Crack Ho Economics
May 11, 2010A Happy Holiday Hosing to All
December 16, 2009Christmas is coming and it will be a sad occasion in the tent cities and other homeless shelters that are a result of the mammoth, sans lube ass fucking delivered by the American oligarchy and it’s whores like that vile corrupt little bastard Joe Lieberman in D.C., Wall Street bagman Barack Obama has delivered a veritable sleighful of same old shit instead of the change that was promised, the worn and threadbare stockings are going to be as empty as his campaign promises and the souls of Wall Street bankers. In yet another of the craven cave-ins by the Vichy DemocRAT party the shit pit Senate commanded by one former Nevada Gaming Commissioner Harry Reid has gutted any sort of health care ‘reform’ short of arming the insurance parasites and empowering them to force the financially doomed to buy protection money, considering Harry’s rumored affiliation with organized crime is it really any surprise that it came to this? Yesterday it was Lansky Lieberman’s baseball bat strike to the kneecaps that killed the new 55 year old age lowering for Medicare eligibility (which would satisfy my personal needs – fuck everyone else and the public option too…I am going native in the land of ‘fuck you I got mine) and today it’s smacking down the importation of pharmaceuticals from Canada. Bring out the leeches! Oh, don’t bother, they’re already here.
So we once again arrive at the ‘most wonderful time of the year’, the right-wing freaks are again shrieking about the phony librul [sic] War on Christmas, this time plumbing the depths of the deranged mind of peckerwoods, Beckers and Palinazis with the ludicrous claim that phony librul Obama had scheduled his presidential address on December 1st to preempt that great American traditional holiday treat A Charlie Brown Christmas. This latest upchucking of fascist media bile even tops the typical Yuletide green vomit spew of Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the FOX Nazis, it seems to me that for one thing Obama was giving the speech to announce the escalation of the war in Afghanistan and we all know that war and murdering Muslim babies is as beloved to the savage chickenhawk cowards on the right as Grandma’s sweet potato pie and secondly wasn’t one of the big themes of A Charlie Brown Christmas the creeping commercialism that had taken over Christmas to begin with? I mean here in the near fully evolved Capitalist shithole of dog eat dog Murka Santa and the retailers, credit card companies and Madison Avenue pimps long ago triumphed over Jesus who has played second banana to the jolly fat man in the red suit for decades now. Gotta give it to the right wing freaks, their sense of history is as distorted as ever and it’s just more piss in the egg nog for everyone else.
So anyway, I want to throw out a few Christmas thoughts before my annual holiday hiatus from blogging (I will return after the first of the year) and foremost I want to give a nice big thank you to Citibank’s top flesh eating buzzard Vikram ‘the bandit’ Pandit. Your government subsidized den of usury and iniquity sent me out a nice little statement on my credit cards (which I had for year and NEVER missed a payment date on) that announced that I could either choose to keep your little plastic devil cards and agree to a 30 + percent interest rate or opt-out by a specified date and keep my old terms. Thanks for the warning fuckwad and thanks even more for this list of stuff that I, Ed Encho have put on your cards prior to my opting out and then advising my lawyer to send you my intention to file bankruptcy letters in the next few months:
1 – 2 year subscription to International Socialist Review
1 – digital camera
1 – Blu Ray player
1 – Inglourious Basterds Blu Ray
1 – Dark Knight Blu Ray
1 – Gladiator Saphire Edition Blu Ray
1 – V for Vendetta Blu Ray
1 – Acer Netbook mini-computer
1 – iPod nano 6th generation (16 gbs)
5 – cases Samuel Adams beer
4 – cases Budweiser
3 – 1.75 liter bottles of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum
1 – 1.75 liter bottle of Grand Marnier
2 – Quarts of Jack Daniels sippin’ whiskey
4 – Gallons assorted Gallo jugs of wine
3 – Spiral Sliced Hams (avg. 7 lbs)
2 – Butterball frozen turkey breasts
5 – lbs gourmet coffee
1 – programmable deluxe coffee maker
5 – Assorted Video Games
1 – Drive By Truckers CD
1 – REM Live CD
1 – Each remastered Beatles CD’s (Abbey Road, White Album, Sgt. Pepper)
5 – pounds fresh 20-25 shrimp
5 – pounds fresh snow crab legs
2 – Boxes of 48 miniature cordial chocolate liquor bottles
2 – Cheescake Factory 12 individual sliced cheesecakes
10 lbs – Planters Dry Roasted peanuts
5 lbs – Macadamia nuts
6 – Assorted dog chew toys (moose, duck, bobo, holiday bobo, raccoon, pig and hedgehog)
1 – Deluxe dog bed
1 – Dinner for four at the Outback restaurant along with appetizers (the coconut shrimp are just fucking great) and drinks.
So you little pigfucker, I would like to thank you from myself, my family and my friends for all of the great swag that I have run up in the last few weeks on Citi’s dole and I still have nine more shopping days to go, just under 2,000 left (can you say PARTY TIME) of available credit and thirteen more days until the opt out deadline. I would strongly encourage every other American who is on to the scam to do likewise. It’s a way to boost the economy by buying shit during the season and to shaft you sleazy pricks on the back end.
And if there is anything I hate more than the very concept of Christmas and what it has mutated into in Capitalist America – malls full of morons, political operatives using the season to pander to the angry white fuckwads who have been deprived of it all for their entire pathetic lives, having to be nice to people who you ordinarily would sooner rip their throats out, relatives straight out of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – it is the inconvenient little truth that it’s not even Jesus’s birthday, it is an arbitrary date plucked from the ass of the Roman Emperor Constantine in something like the Fourth Century, don’t tell that to the Palinazi zombies though. You see my friends, Christmas is bullshit, it has been eaten alive by Santa Claus and same pus filled, four-flushing scumbags who are arbitrarily altering the rules on credit card accounts in the aftermath of their bloodsucking feast at the taxpayer trough. It’s all phony and here in Chumpland the suckers eat it up.
And one of the most hypocritical and dishonest aspects of the holiday season is having to pretend to like people who are complete assholes, ignoramuses, blowhards, bigots and the worst of them all: Republicans. A wasted night, usually on a Saturday when there are the NCAA football conference championship games on and spent amidst a gaggle of boring, self-centered idiots who know nothing of history, economics, civics or a concept of what really goes on in the world that is more advanced than the cartoon bullshit that passes for the news in this rotting empire. I must qualify my disdain for these parties in that I do make a distinction between family gatherings and parties with close friends rather than co-workers or the even more dreadful spouse’s co-workers. These affairs are intolerable, the music sucks, the company is bad and often times since they are pot luck events the food is even worse.
