When Martial Law Came to Boston

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.

-Roy Batty

As it has been with every other aspect of the fascism that has come to this land, a sad, permanently damaged and ultimately to be damned by the judgement of history place of fear and loathing the roll out of martial law to American soil, in Boston on Friday was wrapped in the flag.The heinous and barbaric act of sheer inhumanity that precipitated it was Monday’s bomb detonations at the Boston Marathon where a despicable act of criminality was perpetrated by scum. Nobody who plans and then carries out such a malicious act of cruelty is deserving of anything less than being made subject to the full fury of the law. Those were innocent people whose lives were forever ruined by those monstrous little Chechen bastards and their shrapnel bombs. People who were happy, trained at length for their race and for them it was to be a day of personal triumph and accomplishment and they were deprived of it, some will never run again. It was an act that defines the very essence of all that is diseased and wrong with the human condition and will forever live in infamy. That being said, the overreaction of authorities in rolling out a de facto state of martial law will prove to be far more damaging to this already reeling nation than anything that the brothers Tsarnaev did on that lamentable day of blood, horror and sorrow. 

Just as those events of September 11, 2001 set into motion a series of actions that led to two ruinous and nationally bankrupting wars, the evisceration of American civil liberties, the unleashing of an out of control and ever expanding surveillance apparatus that has no accountability, the codifying of torture, a terminally damaged political system and a myriad of other indignities so too shall Black Friday, April 19, 2013. It was on this day that the streets of Boston and the surrounding suburbs brought to mind scenes from a certain European place in the middle of the last century, armored troops marching through civilian streets and the local citizenry stripped of their rights of freedom, prisoners within their own homes. Paramilitary forces which only in Orwellian newspeak terms can be called “police” with a straight face descended in legions with their armored vehicles, shining black body armor and of course their ever more deadly military weaponry. The city was “locked down” as the 19 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, badly wounded in the earlier shootout that killed his older brother was hunted down like the rabid dog that he is. The citizenry cowered as the storm troopers banged on doors, without warrants of course but such trivial matters cannot be bothered with in our dystopian police state. As Bryant so famously put it to Deckard in the movie Blade Runner – “If you’re not cop you’re little people” and when the scent of blood vengeance is is in the air and the jackboots are kicking at the door there really are only two options.

The media breathlessly hyped this mega-story, you would think that it was O.J. redux or at the very least another breaking news alert about Oscar Pistorious. As the old news maxim goes – when it bleeds, it leads and the bloodier the better for the carrion ensconced in their electronic nests. But this was over the top, way over the top. The freshly severed limbs of the bombing victims had yet to be fully treated when the news cycle suddenly swung into action to cover the search for the alleged perpetrators. By the time that the FBI had released the photos of the brothers the hunt was on and indeed the media found it to be good sporting fun, and very, very lucrative to the bottom line. There were times on Friday that I thought that I was watching the sequel to “The Running Man” with the way that the internet news site headlines changed the prey was being closed in on while the audience was transfixed. The one that I found particularly chilling (and more than a bit nauseating) I believe was on CNN or some other state propaganda organ and was in a huge screaming font WHERE IS HE? as Friday afternoon turned to evening. The sports websites and blogs were even in on the action, not surprising as this was the greatest game in the country for those two or so blessed days after the suspects were set upon by the black clad militarized goon squads. As of today, not one of the cowardly bitches and bastards has called the Boston response martial law, and those who have are mocked, scorned and attacked as crazies.

Typically it didn’t take long for  the usual vermin, the authoritarian Republicans to drop their silly post-election image makeover and slither out from under their rocks to play. The porcine Long Island bigot Peter King was practically calling for all Muslims to be made to wear crescent badges sewn to their clothing and herded into ghettos. Not that it bothered the insane swine when his beloved Irish Republican Army was blowing civilians including children to bits while he proudly supported them back in the 80’s. Then of course there was the ubiquitous Lindsey Graham, once again venturing out of his closet to pontificate from the Sunday morning media masturbatory fests where narcissistic beltway celebrities playact as though they are really journalists rather than the sycophants and toadies that they are and always have been. Senator Graham, soon to be joined by the dyspeptic old fool John McCain will call for military tribunals and the expansion of Gitmo and it is inevitable that this latest outrageous act of violence will serve as the basis for a national ‘conversation’ on the use of armed drones across the fruited plain. McCain especially is a veteran media whore, the doddering and drooling buffoon has been comfortable in front of the cameras ever since he made those Commie propaganda videos to curry favor with this Vietnamese captors and his mania for revenge will soon use the Boston bombings to call for yet another war, likely Iran this time. If they have not done so already there will soon be linkages in the slimier realms for the right-wing Koched up media and blogosphere tying the bombing to Obama, likely by invoking the bogeyman Bill Ayers. Some things never change.I have already seen several stories using the bombing by the brothers Tsarnaev in order to exploit the anti-immigrant bigots that are the party base, I suspect it is only a matter of time until Rush or Glenn or Sean or Ann or any of the other turds is out there promulgating some hogwash about a linkage to gay marriage. Not to worry though, there will be plenty of company from ever feckless Democrats, quislings whose cynicism never fails to surprise when it comes to reigning in an out of control armed to the teeth national asylum.

After the killing of Tamerlan and the capture of Dzhokhar, who is being held in the state of legal limbo that now has replaced due process in this rotten land of incipient fascism it was like Christmas morning and the day after a Patriots Super Bowl win all wrapped into one. There were celebratory affairs at Red Sox and Bruins games as well as throughout the nation at sporting events, it was like another hit of that mythical narcotic post-9/11 national unity that the Neocons have long found to be far, far better than sex, a red, white and blue orgasm screamed out to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner. Obama, whose lamentable time in office has all by chiseled the Bush-Cheney abomination into stone even showed up in Beantown to make one of his fine speeches. This time unlike Sandy Hook Elementary, when another terrorist named Adam Lanza blew the guts and brains out and the limbs off of twenty small childrenchildren there WILL be action. You see, in the down the rabbit hole existential hell of the “new normal” in America any mass killing that feeds the beast and expands the police state. This is especially so if it can be used as additional justification to sell even more guns is a dead bang certainty to go over in a true bipartisan manner with the rats in the halls of our contemptible Congress. While not even watered down background checks on gun purchases with massive public support can become law a further weaponizing of the state after the Boston tragedy is certain to not only result in an immediate ratcheting down of civil liberties in the name of “safety”. The rancid buzzard that is Wayne LaPierre, fresh off of the feasting on the corpses of the Sandy Hook victims to sell more guns will likely be pushing the meme that if all of the runners and spectators at the Boston Marathon had just had more guns then none of this would have ever happened.

This is a sickening time in history to be an American, our forebears would be ashamed. There is no longer such a thing as social justice as the ultra-wealthy and well-connected burrow themselves into government to ensure that the shrinking and increasingly desperate taxpayer can be shaken down to subsidize Wall Street gambling. The founding fathers, the ones who are constantly invoked by the selectively fascist shock troops of the so-called Tea Party would be aghast that that fine Constitution that they put together has been gutted as America becomes a more palatable to the eye banana republic but the ones who would be the most ashamed would be our World War II veterans. They sacrificed all to fight fascism but it is now a rising and malevolent force that only grows stronger, like a city killing hurricane.

And the fascism was on display for all to see on Friday in the streets of Boston, how much longer until it comes to YOUR city?

Happy 10th Anniversary: The Orgy Of 9/11 Exploitation

 

In the US on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, politicians and their presstitute media presented Americans with “A Day of Remembrance,” a propaganda exercise that hardened the 9/11 lies into dogma.

– Paul Craig Roberts

Ten years gone. The big lies of 9/11, that oh so glorious day in America when the reset button was flipped on over two hundred years and the country flipped full blown fascist were cemented into place forever over the weekend. One of the only institutions more respected by the star-spangled sheep than the blessed military, the National Football League played an enormous part in promulgating the new normal and glorifying the society changing event that has come to be justification for plunder, wars without end, a colossal police state and the undercurrent of anti-Muslim hatred that will soon lead to blood in the streets. It was a day when corporate advertising took full advantage of the exploitation of the 9/11 dead (no mention ever goes to the the tens to hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians murdered by the U.S. military and our allies in the endless and phony war on terror) and used the occasion to pimp their products. Not that this is entirely precedent setting, the Republican party was cashing in on the ‘terrorist’ attacks while the smell of rotting flesh still wafted in on the morning breezes in lower Manhattan. The appropriation of 9/11 by corporations is only the obvious evolution of the moral decay that has a once mighty nation up against the ropes, staggering like a punch drunk palooka and just struggling to avoid the knockout blow. 


Being a football fan for years the NFL season opener had long been a festive event. There was beer, parties and barbecues followed by a day spent immersed in football. Not this year, the repulsive promotion of the new American religion of 9/11 was too much for me to take, I spent the majority of the afternoon monitoring the games on the internet. I skipped all of the pregame ceremonies, the usual pregame shows where buffoons like Terry Bradshaw (once accused of being so dumb that he couldn’t spell cat if he was spotted the first two letters) and grinning shit salesman Howie Long would ensure that sports and war metaphors would become interchangeable. FOX’s NFL for example had long been in the war propaganda business, Murdoch the old dog knew fully well that pushing right-wing political agendas would be his bread and butter as his cancerous media empire metastasized across the globe and he knew that faux patriotism and sports sold to the masses. It was on Veteran’s Day weekend back in 2009 that FOX set up it’s NFL show studios in Afghanistan, with all of the assclowns who never wore the uniform in actual service were dressed up in their cammies like fake soldiers. Bradshaw looked the most ridiculous of all, like a bizarre form of movie parody of an out of touch general. Not that FOX is unique, the porcine Peter King was traveling around to NFL camps this year in his militarized motorcoach to cover the warmups to the big 9/11 kickoff party. Peter King being the prolific and long-tenured football writer for Sports Illustrated not the porcine I.R.A. terrorist sponsoring neo-McCarthyist Republican congressman from Long Island. The big 9/11 whoop de doo was the one reason why I absolutely knew that the NFL’s labor strife would be over in time for the big games of Sunday past. 

What little football I did watch (I popped in for about ten minutes of the Steelers vs. Ravens game) made me glad that I just skipped the rest. When fuckwad CBS announcer Jim Nance took a cheap shot at Pittsburgh running back Rashard ‘the Fumble Machine’ Mendenhall for his TWITter comments expressing distaste at the unseemly celebrations over bin Laden’s alleged assassination. Nance even seemed to invite violence and harassment to be heaped on Mendenhall throughout the year in making the inference that he could expect to receive hostile receptions on the road. This is what happens when the official state religion of 9/11 needs to deal with heresy, it’s just too primitive to go around and cut people’s tongues out anymore. The games were even more overly militarized than normal, take this account from Glenn Greenwald’s piece The Meaning of Political Rituals Like 9/11 Day:

 

Not just 9/11 Day but everything connected to it was constructed to deliver and implant a very politicized message, over and over.  Consider this email I received from a friend in South Florida after he attended an NFL football game last night in Miami:

 Let me describe the patriotic display at last night’s NFL opener. Men with machine guns at all entrances, to scare off the terrorists. Pat down on the way in, to make sure [my wife] and I weren’t carrying plastic explosives. A moving national anthem with troops out on the field spelling out U.S.A. A moving tribute to the thousands who perished in 9/11 and to our nation’s brave response to that atrocity (which was, of course, the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world). A U.S.A., U.S.A. chant. Then a Stealth B2 Bomber flew over the stadium, followed by fireworks. At half time, a US Army paratrooper squad jumped out of a plane and landed on the field. Maybe next week they’ll shoot some missiles from unmanned drones.

Does anyone want to claim with a straight face that these ceremonies are apolitical, devoid of political messaging?  Everything about 9/11 — how it’s talked about, how it’s described, how it’s commemorated — is all designed to impart very specific political messages, and that’s been true since the day it happened.

The Fumble Machine wasn’t the only one getting publicly pilloried, New York Times columnist and noted economist Paul Krugman drew the wrath of the establishment for his dead on blog posting on that holiest of days that the post 9/11 era is one of shame not valor, glory and remembrance:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

I would disagree with Krugman on the commemorations being subdued, there was plenty of still warm bloody red chunks of meat shoveled into community troughs by the pocket media and the usual pigs lined up to eat the slop. Of course the knives were out and buried in Krugman’s back and not only from the fascist right-wingers but from the same sissified liberal suckup bloggers that I have denounced for years, the ass-kissing, yuppie social climbing types typically found at Daily Kos which is about as leftist as Stalin. Rather than get off on a tangent here about the dismal state of the so-called progressive blogosphere and it’s miserable failings I just will say that I have been doing this for over six years now and I have had more than my share of run ins with the foul types of cretins who sell out to achieve the coveted posting positions at the “A” list prog blogs, especially that foul orange nest of pit vipers. While I have worked with many dignified and talented people I just had to split from it all and just do my own thing. I can attest that elements of the dreck that passes for “the left” online are every bit as foul as their mouth-breathing fascist counterparts only in their own sordid little ways.

Krugman’s piece drew a blistering response, how DARE he blaspheme by actually telling the truth? I mean just how fucking un-American is that anymore? The piece even made war criminal Donald Rumsfeld barf up his Metamucil and cancel his subscription to the NYT. The question goes unasked why a hardened neocon like Rummy would even have a subscription to the damned librul [sic] rag in the first place. Perhaps it has more than a little bit to do with the New York Times having played an integral part in allowing the Bushreich to lie American into attacking and invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Remember Judith Miller? She was Scooter Libby’s fuck-bunny who abused her prominent position with the NYT to promote the bullshit story about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Not that Saddam didn’t at one time actually have WMD, shit he gassed his own people. The dirty little back story is that he got the WMD including the toxic gas from American corporations, the same corporations that good ole Rummy was shilling for when he was sent over to Iraq by Reagan back in the 1980s. Saddam and Rumsfeld were thick as thieves, ever wonder why Hussein was tried and strung up on a murder beef that didn’t include the gassing at Halabja? Sure couldn’t have any of that shit about Rummy coming out in court now could we?

