Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.
—-The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking… They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. … … They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. … … They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. … And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it,
One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organized religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.
-Trent Reznor
Atlas Yawned, Jesus Wept: The high priestess of the religion of “fuck you I got mine” who is novelist and cult leader Ayn Rand has always been a driving force for the destroyers of economies and the anal raping of the working class. Rand, who emigrated to America from her native Russia suffered from a delusional worldview resulting from her families experience during the rise of communism during the revolution days. Rather than learning a valuable lesson from the oppressive thugs who rose to power and then murdered with impunity and stole whatever the hell they wanted to all under the guise of a corrupt ideology instead became some sort of intellectual prophet of a ridiculous school of thought called objectivism which can be boiled down into bumper sticker simplicity as FUCK THE POOR. Rand worked her way up by writing screenplays and eventually novels which took on an increasingly political theme that demonized the state and basic human cooperation and decency which endeared her to the sort of high-rolling assholes that wrecked the country and while waging class war under the battle flag of free market capitalism they are nothing more than the parasites, looters and moochers that Rand condemned. Rand hit it big with her novel The Fountainhead in which the selfish prick hero Howard Roark waged battle and triumphed over an evil socialist system, although the book was rejected by twelve publishers it as all dreck does eventually finds a sucker, usually a self-interested one. The book was published and Rand was well on her way to becoming a cultural icon with a cause celebre. While Rand is often praised as a libertarian idol by selfish dolts it was prominent libertarian thinker Murray N. Rothbard who wrote on The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult, the glassy-eyed members would go on to use the work of Rand to justify the strip-mining of American society through removing the regulatory restraints on financial sociopaths whose crony capitalism is far closer to textbook style fascism than the cynical individuality that Rand often invoked.
An article from Mother Jones magazine pegs the goddess of greed dead on, the piece is entitled And the Rand Played On states that:
Rand’s particular genius has always been her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed. This topsy-turvy philosophy has echoed through the blame-the-victim ranting of CNBC host Rick Santelli and the tax-day tea parties. In this world, it is not possible to admit that the rich and the Republicans may have been undone by their own greed and cluelessness.
Greenspan’s rise is instead a tale of a gerbilish mirror-gazer who flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attentions of Wall Street for twenty consecutive years – in the process laying the intellectual foundation for a generation of orgiastic greed and overconsumption and turning the Federal Reserve into a permanent bailout mechanism for the super-rich.
—
Greenspan met Rand in the early fifties after leaving Columbia, attending meetings at Rand’s apartment with a circle of like-minded intellectual jerk-offs who called themselves by the ridiculous name of “The Collective” and who provided Greenspan with the desired forum for social ascent.
Rand’s magnum opus of bullshit was the massive tome Atlas Shrugged, a 1,200 + page hunk of rancid tripe and sanctimonious garbage so incredibly boring that I was never able to finish the damned thing and I am well accustomed to plowing through tedious volumes of writing. Hell…I couldn’t stand it after the first couple of hundred pages, it is not only as large as a phone book but as entertaining as well. Rand wrote it while holed up in her New York digs jacked up on amphetamines which could explain the length of her screed. The plot is based on the wealthy being portrayed as social victims and seeking out a cultish figure named John Galt as though he is the messiah who can deliver them absolution for their self-centered, sociopathic natures and justification for their throwing a tantrum and withdrawing their ‘gifts’ from a society that doesn’t deserve them primarily because they are not turned into demigods like Donald Trump. Galt has bolted from a society that he like all snobs see no common interest in being good citizens of despite such concepts as basic human decency and morality. Rand uses a climactic speech from Galt that runs from 60-75 pages long depending on the edition as the centerpiece for Shrugged which is very nicely summed up by Taibbi as:
Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, for instance, remains a towering monument to humanity’s capacity for unrestrained self-pity – it’s a bizarre and incredibly long-winded piece of aristocratic paranoia in which a group of Randian supermen decide to break off from the rest of society and form a pure free-market utopia, and naturally the parasitic lower classes immediately drown in their own laziness and ineptitude
The book fairly gushes with the resentment these poor “Atlases” (they are shouldering the burdens of the whole world!) feel toward those who try to use “moral guilt” to make them share their wealth. In the climatic scene the Randian hero John Galt sounds off in defense of self-interest and attacks the notion of self-sacrifice as a worthy human ideal in a speech that lasts seventy-five pages.
It goes without saying that only a person possessing a mathematically inexpressible level of humorless self-importance would subject anyone to a seventy-five page speach about anything. Hell, even Jesus Christ barely cracked two pages with the Sermon on the Mount. Rand/Galt manages it, however, and this speech lays the foundation of objectivism, a term that was probably chosen because “greedism” isn’t catchy enough.”