A particularly embarrassing and rather disgusting experience that has haunted me for quite awhile comes to mind. One year despite knowing better I allowed myself to be dragged to a Christmas party despite having a gastrointestinal virus (not a good thing for those who suffer from the dreaded I.B.S. to begin with. Now at this party there were about thirty people crammed into a smallish two bedroom suburban house with one and a half bathrooms. Now when the beer and booze are flowing at these sort of soirees there is always a wait for the use of the facilities as the evening goes on. Now combine the aforementioned gastrointestinal virus, I.B.S. and some food that is served (I believe that it was some sort of dip that did it) are a seriously problematic combination. Now when you take into consideration the long lines to use the john, the perfect storm comes together, a category four bowel storm to put it more precisely.
By the time that I painfully winded my way down the hallway, doubled over in agony and feeling like the alien was gestating inside of me I was able to make it inside the bathroom. My pants were already down before the door was fully closed and I just managed to park upon the porcelain a split second before what felt like three cubic feet of volcanic mud erupted from my ass at terminal velocity. I know that this is pretty gross but now comes the truly horrifying part. The shitstorm was so fierce that it flew up the back of the throne and soaked the synthetic fur cover of the toilet seat. So now in addition to having a hallway full of angry revelers about to piss in their pants ready to break down the door it was necessary to work very quickly to wash out the toilet cover – unfortunately it was the half bath so the sink was the only place available. The best that I could do was to get the festive Christmas red and white fur toilet seat cover back to more of a maroon and beige and then still half dripping back onto the lid which I propped up again and slithered away hoping that nobody would make the connection and blame me for it. Then I immediately got into my car without saying goodbye and drove like hell away from the scene of the crime.
Now before anybody gets a really negative idea about my character I must admit that I made the whole thing up but you get the point. I did however attend a party once where a lady from the office got so shitfaced that she passed out on the boss’s bed and then once the room started spinning out of control vomited a malodorous mess of jungle juice punch, egg nog and half-digested mini-meatballs and little smokies all over what looked to be a very expensive white fur comforter. Since I loathed both of them I laughed so hard that I nearly really did shit my pants.
If there is a silver lining to the coming economic collapse it is that the caterwauling little monsters at the mall will no longer be able to get everything that they want because daddy and mommy’s plastic is maxed out once and for all. This country has been submerged in shit largely because of the ignorant toxic waste generation who were children during the Reagan years along with their greedy, self-indulgent, boorish materialism who have for too long been taught that ignorance is a virtue and who have been weaned suckling at the tit of instant gratification. For the first time in these little spoiled brat’s lives they are going to finally learn the meaning of the word NO because after the dismal results for this holiday season are announced there will be more store and restaurant closures, commercial property defaults and millions of additional lost jobs as corporations continue to cut deeper to the bone with no further vision than the quarterly earnings statement. The corporations who rigged the system to monopolize America are now going to have to deal with something entirely new – a beggared population who can’t afford a pack of fucking ramen noodles let alone the must have junk and gadgetry that all children ages 3 to 70 with an available line of credit have become accustomed to. I really hope that the coming hardship and era of austerity will make better people of the average American (and this starts with the children) ‘consumer’ (I hate that term, it’s so fucking dehumanizing) as they are forced to live within their means and to enjoy the simple things in life. Hell, my grandparents and their generation survived a depression, fought a world war, were civically active and well informed and managed to create the most advanced and wealthy society in modern history before the baby boomers and Generation Reagan fucked it all up.
So you happy hosed Murkans this is it for this morning’s rant and for the rat bastard plague year of 2010 when even the illusion of being fucked with a smile was shattered. HO HO HO and may your holiday be bright.
Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
ps: During a visit to my local Borders on last week’s Citibank sponsored shopping spree I was a bit aghast to see a pyramid built out of hundreds of Glenn Beck’s ghostwritten hunk of asswipe Arguing With Idiots (you know, the one with Dear Leader on the cover in a fucking East German Stasi uniform) along with smaller displays of Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten tome and for good measure another nice display of Glenn Beck’s Christmas Sweater book (a straightjacket would be far more appropriate). Borders and the rest of the retailers should just do the right thing and donate all of that overpriced, moronic drivel to the poor so that they can burn something in their fireplaces for heat this winter. Happy Holidays to All!
Greedy Pigs Launch Counter Offensive
June 26, 2009Having brought our reality show TV prez to heel, stolen trillions from the taxpayers through their moles in the government and fat and happy from their record bonuses the evil empire that is Goldman Sachs is now fighting back. Bloomberg announced that Wall Street (aka Goldman Sachs) has enlisted two lackeys of the Frankenstein of financial chicanery Hank Paulson to take their propaganda and shove it down the throats of the American sheeple. The timing is a bit off though and so is their overestimation of the ability of the American Idiots to disengage from their electronic crackpipes, Whacko Jacko kicked the bucket yesterday so a lot of money for this sewage could be saved – but hey, it’s mostly TARP mad money anyway ain’t it. Anyway, while the corporate media vultures are picking the meat from Jacko’s still warm corpse the story that I refer to is Wall Street Sets Campaign on Populist Overreaction. Seems like the anger directed at AIG’s plundering and Jim Cramer and CNBC’s lies has the financial oligarchs a bit restive although that anger has been tamped down by the three months running Green Shoots public relations campaign.
Here is an excerpt from the Bloomberg piece:
June 25 (Bloomberg) — Wall Street’s largest trade group has started a campaign to counter the “populist” backlash against bankers, enlisting two former aides to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to spearhead the effort.
In memos of confidential meetings with top financial executives, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association said it began this month the “execution phase” of the operation, which pledges to “embrace change” and accountability. The plan targets policy makers and the media in New York, London, Washington and Brussels and calls for a “city-by-city, grass roots” approach.
The securities industry “must be perceived as part of the solution, which will allow it to better defend against populist overreaction,” the documents, prepared for a June 17 meeting of SIFMA’s board, said.
The board meeting minutes and staff-written papers, obtained by Bloomberg News, outline the program crafted by polling, lobbying and public relations companies paid at least $85,000 a month. The memos provide a glimpse, in often candid language, into how Wall Street is grappling with its pariah status.
“It is imperative that in this historic period of reform, the industry be recognized as playing a positive role in seeking change and providing solutions to the problems we face,” one of the documents said. “There is currently widespread skepticism about the industry’s commitment to this needed change.”
In other words LIES…LIES..LIES to lure the suckers back into the casinos that were propped up by the Pope of Hope rather than the serious structural problems that caused the implosion to occur be corrected. What Goldman Sachs did is best explained by Matt Taibbi in his latest piece from Alternet Suck On Our Yachts.
This isn’t really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn’t have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald’s and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We’re eating it, they’re counting the money.
That is the best explanation of the swindlers’ financial alchemy that I have ever seen and one that even 200 million Michael Jackson mourners could understand. Now as I stated in a post that I did last week about the fascination over Iran’s phony ‘Green Revolution’ (Green shoots, Green Revolution…..yada fucking yada, you would think that for as much money as they are paid that the public relations shops would at least have some originality) that Americans love a good revolution as long as they don’t actually have to arise off of their sofas, put down their remotes and participate. What Goldman Sachs, the Great Satan has done to us all should have millions of pitchfork and torch bearing taxpayers marching on Wall Street demanding mass lynchings. They certainly have time on their hands now that they are fucking unemployed and homeless.