As of today Krugman is a dead man walking, he is so fat a high-value target to the filthy neo-Nazis in the Republican establishment (as well as the rats of the Democratic Obama led corporatists and Wall Street looters) that he will be the new Dan Rather. His bloody scalp will soon be brandished as a trophy, if I were Krugman I would put a lock on my hamper to prevent the underwear sniffing punk Andrew Breitbart or any of his latent pork sword swallowing acolytes from being the ones bearing the tomahawk.

The NFL while wallowing in nationalism and rolling out the military worship barely even paid homage to a true hero, formerly one of their own: Pat Tillman. Tillman left a promising career with the Arizona Cardinals to go and enlist in the Army Rangers after the American Reichstag Fire, it was the patriotic thing to do right? As so much of our current history is a perversely Bizarro reinvention of World War II strained through the electronic crackpipe that is the television Tillman was to place loyalty to country over personal fame and fortune. But 9/11 was not your grandfather’s Pearl Harbor but rather the “New Pearl Harbor” of the cunning, amoral pack of jackal neocons of the Project For The New American Century. Tillman quickly realized that it was all just bullshit and had turned against the wars, who knows what he thought about 9/11 but he was communicating with Noam Chomsky and had a story to tell when he would return home – except he didn’t.

From Dave Zirin on Tillman:

 

In 2004, President George W. Bush appeared on the Jumbotron at Arizona’s Sun Devil stadium to address the combat death of former NFL player turned Army Ranger, Pat Tillman.  Bush said: “Pat Tillman loved the game of football. Yet, as much as Pat Tillman loved competing on the football field, he loved America even more… Courageous and humble, a loving husband and son, a devoted brother and a fierce defender of liberty. Pat Tillman will always be remembered.”

But Sunday— while NFL teams around the country commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—Pat’s name was only mentioned before the game in Arizona.  In stadium after stadium, in pregame show after pregame show, as the NFL’s 9/11 commemoration strategy was rolled out with lockstep discipline, Tillman’s name was conspicuously absent.

George W. Bush certainly got his moment in the spotlight, receiving a standing ovation by 70,000 fans at the Meadowlands. On other football fields, massive flags were unfurled, “official NFL/9/11 logos” were unveiled, soldiers were cheered, Reebok’s “We Will Never Forget” 9/11 gear was worn, and yet it was as if Pat Tillman had never existed.

Tillman was an atheist so the holy war bullshit didn’t resonate with him and one of Dick Cheney’s JSOC hit teams likely were the ones who blew his insubordinate fucking head off.  The official story of being killed by “friendly fire” are bad enough, it puts a damper on the original ‘poster boy’ for American militarism in the new American century, not a thing to throw to the masses of asses on the holiest day of all. That Tillman was shot in the head at close range by his own side, his clothes and diary destroyed and a massive coverup effort undertaken speaks of even darker things. The NFL is far more interested in selling merchandise, advertising and currying the favor of powerful interests than in doing anything so gauchely unpatriotic as telling the truth, an unforgivable sin in The Homeland.

 

 

The New Normal For the 9/11 Generation

Adolf Hitler was more interested in the children who would be the future of his thousand year Reich for all that they would know would be his worldview. It is very similar her in Der Heimat. Our youngest citizens have known nothing other than the fear, fascism, hatred and perpetual warfare that were set into motion ten years ago. They will grow to adulthood in a society where airport checkpoints manned by drooling government goons and the ever present all-seeing eyes of Big Brother are a part of daily life. On Sunday they even trotted out the war criminal George W. Bush as though he were some sort of fucking dignitary despite the truth that after spending the morning of 9/11 with his nose buried in My Pet Goat and then flying around the country on Air Force One like some sort of chickenshit while the treasonous Cheney and Rummy were running the show. And when it comes to chickenshits who has anything on that diseased little turd Eric Cantor, the bespectacled Virginia Republican Majority Leader whose face looks like the logo on the New England Patriots helmet. In an act as brazenly shameless as corporations using 9/11 tributes to sell hamburgers and other crap Cantor took a break from screening anti-Muslim propaganda films on behalf of his Israeli buddies to introduce HR 391 – the resolution to “Never Forget” 9/11, or rather the official big lie of 9/11. In true GOP fashion it was another ghoulish use of the dead to push their decidedly fascist, anti-American political agenda. Then again, pissing on the 9/11 dead is nothing new to the Republicans who had the most kick ass club in the bag once the war criminal Bush grabbed a megaphone and climbed atop that pile of debris at “Ground Zero” while the rubble was still smoldering. As H.L. Mencken once remarked, “imagine a gentleman and you will have imagined everything that he is not”.

I could go on and on about the dishonor of America’s behavior in the aftermath of 9/11 but what’s the point? It was a lamentable display of all that his country has come to stand for that was force fed to us all last weekend, the corporate NFL’s corpse humping being the cherry on top of the shit cake. Guys like Krugman and Chris Hedges had the best takes but there were many, many others who saw this travesty as the charade that it truly was. Hedges, always with a unique perspective flayed the myth by reintroducing the “jumpers” or those who perished in the World Trade Center towers but have been erased from collective memory by a treacherous media. Hedges’ 9/11 10th Anniversary piece is entitled A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe and I excerpt the following: 

The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.

I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies—a foot in a woman’s shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso—lay scattered amid the wreckage.

Scores of people, perhaps more than 200, pushed through the smoke and heat to jump to their deaths from windows that had broken or they had smashed. Sometimes they did this alone, sometimes in pairs. But it seems they took turns, one body cascading downward followed by another. The last acts of individuality. They fell for about 10 seconds, many flailing or replicating the motion of swimmers, reaching 150 miles an hour. Their clothes and, in a few cases, their improvised parachutes made from drapes or tablecloths shredded. They smashed into the pavement with unnerving, sickening thuds. Thump. Thump. Thump. Those who witnessed it were particularly shaken by the sounds the bodies made on impact.

The images of the “jumpers” proved too gruesome for the TV networks. Even before the towers collapsed, the falling men and women were censored from live broadcasts. Isolated pictures appeared the next day in papers, including The New York Times, and then were banished. The mass suicide, one of the most pivotal and important elements in the narrative of 9/11, was expunged. It remains expunged from public consciousness.

The “jumpers” did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the “jumpers” said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The “jumpers” illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The “jumpers” reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire.
The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.

Hedges’ piece evokes an account of the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, another bit of history that has been revised to the benefit of the rapacious looter capitalist state.  Even in their gruesome war justifying lies, lies responsible now for ten years of death and torture, human misery and looting the treasury Americans love their subterfuge sunny side up. People jumping out of a burning building and going SPLAT doesn’t fit that mindset, the mindset of a lemming, a lemming now in freefall down the rabbit hole, and it still doesn’t understand that the rabbit hole is a grave.

The Tea Party: America’s Khmer Rouge

While I remain unconvinced that the ongoing Punch and Judy show over the raising of the national debt ceiling is nothing more but a gambit to destroy Social Security and Medicare, leading to their theft and redirection to the depraved gamblers on Wall Street there is one thing that is certain – the Republican party is a terrorist organization. I have long maintained this very simple truth about this deranged pack of anti-American fascist jackals and their relentless army of neo-confederates, Rapture zombies, teabagger freaks whose blistering hatred for traditional American values is every bit as advanced and savage as their 1930’s German historical counterparts once was. They are looking for the conditions where the system can be damaged to the point where the berserkers can be loosed, goaded on to engage in pogroms and the smorgasbord of scapegoats that are regularly served up by the likes of Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, Glenn Beck and thousands of even more vile although lesser paid instigators until the streets run red with blood. Providing that the debt ceiling “debate” isn’t anything more than another deceptively promoted by a corrupt media shearing of the sheep to keep the Wall Street predators ensconced in their mansions in the Hamptons and partying on their yachts and private jets this may be the time that the shit really does hit the fan.

The phony grass roots Tea Party, a post -Bush re-branding of the most rotten, ignorant and vicious elements of the Republican base conjure up comparisons with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. So intent are these white skinned crybabies at “getting their country back” from the black man in the WHITE House that they clamor for the destruction of the entire country, as the infamous Vietnam saying goes “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”. While the actual effects of not raising the debt ceiling are unknown other than it would blow a hole in the ongoing Wall Street pillaging it would vastly affect the average American schmuck on a far greater level. Assuredly interest rates would rise which the finance industry shills say would hurt lending, as if these scumbags were in the money lending business anyway with banks and corporations hoarding cash but the trickle down effect would likely be devastating. In our uniquely American brand of fascist country trickle down economics aka cutting taxes for the rich has zero benefit for the working class. But as Bush in his waning months and then OBushma in his first two and a half years such schemes are wonderful little hooks to sell the rubes so that the gambling losses of the big Wall Street banks are socialized through government confiscation of taxpayer dollars is just one more knife in the backs of Boobus Americanus. I am amazed at how, on a weekly basis that prices at the local grocery stores continue to rise, gas prices are on the way back to 4 bucks a gallon again and the GOP pledges to focus on job creation have devolved into the standard treasonous pledges to not raise taxes on wealthy chiselers, keep the gays from getting married and out of the military, Muslim bashing and here in the diseased penis of America otherwise known as Florida – anti-bestiality laws. Not that the latter would be a necessarily bad thing were it to encourage the scumbaggers to not reproduce.

But I digress ….

The fascist Republican party as it exists today in the advanced stages of it’s mutation would be nothing more than an object of mockery were it not for the dregs of society that comprise the party base, the serious haters and jacked up on religion crusaders who are hellbent at destroying America from within. They have very serious ideas about the type of society that they desire and would use every bit of law enforcement power of the very government that they so proclaim to despise in order to ensure that their hated enemies, gays, libruls [sic], feminists, Muslims and assorted other non-white, non-Christians. The blacks can be put back in their place because Christ knows that Obama cannot be allowed to reassemble his ACORN forces to mount an assault to enslave the white race and that would happen save the useful boot licking uncle Toms like Allen West, the savage anti-Muslim bigot Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas. The teabaggers and their religious right brothers in arms though have a particular hatred for intellectualism that borders on sheer fanaticism. As I stated earlier, this sort of hard core focused rage and the need to crush all who do not conform under their jack-boots is as vigorous and as unyielding as that of the Khmer Rouge along with their Year Zero social reform policy.

A came across a very horrifying bit from a 1974 Chicago Tribune account on the Khmer Rouge:

“I was very frightened when I saw the Khmer Rouge [Tea Party] saw off the neck of a civilian [gay, Muslim, liberal etc] with the sharp edge of sugar palm leaves,” said Preap, standing amid a cluster of refugees beside a row of flimsy huts.

“They spent three days cutting his head off,” said Preap. “They sawed a little one morning, and then in the evening, and finally the following day in the morning and then in the evening, and finally the following day in the morning and night.

“They made the victim stand up while there were cutting in front of hundreds of people living in the Khmer Rouge area. Then they held him up when he could stand no longer.”

The episode was not just an isolated case but one of many I heard during visits to refugee camps. Khmer Rouge soldiers also have used the knife-like edges of sugar palm leaves to lop off the heads of Cambodian officers captured while overrunning nearby towns and military installations.

“They want the victims to suffer more and to serve as examples for people,” said one informant. “They denounce them as traitors before the crowd.”

“I had to join the Khmer Rouge army or they would have killed me,” said Preap. “Those who refuse to serve they send to their deaths. They walk thru villages telling the people to follow them, and the people must obey.”

When the shit does inevitably hit the fan, exactly what the fascist Republican party wants, these will be the enforcers to hunt down dissenters to the privatization of all that remains, the roads already paid for by the taxpayer will be sold to corporations and plutocrats and the tolls will be crippling to those who travel upon them. Public water systems will be hijacked by profiteers and as in Bolivia, the collection of rainwater will become against the law, the populace has already been largely converted into a nation of rats and snitches courtesy of the fear mongering after 9/11 and if you are found in violation you will be subject to having a pack of foaming at the mouth lunatics wearing tri-corner hats, Captain America costumes and waving Gadsden flags show up at your door to cart you off to the public head-sawing. This makes for one hell of a hedge for the oligarchy and their Republican stooges. And this is exactly why I have recommended that progressives start very seriously rethinking their non-violent tendencies, the street thugs will be the first to be unleashed when the whole thing implodes for the regular folks and a failure to be ready to organize and to respond appropriately will only result in your own heads becoming trophies upon the pyramids of human skulls that they will so enjoy building as a tribute to their fascist leaders.

What Progressives Fail to Understand: This Is War

 

If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.

-Sun Tzu

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

-Ezra Pound

While America continues along the evolution into an authoritarian, fascist state that stands for nothing more than eternal war, upwards redistribution of wealth and the eradication of the social safety net it is imperative that progressives understand one thing – this is and always has been a war. The opposition, being the thug Republican right-wing machine that has seized the levers of control of the state has realized this from the outset and their victories have been legion. Despite the premature victory celebrations and naïve triumphal spirit after the 2008 election of Barack Obama amongst the sad detritus that passes for the “left” in this new American century it should be obvious to all but the most myopic and steeped in denial that nothing has really changed. The Democrats, a failed and compromised political party that long ago left behind any semblance of decency, concern for the working class, liberalism and morality have after only a brief period of holding huge governing majorities capable of enacting real change crumbled, without so much as a whimper. Obama came into office, riding a wave of energized voters, a crackerjack efficient political machine and a mandate, yes a mandate to set things right after eight years of rule by the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil. It is all gone now, timorousness (and amateurish bungling) on the part of the new president, cowardice among the Democrats in Congress and a series of mind-boggling capitulations, retreats and triangulations somehow allowed a fascist political party in the Republicans, seemingly discredited only two years earlier and on the ropes to regain the initiative and control of the government Not only did the Republicans seize control of Congress but it did so with a with a newly energized wave of monstrous animosity, racism and riding upon a pale white horse named blood revenge that the new wave was determined to leave their enemies with nothing but their eyes to cry with.