Amen! The oligarchy has Rand down and is currently in the process of propagandizing the costumed idiots that are the teabaggers into adopting Randian philosophy in promoting the filthy Republican 2012 budget and the destruction of Medicare and Social Security in order to give more tax cuts to the “Atlases”. There has been a recent campaign by the front group for tax chiselers, Dick Armey’s Orwellian named Freedom Works to promote a low-budget film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged using a guerilla marketing campaign designed to circumvent the librul [sic] media and mobilize their mouth-breathing brownshirts to bully theater chains into showing the flick. How effective the introduction of the real Rand into a disorganized, anti-intellectual, semi-literate gaggle of angry rabble whose fourth grade level reading skills are challenged by the ghost written books of Glenn Beck is unknown. The movie has gotten for the most part poor reviews outside of the normal neocon propaganda organs thus reason for the end run around the traditional marketing methods that would normally promote such epics. It is all just more of the same crap though, there will likely be many meetup groups in which selective portions of Rand’s book will be spoonfed to the lemmings much like the constitution was after the GOP co-opted the movement. It’s going to be just like bible study groups where the peaceful and humane messages of Jesus Christ are twisted like inflatable balloon animals into justification for prejudice, servitude, war-mongering and idolatry of the money changers and since so many of the scumbaggers overlap between the churches of false prophets it should be at least marginally successful. Sales of Atlas Shrugged will surely skyrocket although I suspect the majority of those buying will be bored to death after a few dozen pages and simply park it in a place where it can be easily observed by fellow miscreants and travelers.
Regarding Ayn Rand, I will give the devil her due for one thing – she was a devout atheist who allegedly once admonished the iconic neoconservative propagandist William F. Buckley by telling him that “you are too intelligent to belive in God.” That the teabaggers and right-wing freaks in general have latched onto Rand’s rapacious looter theology while they pound their bibles and caterwaul about the evils of liberalism, altruism and scientific advancement is just another example of both their hypocrisy and their imbecility. But the fascists are relentless, well-funded and with Ayn Rand and God on their side are determined to once and for all overthrow the system and the secret Muslim in the White House who doesn’t have a birth certificate. There are no shortage of con-artists, grifters, liars, cheats and flim-flammers who don’t understand the great political benefit of having millions of easily hoodwinked and malleable useful idiots at their disposal which is why a guy like Donald Trump has such appeal. In the end of course we all lose but there is no shortage of nincompoops and jackasses who are happy to wage war against phantom menaces and have no problem whatsoever in putting their children to bed at night cold and hungry as long as they can stick it to the enemy du jour that is rolled out by the plutocrats who depend on their remaining ignorant as an insurance policy.
Really, in the end what it all boils down to is people who base their entire lives and form their belief systems based on one book should not only be ignored but should be shunned like lepers. Whether that one holy book happens to be The Bible, Atlas Shrugged or even Gray’s Sports Almanac for that matter it makes no difference, given man’s capacity for learning and the availability of information if one just gets the fuck off of the couch and turns off the television people who live in an impenetrable bubble of willful ignorance that limits their worldview to the delusions of primitives, madmen, snake oil salesmen (or women) and money grubbers is a misfit. Why is it that in our creeping empire of idiocy that such simpletons and bags of shit bursting at the seams with false morality and certitude are accepted as rational people? It is only in the doomed and dying former land of plenty that rationality could be perversely turned upside down and idiocy worshipped.
As Leonard Cohen once proclaimed, I have seen the future and it’s murder….
Just my two cents
EE
– 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”.
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.
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.
Just my two cents
EE
– 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”.
There will be no help for anybody but the pigs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase coming from the Obama administration, face it people, the only change that the Pope of Hope really ever stood for was left cover for the gargantuan redistribution of wealth upwards. Obama is quite obviously even worse than Bush as the wars continue and mount in number (under the malarkey guise of humanitarian interventions), the torture never stops, the constitution continues to be disemboweled and the airports are filled with dooling thugs in TSA uniforms with the full blessing of the U.S. government to feel up prepubescent little boys and girls. Hell, Bush never could have gotten away with that one and when it comes to economic relief, Le Enfant Terrible did actually send people checks for $600. I always got a sardonic little kick out of the silly liberals who only made excuses for Obama (and still do) in that he was the chess master, or Michael Jordan just studying the opposing team’s defense and ready to explode at any moment into a whirling dervish of athletic daredeviltry as he broke down the formidable defense of the Bad Boys for the championship hardware. The truth, and it is as dark as the proverbial black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night is that Obama is the chess master, it’s checkmate for the working class and he is just like Michael Jordan, a greedy, amoral, selfish multimillionaire prick who once commented “Republicans buy sneakers too” rather than doing the right thing in using his global celebrity to promote progressive social change.For some reason Jordan’s famous quote conjures up one of Obama’s, the one where he proclaimed that if Americans were being denied their right to collectively bargain that he would put on his own pair of comfortable shoes and join them on the picket lines. This alas like so many other things (wars,closing Gitmo, renegotiating trade pacts etc) was just more of the same bullshit about hope and change marketed by Wall Street’s soon to be new bagman at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
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.