But American capacity for outrage is limited to silly wedge issues, who was it that once said that he could hire half of the working class to kill the other half. Anyway, in wrapping up I want to bring attention to this delightful little piece from the foreign press on what our vastly more sophisticated European cousins are capable of when ripped off by the greedmongers.
German pensioners ‘kidnap and torture their investment adviser’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6565206.eceA group of well-to-do pensioners who lost their savings in the credit crunch staged an arthritic revenge attack and held their terrified financial adviser to ransom, prosecutors said yesterday.
The alleged kidnapping is the latest example of what is being dubbed “silver crime” — the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world.
“As I was letting myself into my front door I was assaulted from behind and hit hard,” the financial adviser James Amburn, a 56-year-old German-American, said. “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. I thought I was a dead man.”
He was freed by 40 heavily armed policemen from the counter-terrorist unit last Saturday. The frightened consultant was in his underwear, his body lacerated by wounds allegedly inflicted by angry pensioners.
It appears that two couples had entrusted Mr Amburn’s investment company with €2.4 million (£2 million), which he ploughed into Florida’s boom-and-bust property market. The properties became forfeit during the sub-prime mortgage crisis but the couples wanted their money back.
After being bundled into the boot of an Audi in the west German town of Speyer, Mr Amburn was driven southwards to Chieming, close to the Austrian border, where one of the couples Roland K, and his wife, Sieglinde, 79, had a holiday home.
The financial adviser claims he was held there in a cellar for four days almost naked, fed soup twice a day and beaten. Another couple, Gerhard F, 63, and his wife, Iris, 66, both retired doctors, allegedly helped to torture the prisoner.
“I was beaten. They threatened again and again to kill me,” Mr Amburn said. At least two of his ribs were fractured.
Mr Amburn says he tried to escape once when he was permitted to smoke in the garden. He scaled the wall and ran though the rain in his underpants calling for help.
The pensioners pursued him in their car, shouting: “Stop that man! He’s a burglar!” Two locals pinned him to the pavement and he was taken back to the cellar, where he claims he received another beating.
The investment consultant’s break came when he was allowed to send a fax to a Swiss bank asking for the transfer of the funds demanded by the gang.
On the fax he pretended to refer to call options and to insurance policies (the German word for a financial policy is police). This came out as “call.pol-ice.”
They didn’t notice it but someone at the bank was bright enough to spot it,” Mr Amburn said.
The pensioners are under arrest on suspicion of deprivation of liberty, torture and inflicting grievous bodily harm. These charges carry a maximum of 15 years in prison.
“They were angry because they invested money in propertites in Florida and he lost it all,” Volker Ziegler, chief public prosecutor in Traunstein, said.
The numbers of attacks by elderly people had been rising fast even before the financial crisis hit savings. A three-man gang of pensioners is serving long jail terms for mounting 14 bank robberies across Germany to boost their retirement funds.
Rudolf Richter and brothers Wilfried and Lothar Ackermann were entitled only to modest state pensions of between €100 and €400 a month.
They became enraged by the size of bankers’ bonuses and over nine years — ending in their arrest in 2005 — netted more than €1.3 million. Police recovered only half that sum.
“It is unbelievable how easy it is to rob a bank,” Wilfried Ackermann, 73, boasted during the trial. The men held carrots in their pockets pretending that they had pistols.
On one of the raids Richter, 74, slipped on an icy pavement, dropped the loot and had to be carried to the getaway car.
I can’t happen here.
Newsweek Newspeak
June 23, 2009The green shoots, the most wonderful propaganda onslaught since General Petraeus’s heroic, Reaganesque winning of the Iraq war through the ‘SURGE’ has failed. The stinking undead zombie that is the U.S. economy has not been resurrected through the massive infusions of taxpayer dollars, perhaps spent billions on public relations and lobbying and the changing of the mark to market rules only bought times for the financial predators. The wonderful government subsidized markets are tanking again, there are still no jobs, the housing market is not at all improving, the banks aren’t lending and by the way, bombs are going off in Baghdad again. While neocons and Repiglicans have their panties in a bunch over Barack Obama’s not getting behind their little Iranian PSYOP the real outcry should be from every taxpayer in Der Heimat beause they have just been bent over backwards and butt-fucked by Barack’s Wall Street Dream Team into funneling billions into the Ponzi schemes, getting nothing but pink slips and foreclosure notices in return and are about to have any hope of a national health care ripped away by the corrupt, on-the-take non-term limited cesspool dwellers in Congress.
And the myth of Ronald Reagan is just like the one about Santa Claus, only silliness for the credulous little children of lemming land. Horseshit, total horseshit.
So Newsweek Magazine, a month or so after a ‘change’ to move away from celebrity swill in favor of more hard-hitting and provocative ‘journalism’ has after cover stories featuring celebrities Stephen Colbert and Oprah (so much for ‘change’) rolled out an issue with a cover story – GAG – The Capitalist Manifesto. The piece in question is written by that ubiquitous little geek Fareed Zakaria and in any sane and honestly run news operation would be more honestly entitled The Bullshit Manifesto. But then we are talking about Newsweek, a sorry shitrag that is owned by the Washington Post and is the fruition of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. The salad days of the WaPo and the crusading investigative journalism in the form of Bob Woodward (a man of questionable integrity) and Carl Bernstein have long been flushed down the memory hole and the herald for the beltway elite and well-connected is a shameful example of just how vile and corrupt that the American media has become. The WaPo last week fired its best columnist Dan Froomkin for his daring to go up against the insipid and overly influential neocon house shill Charles Krauthammer over torture. See Glenn Greenwald’s excellent pieces on the firing of Mr. Froomkin, the hiring of Paul Wolfowitz to augment the neocon Wurlitzer and the sad state of the establishment media in general. Oh, and Newsweek also offers a place for a slimy, bitter, chain smoking, fascist pigfucker Robert Bork to rail against Sonia Sotomayor as he continues to inveigh against all that was once decent or free in this rotting empire of gluttony and greed.
As for Zakaria his long essay in which he defends the scoundrels, money grubbers, chiselers, cheats, schemers, high rollers, paper dealers and four flushing TARP fund welshers and the vile cancerous economic system of capitalism had my bile rising before I was even into the second column. It starts out like this:
A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. “Another ideological god has failed,” the dean of financial commentators, Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will “fundamentally reset” the way they work, said the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. “Capitalism will be different,” said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
No economic system ever remains unchanged, of course, and certainly not after a deep financial collapse and a broad global recession. But over the past few months, even though we’ve had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing. Perhaps this is a mirage—or perhaps the measures taken by states around the world, chiefly the U.S. government, have restored normalcy. Every expert has a critique of specific policies, but over time we might see that faced with the decision to underreact or overreact, most governments chose the latter. That choice might produce new problems in due course—a topic for another essay—but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown.
