamp and resorting to cutting deals with thugs and murderers like Razzik as well as turning a blind eye on the drug trade is desperate, he is a four star rat on a treadmill and history is cranking up the speed. So despearate is Petraeus now that his subordinates are unbelievably running psy ops campaigns on Senators, not that this isn’t routine procedure but that it is felt that blood thirsty death junkies like John McCain and Joe Lieberman have to actually be conned into supporting more murder in the name of the almighty American empire. The wheels are coming off now, Petraeus’s talking points are sounding more like those of Karl Rove or Frank Luntz by the day, the latest and most bizarre being that Afghan parents are burning their own kids to make the U.S. look bad. There are rumors circulating that the great general is about to quit his Afghanistan command and the collateral damage of the civilian body count exploding thanks to the Petraeus COIN method which is being exposed as a sham are indicative of a desperate and cunning charlatan working frantically to save his rapidly diminishing political future. I suppose that he could always slink back to Der Homeland in shame and become a cause celebre and hero to uber fascist right-wing degenerates, much like Douglas MacArthur after he was shitcanned by President Harry Truman in Korea for his insubordination. MacArthur in his time may have also believed that “they are fucking with the wrong guy”. It is actually quite fitting that Petraeus would be presiding over the long running Afghanistan clusterfuck which has no end in sight – after all, it’s better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.

Petraeus or no Petraeus, the wars will continue because as obedient little historical revisionist flag-suckers we Americans have the slaughter of brown-skinned, non-Christians for our national glory in our blood. From the day that a child exits the womb the indoctrination of American exceptionalism, we are the good guys and the heinous lie that they ALL hate us for our way of life and therefore must be annihilated to preserve freedom and democracy ensures that the wars will never end. This very morning Obama and the establisment are in the process of plotting another foreign adventure  in Libya (their bankers must be getting nervous), this latest use of raw force will be justified under the left cover of a humanitarian intervention, the sort of hogwash that was peddled to the useful idiots to justify escalation in Afghanistan because of the brutality towards women. Time Magazine featured the war porn of a noseless Afghan woman on the cover to pimp the war to the butterflies, moonbeams, zebras and fairy tales liberals who never met a war that couldn’t be justified under such phony pretenses of protecting human rights. The neocon mighty wurlitzer propaganda machine is already churning as well with the ludicrous claims that the financial collapse was all the fault of those damned dirty Ay-rabs, this Washington Times post has the title: Financial Terrorism Suspected in 2008 Economic Crash, credited to another of those evil little reports that are assembled in Pentagon propaganda chop shops. The headline does have one thing right though, the crash was the result of financial terrorism only the terrorists weren’t wearing turbans and red headbands, rather they were wearing thousand dollar suits and floating off of the coast of the Hamptons in yachts while their derivatives exploded like the financial weapons of mass destruction that they were. War and lies and credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and tainted, buffoon presidential candidates like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are proof that you can sell anything in America. As Mencken once famously remarked, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” or something along those lines. Welcome to Chumpland and stock up on canned goods because the real financial terrorists of Wall Street are bidding up commodities (especially oil) and whiling away their time before unleashing their latest mass casualty attack on America, a Roman orgy of gross speculation: C.M.B.S. 2.0.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows. [Please note these are 1935 U.S. dollars. To adjust for inflation, multiply all figures X 10 or more]

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

– General Smedley D. Butler

Just my two cents

EE