Last night, as predicted by the corporate hack punditry since OBushma even took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the Republican party is once again ascendant. There are many a hung-over scumbagger this morning from the celebration to take the country back (unfortunately the imbeciles don’t seem to give two shits where it goes now – right to the banks and corporations) from that horrible BLACK man in their WHITE House. Down here in the diseased penis of America more formally known as the state of Florida it is like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Confederate Memorial Day all rolled into one. It never ceases to amaze me how an oily little snake like the newly crowned Senator Marco Rubio along with his Ricky Ricardo style pompadour could so easly bamboozle so many into believing that he was some sort of insurgent outsider when in actuality he was the protege of none other than Jeb Bush of the Bush Crime Family. The Governor of this state today is expected to be announced as a ghoulish looking scoundrel named Rick Scott, his resume shows that as head of HCA that he was forced out for participating in the largest case of Medicare fraud in history. As I write this the ballots are still being counted in where else but Palm Beach County, scene of the 2000 con job where the infamous butterfly ballots were blamed for elderly Jews voting for Pat Buchanan which was a marvelously effective cover story for the Bush Crime Family’s election theft.
The breathless will be reaffirming to the brainless that this is the first win in the war against Socialism coming to America, nevermind that none of these wastes of flesh will have anything to say about the massive and ruinous updwardly directed Socialism later today when Helicopter Ben Bernanke sticks the sweet, sweet spike into the arm of the junkie banking system with is 1-4 trillions worth of monetary E Crack. The point is that the dimwits who went out and put the criminal Republican party back into official control of the cash spigots at the head of the trough of our putrescent political system are further confirmation that this country is finished. Stick a fork in our asses, we are done. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between these two criminal entities that are the DemocRATs and the Republicans, one is only more fascist than the other and as is evident after Hope and Change was exposed as Bullshit and Lies. The neocons and the Republicans waged a crackerjack propaganda war as well as a textbook example of how to destabilize a country from within sans actual violence. Latching onto the disorganized Ron Paul/9-11 Truth Tea Party movement and then turning it into an exo-skeleton from which the deranged (but not too deranged to become a millionaire many times over) FOX demagogue Glenn Beck was able to climb into and rouse the peckerwoods who would then co-opt what really was a grass roots movement. Once hijacked by Beck and the ubiquitous Bill Kristol creation Sarah Palin the haters had a new vehicle that allowed them to rebrand the dregs of the base of the GOP, wrap the turd in the flag and get about trying to dislodge the nigger from their WHITE House.
And it worked, nearly to perfection too. The Republican criminals took back the House pretty easily (which will be churned again in two years) and could have seized the Senate were it not for some of the more crazy Palinistas such as anti-masturbation jihadist Christine O’Donnell and the demented Sharon Angle losing, the latter allowing good ole mobbed up Harry Reid to keep his job. The one truly great thing however was the takedown of the Weasel Queen Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, she can now ascend up the hills in San Francisco and retire to her mansion and you have to admit, John Boehner along with his fake crying jags is one hell of a lot more entertaining that shrill, squeaky shrew. As the great H.L. Mencken once remarked, “nobody ever lost money overestimating the intelligence of the American people” or something along those lines and Tuesday November 3, 2010 is proof of the pudding. Not that OBushma and the DemocRATs did themselves any favors, the compromising and corporate dealings took what could have been serious and lasting health care reform and turned it into a backdoor bailout of the insurance parasites (helped along by well-funded and well-organized Astroturf invasions of Congressional town halls by raving brownshirts) with the full power of the state directed against those who don’t purchase their shitty products. Gitmo was never closed as promised, the wars have expanded into Pakistan and Yemen, the false flag terror plots that now seem standard tools for a U.S. President since the Bushreich have been used to justify more Draconian invasions of privacy and stripping of civil liberties – Bush could NEVER have gotten away with putting those naked body scanners into the nations airports. There was also the bailout of Wall Street, the phony stress tests, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers and of course the mega rat Rahm Emanuel. There was also the smugness of liberals, many of whom I know and am laughing at this morning over their post-Obama election frenzy to instantly attack that most important of issues in these most terrible of times – institutionalizing gay marriage on a national level. Now I have nothing against gay people nor their getting married but get a clue you smarmy libs, there just ain’t enough cod liver oil to make a huge amount of Americans who vote to swallow that one. Credit the pathetic remnants of the left with the churning,once they and their flagship party shanked unions and the working class in the back to cater to corporations and the endless aggrieved identity groups seeking to use the government to redress social ills they would forever have those millstones chained to their necks.