“but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown”?? Whaddafuck??? Jesus Fucking Christ, we are at the gates of Hell right now as a result of capitalism. However to highly paid ideologues like Fareed and his fellow travelers like Thomas Friedman who make a good chunk of coin on the circuit serving up globaloney to the suckers and don’t have to worry about the trivial existential horrors of the maxed out, stressed out, thrown out and fucked over and fucked out American on the streets the view is of course much different from atop the ivory towers. Here is some more of this rancid tripe:
Many experts are convinced that the situation cannot improve yet because their own sweeping solutions to the problem have not been implemented. Most of us want to see more punishment inflicted, particularly on America’s bankers. Deep down we all have a Puritan belief that unless they suffer a good dose of pain, they will not truly repent. In fact, there has been much pain, especially in the financial industry, where tens of thousands of jobs, at all levels, have been lost. But fundamentally, markets are not about morality. They are large, complex systems, and if things get stable enough, they move on.
More punishment? How about ANY punishment at all. Shit, those greedy pigs are the only ones that did get bailed out and are now engaged in a feverish orgy of speculation that will have gas at $5.00 a gallon by the time the snowflakes start falling, heating oil will also massively spike and along with the accompanying rise in food prices as commodity markets are cornered one hell of a lot of people are going to have to choose between heating and eating. So Zakaria should spare us that elitist scolding, we never did get to see Bill Maher’s suggestion of two bankers hanging from the big board at the NYSE with their balls in their mouth and other than a few big tokens who are going to be given show trials and slapped on the wrist the pain is all passed on to the shmoes and peasants as it always is in Capitalist Murka. It would be just too much to ask an egghead of Zakaria’s stature why a starving father can be busted stealing a can of fucking Chef Boyardee ravioli to feed his cold and hungry family and disappear into the bowels of the vast for profit prison gulag system while the treasonous looters are not only smacked on the wrist with a wet noodle but given more of the house money to piss away gambling. Here is another piece of the essay if, that is if you can stomach it:
A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East Asian currency crises—which were far more painful in those countries than the current downturn has been in America—we saw the pace of market-oriented reform speed up. If, in the years ahead, the American consumer remains reluctant to spend, if federal and state governments groan under their debt loads, if government-owned companies remain expensive burdens, then private-sector activity will become the only path to create jobs. The simple truth is that with all its flaws, capitalism remains the most productive economic engine we have yet invented. Like Churchill‘s line about democracy, it is the worst of all economic systems, except for the others. Its chief vindication today has come halfway across the world, in countries like China and India, which have been able to grow and pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by supporting markets and free trade. Last month India held elections during the worst of this crisis. Its powerful left-wing parties campaigned against liberalization and got their worst drubbing at the polls in 40 years.
Whenever a neocon or in Zakaria’s case, a neoliberal scoundrel needs to invoke a bit of legitimacy with the masses of asses it is the bread and butter to bring up good ole Winston Churchill. And the drivel about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions up out of poverty is just that, in layman’s terms it’s total bullshit. Capitalism itself, is as iconic Wall Street god and role model to the Reagan generation of shit Gordon Gekko once eloquently put it “a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another”. So Zakaria can engage in as much spin as necessary to argue his case, tell it to the millions of uninsured Americans, the jobless whose employment was shipped overseas to third world shithole sweatshops that are never seen. No, no no…when the shills for the financial cartels want an example of the wonders of globalization they show the glimmering steel and glass towers of modernity in Bangalore, just another Potemkin Village that obscures the ugly truth that capitalism is destroying the planet. Showing the slums, ghettos and slave labor staffed factories would interfere with the grand vision of the Lexus and the Olive Tree. I have had just about enough of the column that I can take without vomiting on my keyboard but just want to throw in this last little piece:
More broadly, the fundamental crisis we face is of globalization itself. We have globalized the economies of nations. Trade, travel and tourism are bringing people together. Technology has created worldwide supply chains, companies and customers. But our politics remains resolutely national. This tension is at the heart of the many crashes of this era—a mismatch between interconnected economies that are producing global problems but no matching political process that can effect global solutions. Without better international coordination, there will be more crashes, and eventually there may be a retreat from globalization toward the safety—and slow growth—of protected national economies.
Now the more conspiratorial (or to avoid the pejorative tin foil hatter – aware) types this is starting to sound strangely like a case for that dreaded New World Order aka a global corporate government that is being pimped. You can read the rest of the article yourselves if you have a high tolerance for bullshit. It bears mentioning that Fareed Zakaria is a Council on Foreign Relations mouthpiece and like the rest of his ilk is out there shilling for globalist predatory capitalism in a major publication like Newsweek. We are basically fucked right now because the establishment has rigged the game, Mr. Zakaria, like Obama is there to do the soft closing for those who are actually able to fucking read. For the rest, the prison camps await along with the reeducation to be a good little capitalist slave – think of O’Brien and his pet rats in Room 101, you get the picture.
The CFR along with all of these other big time elite groups (Bilderberg,Trilateral Commission, Davos, G8 etc) are nothing other than proponents for a global corporate state where we are all reduced to chattel and indentured servants in their system. Actually railing against these elitists is one of the few things that the knuckledraggers on the far right actually do that is remotely constructive – unfortunately it is then filtered through CIA fronts like the infamous John Birch Society to meld it with anti-immigrant racism, gun grabber paranoia and in the biggest lie of all turning it into a great Communist conspiracy rather than the quite obvious one of fascist corporatism. The future of capitalism is going to be patterned after that great model that is our top creditor China and the authoritarianism, censorship, goon squad paramilitary types who will grind our bones to make their bread. And this ties back into the Iran uprising, whether it is real, partially real, fomented by spooks or over sensationalized by the pocket media is irrelevant. Until Americans are ready to lay it on the line and take to the streets rather than sitting on their asses in front of state controlled television propaganda and don’t replace Twitter with guns then we are fucked. That’s just the way that it is and our revolution won’t be televised.
It is becoming more apparent that the shits won and won easily, hell our great savior for change Backless Barrack never even gave change a chance, just turned the policies over to pigs like Summers and Geithner so that they could save their casinos and their offshore money pools. The new issue of Foreign Affairs (the CFR journal) gives some time to the concept of G2 which is the U.S. and China. China is the perfect next stage of capitalism, once it has sucked the life out of the working and middle classes it needs an authoritarian police state to function at maximum capacity. Thanks to the Bushreich we already have the police state apparatus here (spying, paramilitary police etc) and not smiling Barack the new face for all of it is ensuring that generations will be condemned to corporate bondage, their fate has already been sealed with his acquiescence to Wall Street paper pushers.