That the fascist Republicans were able to so easily set the agenda during the first two years of the Obama administration leading up to the “shellacking” suffered by the Pope of Hope in November 2010 should surprise nobody. The chronically weak and pathetic leadership of the Senate by Harry Reid , the former boxer turned politician was instrumental in the failures to attain even minimal change and one has to wonder exactly what forces truly drive the agenda of the one time Nevada Gaming Commissioner. Obamacare, is an abject joke, a backdoor giveaway to the blood-sucking insurance industry parasites who now have the power of the state backing them to strong-arm Americans into buying their overpriced, crappy product but it is what valuable time, energy and political capital was wasted on. With the Senate already being a collection of largely corrupt, venal, pompous and entitled tools of banks, corporations, the military and in at least one highly visible case Israel it was simple to ensure that no meaningful health care reform would ever be created, given that the top Senator in charge of the legislation was one Max Baucus who was in the hip pocket of the health care industry it was all a charade. The selling out of America has become a bipartisan effort and campaign cash or in layman’s terms bribery is the coin of the realm. With the thorough hijacking of the political system by big money, a stacked judiciary and a Supreme Court that has even less respect for the U.S. Constitution than George W. Bush with their landmark Citizen’s United decision to further enable the buying of government by plutocrats and corporations, backed by a media machine that peddles lies, sensationalism and legitimizes dangerous highly paid demagogues as though their ‘opinions’ actually are serious we simply must admit that the game has already been lost. The extreme right-wing, being big money, energy and finance cartels, avaricious corporations and their millions of shock troops brainwashed by a bizarre doppelganger dogma of Christianity along with the twenty percent or so in the society who are authoritarian personality types have near total control now and are soon coming for the rest of it.

That the left and progressives have failed and failed miserably is not shameful, especially when understanding the decades long, enormously costly and coordinated with military style precision efforts to thoroughly destroy all meaningful change that has occurred in America since the early 20th Century. To comprehend the concerted effort to undermine New Deal programs and liberal ideals one must first realize that the spawn of the Robber Barons never went away gracefully into the good night after hard-fought and often costly in terms of life and liberty wins by organized labor. Despite the decades long onslaught of predatory capitalist propaganda the unions that helped to build this country into an economic powerhouse with a middle class that was the envy of the civilized world, a progressive education system, a mighty infrastructure and public institutions that actually acted in the interests of the American people and the betterment of the society as a whole. When you see the smoldering wreckage that we have been reduced to in 2011, thanks to he hijacking of the system by fascists, the decimation of organized labor, the assault on public education, rampant historical revisionism and the erosion of our public institutions by right-wing termites eating away from within it is hard to suppress the urge to vomit.

The war that so many denied even existed has been lost and the primary reason why it has been lost is that liberals and progressives have failed to realize that it was always a war in the first place. Not only a class war but also a war against American freedoms, values and basic human dignity. It took decades to destroy the country and it would be magical thinking to believe that it isn’t going to take decades to beat back the fascists and take the country back, many of us will not see the completion of this in our lifetimes but it is time to organize and to begin the formation of a resistance. The political system is no longer functional, we live in a failed state that has succumbed to the cancer of fascism, writing letters to Congress, wasting time on boycotts, engaging in internet campaigns with the self-centered, ipad wielding twerps that congregate at grand galas of collective masturbation like Netroots Nation and carrying signs in the streets does not work. It is time to fight back, as the writer and social activist Chris Hedges says: “We will be saved only with the birth of a new militant radicalism, one that defies all formal power structures including the Democratic party.”

It is time to find a stomach for a donnybrook, the time for debate and hope for change at the ballot box has passed, the corruption is too deeply entrenched and there is too damned much at stake for anything less. As I previously stated, the right-wing and the fascist fifth columnists have ALWAYS treated the battle for America as a WAR, as arch-conservative political activist Ralph Reed once remarked: “I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” 

“Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.”

-Mao Tse-tung

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

-Henry A. Wallace

Part II: A Rigged Game

Make no mistake about it that the attack on progressive and traditional liberal ideals in this country has been a long running, ideologically fueled, dog eat dog jihad dating back to at least the era of the despised “class traitor” Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. The pigs who run this filthy sty, many of them descended from elitist stock have opposed every bit of social and labor progress that was won at such a cost by our forebears. There were once Americans who organized and did so at great risk of injury, imprisonment and their very lives who fought to implement a system that eventually resulted in a strong middle class, largely the result of the clout of the labor unions, unions that are now in the final stages of eradication. That such progress was allowed to be rolled back to the darkest days of worker exploitation and the excess of rapacious greed that thrives in an unequal society is our enduring tragedy, that it was done without a fight is our enduring shame. Now in 2011 the final stages of the great dismantling are to borrow a treasured propaganda nugget of a corrupt media – picking up steam. The ongoing battle over raising the debt ceiling is garbage as is the sudden panic over the national credit card and the deficit, none of the swinish squealers who bleat in phony sanctimony about “the future of our children” gave a rat’s ass when the Bush administration had the national credit card and was maxing it out like a stoned teenager on ruinous wars, tax cuts for the rich and giveaways to the financial fraudsters whose worthless mortgage backed securities and derivative instruments blew a hole in the economy. The real goal of the “new normal” and the crushing austerity that will be enforced is to eliminate what remains of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs. They are coming for Social Security and Medicare and as the brilliant social critic George Carlin pegged it dead bang in one of his most scathing rants The American Dream:

And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”

The intention of the fascist looter class has always been to impose a new feudalism on those who are not in “the big club”.  The great wars of the 20^th Century provided the oligarchy with the cover needed to dismantle dissent and movements for economic justice in this country. With the Woodrow Wilson administration determined to feed Americans into the charnel house that was Europe during World War I, a conflict that the United States had no business being involved in and that made industrialists and Wall Street speculators obscenely rich there was the Espionage Act of 1917 (currently in the process of being revamped in order to use against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange) and the Sedition Act of 1918. Promulgated by the state to stomp on criticism of the blessed war the power of the state was marshaled into also putting down the hated by the establishment American  Socialists, notable Eugene Debs who was imprisoned for his blasphemy of the capitalist war machine. The laws were used to justify the rounding up, persecution and deportation of radical leftists, notably during the Palmer Raids by an already thoroughly rotten to the core Justice Department.  The economic collapse triggered by criminal plunderers on Wall Street leading to the Great Depression eventually led to the social reforms of Roosevelt and their institutionalization. World War II, “the good war” fought by “the greatest generation” was sold as a great conflict of good versus evil for the fate of the future of human civilization itself but the war was essentially a clash of empires with the greatest spoils being won by the United States of America. Few bother to consider the hypocrisy of destroying the devil that was Hitler through an alliance with a man who was possibly an even greater tyrant, mass-murderer and evil incarnate that was Josef Stalin.

When the war was over and much to the delight of the looter class, Roosevelt finally dead, it was a seamless transition to carve up the spoils and then turn on Stalin, he was on longer useful as an ally but would provide a malevolent figurehead for the enduring menace that was Communism, a true enemy of fascism and would be used as blanket justification for the wars, witch hunts, bloated defense budgets and societal transformation until the day when the U.S.S.R. imploded. The 1950s saw the decimation of the remnants of the real left with the inspiration for today’s debauched harassment of Muslims – McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (likely a personal hero of current fascist Governor Scott Walker) holding hearings, law abiding Americans being harassed into taking loyalty oaths, the carnival of perversion that was the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) serving as a vehicle for a vicious, conniving shit named Richard M. Nixon to slime his way into power by publicly kicking in the spleen of a needed blood sacrifice named Alger Hiss. Nixon’s trademark shamelessness and anti-Commie demagogy greatly contributed to the rise of a virulent, flag-swaddled fascism that was exemplified in the John Birch Society and the new wealth of the western sunbelt. This toxic movement would vomit up Ronald Wilson Reagan, the avatar of a savagely anti-American fifth column who to this day is canonized as a saint, the Lenin figurehead for the great revolution of which we now find ourselves as victims of as it nears the endgame.

The tumultuous 1960s with the heinous atrocity of the Vietnam War following the brutal and still unsolved assassination of President John F. Kennedy would prove to be a boon to the fascists, especially those that are now concentrated in the Republican party. The Civil Rights Movement would ensure that unrepentant racists, especially southerners would shun the Democratic party for generations, the chicken-fried version of bastardized Christianity would act as an accelerator and preserve the region for the GOP for going on four decades now. The antiwar movement was a bonus and during the political resurrection of Richard Nixon that culminated in his 1968 election until his fall a young ideological media wizard named Roger Ailes would ensure that the social upheaval that marked the era would be given a black face or adorned with hippie beads and peace signs. The 1960s were going to be the last time that the establishment would ever be confronted with a serious threat to the status quo and the lessons of that era were well learned by the fascist right. The revolt against the war and the demand for economic and social justice just may have succeeded were it ever to be allowed to have serious leadership. The movement was efficiently and mercilessly decapitated in little more than two months in 1968 when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both conveniently taken out, victims of the same sort of “lone nut” that always is able to circumvent security, escape surveillance and show up at the exact optimal moment of opportunity when a threat to the status quo has to be eliminated.

The Vietnam War, social unrest associated with it and later the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon, the at the time high priest of politics as war set the stages for the crusade against social justice that would follow. The fascist right-wing and American big business fully understood the importance of controlling the media, Ailes taught Nixon of the potent tool of television, a medium that had yet to explode into its full potential as a method of social indoctrination and brainwashing as it did with the advent of cable and satellite technology. The 24/7, hundreds of channels television revolution would nicely coincide with the coronation of Ronald Reagan as America’s founding father, hell, how could anyone ever imagine anyone else being president? The Powell Memorandum, which laid out the blueprint for the media takeover and establishment of propaganda organs and “policy” organizations, known as think tanks was already being implemented. The post-Vietnam era saw the creation of a legitimized network of institutions devoted solely to ensuring that corporate power and those who would be tools of the oligarchy would be served. Nixon was a master at exploiting the resentments of others, of pushing the right buttons, of lies and scurrilous attacks that pitted American vs. American that would come to define the future of American politics. I highly recommend the great book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein to those who may be interested in a fascinating chronicle of the Nixon years that birthed the present.

The Heritage Foundation, one of the most prominent of the right-wing think tanks was funded by money from Robber Baron descendent Richard Mellon Scaife and the John Birch Society influenced Coors family. The Manhattan Institute was founded by longtime Wall Street/CIA/OSS figure William Casey. The Cato Institute was founded by the Koch Brothers (their great family fortune came from building oil refineries for Stalin) whose longtime influence is only now finally coming to light. Cato was a part of a fascist right-wing project to clean up libertarianism, transforming it in the public eye from a loose collection of true anarchists, antiwar and anti-state, pot smoking, free spirits who had to be brought to heel to promote the true party agenda which would mirror Koch and the other plutocrats’ financial interests.  These 1970s organizations joined the already established American Enterprise Institute, a prolific pro-war, looter capitalist advocacy snakepit along with all of it’s Neocon spinoffs, The Hoover Institute , The John M. Olin Foundation and a myriad of others, tentacles of the fascist right-wing octopus. Rather than get bogged down in this particular area I would refer readers to the fine David Brock book entitled The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How itCorrupts Democracy. Brock heads up one of the lone the progressive counterparts in the hated Media Matters for America, a watchdog group so loathed by the right-wing that it has been demonized incessantly on the Rupert Murdoch terrorist FOX network. Brock by the way is no stranger to right-wing lowball dirty tactics and strategy, he was a former operative who developed a conscience and joined the battle against fascism. Brock is also gay and was ostracized by the virulent elements of the GOP who years later likely rue the day that they persecuted the wrong man.

The most dangerous as well as the most secretive of the think tanks is the Council For National Policy. The CNP, is where the shadow government types or to those who on the left who may be typically squeamish of such a term – the intelligence agency rogues, the ends justify the means types who waged the dirty wars against the commie devils in Southeast Asia and Central and South America joined forces with John Birch Society veterans, big Texas oil money, right-wing media moguls and Christian theocrats. Real hard-liners such as General John Singlaub and Lt. Colonel Oliver North joined other ‘luminaries’ such as Nelson Bunker Hunt, the right wing beer magnate Coors Family, Paul Weyrich, Edwin Meese, Jesse Helms, Phyllis Schafly, revered by teabagger swine Glenn Beck’s idol Cleon Skoussen and a roster of members continually updated to include influential right-wingers of the day, and movement types as John Ashcroft, Grover Norquist, DeVos Family members including mercenary kingpin Erik Prince, Birther propagandist Joseph Farah, Rick Santorum and even possibly even former DHS head Michael Chertoff  the man who has been instrumental in putting naked body scanners into the hands of authoritarian, sexual molester TSA goons in our national airports who was a prominent speaker at a CNP gathering in 2006 along with North, John Bolton and Robert Bork. Unfortunately, the current member list is guarded like the crown jewels themselves and the organization shuns questioners. 

The fascist Republican takeover of America could not have been successful without a militant, dedicated army of activists and shock troops. Before there the phony grass roots corporate media darling Tea Party existed there was the mobilization of the true believers that are the Religious Right – America’s own Taliban. CNP was founded by the Reverend Timothy LaHaye, the creator of the Rapture death cult bible that is the multi-million dollar franchise of the Left Behind series and eerily seems to be adaptable to promote a crusader’s view of the Middle East and the need to promote the policies of Israel and the American empire’s control of the key oil producing regions. Joining LaHaye is a who’s who of Christian zealots, the late Rousas J. Rushdoony, widely acknowledged as the father of Christian Dominionism, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer and D. James Kennedy. The CNP and the think tank networks are little understood by most progressives and liberals who still believe that change can be effected at the ballot box, they know nothing of the organizational structure that they are up against in a war for America. The CNP by the way vetted and gave their blessing to Sarah Palin as John McCain’s 2008 Republican party presidential  running mate. The Council For National Policy seems to be far more than a think tank, it smacks of being the serpent’s head of a serious fifth column fascist element, the presence of Singlaub and North, both no strangers to black ops would seem to give that idea some credence, much deeper investigation of this organization needs to be undertaken, I would refer readers to this recent piece by Robert Parry: The GOP’s CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country toSweep Back Into Power.