The DemocRATs did everything to fuck themselves and they were so good at it that the fucking was right up their collective poopers with Tabasco flavored lube. Take our political race here in Florida, they rolled out some dikey looking broad to run for Governor named Alex Sink whose ties to the banking industry seemed to not matter one bit over her resemblance to fake left heroine Richard Maddow on MSNBC and their choice to run against the criminally diseased Rubio was a black dude named Kendrick Meek who was once one of those trooper guards for Bubba Clinton when he visited the state. Call me a raving cynic but isn’t the choice of two identity based minority groups as fodder to voters just a more elitist version of the Republicans pandering to the unwashed trailer trash and zoned out Jesus freaks? Why am I even writing about this crap? To vent I guess, I am certainly not childish enough to believe that it really matters much which of the two entrenched political parties actually is in power, nothing is going to ever change in this rotting country land of greed, sorrow and stupidity until the people get off of their fat asses, detach said fat asses from their living room sofas, unplug the umbilical cord leading to the television and take to the streets to purge this rancid system once and for all. Hell, look at the French and their recent uprising over the government’s TWO YEAR change in retirement age. Meanwhile, here in Der Heimat, their civic duty completed, Americans can go back, pick up the remote and dial up the ballgame of the day or Dancing With the Stars.
What the fuck has happened to this country?
Last night, as predicted by the corporate hack punditry since OBushma even took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the Republican party is once again ascendant. There are many a hung-over scumbagger this morning from the celebration to take the country back (unfortunately the imbeciles don’t seem to give two shits where it goes now – right to the banks and corporations) from that horrible BLACK man in their WHITE House. Down here in the diseased penis of America more formally known as the state of Florida it is like Christmas, Thanksgiving and Confederate Memorial Day all rolled into one. It never ceases to amaze me how an oily little snake like the newly crowned Senator Marco Rubio along with his Ricky Ricardo style pompadour could so easly bamboozle so many into believing that he was some sort of insurgent outsider when in actuality he was the protege of none other than Jeb Bush of the Bush Crime Family. The Governor of this state today is expected to be announced as a ghoulish looking scoundrel named Rick Scott, his resume shows that as head of HCA that he was forced out for participating in the largest case of Medicare fraud in history. As I write this the ballots are still being counted in where else but Palm Beach County, scene of the 2000 con job where the infamous butterfly ballots were blamed for elderly Jews voting for Pat Buchanan which was a marvelously effective cover story for the Bush Crime Family’s election theft.
The breathless will be reaffirming to the brainless that this is the first win in the war against Socialism coming to America, nevermind that none of these wastes of flesh will have anything to say about the massive and ruinous updwardly directed Socialism later today when Helicopter Ben Bernanke sticks the sweet, sweet spike into the arm of the junkie banking system with is 1-4 trillions worth of monetary E Crack. The point is that the dimwits who went out and put the criminal Republican party back into official control of the cash spigots at the head of the trough of our putrescent political system are further confirmation that this country is finished. Stick a fork in our asses, we are done. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between these two criminal entities that are the DemocRATs and the Republicans, one is only more fascist than the other and as is evident after Hope and Change was exposed as Bullshit and Lies. The neocons and the Republicans waged a crackerjack propaganda war as well as a textbook example of how to destabilize a country from within sans actual violence. Latching onto the disorganized Ron Paul/9-11 Truth Tea Party movement and then turning it into an exo-skeleton from which the deranged (but not too deranged to become a millionaire many times over) FOX demagogue Glenn Beck was able to climb into and rouse the peckerwoods who would then co-opt what really was a grass roots movement. Once hijacked by Beck and the ubiquitous Bill Kristol creation Sarah Palin the haters had a new vehicle that allowed them to rebrand the dregs of the base of the GOP, wrap the turd in the flag and get about trying to dislodge the nigger from their WHITE House.
And it worked, nearly to perfection too. The Republican criminals took back the House pretty easily (which will be churned again in two years) and could have seized the Senate were it not for some of the more crazy Palinistas such as anti-masturbation jihadist Christine O’Donnell and the demented Sharon Angle losing, the latter allowing good ole mobbed up Harry Reid to keep his job. The one truly great thing however was the takedown of the Weasel Queen Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, she can now ascend up the hills in San Francisco and retire to her mansion and you have to admit, John Boehner along with his fake crying jags is one hell of a lot more entertaining that shrill, squeaky shrew. As the great H.L. Mencken once remarked, “nobody ever lost money overestimating the intelligence of the American people” or something along those lines and Tuesday November 3, 2010 is proof of the pudding. Not that OBushma and the DemocRATs did themselves any favors, the compromising and corporate dealings took what could have been serious and lasting health care reform and turned it into a backdoor bailout of the insurance parasites (helped along by well-funded and well-organized Astroturf invasions of Congressional town halls by raving brownshirts) with the full power of the state directed against those who don’t purchase their shitty products. Gitmo was never closed as promised, the wars have expanded into Pakistan and Yemen, the false flag terror plots that now seem standard tools for a U.S. President since the Bushreich have been used to justify more Draconian invasions of privacy and stripping of civil liberties – Bush could NEVER have gotten away with putting those naked body scanners into the nations airports. There was also the bailout of Wall Street, the phony stress tests, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers and of course the mega rat Rahm Emanuel. There was also the smugness of liberals, many of whom I know and am laughing at this morning over their post-Obama election frenzy to instantly attack that most important of issues in these most terrible of times – institutionalizing gay marriage on a national level. Now I have nothing against gay people nor their getting married but get a clue you smarmy libs, there just ain’t enough cod liver oil to make a huge amount of Americans who vote to swallow that one. Credit the pathetic remnants of the left with the churning,once they and their flagship party shanked unions and the working class in the back to cater to corporations and the endless aggrieved identity groups seeking to use the government to redress social ills they would forever have those millstones chained to their necks.