I would recommend an alternative to Fareek Zakaria’s elitst propaganda in their polemic for the rich Newspeak. Harper’s Magazine, a fine, truly American intellectually solid publication has a wonderful cover story on the failure of the Pope of Hope, check out Barack Hoover Obama, subtitled The Best and the Brightest Blow it Again by Kevin Baker. It’s better written, more historically accurate and not delivered by the sort of conniving little swine who would piss down your back and try to convince you that it is raining for an establishment that swears 2+2=5.
Fareed Zakaria is nothing other than another manure monger and god knows that there is no fucking shortage of them here in our rotting, fucked over empire.
Newsweek Newspeak
June 23, 2009The green shoots, the most wonderful propaganda onslaught since General Petraeus’s heroic, Reaganesque winning of the Iraq war through the ‘SURGE’ has failed. The stinking undead zombie that is the U.S. economy has not been resurrected through the massive infusions of taxpayer dollars, perhaps spent billions on public relations and lobbying and the changing of the mark to market rules only bought times for the financial predators. The wonderful government subsidized markets are tanking again, there are still no jobs, the housing market is not at all improving, the banks aren’t lending and by the way, bombs are going off in Baghdad again. While neocons and Repiglicans have their panties in a bunch over Barack Obama’s not getting behind their little Iranian PSYOP the real outcry should be from every taxpayer in Der Heimat beause they have just been bent over backwards and butt-fucked by Barack’s Wall Street Dream Team into funneling billions into the Ponzi schemes, getting nothing but pink slips and foreclosure notices in return and are about to have any hope of a national health care ripped away by the corrupt, on-the-take non-term limited cesspool dwellers in Congress.
And the myth of Ronald Reagan is just like the one about Santa Claus, only silliness for the credulous little children of lemming land. Horseshit, total horseshit.
So Newsweek Magazine, a month or so after a ‘change’ to move away from celebrity swill in favor of more hard-hitting and provocative ‘journalism’ has after cover stories featuring celebrities Stephen Colbert and Oprah (so much for ‘change’) rolled out an issue with a cover story – GAG – The Capitalist Manifesto. The piece in question is written by that ubiquitous little geek Fareed Zakaria and in any sane and honestly run news operation would be more honestly entitled The Bullshit Manifesto. But then we are talking about Newsweek, a sorry shitrag that is owned by the Washington Post and is the fruition of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. The salad days of the WaPo and the crusading investigative journalism in the form of Bob Woodward (a man of questionable integrity) and Carl Bernstein have long been flushed down the memory hole and the herald for the beltway elite and well-connected is a shameful example of just how vile and corrupt that the American media has become. The WaPo last week fired its best columnist Dan Froomkin for his daring to go up against the insipid and overly influential neocon house shill Charles Krauthammer over torture. See Glenn Greenwald’s excellent pieces on the firing of Mr. Froomkin, the hiring of Paul Wolfowitz to augment the neocon Wurlitzer and the sad state of the establishment media in general. Oh, and Newsweek also offers a place for a slimy, bitter, chain smoking, fascist pigfucker Robert Bork to rail against Sonia Sotomayor as he continues to inveigh against all that was once decent or free in this rotting empire of gluttony and greed.
As for Zakaria his long essay in which he defends the scoundrels, money grubbers, chiselers, cheats, schemers, high rollers, paper dealers and four flushing TARP fund welshers and the vile cancerous economic system of capitalism had my bile rising before I was even into the second column. It starts out like this:
A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. “Another ideological god has failed,” the dean of financial commentators, Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will “fundamentally reset” the way they work, said the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. “Capitalism will be different,” said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
No economic system ever remains unchanged, of course, and certainly not after a deep financial collapse and a broad global recession. But over the past few months, even though we’ve had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing. Perhaps this is a mirage—or perhaps the measures taken by states around the world, chiefly the U.S. government, have restored normalcy. Every expert has a critique of specific policies, but over time we might see that faced with the decision to underreact or overreact, most governments chose the latter. That choice might produce new problems in due course—a topic for another essay—but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown.
“but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown”?? Whaddafuck??? Jesus Fucking Christ, we are at the gates of Hell right now as a result of capitalism. However to highly paid ideologues like Fareed and his fellow travelers like Thomas Friedman who make a good chunk of coin on the circuit serving up globaloney to the suckers and don’t have to worry about the trivial existential horrors of the maxed out, stressed out, thrown out and fucked over and fucked out American on the streets the view is of course much different from atop the ivory towers. Here is some more of this rancid tripe:
Many experts are convinced that the situation cannot improve yet because their own sweeping solutions to the problem have not been implemented. Most of us want to see more punishment inflicted, particularly on America’s bankers. Deep down we all have a Puritan belief that unless they suffer a good dose of pain, they will not truly repent. In fact, there has been much pain, especially in the financial industry, where tens of thousands of jobs, at all levels, have been lost. But fundamentally, markets are not about morality. They are large, complex systems, and if things get stable enough, they move on.
More punishment? How about ANY punishment at all. Shit, those greedy pigs are the only ones that did get bailed out and are now engaged in a feverish orgy of speculation that will have gas at $5.00 a gallon by the time the snowflakes start falling, heating oil will also massively spike and along with the accompanying rise in food prices as commodity markets are cornered one hell of a lot of people are going to have to choose between heating and eating. So Zakaria should spare us that elitist scolding, we never did get to see Bill Maher’s suggestion of two bankers hanging from the big board at the NYSE with their balls in their mouth and other than a few big tokens who are going to be given show trials and slapped on the wrist the pain is all passed on to the shmoes and peasants as it always is in Capitalist Murka. It would be just too much to ask an egghead of Zakaria’s stature why a starving father can be busted stealing a can of fucking Chef Boyardee ravioli to feed his cold and hungry family and disappear into the bowels of the vast for profit prison gulag system while the treasonous looters are not only smacked on the wrist with a wet noodle but given more of the house money to piss away gambling. Here is another piece of the essay if, that is if you can stomach it:
A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East Asian currency crises—which were far more painful in those countries than the current downturn has been in America—we saw the pace of market-oriented reform speed up. If, in the years ahead, the American consumer remains reluctant to spend, if federal and state governments groan under their debt loads, if government-owned companies remain expensive burdens, then private-sector activity will become the only path to create jobs. The simple truth is that with all its flaws, capitalism remains the most productive economic engine we have yet invented. Like Churchill‘s line about democracy, it is the worst of all economic systems, except for the others. Its chief vindication today has come halfway across the world, in countries like China and India, which have been able to grow and pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by supporting markets and free trade. Last month India held elections during the worst of this crisis. Its powerful left-wing parties campaigned against liberalization and got their worst drubbing at the polls in 40 years.