Rather than further spend time on the fascist right-wing infrastructure I am not going to bother with the thoroughly controlled and corrupt corporate media, this in and of itself presents the largest obstacle to any sort of derailing of the fascist juggernaut. Following the model established by Father Charles Coughlin the fascist right hit it big with Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, his hectoring demagoguery was broadcast to tens of millions at the crucial time when the early stages of Reagan’s dismantling of the system had to be sold. There was nothing like the pigman’s rubbing salt into the raw wounds of those whose farms had been busted out, whose lives who had been destroyed and who were easily duped into finding scapegoats in order to protect those who were responsible. Limbaugh bred an industry of strident electronic hatemongers who fulfilled the warning of the reviled liberal former WW II era Vice President Henry A.Wallace:

 

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

With the aforementioned Powell Memorandum stressing the importance of the control of the media to control the future of America this mission has been accomplished, give a big assist to neoliberal Bill Clinton and his Telecommunications Act of 1996 for the dismantling and consolidation spree that has allowed for the majority of Americans to be woefully under informed and mesmerized by lurid local stories foisted as great national crises while the country is gutted by the fascists. There may yet be some hope that the Rupert Murdoch media empire will take a big hit with the still breaking British hacking scandal, a rancid illustration of the collusion of government figures with kingmakers like Murdoch but despite tactics that undoubtedly pale next to what FOX and other components of the right-wing Republican machine are doing in America. With new revelations on the attempted exploitation of 9/11 victims phone calls this could be a spear jammed into the belly of the beast but it is not likely to get much play in our media. There will always be another dead child, sex scandal or ginned up terrorist plot to deliver the electronic opiate to the masses of asses, and perhaps NFL season will soon open after the union has been busted – move along, there’s nothing to see here.

The fascist right-wing and the corporate state have already won, our political system has been reduced to nothing more than political theatre and an ongoing duel between two criminal entities in the full blown fascist Republicans and the fascist lite Democrats to control the spoils system and obtain the regal privilege of being the ones that get to yoke the slaves and deliver them to the man.Were the RICO laws to ever be seriously enforced then the two money parties and their Wall Street and corporate owners would be targeted, then that would be in a society that respects the rule of law, unfortunately we don’t live in one.

There is no hope to dismantle this machine, it’s even money that it will self-destruct though but not until every last bit of blood is extracted from the average American, every bone has been ground to provide sustenance to the machine and then there is the high-tech, militarized police state that has been constructed since September 11, 2001 to deal with matters once it happens. At this point it is no longer anything but a silly fantasy to expect that the system can be changed through the calculatedly eroded process that was once called democracy, too much damage has been done for too long a period. America is in a very dark place today, it is not often that I am in agreement on anything at all with the Neocons but I must say that their intellectual father Leo Strauss was onto something when he blamed liberal Weimar Germany and the feckless opposition to the Nazis for the horrors that would follow, he was right. Philosopher Karl Popper hit the target as well:

“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.” 

The time has come for progressives to realize that this is war, always has been war and their naivete to realize this has led us to this point.

Let the resistance begin. 

I don’t want to get any messages saying, “I am holding my position.” We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the enemy do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!

-General George S. Patton

Part III: Fighting Back

I have long drawn much scorn from those who should have been allies during my affiliation with the ‘left’, those who insist on never lowering themselves to the levels of those that seek to destroy them, they would still be arguing that even as they were on the cattle cars being trucked to the gas showers. I have long advocated for a counterattack against the fascists on their own terms, they understand nothing other than raw aggression, eye for an eye, frontier style ‘justice’. You cannot reason with them, especially those who are the zealots that comprise the shock troops, the brownshirts, the rabble and the street thugs. They need to be dealt with in the harshest of manner and if the time comes they need to be met with an appropriate level of violence that they themselves are fully prepared to use. There is really no other way, as an old Marxist acquaintance of mine liked to say, “you don’t debate fascists, you destroy them”, the fascist right, outside of their pederast style obsession with cannibalistic capitalism feared the unions because they understood this and confronted power with power. Were the real left still around today instead of the namby pamby collection of weaklings, sissies. utopian talkers and bleeding heart types that comprise the ‘left’ we would not have been overrun and crushed by sociopaths and their goons. As I previously referenced Neocon Leo Strauss he did understand one thing, that you cannot negotiate with those who would just as soon use your skull for a salad bowl. I encountered this failure to come to terms with this most basic of facts in terms of our current situation far too often with those of otherwise good intent who refused to view contemporary America in historical terms, particularly in comparison with Nazi Germany. I am fully aware of Godwin’s Law damning Nazi analogies and to me it’s just more of the same lame liberal bullshit. Not only are the Nazi’s the predecessors of today’s American fascists, specifically those who fly the Republican party’s bloody red flag perfect examples for the obvious reasons but everyone knows who the Nazis were and other comparisons would be wasted on ignoramuses such as those who are commonplace in Der Homeland circa 2011. Sadly too many of them are also entirely ignorant of the level of complicity that capitalist American interests including prominent industrialists and Wall Street bankers had in the building of Hitler’s death machine, that is going to have to wait for another time though. 

While I detest Neoconservatism and it’s merger of worship of the warfare state, it’s manipulation of religion, fear and nationalism in order to justify conquest and oppression both abroad and at home I find a good deal of merit in Strauss’s argument that it was liberalism that failed to halt the Nazi horror by not confronting it on it’s own remorseless rules of engagement while the movement was still nascent. Were the populist anger that was masterfully harnessed by Hitler and his minions been redirected back against his death cult with white hot vengeance how much suffering could have been averted? Human nature is not virtuous and good and beneath a very thin veneer lurks a pitch black innate need for destruction, an instinct in which survival trumps all else and the inconvenient truths of human history have proven time and again that our better angels will ultimately be overcome by our internal demons. History is also not linear, history repeats itself but never in exactly the same way and there will likely never be any sort of a murderous state that will be as ostentatious in it’s cruelty and cult mentality like the Nazis ever again. But the similarities are there between Weimar Germany and the America of the new century, the economic futility, the failed political system, the eroded civil liberties, the codification of torture, the disembowelment of the Constitution, the pollution of the judiciary, the militarizing of the national mind, the need for an enemy and most importantly of all, a right-wing movement already in a high state of readiness that is only awaiting their very own Führer.

But I Digress…..

With my differences with many progressives and liberals already well documented it was with much surprise that when on one of the radio shows that I listen to on a fairly regular basis, a regular caller got it. During the Bob Kincaid Show on the HORN, which stands for the Head On Radio Network (brilliant radio, listen and if you like it please kick a few bucks into the kitty for these people who are fighting the good fight, they need to pay the bills) on June 14th at around the 1 hr 19 min mark David in Maine, a cutting edge thinker hit the mark. David, understanding the futility of the current system, the stacking of the deck and the need for both urgency and assertiveness among progressives blew away guest host John Fox with his proposal for what he called a “universal progressive discipline camp”.  This was sheer brilliance, what David proposed was straight out of the Republican playbook, a hiring of the finest strategic minds from around the globe, military types to instill an iron hard brand of discipline into those who would attend. David was inspired by the Louis Theroux BBC documentary entitled Miami Mega Jail and the concept of GABOS an acronym for Game Ain’t Based on Sympathy. GABOS is the law of the jungle, as the subheading of the Guardian article that I linked to puts it so aptly – Want the bottom bunk? All you have to do is beat another inmate half to death. I was stunned, this concept in all of it’s primitive, remorseless honesty illustrates exactly the strategy of the fascist Republican right-wing. It is so simple, so astonishingly eloquent in it’s bumper sticker type of message that it could have been conceived by Frank Luntz (or Goebbels for that matter) himself. In the land of fuck you I got mine that is America the rich will reign and the rest of the peasants will in the streets engaging in knife fights for the daily ration of bootstraps that they are provided by their rulers. To the losers go the blade and to the ‘winner’ go to the for-profit prison system. 

The one key aspect of Miami Mega Jail that David referred to was a boot camp for inmates in which hard ass military professionals are brought in to give the prisoners one last chance. David talked about how a program such as this was necessary to confront the right, it would provide “toughness” and “discipline”, the sort of character traits that are absolutely critical to winning a war of attrition, building “an Army” so to speak. Mr. Fox was like most progressives more than a bit taken aback by the idea. Whether people want to admit it or not the Republicans have total control of the country now, they have utilized this very strategy, through their activist base organizations, their churches and their tea party bunds, their militias and their prayer groups they have already built an army and again, this has always been a war to them. David referenced spending some time at West Point during his call, it would take a veteran to appreciate this sort of thinking, as one who spent some time in the military myself I get it. In order to overcome a much more determined enemy, one that utilizes up to date strategy, is relentless and absolutely hates America as it is it is imperative to do likewise in order to combat it. He equated it with war college, but taking it to the next level…. this is a concept that I have long found alien to the ‘left’ with their small protests, emails, phone calls and letter writing, none of which is effective against an entrenched enemy who understands what it takes to win. There was a silence and then some fear, and it was palpable from fill-in host Fox who worried more about what Limbaugh and Beck would do were they to hear the show rather than how their ilk should be hunted down like rats. Were this a country with nads there would be a Scarface style hit team enroute to Limbaugh’s tony Palm Beach compound to scale the walls once the shit really hit the fan, they could saw off his ugly fat fucking head and mount it on a pike like something out of Lord of the Flies.

Let’s face it, the ‘left’ as it exists now are pussies, when they chased labor out of the new ‘left’ they discarded their backbones. Old labor, especially returning World War II veterans who belonged to unions would make very short work of the fascists who despite their numbers, their animosity and their braggadocio are as yellow as their silly-assed Gadsden flags and most of all they are stupid and blinded by their meanness. They are pack animals who have no taste for a fair fight and their leaders know this which is why they use their media to put a certain noble sheen on proto-fascist loudmouths like the vastly overhyped Tea Party, the remains of what was once a libertarian based antiwar movement. The ‘left’, once again proving that the one thing that they truly understand is failure never bothered to attempt to tap into the righteous anger in this country over the offshoring of millions of American jobs, the bailouts of financial terrorists on Wall Street who destroyed the economy and thanks to Obama, have been allowed to go back to their looting with impunity.  There was a serious attempt for an alliance between progressives and principled libertarians such as those who backed Ron Paul but have been chased out of their own movement by savvy Republican operatives. Alas, it never happened as if it ever could happen. One other thing that I fell out of favor with my progressive friends for was my advocacy for just that sort of broad-based coalition, we can argue about the differences later but the first and foremost priority needed to be restoring the rule of law and destroying fascism in America. 

As the great radical Saul Alinsky once put it, To fuck your enemies you’ve first have got seduce your allies. Former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in his book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement laments the demise of opposition to the wars during the Bush years, wars that continue to this day absent any form of resistance, the ‘left’, other than principled and consistent critics who have largely been relegated to the fringes of discourse are predictably missing in action. This from Ritter:

Bear in mind that in conflict you are in almost all occasions confronting an opponent who is determined to win as you should be. This opponent is looking for any sign of weakness on your part, and will be certain to exploit this weakness with as much decisiveness and ferocity that can be brought to bear. If you are not prepared to confront such an opponent, then don’t enter the field of battle. Conflict is not for the faint of heart. In conflict you must be prepared to knock your opponent down, and then, instead of offering a helping hand, hold your opponent down with the heel of your foot while you plunge a bayonet into his or her heart. You can be assured that your opponent would do the same to you.

AND –

The American progressive movement has not always been this devoid of leadership and structure. One only need to study the life and achievements of Saul Alinsky, a Chicago-based former criminologist who revolutionized the grassroots movements of the 1950s and 1960s into genuine political movements possessing real political power.

AND –

Simply put, if the antiwar/peace and justice movement can attract more people to its cause than their opponents can to theirs, then the antiwar/peace and justice movement will emerge victorious. Therefore, a governing principle when waging peace is to creadt an ideological foundation that is capable of appealing to the broadest possible segment of a given democratic society.

AND –

If his advice is taken then what will emerge will be a diverse coalition of interests who now finally understand that the system as it exists is run by global criminals who have no loyalty to America and actively have attacked everything that was great about her while usurping our democracy and undermining our freedoms and economic prowess. Wall Street looters and industrialists have always hated America because there was a system of governance here that afforded rights to all people and not only those with money. It has been a long time coming and the time to act is yesterday.

Sage advice from a man who is a military strategist, the type that David’s “universal progressive discipline camp” suggestion would likely welcome with open arms, note that Ritter advocates the OODA Loop Theory, something that progressives and liberals can chew on while they ponder how they could possibly have ever allowed Saul Alinsky to be stolen from them by the teabagger brownshirts? Pearls before swine I guess… 

As for the progressive-libertarian joint effort, it isn’t as far out as it sounds, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader get it as did 1960s radical activist Carl Oglesby but Paul is a “nutcase” despite his anti-interventionist, antiwar, pro-civil liberties, anti-Federal Reserve stance and he wants to abolish the Gestapo TSA as well. Nader is poison to the Democrats and progressives/liberals who still believe in the functioning system despite watching Bush family operatives steal the 2000 election in Florida and then have not do a goddamned thing other than jerk off and point fingers at Nader when the Supreme Court put George W. Bush into the White House. Oglesby is a “conspiracy theorist” the dreaded pejorative that is used by all establishment lackeys and those enshrouded in comfortable cocoons of denial when they dare to ask serious questions. For even suggesting such a thing, even temporarily I was shunned as a leper, mocked and derided as much for that as for my inability to suck it up, turn the other cheek and be a pacifist. I must admit that I always had a bit of sympathy for the Jack Nicholson character, Colonel Nathan Jessep in the movie A Few Good Men, his methods were unsound and his arrogance was his undoing but he had it right when he barked that:

You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

The liberals and progressives are impotent and on the verge of extinction, of being hunted and persecuted in their own country simply because they never understood that there had to be someone on that wall to beat back the hordes.  Better get a clue folks, they are closing in now.