The DemocRATs did everything to fuck themselves and they were so good at it that the fucking was right up their collective poopers with Tabasco flavored lube. Take our political race here in Florida, they rolled out some butch looking broad to run for Governor named Alex Sink whose ties to the banking industry seemed to not matter one bit over her resemblance to fake left heroine Richard Maddow on MSNBC and their choice to run against the criminally diseased Rubio was a black dude named Kendrick Meek who was once one of those trooper guards for Bubba Clinton when he visited the state. Call me a raving cynic but isn’t the choice of two identity based minority groups as fodder to voters just a more elitist version of the Republicans pandering to the unwashed trailer trash and zoned out Jesus freaks? Why am I even writing about this crap? To vent I guess, I am certainly not childish enough to believe that it really matters much which of the two entrenched political parties actually is in power, nothing is going to ever change in this rotting country land of greed, sorrow and stupidity until the people get off of their fat asses, detach said fat asses from their living room sofas, unplug the umbilical cord leading to the television and take to the streets to purge this rancid system once and for all. Hell, look at the French and their recent uprising over the government’s TWO YEAR change in retirement age. Meanwhile, here in Der Heimat, their civic duty completed, Americans can go back, pick up the remote and dial up the ballgame of the day or Dancing With the Stars.
What the fuck has happened to this country?
EE
The level of sheer vitriolic nastiness, baseball cap to the knees tactics (aka Tonya Harding politics) and jackbooted enforcement of political correctness by the current American political left has been nothing short of astonishing as all divisions are bared by the current Hillary Rodham Clinton-Barack Obama steel cage death match (click here for a wonderful and fun little treat all too symbolic of what passes for politics any more in our Idocracy. I have not in my three years or so of blogging ever seen shuch shrillness, crying mommy, cyber bullying, censorship and caterwauling over assuaging the feelings of the identity based groups who have attached themselves to the gigantic hog at the feeding trough that is the Democratic party in the same spirit of their much savvier brethren in the Republican pig sty.
The carnage has been unbelievable as the surrogates of Mrs. Clinton and their angry army of post-menopausal crusaders hunt the blogosphere in packs swarming, intimidating and spreading outright lies and propaganda while enforcing pressure on blog owners and admins to stigmatize, censor and ban any who don’t use the utmost deference in planting big, wet sloppy kisses on the Queen’s ass. I have personally been a party to some of this and faced as withering an attack as anything that I ever faced when fighting the right and what made it so bizarre is that those who once were firmly aligned with those fighting to beat back the tide of American fascism are now reduced to the ‘my team vs your team’ identity based politics that the modern Democratic party milk to continue their con game in passing themselves off as any sort of legitimate opposition entity.
The most kick ass club in the bag for the legions of Hillemmings is the dreaded ‘misogynist’ card which has been dealt from the bottom of the deck most recently by that preening little British fag Elton John. ‘Sir’ John, the madman across the water is the abosolute last person who should be lecturing anybody on the finer points of gender based etiquette and lecturing Americans for their misogyny, it’s like being given an ethics lesson by Karl Rove or being taught table manners by Jeffrey Dahmer and it earned him a spot on Keith Olbermann’s Worst Person In The World list last night, jusfifiably so. We have enough problems with fanatical Zionists and the American high rolling Jews who largely back Clinton and meddling in our domestic political system and no advice from a pole smoking Englishman is necessary. Let’s face it, we have enough of our own fucking problems in retaining our national sovereignty in an increasingly hostile globalist world. Besides, the misogyny thing just doesn’t work with Mrs. Clinton no matter how much her stooges and public relations hacks want you to think so, this is a woman who is the penultimate elitist, was a high powered corporate lawyer, a Wal-Mart board member and currently a U.S. Senator so where exactly did she smack into that glass ceiling like a fly into a windshield?