Whenever a neocon or in Zakaria’s case, a neoliberal scoundrel needs to invoke a bit of legitimacy with the masses of asses it is the bread and butter to bring up good ole Winston Churchill. And the drivel about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions up out of poverty is just that, in layman’s terms it’s total bullshit. Capitalism itself, is as iconic Wall Street god and role model to the Reagan generation of shit Gordon Gekko once eloquently put it “a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another”. So Zakaria can engage in as much spin as necessary to argue his case, tell it to the millions of uninsured Americans, the jobless whose employment was shipped overseas to third world shithole sweatshops that are never seen. No, no no…when the shills for the financial cartels want an example of the wonders of globalization they show the glimmering steel and glass towers of modernity in Bangalore, just another Potemkin Village that obscures the ugly truth that capitalism is destroying the planet. Showing the slums, ghettos and slave labor staffed factories would interfere with the grand vision of the Lexus and the Olive Tree. I have had just about enough of the column that I can take without vomiting on my keyboard but just want to throw in this last little piece:
More broadly, the fundamental crisis we face is of globalization itself. We have globalized the economies of nations. Trade, travel and tourism are bringing people together. Technology has created worldwide supply chains, companies and customers. But our politics remains resolutely national. This tension is at the heart of the many crashes of this era—a mismatch between interconnected economies that are producing global problems but no matching political process that can effect global solutions. Without better international coordination, there will be more crashes, and eventually there may be a retreat from globalization toward the safety—and slow growth—of protected national economies.
Now the more conspiratorial (or to avoid the pejorative tin foil hatter – aware) types this is starting to sound strangely like a case for that dreaded New World Order aka a global corporate government that is being pimped. You can read the rest of the article yourselves if you have a high tolerance for bullshit. It bears mentioning that Fareed Zakaria is a Council on Foreign Relations mouthpiece and like the rest of his ilk is out there shilling for globalist predatory capitalism in a major publication like Newsweek. We are basically fucked right now because the establishment has rigged the game, Mr. Zakaria, like Obama is there to do the soft closing for those who are actually able to fucking read. For the rest, the prison camps await along with the reeducation to be a good little capitalist slave – think of O’Brien and his pet rats in Room 101, you get the picture.
The CFR along with all of these other big time elite groups (Bilderberg,Trilateral Commission, Davos, G8 etc) are nothing other than proponents for a global corporate state where we are all reduced to chattel and indentured servants in their system. Actually railing against these elitists is one of the few things that the knuckledraggers on the far right actually do that is remotely constructive – unfortunately it is then filtered through CIA fronts like the infamous John Birch Society to meld it with anti-immigrant racism, gun grabber paranoia and in the biggest lie of all turning it into a great Communist conspiracy rather than the quite obvious one of fascist corporatism. The future of capitalism is going to be patterned after that great model that is our top creditor China and the authoritarianism, censorship, goon squad paramilitary types who will grind our bones to make their bread. And this ties back into the Iran uprising, whether it is real, partially real, fomented by spooks or over sensationalized by the pocket media is irrelevant. Until Americans are ready to lay it on the line and take to the streets rather than sitting on their asses in front of state controlled television propaganda and don’t replace Twitter with guns then we are fucked. That’s just the way that it is and our revolution won’t be televised.
It is becoming more apparent that the shits won and won easily, hell our great savior for change Backless Barrack never even gave change a chance, just turned the policies over to pigs like Summers and Geithner so that they could save their casinos and their offshore money pools. The new issue of Foreign Affairs (the CFR journal) gives some time to the concept of G2 which is the U.S. and China. China is the perfect next stage of capitalism, once it has sucked the life out of the working and middle classes it needs an authoritarian police state to function at maximum capacity. Thanks to the Bushreich we already have the police state apparatus here (spying, paramilitary police etc) and not smiling Barack the new face for all of it is ensuring that generations will be condemned to corporate bondage, their fate has already been sealed with his acquiescence to Wall Street paper pushers.
I would recommend an alternative to Fareek Zakaria’s elitst propaganda in their polemic for the rich Newspeak. Harper’s Magazine, a fine, truly American intellectually solid publication has a wonderful cover story on the failure of the Pope of Hope, check out Barack Hoover Obama, subtitled The Best and the Brightest Blow it Again by Kevin Baker. It’s better written, more historically accurate and not delivered by the sort of conniving little swine who would piss down your back and try to convince you that it is raining for an establishment that swears 2+2=5.
Fareed Zakaria is nothing other than another manure monger and god knows that there is no fucking shortage of them here in our rotting, fucked over empire.
Usurious Bastards
March 26, 2009The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.
-Carroll Quigley
As the conventional wisdom goes, the stock market is predicated on trust and as a crusty old uncle of mine once said to a young and impressionable teenager with zero knowledge of the way that the world really worked: “trust me is just another two letter word that means the same as fuck you.” Old Uncle Harvey’s words of wisdom came home to roost on this Monday morning in America when the finance oligarchs were able to use their inside juice to pull off the grandest and most audacious heist yet in this season of sleazy swindles. Obama Treasury Secretary and Wall Street fixer Timothy Geithner delivered the bacon for the bankers, gave the crack ho stock market a wonderful and intoxicating fix that sent the Dow screaming up by nearly 7 percent in a matter of hours and locked in the losses for the great grandchildren of every poor schmuck with the misfortune to be living through this period of plunder and wealth consolidation.
In phase two of the ongoing SPLURGE (any similarity to the con-game called the surge that allowed us to become winners in Iraq is fully intentioned), on Tuesday night, our very own national Teflon coated bullshit salesman, President Barack Obama, the banker’s gofer and shill for the new generation began to sell it to the saps and a marvelous job he is doing. This man my friends is no new Roosevelt, he is the devil in disguise and he (as many progressives had warned) is in the bag for the establishment. What we really have is a by proxy continuation of the Clinton administration, of course Hillary was to have been the one but in the waning days of the ruinous Bush-Cheney neocon war on America it was just too tough to pimp another dynasty so the crooks who run the system found another pitchman. I cannot possibly articulate the sense of disgust and betrayal that I am experiencing as I write this, it is very difficult to restrain my gag reflex and keep from vomiting on my keyboard because once again the scum wins again and Americans have been played for chumps. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman(another Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz decried its “perverse incentives”) and columnist for the damned liberal New York Times put it best in his Monday column Financial Policy Despair:
Over the weekend The Times and other newspapers reported leaked details about the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan, which is to be officially released this week. If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, has persuaded President Obama to recycle Bush administration policy — specifically, the “cash for trash” plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair.
But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.
The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.
But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.
You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.
Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.
This isn’t likely to win Krugman any friends in the Obama White House, especially with a sleazy little political gangster like Rahm Emanuel who I predict will eventually make even the Great Satan Karl Rove look like an amateur running the show and protecting the interests of his investment banker buddies. While Barack Obama may be the friendly Fozzie Bear face of this latest hostile takeover of the White House the real example of how things are really done is in this incredible NYT piece from back in January:
Early this month, Barack Obama was meeting with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and other lawmakers when Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, began nervously cracking a knuckle.
Mr. Obama then turned to complain to Mr. Emanuel about his noisy habit.
At which point, Mr. Emanuel held the offending knuckle up to Mr. Obama’s left ear and, like an annoying little brother, snapped off a few special cracks.