 

Tea Party Khmer Rouge Will Break Rubio’s Rice Bowl

“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy – then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight – assuming it was straight in the first place.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

You have to hand it to the Republicans, they are consistent. With the national media fervor over the demented theocratic shrew from Minnesota Michele Bachmann still blazing, they are already leaping like fleas from one rabid dog to another. Not that this should be any surprise but the buzz is starting over the newest “rock star” (Christ, what an unoriginal term coined by a lazy pack of mental masturbators) which would be one Marco Rubio of Florida, Jeb Bush’s very own protege. Now Rubio, a greasy little operator with a Tony Montana staccato as well as a Ricky Ricardo pompadour certainly has zero national experience but his place as potential Vice President on whichever assclown emerges from the GOP primary scrum would be Karl Rove’s wet dream in that the fascist Republicans would be banking on his appeal to a Hispanic demographic. This certainly shows that they are now reduced to smelling their own piss given the party’s heavily reliance on anti-Hispanic (eg: illegal alien bashing) demagoguery which feeds the berserkers of the base which has been re-branded as the “Tea Party” in an immensely successful effort spearheaded by FOX, the Wall Street Journal and the Koch Brothers network of think tanks. The problem is not with Rubio’s lack of experience, one Barack Obama was transformed from a junior Senator from a corrupt cesspool of a state into our current reality TV president but it is insanity to think that such a diverse candidate would sell to a party with a central tenet of fighting against diversity. The scumbaggers certainly won’t swallow a potential ticket of a Mormon AND a Hispanic and certainly not in 2012 which is going to resemble a Julius Steicher-Joseph Goebbels style blast furnace of hatred aimed at gays, Muslims and especially undocumented immigrants (the preferred term for the political correctness Nazis).

Despite the rancid state of the American economy Obama is not going to be beaten solely on the basis of lost jobs despite his administration’s shaking down of the taxpayer to funnel money by the billions into Wall Street gambling casinos because other than a complete sap who is really going to trust the fucking Republicans on fixing the economy? Tax cuts for the rich chiselers and rapacious corporate swindlers are now in reality thoroughly discredited, only being kept alive by the ongoing hammering of the talking points in their bought and paid for media and only affects those who still like tortoises with their heads inside of the shell mainly get their McNews fed to them in bite-sized chunks by said media. Now I certainly am suspicious that the GOP and big business are deliberately sabotaging the economy in order to beat Obama (something that in any real land that respects the rule of law would have the bastards brought up on charges of treason) but when their leaders are guys like Eric Cantor, the conniving little shit whose ambition is only exceeded by his greed and poor judgment is actively shorting the U.S. bond market to profit personally from a default as well as a couple of career hacks like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell they aren’t fooling anybody despite their ‘my dick is longer than your dick’ game that they are playing with OBushma over the debt ceiling.

The GOP’s only winning hand in 2012 is to go all in with the same racism, gay baiting, pandering to low I.Q. peckerwoods with religious nonsense and braying about Sharia Law that have been their bread and butter. The vaunted Supreme Court along with the R-A-T-S (Roberts-Alito-Thomas-Scalia) have in their ongoing politicizing of the judiciary decided to make gay marriage an issue nest year which only panders to the same type of mouth-breathers whose credulousness and misdirected anger over their fucked and pathetic lives have already enabled the looters who have destroyed America from within. Now that their beloved 9/11 talisman has been stolen from them with Obama’s taking out of the bad ass bogeyman Osama bin Laden look for the racist lies delivered by the billions of dollars that the Koch Brothers and their ilk toss into the electronic cesspool to be overwhelming. It’s the ONLY way that they can possibly win back the WHITE House with the woeful slate of candidates that they are fielding. Which is why Marco Rubio as a difference maker is so absurd.

Recently stories in the St. Petersburg Times and other Florida papers have focused on the growing angst within the lunatic fringe, racist, know-nothing pseudo movement formally known as the Tea Party towards their one time savior Rubio. To say that the honeymoon is just about over would greatly understate the truth in that the ideological purists of the American Khmer Rouge may just be starting to catch on that they were played by Jeb Bush’s little understudy from Miami. The Tea Party which is really just a spiffy way of referring to the  hard core haters and neo-Confederate Jesus juicers of a Republican base post the toxic George W. Bush name has a serious Year Zero style plan for a grand American right-wing social engineering project that anything but a cult like devotion towards seeing through will quickly be discarded and kicked out of the club. You see, taking their country back has always been all about destroying the social safety net, ridding the land of their hated enemies including liberals, gays, successful Hispanics and Blacks with any sort of power who aren’t toadies for the GOP, for example a glorified lawn jockey like Allen West or Herman Cain. The scumbaggers also want to strip women of privacy rights, round up and intern Muslims and while they bask in the glory of their political power to destroy they also eagerly enable the oligarchs and billionaire tax cheats like the Koch Brothers to destroy the regulatory structure and profit obscenely at the expense of the working class.

Seems like the Gadsden flag-sucking berserkers are getting a bit restive with their pet Hispanic Rubio, his stance on immigration is a bit too liberal for the disciples of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and they are demanding action from the son of Cuban immigrants, the same type of people that the Palinazis have no tolerance for. You have to admit that watching Rubio do the Mexican Hat Dance on this issue is a thing of beauty at least for those like myself who have always recognized that Dirty Marco despite his Tony Montana staccato was nothing but an opportunistic fraud. Unlike Governor Skeletor Marco Rubio isn’t an ideologue nor a pathological criminal. Rubio in a way is much worse, he is a low rent conniving charlatan with zero scruples who saw an opening and rode a wave of visceral hatred and racism courtesy of the GOP co-opted teabaggers to a Senate seat. Rubio is shifty, sneaky and as slick as Florida Koch Whore Governor PRick Scott’s slime trail but he isn’t a lunatic. It’s going to be fun watching him try to triangulate Clinton style to satisfy the beasts of the tea party as they bray for shovels of bloody meat. I personally think that Dirty Marco is just laying in the weeds like a hungry little animal watching Governor Skeletor destroy Florida so when the time comes he can sweep into Tallahassee and be seen as a savior.This may not be possible now as he betrays the useful idiots whose racism he relied on to slither his way into a U.S. Senate seat…and he is going to appeal to enough of these freaks nationally?

All of the angry racist northern transplant fatties sucking off the government dole in the Villages of Sumter or Tea Party Central have been crapping their star spangled Grampers now that their little pet isn’t quite the race baiting demagogue that he portrayed himself as. Though luck to the bluehairs living up in Copland, despite their deep seated bigotry you all put up with Ricky Ricardo as long as he sang and danced your tune (perhaps a Salsa version of the Horst Wessel Song) but once he is no longer the pocket Cuban they turn on him like the bitter old relics of a society long gone but one that they are dug in like Alabama ticks to try to restore. Yes indeed the haters so wanted a man like Dirty Marco who represented CHANGE, the teabaggers were going to transform the system and were mesmerized by the siren song of careerists like Rubio. The dumb bastards in the Tea Party are barely smart enough to change their underwear, accepting an insider like Rubio and expecting anything less than being sold down the river is evidence of their gullibility. Sure they will give Marco hell for anything less than supporting a total roundup and deportation of undocumented immigrants, building a fifty foot electric fence along the boarder along with an alligator infested moat, mining the harbors and gassing those who dare to come back.

Tough luck you schmucks you been had – welcome to Chumpland!.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

Mad Dog Motherfucking Mean

Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.”

– Josey Wales

Been awhile friends but the bad man is back, back with a vengeance and like the avenging spirit that was the famous Clint Eastwood role in High Plains Drifter I am getting ready to paint the town red. Red with pigs blood that is, of course in post-democracy America, in our all-seeing fascist surveillance society I speak in purely figurative terms, lest the midnight knock come and the jackboot of Homeland Security kick down my door. This is what it has come to, it’s nut-cuttin’ time, time to throw down, stand up, be counted and dispense with whatever passes for resistance in this electronically lobotomized lemming colony. Face it, things are never going to get better for the average person in Murka, the entrenched rot of corruption is too deep, can’t be easily cut out, the financial system lies in smoking ruins thanks to a gangster government and the failed political system that has facilitated it. The swine and swindlers will continue to bleed this place until there is no blood left and then it will run in the streets, likely when the fascists and their propaganda pimps begin calling for the inevitable pogroms. Any moves to somehow ameliorate the suffering, take for instance yesterday’s surprise announcement of the tapping of the oil reserves to stop the psychotic speculators and their masturbatory greed will be harshly and immediately attacked by a corporate media machine determined to keep the game rigged at all costs. Enjoy today because today is the best day that you are going to have for the rest of your lives, each subsequent day will be a gradual erosion of living standards, whatever remains of your rights and one toehold deeper into the abyss. This is the new American birthright for to be an American is to be a fat bovine creature, swaddled in stars ‘n stripes ensconced in front of the precious television that provides the sweet, sweet spike for tens of millions of addicts.

I have been away from it all for awhile, just not much inclination to write much. The ‘death’ of our Emanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden felt like a good place to end it all, the closing of the circle of the big lie of 9/11 that I have railed against for the past six years since I have been doing this. I certainly did consider it and did so very seriously, there are other projects that I would like to do, maybe some fiction, a book, other forms of media but the situation is too grave and there are too few fighters. I have made the journey since mid-2005 when I first started to blog, primarily to keep my sanity as those were still the worst days of the Bushreich before the abhorrent little twit was exposed as the impotent borderline retard that he always was by the wrath of nature combined with capitalist greed that was Hurricane Katrina. Bush never was quite the same after that and it was hard to believe that the peak of the fascist right-wing freak show that was the siege over the still breathing corpse of one Terri Schiavo had only occurred a few months prior. Bush and Cheney continued to cut a category five swath of destruction through the country and the world but it was slowed and the ouster of the criminally psychotic Tom DeLay from power jammed up the machine albeit briefly. It was my outrage against the right-wing scum, the traitors that manifested itself in the Republican party that drove me to raging against the machine in the first place.

I originally identified with the left (or the putrid excuse that passes for it these days), still having some idiotic and naive sort of faith in the Democratic party being able to provide some semblance of a return to normalcy were it to regain political power. While I am and always have been a registered independent I bought into the lesser of two evils meme, especially when the greater of the evils was just a notch below Satan. I broke into blogging at a number of liberal sites, quickly learning my lesson that intolerance and censorship was not the sole domain of the right when I ran afoul of the turds at Daily Kos, when it all comes down to it, and I have said this before Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga, who built a perfect mousetrip, somehow being trotted out as the voice of progressives and liberals is when it all comes down to it about as left as Stalin and his rotten blog is a cesspool of idiotic political correctness, elitism and bad writing. I was run out of there very quickly as have been many others with the ability to transcend the bullshit and think for themselves. I bounced around on a number of lesser blogs as a regular contributor, one a fairly prominent one run by a self-proclaimed Democrat who wears her party alliance on her sleeve. I had a chance to become more widely read had I hewed to just doing political attacks and screeds on Republican Nazis but early on I understood that the entire fucking system was rotten, I was too much of a renegade to be mainstream. I made other alliances, the people who I worked with were passionate and devoted but few were able to grasp the bigger picture, with the election of Obama in 2008 there was no longer that common enemy and the ‘left’, basking in their imagined triumph rapidly began to fragment into the collection of competing identity based groups that they are in order to divvy up the spoils. They did not as I warned continue to wage war against the fascists and they came to embrace the ongoing murders of civilians, brown-skinned, non-Christian ones as long as their tolerance for immorality was cloaked in humanitarian bullshit like women’s rights, they became cruise missile liberals. I officially made my split from them with my blistering goodbye entitled A Farewell to Arms: Why I Left ‘the Left’ from which I excerpt the following at length:

To HELL with the ‘left’! I am finished, done, disillusioned and over it, the divorce papers have been filed and are now finalized and I am not going back. As of this day, I will no longer allow myself to be affiliated or endorse the ‘left’ in any way, shape or form. So long folks, it was real and it was fun but in the end it was unfulfilling and dare I say, a waste of time and effort. Is this overly harsh? Perhaps it is but the break has to be made and it can no longer be put off. I assure you, this was no hasty decision but rather something that has been a slow and agonizing process, a steady drip…drip…drip.., like Chinese water torture and suddenly the mind goes, the spirit breaks and the ugly reality of the situation cannot be denied or disguised. So to all of my good friends on the left I wish you the very best but I am no longer one of you and maybe I never was, it was never dogma to me only a desire for some sort of social fairness and a fair shot but the American left being a shell of it’s former self with labor broken and the DLC corporatists having taken over the Democratic party it has been reduced to shills for the Democrats and squabbling identity groups each with an agenda that prevents any sort of unity necessary for a mass movement for real change. Sucks but that is just the way it has to be.