The entire thing is just total horseshit and the Establishment is desperate to do anything that is possible to take out Obama and roll out the red carpet for the return of the globalist Clinton crime family. In some of the darker corners of the internet there are already sinister connections being made between Saint Barack and the dead homosexual choirmaster at Reverend Wright’s Chicago church (making it pretty evident that the pocket media continues to flail away at the Wright sideshow) that are largely being pimped by members of the Lyndon LaRouche network. The high priest of conspiracy (who occasionally does have points of some merit) has already come out in favor of Clinton and is throwing his very substantial weight behind what is going to be a coordinated smear campaign with the Rupert Murdoch/Richard Mellon Scaife media empires to savagely take down Obama when the time comes. He was only supposed to be a ringer designed to make this sham democracy look like the real thing for the rubes and buffons in idiot America but then he got bigger ideas and went off the reservation. Judging from the percolating of such slime I predict that the mother of all racist/anti-Semitic smart bombs is being put together to forever terminate the candidacy of Mr. Obama with extreme prejudice. I had this prediction result in censorship at another site that I immensely respect for it’s ability to be inclusive and open to all opinions but Clinton surrogates flooded the admins with cries of foul and it was hidden. We will see what happens and there is no fucking way in Hell that the Clintons are going to allow an usurper to that which they are entitled.
Hell, you saw what happened to Air America’s Randi Rhodes who was suspended by that faux left radio network for making reference to Mrs. Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro as “fucking whores”(at least she didn’t call them fucking fascist cunts) during a non-network sponsored appearance that exposed the ‘liberal’ network as nothing more than a propaganda arm of the corrupt Democratic party. Rhodes who had become increasingly critical of Rodham-Clinton was sold down the river much like Mike Malloy was a year or so ago by Air America and like Malloy managed to land another gig pretty quickly at Nova M Radio which is a bit more open minded when it comes to telling it like it is although I am not down with having to cough up the coin to subscribe not that I am a huge fan of the often obnoxious Rhodes anyway. Such is the state of free speech in Murka post 9/11 where every dissenter is a potential Al Qaeda member, war is peace, ignorance is knowledge and freedom is slavery.
I would rail on at length about the abomination that is the ‘left’ but will leave that for another time, suffice it to say that the real left was laid to waste by a long-running, coordinated fascist campaign that changed the language, erased our history, destroyed the unions and allowed a bunch of dope smoking, long haired, baby killing, sodomy worshipping, holier than thou identity based cliques to fill the vacuum and we as Americans have been suffering for it ever since.
Think about THAT the next time that you gas up your car or go buy groceries, what you are dealing with now is the triumph of fascism that only was made possible by the hijacking of the REAL left by the effete, politically correct snobs and cheese eating limousine liberals. I have made my break with the bitches and bastards, let them chew on each other until there is nothing left, I am finished with the bogus left-right paradigm.
Monkey See, Monkey Do: Nice to see our friends the money grubbing, communist, totalitarian Chinese playing the same fear cards of their American cohorts in attempting to distract from the international outrage over their brutal crackdown against Tibetian protestors with surprise, surprise – an Al Qaeda threat to the Olympics. The fucking chinks are going to use the Bejing games this summer to showcase what a wonderful country that they have much like Hitler did in Berlin back in 1936. I would strongly recommend boycotting anything related to the 2008 Olympics – which are antiquated, overly commercialized, boring and just plain suck to begin with – over the human rights abuses of the Chinese government. The paramilitary goon squad dubbed the men in blue who have been assigned to escort the olympic torch across the world and who have beaten protestors is an outrage and that such groups are allowed to operate on American soil is just another example of how the global criminals and Wall Street looters and their finely pefumed political whores have sold their souls to the company store.
Been laying low for awhile and working on bigger and better things but I just have to get past this burr up my ass on the latest polls that have the Mulatto Miracle on the ropes as a result of the jump starting of hostilities with the Russkies along with all other manner of nonsensical horseshit designed to pander to the morons in this dumbest fucking country in the history of humanity.
This was a reply to a post that I did on another blog that expresses my utter and complete contempt for a most contemptible mass media and their ridiculous fucking polls.
Fascist or Fascist Lite – you be the judge!
Just like those fucking tests that they do in your grocery store between frozen shit and the new and improved frozen shit.
Just a fuckin’ rant folks….
RE – Other than Sham Polls…
Like this one because if you read between the lines the polled are those who are at home sitting on their asses in front of their beloved electronic god in the living room vs. the more savvy and informed who choose not to rot in front of their TV you can see that the numbers are skewed and a scam as well.
Now WHY is this happening NOW
A cynic like myself smells a Clintonist overthrow at the Denver Convention next week by portraying Jesus Obama as unelectable – at the very least it is pressure for the V.P. slot and we all know how well that worked out for LBJ.
On the other hand, a lot of folks including myself are pissed as hell at Mr. Obama for his feckless pandering – screw the nauseating display of him prostrating himself in front of AIPAC the vomit reflex was triggered during that false prophet Rick Warren’s travelling salvation show last week – which has turned off those of us who are very serious about this change thing and aren’t going to be hornswoggled by some finely attired frontman for the looter capitalist empire.