The venomous cobra that is Emanuel is of course Mr. Obama’s minder and handler, note that he was the first announced member of the new administration, the first of a reoccupation of Washington by Clintonistas. The promised change, at least to this point has been strictly cosmetic, the wars still continue, more troops are headed to Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires past, Gitmo is still open, the new administration is engaging in Clintonian language manipulation regarding ‘torture’ that invokes memories of “it depends on what the meaning of is is”, the military is getting ready to be sent to the Mexican border and there has been no serious discussion of reigning in the run amok police state and the Stasi style high tech domestic spying operations. Yep, change has come to America alright, just like “the check’s in the mail”, “this won’t hurt a bit”, “I love you” and “I promise not to come in your mouth”…and it was all wrapped up in a big bundle of stinking dogshit with a $ sign on it and parked on the doorsteps of Americans and set afire by the Geithner-Bernanke-Paulson triad with the unarguable message that you are either cops or little people. Webster Tarpley had a good one that I heard that saving the banks is like trying to save one of Count Dracula’s victims by giving the blood transfusion to the victim through the vampire when the real remedy is to just pull him off and drive a stake through his heart.
It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
And
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
And
There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That’s the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers’ credit card.
The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren’t much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don’t know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word “zero coupon bond” in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.
That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize “toxic” risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.
The most likely scenario, should the Geithner plan go through, is a combination of looting, fraud, and a renewed speculation in volatile commodity markets such as oil. Ultimately the losses fall on the public anyway, since deposits are largely insured. There is no chance that the banks will simply resume normal long-term lending. To whom would they lend? For what? Against what collateral? And if banks are recapitalized without changing their management, why should we expect them to change the behavior that caused the insolvency in the first place?
The oddest thing about the Geithner program is its failure to act as though the financial crisis is a true crisis—an integrated, long-term economic threat—rather than merely a couple of related but temporary problems, one in banking and the other in jobs. In banking, the dominant metaphor is of plumbing: there is a blockage to be cleared. Take a plunger to the toxic assets, it is said, and credit conditions will return to normal. This, then, will make the recession essentially normal, validating the stimulus package. Solve these two problems, and the crisis will end. That’s the thinking.
Rome eventually understood that its imperial frontiers exceeded its resources and pulled back. This realization has yet to dawn on Washington.
More budget savings could come from a different approach to the financial crisis. The entire question of bailing out private financial institutions needs rethinking. The probability is that the bailouts are not over. The commercial real estate defaults are yet to present themselves.
Would it be cheaper for government to buy the shares of the banks and AIG at the current low prices than to pour trillions of taxpayers’ dollars into them in an effort to drive up private share prices with public money? The Bush/Paulson bailout plan of approximately $800 billion has been followed a few months later by the Obama/Geithner stimulus-bailout plan of another approximately $800 billion. Together it adds to $1.6 trillion in new Treasury debt, much of which might have to be monetized.
Could this massive debt issue be avoided if the government took over the banks and netted out the losses between the constituent parts? A staid socialized financial sector run by civil servants is preferable to the gambling casino of greed-driven, innovative, unregulated capitalism operated by banksters who have caused crisis throughout the world.
Perhaps the Federal Reserve should be socialized as well. The notion of an independent, privately-owned Federal Reserve system was never more than a ruse to get a national bank into place. Once the central bank is part of the state-owned banking system, the government can create money without having to accumulate a massive public debt that saddles taxpayers’ and future budgets with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual interest payments.
Inviting the Sheep for Another Shearing
March 20, 2009What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.
-Pink Floyd (sheep)
In the ongoing madness of an America in terminal decline, the great Surge II is now underway. This one has nothing to do with mass brainwashing that all is ell in Iraq and that we are indeed winning thanks to our shining medal festooned superstar quarterback otherwise known as General God (aka David Petraeus) to divert the flocks attention away from a doomed imperialist crusade. Nope, this one hits closer to home, it started last Monday with a sly piece of internal propaganda from Citigroup’s CEO Vikram Pandit having its best quarter since 2007 which triggered a sucker rally in the Wall Street casinos that dictate to the inhabitants of chumpland. The pocket media once again did their job, selling this latest call for the sheep to come and be sheared with all the effectiveness that they pimped the murderous lies of George W. Bush, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Things – ARE getting better you see, the gloom-gloomers, the glass is half-empty pessimists, the neurotic nervous nellies and the naysaying Eyores are all wrong, it’s a disease, in their heads, the economy is rocketing its way back to robustitude. The most incredible example of just how thoroughly corrupt that the corporatist media has become is the pernicious cover story of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine that has a picture of good ole Uncle Sam saying that he wants YOU to START SPENDING!… YOU need to INVEST in America – before it’s too late.
The Newsweek story, by Daniel Gross which inside is even more insidious in that it beats the reader over the head with STOP SAVING NOW! – in all caps and taking up the better part of page 27, page 26 is a picture of a squirrel (a cartoon representation of those greedy pigs who dare to save their own money rather than gamble in the Wall Street casinos who holding onto a backload of acorns has caused the branch of the tree to CRAK! Jesus fucking Christ, this is propaganda at its finest, even a cynic like me is astounded by the dastardly nature of this banker swill in one of the nation’s premier ‘news’ magazines.
A more sophisticated version of Mad Money Cramer, Gross goes on to say:
Saving cash and building up reserves is a necessary first step to recovery. But eventually the mountain of cash has to be put to work. Last week’s sharp market rally was certainly a sign—however fleeting it may turn out to be—that investors are putting money to work again. Retail sales in February provided another hint that purse strings may be loosening. But there’s much more work to be done. Ironically, post-bubble periods are frequently great times to start new ventures. The best time to start a dotcom wasn’t in 1999 when the IPO market was raging, it was in 2002, when the price of everything associated with the business—office space, programming talent—had plummeted. When Allied Corp. in the late 1980s didn’t want to pursue the development of consumer products based on global-positioning-satellite technology, Gary Burrell left, raised $4 million and formed Garmin, which today employs about 7,000 people.
Great solution, just trust Wall Street with that money, think long term, be patriotic even if the malefactors of great wealth do not and are more than happy to wallow in international troughs and then come back to shit on America. Gross, a highly-paid, high profile stooge is just playing his part in the ongoing relaunch project to save Wall Street looters and protect their plunder. We have seen this story already, Americans with dollar signs in their eyes and cash register bells going off in their heads like some bizarre real life Uncle Scrooge cartoon, duped into thinking that they can actually become rich and powerful themselves just like The Donald line up to be fleeced by the flim-flam men with the political juice and insider knowledge as they seek to cash out one more time. Perhaps a final time before the country impoldes inward upon itself. All aided and abetted by the media, the Wall Street cadre occupying Barack Obama’s White House, guys like Lawrence Summers and the conniving little twit Tim Geithner whose announcement as the new treasury secretary was greeted by a 6.5 % spike in the DOW, the crack-ho economy got a mainline spike into the arm and knew that the paper pusher inside the administration would ensure them that the game would go on and on. In the end of course, all has been enabled by the bewildered herd of sheeple themselves, brainwashed from birth into the bastardized capitalist system that is already drooling over being able to suck the blood from their grandchildren on account of their greed, stupidity and folly.