And –

By choosing to focus on wedge culture war issues no matter how noble the cause may, be the ‘left’ has failed abysmally in only providing gasoline on the fire that is being ignited on the extreme right and this is going to be costly in impossible to overstate terms in the future as a new, ultra-virulent strain of cult of personality, anti-intellectual, Christian fascist vengeful malignancy percolates throughout this country. There is an ideologically driven cataclysm coming and it will have every bit the force of the Nazis, Stalinists or Khmer Rouge and the gutters will be filled with blood, the streets with violence and no guarantee of personal or family safety by the law or militarized police who will protect the wealthy and elites only while the shock troops hunt down liberals, gays and today’s Juden, the Muslims who have been so easily demonized by the Pentagon and the Zionists who seem to have reasserted an ugly but more subtle form of control with the newest blown out of proportion ‘terrorism’. The king of the Israeli fifth column in America, Senator Joseph Lieberman will soon be using his position as head of the Senate Heimat Security Committee to launch witch hunts and hold show trials which will rival those of Stalin and McCarthy and people like you and I will be accused of being ‘terrorist sympathaziers’, the propagand about white al Qaida has already been getting some mileage as the creeping cat feet of fascism march onwards. Just how important are social issues when the task of rolling back American fascism renders all else irrelevant?

Myself and others have warned about the triumphal premature celebrations in the defeat of the extreme right, electoral victories and half measures at silly centrist governance have allowed this vicious hydra to regenerate. The failure of the ‘left’ to generate the cohesiveness necessary in order to form a viable political mass movement and the embracement (no matter how tepid by some) of the corrupted Democratic party and the amateur that is Barack Obama has set up the dominoes perfectly for the perfect storm once the economic collapse finally does occur. The plethora of gay marriage iniatives in the early days of the insipid Obama administration smacked of a sort of arrogance among limousine liberals, as though the enemy had been vanquished and it was time to exact that revenge which would both terrible and satisfying in rolling back the dark ages iniatives or the Religious Right roundheads. But that focus provided cover for the rats that are the corporatists, banksters and lobbyists that rode into power tucked away inside Obama’s Trojan Horse and whose plunder and subsequent fall into public disfavor have driven Democrat and Obama’s poll ratings down faster than whaleshit sinking to the bottom of the sea and allowed the American fascists to regroup and now in the aftermath of the underwear bomber false flag, with the fear fresh anew the sheeple will tolerate ANY police state measures to protect their putrid little lives as they cower and submit.

I have a lot of friends on the left and I mean them no malice or insult in my breaking ranks, they are good people, probably better than I in that they are pure of heart and always seek to build a better society, to nurture and to foster love instead of hate. Sadly though, in the real world butterflies, zebras, moonbeams and fairy tales are just that, illusions when confronted with an enemy that recognizes no rules, decorum, compassion or fairness and when the time comes will happily leave liberals and progressives with only their eyes to cry with..if they are even that generous. You see, my friends never understood the nature of this war, and it is war and only those of staunch spirits, strong stomachs and the righteous tenacity to climb upon that wall and fight the bastards on their own terms are ultimately going to have a chance. As the ‘left’ is comprised today it can be dismissed, laughed at and generally ignored by the rotten bitches, bastards and corporations that run this system and that is exactly what Rahm Emanual, his sock puppet ‘boss’ and the rest of the establishment are doing, they are doing. Liberals and the ‘left’ have this view that ‘we are better than they are so we don’t have to stoop to their level’, but in the end they always lose.

And –

As Nietzsche spoke of fighting monsters and warned of the abyss well it does look back but ultimately humanity is doomed to war, it is out nature and to deny that is the ultimate form of self denial. The best resistance against militarism, the police state and war is coming from the libertarian front, for example Justin Raimondo’s Antiwar.com, I also have long admired the Ron Paul movement for calls for ending the Federal Reserve although I have been more than a bit dismayed to see it so easily co-opted by the corporate teabaggers and the Dick Armey of Darkness, the Palinazis and the idiot buffoon racist Birthers and religious fanatic Birthers and so has one of the founders of the movement. There is however a good deal of misdirected but righteous anger out there that is too easily hijacked and misdirected into the fascist brigades that the ‘left’ has failed to take advantage of to bolster it’s power and rally around some sort of real cause rather than the agendas of identity groups seeking government action to redress a history of injustice.

I have always been an independent with views more compatible with the old left, the labor left and the intense focus on social issues in which the activists ignore basic economic fairness, antiwar, pro-civil liberties matters in order to waste energy tilting at windmills. Let’s face it, no matter how moral that the crusade for gay marriage may be (basically another civil rights fight to eliminate the sad fact that in 21st century America that there are still people who are treated as second class citizens and face institutionalized persecution) – it’s a loser with large demographic blocks that nothing short of a mass die out over a period of a few decades is going to resolve and while it sucks, it’s the truth, shit, millions of morons are ready to launch a civil war because the fucking President is black and until the numbers of these anachronisms are reduced America will always be defined by the hatred of the other, which of course will always be exploited for maximum political gain by fascists. The younger generations do not care about whether one is gay or straight or has a different skin color, they are far more tolerant and acceptable than their parents or grandparents but the reality is that as America is currently constituted this is a loser for the ‘left’ and energy would be better spent in fighting imperialism, economic royalism, a vast for profit prison gulag and a militarized police that is determined to keep it full.

Also, global warming (the carbon footprint is akin to a carbon jackboot stomping up and down on a human face while the speculators get richer than Midas), immigration ‘reform’ and the ugly sort of imperialist liberalism that supports more war, military spending and murder to promote pet causes such as women’s rights and other emotional based malarkey is just intolerable. The Empire is broke, women are oppressed by institutions within our own borders and the cycle of militarism will not be seriously challenged as long as there are cruise missile liberals determined to use force to be Team America global police. I saw an ugliness among too many liberals and progressives during the past summer’s Iranian uprising, the ‘Green Revolution’ not to be confused of course with ‘Green Shoots, or ‘Green Energy’ and the ‘left’s’ piling on the regime of the devil Ahmadinejad only served to reinforce the incessant neocon propaganda and Zionist right-wing warmongering that has the doomsday clock ticking towards World War III. In all liklihood, Israel will attack Iran at some point in the coming year, Obama’s infatuation with the phony war on terror will ensure that the U.S. is sucked in which will be catastrophic but now that the antiwar movement has been marginalized by the foulness that is the Democrat party, now that Cindy Sheehan has served her purpose and been unceremoniously dumped and now that the ‘left’ has once again failed to mobilize around any serious issue that has crossover appeal we are all helpless to stop it.

I will devote my energies to trying to assist whatever remains of the antiwar movement (which isn’t much after most of the larger groups were co-opted by the filthy corporatist Democrats and Raht Emanual), continue to support the abolishment (or at the least auditing) of the Federal Reserve, fight for a reigning in of excessive corporate power, rail against the abuses of civil liberties, the police state, torture and surveillance and the menace of globalization. In a sad land of ignorance and hostility that has institutionalized torture with about half the population being down with it just how long is it going to be until they actually start to torture the other half?

The ‘left’ is too fragmented and there are far too many internal squabbles to mount any sort of a counter-movement against this irrational, ignorant and mean army of darkness that is suckled at the teat of the imperialist warfare state and lives in a world of unreality fed by a lifetime of indoctrination to illusions and lies and I am getting off of that woebegone merry-go-round once and for all before it either kills me or drives me totally fucking batshit.

And –

Loose the Rats: I remember once when I was in my early twenties, a certain restaurant that I had worked for had become so intolerable that there was a parting of the ways (mutual of course) regarding employment. Well, said restaurant naturally had a pretty high turnover rate so myself and a fellow former wage slave conspired one night over many a beer (and I must admit a bit of weed) to seek revenge against the owners. We would go in on a stealth mission and create a disturbance that would be guaran-fucking-teed to cause maximum chaos. So we went to a local pet shop and purchased two live rats which we smuggled in during peak hours in our backpacks and while we swilled a few beers in a booth in the back, ate chicken wings and were generally looked at as scum by our former co-worker wait staff we had a hard time not pissing our pants. Well, when we were finished, we paid our bills and let the rats out of the backpacks and just left the fucking place….we never knew what happened and that was the beauty of it. Maybe the rats caused a total scene and a mass evacuation and maybe business was forever wrecked for those satanic pricks who owned the goddamned place – somehow I doubt it because the damned place stayed in business. Perhaps though, the owners found the rats first before they ran off the paying customers and caused a pox of word of mouth advertising that was up there with the Bubonic Plague and changed their ways, I don’t know and shit, I really don’t know exactly were I am going with this little thread so I digress…..

Maybe the moral of the pet shop rats is that it was a shock that could have actually have been naïve enough to think that such a futile and stupid act would have changed hearts and minds but that was back in the 80’s when things were different and there was still some semblance of actual fucking sanity in this rotten shell of a country, back when it was STILL POSSIBLE to avoid the coming forced anal probes by militarized Darth Vader police goons in local shopping malls. Nothing that I was ever going to do on the left, much like loosing the rats on those miserable, skinflint, authoritarian pricks who ran that shithole of an eatery was going to do a damned thing to change anything or any body, it was just plaintive wails from planet shit directed at the choir…amen.

So to those on the ‘left’ who I have joined in battle with over the years only to realize that it is ultimately a futile struggle I say good luck and may your efforts bring fruit and some degree of satisfaction so long as they do not conflict with mine. I am going it alone from this point onward, bound by no loyalty to ideology, faction or any group, that only belongs to those who are allies the bigger fight at hand now. I would implore you who are able to transcend your past prejudices, ideals and indoctrinations to become a bit less dogmatic and much more pragmatic in reaching out to those who not only can be saved but who also are trying to break free from their own conditioning.

Granted it was a long excerpt but it pretty much expressed my feelings at the time, for better or worse I struck out on my own.  For some reason that I still can’t quite understand myself I thought that I could actually work at trying to salvage some of the wretches from the media creation that is the Tea Party, really just a collection of pissed off people with reasons to be pissed off but nowhere to go thanks to the abysmal failure of ‘the left’ in this country that was hijacked by cynical political operatives and deep-pocketed, tax chiseling plutocrats like the Koch Brothers. Being that a good amount of the pseudo-movement, other than the re-branded browshirts of the GOP base are remnants of what used to be the Ron Paul revolution, which due to the anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties and anti-Federal Reserve stance of Dr. Paul I long had been sympathetic to despite my loathing of libertarian economic theory. I got into this thing, writing and raising hell out of the need to stop fascism at all costs so I have always been of the opinion that a progressive-libertarian alliance would be sufficient to slow the machine, there was enough common ground and the other things could be hashed out later on after the fascist cancer was cut out. I followed up “A Farewell to Arms” with another piece entitled In Defense of Joe Stack that ensured that the break with the ‘left’ would be permanent. It was about as subtle as the attack on Colonel Kurtz’s compound at the end of Apocalypse Now.

I tried to work with the disaffected and even reached out to my local Glenn Beck teabagger klavern to try to talk sense but it was useless, those people are just too far gone, to propagandized, too angry and too deeply infiltrated by the dead enders of the the Republican base and the Religious Right, there is nothing left of what used to be the Ron Paul movement, like the party itself all non-adherents to the Ayn Rand doctrine of “Fuck You I’m Rich” and the Neocon dogma of imperial conquest and the sanctimonious place on the planet for the wart on the ass of humanity that is fortress Israel any who don’t drink the Kool Aid have been ousted. So much for that Idea. I have only worked sparingly on writing over the past year and a half, largely out of a sense of total disillusion and the absence of any sort of organized resistance to the ongoing destruction of what remains of the country that I was born into.

But the lone wolf thing just doesn’t work that well, not when the economy continues to collapse, with an assist to a fanatical Republican party that will block any effort by the extremely disappointing Obama to mediate and somehow get people back to work. The GOP has long been a bastion of a certain fascism, at least since the end of World War II and the tracks of the oligarchs along with their descent into gangster capitalism through their affiliations with rescued Nazi war criminals, rogue intelligence networks, stone cold military psychopaths and organized crime are easily traceable for one who devotes a bit of time to the job. What is ongoing in America today is a textbook example of how the capitalist mafia, the CIA operates abroad, Robert Parry’s recent piece entitled The GOP’s CIA Playbook: Destabilize the Country to Sweep Back Into Power is a must read and I excerpt the following:

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.

Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.

To stop this spread of “socialism,” nearly anything goes. Take, for example, Chile in the early 1970s when socialist President Salvador Allende won an election and took steps aimed at improving the conditions of the country’s poor.

Under the direction of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the CIA was dispatched to engage in psychological warfare against Allende’s government and to make the Chilean economy “scream.”

U.S. intelligence agencies secretly sponsored Chilean news outlets, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio, and supported “populist” uprisings of truckers and housewives. On the economic front, the CIA coordinated efforts to starve the Chilean government of funds and to drive unemployment higher.

Worsening joblessness could then be spun by the CIA-financed news outlets as proof that Allende’s policies didn’t work and that the only choice for Chile was to scrap its social programs. When Allende compromised with the Right, that had the additional benefit of causing friction between him and some of his supporters who wanted even more radical change.

As Chile became increasingly ungovernable, the stage was set for the violent overthrow of Allende, the installation of a rightist dictatorship, and the imposition of “free-market” economics that directed more wealth and power to Chile’s rich and their American corporate backers.

Though the Allende case in Chile is perhaps the best known example of this intelligence strategy (because it was investigated by a Senate committee in the mid-1970s), the CIA has employed this approach frequently around the world. Sometimes the target government is removed without violence, although other times a bloody coup d’etat has been part of the mix.

Home to Roost

So, it is perhaps fitting that a comparable approach to politics would eventually come home to roost in the United States, even to the point that some of the propaganda funding comes from outside sources (think of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)

Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side).

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

This vertically integrated media machine allows useful information to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to conservative magazines and book publishing. Right-wing propagandists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to all manner of public outlets to hammer home the talking points.