Now here is the funny thing, an Obama advance research operative called me at home tonight asking me what I thought.
-I said that while I have ALWAYS been a registered independent I have always voted Democrat with the exception of Ross Perot in 96.
-I said that I am furious over busting my ass to elect Democrats in 2006 only to go Judas and refuse to live up to their implied contract in ending the war and holding the war criminals accountable.
-I told her that the minute that St. Barack threw Reverend Wright under the bus for telling the truth (although it could have been expressed better) that I smelled the big con coming again.
-And finally I said that my vote will NOT go to any Democrat from now until hell freezes over until that corrupt lie of an opposition party stands up for working class Americans again.
There was a long and uncomfortable silence on the other end of the phone and then I said please feel free to call back in October.
The polls lie as badly as the charlatans that the two party oligarchy trots out as legitimate choices.
UPDATED
RE: Frick and Frack aka Obama and McCain
They remind me of that old commercial for chicken mcnuggets or something done by a competitor (Wendy’s?) – pieces are pieces and parts are parts. Obama and McCain are interchangible ass clowns who will do nothing whatsoever to change the course of a disastrous foreign policy that now incredibly has the U.S. on a collision course with Russia who does have nukes and a shitload of them.
I defended Obama against that filthy whore Hillary Rodham Clinton against the protestations of others as well as their good advice at the time of people not as naive as I to believe that there was enough of a functional system left that it could still be changed through traditional means – I was wrong.
The Reverend Wright thing put a burr up my ass because every damned thing that the man said was spot on and the full pressure of the pocket media kingmakers was brought down on Mr. Obama including a brutal interview on Press the Meat by the prematurely deceased courtier and stooge Tim Russert. Obama could have used it as an opening to address the issues of American imperialism, racism, state sanctioned medical experimentation on blacks (see Tuskegee) and the blowback of 9/11 (which I am a skeptic of because I still believe that it was a highly coordinated Edward Luttwak style coup d’etat undertaken by a multi-national cadre of professionals). But he caved
Then there was the putting on of that stupid fucking beanie and grovelling at the feet of those extremist right wing pigs in Israel to prove that he was trustworthy enough to continue to turn a blind eye to their monstrous human rights violations, their infiltration of the U.S. government for the purpose of espionage and blackmail and their ongoing abuse of The Holocaust as justification to wage their own genocidal campaigns.
FISA was what really soured me on the Magic Mulatto, the Democrats have NO intention whatsoever of restoring the rule of law to the land or our civil liberties and the cowardly cave in on Bush’s illegal spying (to GWB’s credit it was going on long before he arrived though through ECHELON and Main Core)and the granting of Telecom immunity for their crimes.
There have been a myriad of other things as well but the disgusting suckfest in front of the Raptureheads and misguided knuckledraggers who hate for Jesus at that fucking moronic false prophet Rick Warren’s goat barn was the final straw.
Fuck them all man, this thing is too far gone to be saved and I no longer advocate even participating in the con game by voting – it is a waste of time and bestows the aura of legitimacy on a corrupt lie of a process.
Now back to the transcription dungeon, I have about a hundred and a half pages of the Oglesby book to go but also am working on what I hope to be a dynamite piece on the surveillance state – can’t give too many details now though.
Just my two cents over the Morning Cup O’ Joe
EE
-Don Henley – Dirty Laundry
Welcome to Blacksburg, Virginia – the place where flocks of mockingbirds turned buzzards and seeking to feast on fresh carrion swarm. The aftermath of the causes of the worst school shooting in the nation’s history that claimed the lives of thirty three innocent people will be pontificated upon, spun and desecrated with the coming 24/7 saturation coverage on cable television news networks. Some media sources are already dishonestly playing up the massacre as the worst mass murder in United States history which is as intellectually dishonest as it is revisionist, a country build upon the killing fields that were a product of the genocidal doctrine of Manifest Destiny does not have clean hands and there are many a state sanctioned slaughter of innocents in our closet. Gore Vidal is spot on correct in his reference to The United States of Amnesia although I might add willful ignorance and a deep seated callous indifference as well.
There will be much weeping and gnashing of the teeth in the guise of examination into exactly why this happened in the coming news cycles that will gobble up days, weeks and months.