It’s pretty simple to see that the Republican party, which IS by definition a terrorist organization is hellbent on letting it all burn, so intent are they at mobilizing their millions of haters to defend a system that quite simply is as much a failure as the Communism that they for the better part of a half-century used to justify their plunder of nations, drug trafficking and money laundering and racketeering scams. Now fully metastasized, the menace of full blown carnivorous capitalism has come home to feed, those who really run this lunatic funhouse will continue to exploit economic misery, racism and fear using their media messaging machine and Operation Gladio style entrenched stay behind network until Americans are in the streets killing each other while they continue to suck the blood from the dessicated carcass of what used to be a land of opportunity.  That day is coming, while our corporate media crawls around in the semen stained underpants of Anthony Weiner or peddles more tabloid pornography about dead children to the lemmings, electronically colonizing their brains the world is erupting outside of our borders, look at Greece, soon there will be a triggering event and the chaos will come home, progressives, liberals and non-politicized folks are going to have to make a choice, kill or be killed, it’s the law of the jungle and it has been embraced by those who run it. GABOS. – Game Ain’t Based On Sympathy.

Plumb Mad Dog Mean: The system has failed and the day of reckoning is coming, best saddle up and get prepared lest you be destroyed by it, read some history on what happens when the thugs are unleashed. If you happen to have children ponder how you would like to see them raped in front of you, the last thing that you witness before your own murder. The armies of darkness are already connected and are awaiting their orders from their handlers on the right-wing propaganda machine, the real economic conditions continue to create misery and the always convenient scapegoats are produced.The time has come to cast aside any notions of being able to rationalize with these people because it isn’t going to happen. One could always flee the country, much like the Jews who could see the writing on the wall fled Nazi Germany before Hitler’s murder machine was operating at peak efficiency but that is expensive, prohibitive and let’s face it, the rest of the world, save the Muslim countries is under the control of the same type of elitist rich pigs that America is and the war machine is hellbent on destroying the Muslim world as surely as the American Indians were laid to waste to make room for expansionism and capitalist greed. The time to fight is now, no more fucking around, especially with the political process – it just doesn’t work!

Embracing a New Radicalism: The only way to fight back against the fascist endgame is to return to our past, prior to the “New Left” that arose out of the protest movements of the Sixties and that which to this day far too many continue to embrace despite it’s outdated model. There will be no more mass protests, the days of turning out into the streets is over, the right-wing has ensured that not only will there be no media coverage but their goons ala the scumbaggers are drooling over the prospect of being unleashed, like the Rockefellers of yore who bussed in murderous freaks to break strikes so will the front groups of Koch Industries and their ilk bus in vicious haters to bust up the hated libruls [sic]. Those who cling to a resurgence of that form of mass protest are as delusional as those who still believe that change can be affected at the ballot box, While there continue to be suckups, sycophants and self-infatuated groupies who continue to buy Brand Obama and the even worse Brand Democrat a return to the radicalism of old, rather than the sign carrying, keyboard thumping ineffective form of activism that exists on the pathetic remnants of the “professional left” today. It is not effective and shooting a few marbles from a slingshot is not going to put a dent in the Deathstar that is the American fascist capitalist infrastructure, it’s militarized police state, high-tech surveillance and disinformation machine and legions of trained activists and spokespeople. For what is needed, I would suggest listening to Chris Hedges, a man as reviled by the “professional left” and it’s venal gatekeepers like HBO’s Bill Maher and his ilk as he is by the mouth-breathing fascist droogs on the right. Hedges has always been a hero of mine and his work has continued to rise in order to address the threat that we face today. Hedges, who recently wrote a scathing book entitled The Death of the Liberal Class is taking his game to the next level, his recent work and speeches, like this one on The Myth of Human Progress are essential for those who are serious about surviving. Hedges addresses the rancid putrescence of the failed liberal establishment and doesn’t mince words:

We will be saved only with the birth of a new militant radicalism, one that defies all formal power structures including the Democratic party.

The failure of the liberal class whose role in society is designed to prevent unchecked assault by centralized power is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute your airwaves, 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, sanctify unfettered capitalism and become a source of personal enrichment, let unions wither under corporate assault, let social services and public education be gutted and stripped of funding, let Wall Street carry out fraud, deception and plunder with impunity and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class and much of the left has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multi-culturalism, identity politics and tolerance.. a word Martin Luther King never used and forgot about the primacy of justice. We chatter about something called the American Dream now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all of the levers of power that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax and we are being shoved back into the cage. Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education .. nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semi-literate…the rise of amoral politicians such as  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who pose as liberals while selling their souls and betraying basic liberal and democratic principles for corporate money have left us largely defenseless.

The last vestiges of unionized in the public sector are reduced to protesting in states like Wisconsin for collective bargaining – in short the right to ask employers for fair working conditions. This shows how far labor and the country has deteriorated and it looks as though even this basic right to ask as well as raise money through union dues has at least for the moment been successfully revoked in Madison. The Democratic party and the remnants of organized labor steered passions in Wisconsin away from a general strike where workers should have gone to tepid attempts to recall legislators. The public debate meanwhile dominated by corporate controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent our reconfiguration into a neo-feudal society. The airwaves are saturated with good looking and charming corporate apologists. They ask us why public sector employees have benefits sneeringly called entitlements while non-unionized and working class people are denied and the argument is ingenious, it pits desperate worker against desperate worker in a mad scramble for scraps. It is of course the wrong question, why we should ask don’t working men and women have health insurance, pension plans, job protection and living wages and until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping as those who went before us did, that the elite will always promote itself at our expense, we are doomed to a 21^st century serfdom. The elite with no check left on their greed and criminality are gorging on money, while they are slashing basic services, budgets for schools, fire fighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly so WE will pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out 14 trillion dollars of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings.

Hedges is reviled by the same type of vapid, self-righteous cretins who I chose to disassociate myself from when I left ‘the left’, I refuse to be a “team player” in the “post-partisan era” and for those who would crucify one as myself on the cross of political correctness for my rhetorical flourishes – they can go and fuck themselves. I have been called everything: whack job, fascist, misogynist, Jew hater, homophobe, heretic and reactionary, coming from feckless weaklings with no stomach for the rough stuff I suppose that is a badge of honor. Being that I am now totally dispensing of all bullshit let it be known that first and foremost that I fucking hate everybody, spare me the pox of political correctness that is what drove me away from the butterflies, moonbeams, zebras and fairy tales crowd in the first place. Others should shun those who would negotiate with fascists who should be destroyed and tolerate the most intolerant in order to wear their high-hats, they would be arguing that “they are better than that” by not engaging those who wish to destroy them while they are in the cattle cars being trucked off to the gas chambers and forced labor camps.

So, it is with this that I now return to my roots, a rhetorical bomb-thrower hellbent on engaging and destroying the fascists, collateral damage be damned. Time to get plumb mad dog motherfucking mean because you don’t bring a protest sign to a knife fight. 

A nickel’s worth of my two cents

EE

Flag Suckers Rejoice as Obama Waves bin Laden’s Bloody Scalp

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

Mark Twain

The local marine life has yet to begin to digest the rotting carcass of the now officially deceased arch-enemy of Murka, Osama bin Laden but the bottom-feeders of the American political system and it’s media support system are in full feeding frenzy. USA! USA! USA! is being chanted at sporting events following the rendition of the bloody good nationalist anthem the Star Spangled Banner or the ode to the incestuous breeding of war religion and nationalist frenzy “God Bless America”. The beer-sodden buffoons watching the pro basketball and hockey playoffs in swanky tax payer subsidized venues as well as in thousands of smaller gatherings across the fruited plain are whooping it uo. In the third day of orgasmic national euphoria following the coming out party of one Barack Hussein Obama, a man who was born in the USA and now has bagged the mother of all trophies much to the enduring shame of the swine, vermin and useful idiots that used to be the vastly overrated political force of nature called the Tea Party. You almost have to feel for the poor Republican fascist slobs who bet the entire house on their ability to infiltrate, hijack and then manipulate that now pitiable mass of angry, low-information, pasty, lard-assed and perpetually pissed off white folk into a re-branding of the same old god n’ guns, gay bashing, racist garbage that had been their ultimate trump card for decades. The Republican Tea Party, not that long ago heralded as real change that you can believe in by the propaganda organs of the oligarchy such  as the vaunted Wall Street Journal has suffered monumental and irreversible damage in less than a fortnight. It is almost surreal that just last week the full throated roar of the corporate media propaganda machine and their newest celebrity avenger, the Donald, were closing in on the wounded and feckless Obama, a man  equally detested by the pigs who hide their vitriolic bigotry under the cover of the Republican party banner as well as his own base for his callous and endless series of betrayals. Then lightning struck, the storms rolled in much like ravenous destructive tornadoes through the very heart of peckerwood nation in Alabama and Obama emerged forever changed, toughened by the scrum and brandishing the bloody scalp of the villain of all villains, Osama bin Laden like a powerful talisman. 

I have personally been on record on a fairly consistent basis throughout the years as believing that Osama bin Laden was in fact dead. Somehow it was hard to imagine a prolonged period of longevity for a man accused of heading up the greatest ‘terrorist’ attack in U.S. history who was dragging around a dialysis machine though the most rugged parts of the Afghan mountains. Who knows, maybe he did survive in order to be hunted down and have a couple of caps busted into his skull over the weekend by U.S. Navy Seals who were likely under orders not to take him alive. But if that is the case, then it really brings about far more troubling questions, for example why exactly was he still alive, living in pretty nice digs in a Pakistani military town? That the United States would NOT have known about this sooner and taken him out for his alleged crimes would lead a skeptic to believe that just maybe he was still alive for a reason. Perhaps a reason like just maybe he was still an active intelligence asset, laying low and kept under protection by an ally in Pakistan until he outlived his usefulness or perhaps he was going to go rogue and spill his guts about his days in the semi-employ of the USA. This would explain the killing and subsequent dumping of the body, after all, dead men tell no tales but the absence of a body also begs the question of whether any of it is real at all, I always keep thinking about what a son of a bitch it must have been to lug around that dialysis machine though the Hindu Kush.


But I Digress…..



All that George W. Bush ever had was Saddam’s gun, now Mr. Obama has the mojo and has grabbed a ride upon the back of the raging beast of a new nationalism while the Republicans and their hideously botched and badly whupped angry white male teabaggers slinked away with nary a fig leaf to provide cover for their now embarrassingly inadequate pee pees. They have once and forever been exposed as the bald-faced lie that they always were – Tea Party my ass!. Newt Gingrich? Please, get the fuck out of here. The Donald? Like his pet birthers, his sorry, obnoxious ass is yesterday’s garbage. Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann? You gotta be fucking kidding, the Thelma and Louise of the neoconservative movement are so yesterday now, shorn of their Obama the Muslim and Sharia law cant, whatever remains of the GOP isn’t about to let those two dizzy, crazed bitches drive it over the cliff. Mike Huckabee? Even Mr. fascism wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross has turned on the free-falling star demagogue Glenn Beck. Mitt Romney? The smartest of the bunch from the get go, he has announced that he is skipping the gathering of loons and closet Nazis that is the Republican party debate later this week. Ron Paul? His anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties stance is anathema to the party of the plutocrats and blood drinkers. With a wave of Ayn Rand worshipping Koch Brothers owned governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Florida taking flak and alienating more non-dead-enders by the minute, their Republican state legislatures eschewing their once promised work on jobs and economic rejuvenation to instead focus on revoking women’s rights, busting unions, cutting budgets for all but their crony projects and destroying education as we know it are about as popular as genital herpes and will likely be either recalled or voted out of office in the next election cycle. 

This is the metaphorical perfect storm for the Republican party, a collection of America hating, fascist fifth columnists that should have been eradicated when George W. Bush’s helicopter lifted off the White House lawn but survived only because they could appeal to the emotions of those whose gullibility knows no bounds and whose stupidity is incomprehensible. They are now facing their Götterdämmerung, it must be pretty bleak down in the bunker as the Russian army is closing in and it’s going to be sweet justice to see them hoisted on their own petard of 9/11 and the War on Terror. With the only card left to play, the coming holy war over the raising of the debt ceiling, the GOP is on the brink of suicide, failing to raise the bar is only going to drive away the moneychangers who will side with the now heroic Obama. The exodus of plutocrats other than the Bircher Koch Brothers whose family fortune came from their daddy building oil refineries for Stalin will leave the party rather than face the prospect of a limit be placed on the national credit card that funds their addictions. In the end, which is coming soon, the fascist Republicans who through decades of sociopathic and cocksure, ruthless Mayberry Machievellian cynicism combined with a regressive ideological perversion courtesy of a symbiosis with the delusional tent preachers who hit it big off their ability to mobilize Rapture freaks, stone crazy dimwits and recalcitrant neo-confederates has ensured that it would carry within it’s pustulent, sweating belly the self-destruct mechanism that will soon be triggered. 


Any sane Republican (and that is pretty much an oxymoron these days) is like Ripley heading for the escape pod on the Nostromo. There has never in the history of this country been an entity that is so desperately in need of a purge, a massive makeover and a mange dip than the GOP. Once a legitimate entity with much to offer it shed itself of those who were rational but were deemed to be heretics by the neocon utopians, loyal Americans like economist and former Reagan Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, now a prolific writer who has spent the better part of the last decade trying to fight the brownshirts that took over his party, rudely casting out the rational in favor of the greed-crazed monsters and the war freaks. A good deal of what ails America today is due to a failed political system, an opposition party that lives in a reality based world and has more at stake than a lust for power backed by a deranged mob of berserkers seeking to use the power of the state to punish their enemies and erect their perfect society has no future. That is going to become very apparent to all but the dumbest of the dumb, the purebred haters sequestered behind the cornbread curtain who were I a religious man would venture to suggest just reaped the wrath of God when the tornadoes came.

Certainly Looks More Real than the Other Fake Videos and Pictures of “UBL”

Sweet Serendipity: Little more than a week ago Barack Obama was little more than the exemplification of failure at every level, the economy is still horrible, gas prices are spiking, joblessness is rampant, an out of control Federal Reserve continues to shovel more and more counterfeit money into the maw of a crack ho economy. There are also the wars that are multiple, costly and unwinnable, his enemies smelled blood and were closing in for the kill, allegedly a swarm of private investigators were allegedly dispatched to Hawaii to hunt down the real story of Obama’s birth certificate, the tabloid media was drooling over the prospect of a long-running and cruel crucifiction running up to the primaries. Then, in some sort of though the looking glass Horatio Alger story the President sweeps like a whirling dervish from the outhouse to the penthouse and in an act of raw blasphemy in a culture that reveres celebrity and greed as the highest of all human virtues rudely evicts reality television star and real estate swindler Donald Trump from it. 


Obama, now ironically eight years to the day that his predecessor George W. Bush landed on the deck of the USS Lincoln in a Top Gun style flight suit that boasted a codpiece that must have had John Holmes rolling over in his grave, has the nation eating out of his hand. Now a country filled with dangerous freaks whose basic understanding of life can be summed up by their basic ability to comprehend an us versus them, cinematic, fantasy view of the world as it has been fed to them by John Wayne, Dirty Harry, Rambo, Jack Bauer or any other renegade,bad assed, rule-breaking tough guy has at least for the moment united in support of Obama for his successful slaying of the ultimate evildoer. Were he a serious man with serious solutions he would use this rare opportunity to seize the controls of the good ship America and drive it out of the rancid and regressive wormhole that it plummeted into after 9/11 thanks to the political exploitation of the horror of that day. First and foremost, get the fuck out of Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. Now is the time to declare victory in the phony war on terror and come home. Maybe it’s just bullshit and fantasy that Obama can claim to have won the GWOT but it is just a different spin on the Reagan won the Cold War myth, and Christ knows that Obama has been open in his admiration of The Gipper. It will be hard to not do the rational and right thing for the country and just leave that sucking black hole of money, drugs and death, especially if the early reviews from the sycophants in the media carry any currency with our newest Murkan hero, here is a sampling:

From Dana ‘Skull and Bones’ Milbank over at the Washington Post

The White House advance team put the presidential podium at an odd angle in the East Room, so that an oil painting showing George Washington would be in the shot behind President Obama. This made it appear from a certain view that Washington was patting Obama on the back.

It’s not such a stretch to think that the first president would join the backslapping over Sunday’s killing of Osama bin Laden. Heck, even Dick Cheney was congratulating Obama.

From David Frum, former Bush speechwriter responsible for coining the phrase ‘The Axis of Evil”

Now, stop questioning Obama’s legitimacy

So much to say about the long-awaited visiting of justice upon Osama bin Laden.

But there’s one effect on U.S. domestic politics that deserves a thought:

Here’s hoping that we have at last seen the end of this ugly insinuation that there is something less than fully American about the black president with the exotic name.

On Wednesday came the release of the long-form birth certificate that provided the final decisive refutation of the birther lie that the President Obama was born elsewhere than the United States.

On Saturday at the White House Correspondents Dinner, the most visible proponent of that lie, the blowhard TV tycoon Donald Trump, was publicly ridiculed in front of an audience of 3,000 people, without a voice to excuse or defend him.

And then late Sunday, the president told the nation of the execution of his order to shoot and kill bin Laden.

The success of the bin Laden operation is a great moment for the United States — and not only for the United States.

But it is also a deservedly bad moment for some of the destructive forces in American public life, for those who have substituted for ordinary politics a sustained campaign to brand Obama as an outsider, as un-American, as non-American.

From Haaretz:

When Obama yesterday called former President George W. Bush to inform him of the end of the decade of the exhausting hunt, both knew that without Bush’s wars in Asia, Obama would not have been elected president, and that after being elected, he continued on his predecessor’s path in fighting terror and interrogating prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. He used the same secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and the same commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

But since everything is personal and everything is a matter of timing, Commander in Chief Obama will get all the glory and will hope that Petraeus doesn’t give in to Republican wooing to retire from the military and run against Obama. To judge by the outburst of public enthusiasm, bin Laden’s end has put to rest doubts about Obama’s devotion to his homeland and to concerns that he is soft and sympathizes with Islam. More than his birth certificate, his speech in which he waved bin Laden’s scalp has crowned Obama head of the American tribe.

It is hard to now imagine something as borderline retarded as demanding Obama’s college transcripts to show that he unfairly benefited from Affirmative Action being taken with any seriousness outside of FOX or any other gaggle of cyber idiots; and so much for the now neutered storyline about Obama’s father being kicked out of Harvard. In a land where George W. Bush can brag that he was a “C” student at Yale and whose grandfather Prescott Bush‘s Union Banking Corporation was actually shut down by FDR for laundering money for the Nazis under the Trading With the Enemies Act such hypocrisy only serves to further illustrate the infantile willful ignorance of the public at large as well as the enduring success of a bought and paid for corporate media that ensures that huge demographic segments remain electronically lobotomized.

In the land of America in the New American Century there is no shortage of idiots, the system needs them to remain that way in order to exist. Barack Hussein Obama stared into the jaws of the monster and through a combination of luck, cunning, hubris of the opposition or something else has survived. 

Barring the Mayan predictions of the 2012 end of the planet Mr. Obama is assured of another four years in charge of the armed madhouse. 

Book it Don-O!

After Bin Laden: Onward to Weimar or Back to America

Now that the death of Osama bin Laden, allegedly the kingpin of the ‘terrorist’ attacks on September 11, 2001 that threw the United States into a bizarre parallel universe where war became peace and lies became conventional wisdom in a land where a choking, always present fear was the coin of the realm has been announced, it is a strange period, an interregnum. It is like that certain  ‘moment of clarity’ that alcoholics occasionally experience, the one time that they can emerge from their disease, see the wreckage of their lives and be shocked into corrective action. In any sane country this could be a moment to reflect upon what we have become, all as the neocon tools and their propaganda have insisted has been justified on the existence of this evil evil man. We have had our civil liberties shredded, the Constitution has been gutted, the insane doctrine of preventative war has led to a Middle East and parts of Eurasia aflame, the bodies of both the guilty and the innocent can be stacked more than halfway to Jesus. We have seen our airports turned into abominable places where law abiding citizens are treated with suspicion, ruled over by drooling TSA government thugs, forced to remove our shoes, march silently through the naked body scanners promoted by the corrupt former head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, the ‘pat downs’, a grossly Orwellian term that in true American style puts a nice sugar coating on sexual assault have become more aggressive, children are felt up in front of their parents, potentially causing lasting psychological damage and if anyone dares to complain about it, the TSA has now come out and stated that they would be targeted for even more harassment.

Police departments have been militarized under the guise of fighting terrorism, a term that has over the last decade morphed into something as vague as to label legitimate political dissent as terror. The country has established a vast network of secret torture gulags or black sites, extraordinary rendition (or kidnapping) is standard operational procedure. Torture by the way now is the official law of the land, thanks to a sadistic gang of psychopaths in positions of power and assisted greatly by foreign media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose state favored, right-wing propaganda machine FOX polluted millions of minds with their insipid torture promoting series 24 featuring America’s favorite Nazi Jack Bauer. We are all spied on constantly, arms of the national security state such as the NSA are out of control and engage in data-mining and predictive analytic patterning that comes very close to Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and the Department of Pre-Crime, if not official government entities then the spying is farmed out to the private intelligence firms that have raged through the nation like a mutant form of kudzu, all of it is being funded on the backs of the taxpayers who are forced to pay for our own enslavement. Chances are that if you live in a major city you have at least one fusion center where military, big government and local police intersect to spy on you. Habeas corpus is a thing of the past now and any American could find themselves scooped up and disappeared, just like in Stalin’s Russia or in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, totalitarian states that were built on the big lie of protecting the people from terror.

What truly bothered me yesterday was the outpouring of national bloodlust over the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden. There were parties, fans at sporting events chanted USA! USA! USA!, the media was filled with slavering platitudes and other dreck celebrating the death of the evil one, even Sports Illustrated got in on the national orgy of vengeance slaked with ace football writer Peter King (not the I.RA. terrorist supporting, anti-Muslim wanna be McCarthy from Long Island who shamelessly used the news to deliver a kick to the hated Obama and to endorse torture) leading off his weekly column with a bit of red, white and blue rah rah. There were homages paid to national unity anew, just like that warm feeling of a national mob mentality that largely existed after 9/11 itself, never have I seen such an orgy of rapturous glee over an assassination. It could be that this is just a cathartic moment, one where a people beaten into submission by fear and yoked by a fanatical government hellbent on creating a police state finally rid themselves of both their demon and the fear that has enslaved them while they were beggared, ripped off and foreclosed upon to finance the hunt for the national villain .

More likely though it will be something far darker as things in the new American century have a tendency to be. The renewed unity comes at a time of severe economic privation, an increasingly restive populace fed a constant stream of anti-Muslim propaganda to dehumanize ‘the enemy’ and a fascist political party in the Republicans that is looking for that man on the white horse, desperately seeking to return to power in order to force their dystopian vision of a society upon others and now there is a police state infrastructure to back it up. The past week may have beaten back the more vile elements when Obama produced his long form birth certificate and newly minted GOP gladiator Donald Trump was publicly ridiculed but the bin Laden death (sans body as it may be) could rather than provide the aforementioned catharsis could instead go the other way and serve to justify all that has taken place since the day the planes hit the buildings. It is already being spun that the fascist, surveillance, torture state was instrumental in bagging the bad ass bogeymen, as the end justifies the means and the wars could despite the looming bankruptcy of the country be expanded rather than winded down now that bin Laden is officially deceased.

The beast has been loosed and now it has acquired a taste for blood….

Just my two cents over the mornin’ cup o’ joe

EE

After Bin Laden: Onward to Weimar or Back to America

Now that the death of Osama bin Laden, allegedly the kingpin of the ‘terrorist’ attacks on September 11, 2001 that threw the United States into a bizarre parallel universe where war became peace and lies became conventional wisdom in a land where a choking, always present fear was the coin of the realm has been announced, it is a strange period, an interregnum. It is like that certain  ‘moment of clarity’ that alcoholics occasionally experience, the one time that they can emerge from their disease, see the wreckage of their lives and be shocked into corrective action. In any sane country this could be a moment to reflect upon what we have become, all as the neocon tools and their propaganda have insisted has been justified on the existence of this evil evil man. We have had our civil liberties shredded, the Constitution has been gutted, the insane doctrine of preventative war has led to a Middle East and parts of Eurasia aflame, the bodies of both the guilty and the innocent can be stacked more than halfway to Jesus. We have seen our airports turned into abominable places where law abiding citizens are treated with suspicion, ruled over by drooling TSA government thugs, forced to remove our shoes, march silently through the naked body scanners promoted by the corrupt former head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, the ‘pat downs’, a grossly Orwellian term that in true American style puts a nice sugar coating on sexual assault have become more aggressive, children are felt up in front of their parents, potentially causing lasting psychological damage and if anyone dares to complain about it, the TSA has now come out and stated that they would be targeted for even more harassment.

Police departments have been militarized under the guise of fighting terrorism, a term that has over the last decade morphed into something as vague as to label legitimate political dissent as terror. The country has established a vast network of secret torture gulags or black sites, extraordinary rendition (or kidnapping) is standard operational procedure. Torture by the way now is the official law of the land, thanks to a sadistic gang of psychopaths in positions of power and assisted greatly by foreign media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose state favored, right-wing propaganda machine FOX polluted millions of minds with their insipid torture promoting series 24 featuring America’s favorite Nazi Jack Bauer. We are all spied on constantly, arms of the national security state such as the NSA are out of control and engage in data-mining and predictive analytic patterning that comes very close to Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and the Department of Pre-Crime, if not official government entities then the spying is farmed out to the private intelligence firms that have raged through the nation like a mutant form of kudzu, all of it is being funded on the backs of the taxpayers who are forced to pay for our own enslavement. Chances are that if you live in a major city you have at least one fusion center where military, big government and local police intersect to spy on you. Habeas corpus is a thing of the past now and any American could find themselves scooped up and disappeared, just like in Stalin’s Russia or in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, totalitarian states that were built on the big lie of protecting the people from terror.

What truly bothered me yesterday was the outpouring of national bloodlust over the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden. There were parties, fans at sporting events chanted USA! USA! USA!, the media was filled with slavering platitudes and other dreck celebrating the death of the evil one, even Sports Illustrated got in on the national orgy of vengeance slaked with ace football writer Peter King (not the I.RA. terrorist supporting, anti-Muslim wanna be McCarthy from Long Island who shamelessly used the news to deliver a kick to the hated Obama and to endorse torture) leading off his weekly column with a bit of red, white and blue rah rah. There were homages paid to national unity anew, just like that warm feeling of a national mob mentality that largely existed after 9/11 itself, never have I seen such an orgy of rapturous glee over an assassination. It could be that this is just a cathartic moment, one where a people beaten into submission by fear and yoked by a fanatical government hellbent on creating a police state finally rid themselves of both their demon and the fear that has enslaved them while they were beggared, ripped off and foreclosed upon to finance the hunt for the national villain .

More likely though it will be something far darker as things in the new American century have a tendency to be. The renewed unity comes at a time of severe economic privation, an increasingly restive populace fed a constant stream of anti-Muslim propaganda to dehumanize ‘the enemy’ and a fascist political party in the Republicans that is looking for that man on the white horse, desperately seeking to return to power in order to force their dystopian vision of a society upon others and now there is a police state infrastructure to back it up. The past week may have beaten back the more vile elements when Obama produced his long form birth certificate and newly minted GOP gladiator Donald Trump was publicly ridiculed but the bin Laden death (sans body as it may be) could rather than provide the aforementioned catharsis could instead go the other way and serve to justify all that has taken place since the day the planes hit the buildings. It is already being spun that the fascist, surveillance, torture state was instrumental in bagging the bad ass bogeymen, as the end justifies the means and the wars could despite the looming bankruptcy of the country be expanded rather than winded down now that bin Laden is officially deceased.

The beast has been loosed and now it has acquired a taste for blood….

Just my two cents over the mornin’ cup o’ joe

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 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