The grand story of the shooter and what exactly drove him to wreak bloody havoc on that horrible April Monday morning, nearly eight years to the week after the murderous spree of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine Hight School has yet to be told. From early reports it was the standard stereotypical loner; a Korean born English student who wrote plays containing “macabre violence” and denounced others as “deceitful charlatans”. As if that has any fucking thing to do with the price of rice in China. Among more notable literary figures with a penchant for the bizarre Stephen King has become a multi-millionaire writing stories containing “macabre violence” and I regularly rail against the abundance of “deceitful charlatans” that pollute this sick and terminally fucked up society and neither of us are mass murderers. Movie scripts like Saw and Hostel spawn smash megaplex hits by offering graphic depictions of sadism and violence and they gross millions so the writings of Cho Seung-Hui are yet another canard, a red herring used to justify the violent acts that are inevitable in a society that regularly worships at the temple of bloodshed and cruelty. You can always count on the public relations flacks masquerading as journalists for more wildly over-hyped horseshit and manufactured storylines to mesmerize the pathetic and bewildered herds of sheeple that have overrun television nation.
Careers are made off of stories like this and the fact that an ambitious ‘journalist’ could grab a ride on the riverboat, a seat on the gravy train and experience an O.J. Simpson moment is forefront in many minds of the death sucking vultures of the mainstream media whores. They are chasing ambulances as though they were white broncos. They descended on the ruins of the Gulf Coast not that long ago scavenging like feral rats in dumpsters amidst the debris of a ruined city rife with the stench of rotting food and bloating corpses, of misery and of the raw musk of ambition that fuels careers in the disgraceful fucking excuse for a media that this country has been stricken with. They rooted through the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and then they were gone and while great swaths of New Orleans still lie ruined they moved on to the next big thing – John Mark Karr, Bennifer, Suri Cruise, Baby Brangelina, Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith or the child murdering pederast of the week. It is always the same – only the names change but mass murders in schools can be career makers. Of course the usual suspects were already picking out their Hokie memorabilia to shamelessly display while the bodies were still being autopsied – Paula Zahn, Geraldo and a pack of other lesser known predators seeking to pick whatever meat remains on the bones of dignity in America’s latest and greatest grand ratings spectacle. Fuck them all, they are vermin who only serve to perpetuate the culture of tabloidism, violence, death and celebrity.
“Seeing him descend bright-eyed and sweaty on wretched New Orleans, as he did in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, was like watching a vulture on crystal meth. The word that came to mind was not ‘reporting,’ but ‘feeding.”
-Critic Tim Rutten on Geraldo Rivera
This latest horror of a society gone to seed is good death- mass murder, dread, fear, ratings – not bad death, the bummer of the war dead and the hundreds of thousands of non-Christian, brown skinned victims of a gross savagery undertaken in the name of freedom, freedom to watch cable television and the good death. The type that can be exploited, that pleases the sponsors and the political apparatchik seeking to point the fingers at monsters rather than themselves. I am dead certain that Karl Rove was so ecstatic to see the slaughter at Virginia Tech knock war, deleted emails, Gonzo and the rot of empire out of the headlines that he made some popcorn and pulled up a seat in front of his plasma flatscreen to enjoy the show. Millions of American ghouls joined them in front of their own glowing living room false idols. This is big time shit, never mind that far worse slaughters happen in Iraq every fucking day – 55 more of those whose lives are like mere insects or rodents in terms of their relative value compared to ordinary Americans were added to the tab of the war pigs yesterday.
But I digress…Never mind the actual victims they will still be dead come the next news cycle and there are grieving families to interview and shaken survivors to prod for the little bloody exclusive details of their moments when certain death passed them over and took their classmate, their lovers, their friends.
There are also precious political points to be scored.
There will be those who use this to further implement the creeping police state, surveillance companies will base their entire marketing campaigns on this tragedy. Right wing lackeys seeking to pander to their base will decry that every person in America is not required by law to wear a sidearm and the pathetic timorous candy asses of the Democrat wing of the war party will rail and demagogue against firearms in their run up to Hillary’s coronation in 2008. Their efforts to spin the killing spree in Blacksburg for the sake of scoring cheap political points is as shameless exploitation of the dead and the dishonoring of the bereaved loved ones as is George W. Bush’s latest photo-op at the Virginia Tech campus for today’s memorial where instead of the typical soldiers and snowflake babies he used the mourning students and families as stage props.
The neoliberal fake left (fittingly referred to as such after their treacherous sellout of labor by the parasitical DLC whose taste for corporate cash, war, globalization and special interest groups is an abysmal disgrace) is no better, quick on the draw to blame it all on the NRA and the availability of guns seeking to take a stand against the wrong highly influential lobby that is killing America. Knee jerk, politically expedient attacks on restricting gun ownership by party hacks at the same time that an unaccountable private army named Blackwater grows stronger by the day is a grave and dangerous threat to liberty. Thousands of trained killers for hire who are unchecked by any law and given carte blanche by the scofflaws of the militant Republican junta are a clear and present danger within our borders and a menace as unseen before in our history. If there was ever a time to strongly support a well-armed militia this is it.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and a society that exalts violence whether it be the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Jack Bauer breaking fingers, the blasphemous apocalyptic filth that permeates mega-church congregations or the latest in high tech, mega pixel slaughterhouses offered up by the video game industry should not be surprised when the carrion birds come home to roost.