As a counter to the mainstream drivel that Gross and Newsweek are peddling as pearls of infinite wisdom I counter with an excerpt from a piece from his month’s Harpers. Infinite Debt by Thomas Georghegan discusses the ruinous and usurious effects of the debt based economy and its victims The same ones that Gross and his fellow pocket media hacks are now trying to swindle out of whatever little they may now have in their piggy banks having been badly burned by the existing system that has beggared them and cast them out of jobs and homes in addition to destroying their pensions and 401k retirement plans. From the Harper’s piece (which I will be addressing at length in my coming post Usurious Bastards):
Which is why the middle class is shrinking. Basically, we’re all waiters now; we’re bowing and scraping and working for the banks. Look closely at any American, and it’s even odds that he or she, directly or indirectly, is somehow employed by the “financial services sector,” which covers insurance and real estate and financial instruments of any kind. As brokers, lawyers, loan collectors, loan consolidators, secretaries at big investment firms, chauffeurs of private limousines, or even the high-tech types who exist solely to service banks — all of us, millions of us, are part of it, living off it in some way, as three generations ago we lived off manufacturers.
The game is rigged people, and the hit job done on America by the rotten fuckers on Wall Street and their institutionalized system of debt slavery is all that is left, and STILL the banksters on the street and the gangsters in D.C. are doint everything that they can to continue to bleed the silly and naive masses of asses by doing all that is possible to get the debt/consumerism bubble reinflated. In a rare piece of sanity that slipped by the censors and minders of the memory hole a Reuters story, More debt: a curious solution to a credit crisis dared to utter the heresy that:
Indeed, a huge part of the Treasury’s economic rescue plan is based on reviving securitization. This is the process by which everything from real estate and auto loans to credit cards and student debt gets repackaged into bonds and is then sold on to investors in a secondary market.
Given this history, Wray, also a senior fellow at the Levy Economics Institute, said asset-backed bonds are the problem, not the solution. “We need to kill off securitization and go back to banking — loan officers and underwriting.”
Wall Street is a con game, it depends on confidence in order for the moneychangers to book their fees and peddle their bad paper, given the Surge II it’s apparent that the entrenched elitists are determined to wage war against any sort of change that Obama may have in mind. Given the first two months of the administration and while being mindful that it’s still early, despite some initial guarded optimism I am becoming more and more certain that nothing is changing except the management of the whorehouse. I now find myself in agreement more or less with those progressives who were wary of Obama from the onset, with his government packed with recycled Clinton era swine, the usual assortment of Wall Street and Federal Reserve grifters running fiscal policy and his still stinging kick in the balls from the Israel lobby over the Freeman resignation it only looks like more of the same shit but in a different package. Helicopter Ben’s announcement that the Fed would now be buying American debt to save their fucking system, the dollar immediately took a shit and with the coming wave of hyperinflationi as a result of this latest idiocy this story should send a cold chill up the spine of all who are onto what has really been going on as America has been gutted: The US is Facing a Weimar Moment. Read it if you dare.
As Orwell once wrote in the literary classic Animal Farm:
“All animals are equal, some are just more equal than others”
Republican ‘free marketers’ are unscrupulous and pathologically greedy, they also delight in the trafficking of human misery for profit. It makes them feel empowered. They are like the S.O.B. sitting at the Monopoly table who is not content in owning Boardwalk and Park Place as well as all of the utilities and railroads but also buys Baltic and Mediterranean and loads them up with houses and hotels then squeals with childlike glee when some poor bastard lands on one of them and is driven into bankruptcy. The game of Monopoly is very relevant to life itself in laissez-faire hell, where the rich are able to accumulate property on a rapidly escalating scale and as wealth rapidly increases the less fortunate are driven into bankruptcy with the winner being the monopolists.
This is Laissez-Faire ‘free market’ Capitalism in its ultimate form, the ‘free market’ is only truly advantageous and ‘free’ to those who have the most cash and assets and they are gathered at the expense of the poor who eventually are the losers but hey, that’s what it’s all about isn’t it in the Wall Street Journal’s perfect world. Now that the rape of the system has nearly been completed how long is it going to take until there is a realization of just how thoroughly the free market fanatics have cannibalized the country in pursuit of profit? And the denial needs to stop immediately, the existing system has already failed and failed miserably.
Capitalism is eating itself. Like a python slowly trying to digest it’s own tail, the economic master plan, the Shock Doctrine has come home now and the sheep are being prepped for yet another shearing, soon they will served up with a side of mint jelly.
It is important to understand that a distinction needs to be made when it comes to capitalism between that which is regulated and the ‘free market’ aka Lassez Faire strain that the road to hell is paved with. The end result of unregulated capitalism is monopoly of the most extreme sort as well as the redistribution of wealth to those at the top of the class system, I wonder why nobody has ever dubbed this as ‘trickle up economics’ which is of course exactly what it is. One of history’s most important and enduring lessons is that hundreds of thousands must toil in the muck in order to allow one rotten, greedy son of a bitch to have his face displayed on a sphinx. The American middle class are the ones who are forced by their Wall Street pharaohs to build the bricks for the monuments to the super wealthy under increasingly hostile conditions in increasingly dangerous work environments with an increasingly smaller amount of straw.
The establishment after all has a vested interest in the existence of a huge and desperate underclass. The accompanying crime and urban rot helps to breed the necessary fear that justifies increased police powers and surveillance so as to keep the interests of the elite safe and sound while they sleep behind the walls of their gated communities each night. We were swindled by the free market pimps and deregulation pushers, all that it all did was create conditions for monopolies and trusts and consumer gouging. Take an honest look at yourself, are you truly better off today than you were yesterday? Or the day before? Or five years ago?
Well understand one thing…..today is as good as you are going to have it for the rest of your life under this existing rotten system.
We Are All Losers: The system itself is designed to make losers of us all except that extreme few with the means to purchase influence and therefore protection.
Under this system we all lose, mainly our losses are incremental.
We lose our lives through an increasing amount of time spent on a job locked in a struggle of diminishing gains to even survive.
We lose our health
We lose time with our children and families, this is the most tragic loss of all in most instances as it perpetuates the cycle of the decline in human relationships and destroys the family. Despite what the establishment propagandists and their phony religious wars with their insipid ‘pro family’ sloganeering it is not the loss of morality in through cultural changes in society that is causing the degradation of the family but the greed of an unfettered and monstrous capitalist system that demands more and more in order to slake its bloodsucking appetite for profits. It is the pursuit of these profits at the expense of our humanity that has laid waste to the family, and our values and every day that we are forced to prostitute ourselves in order for the wealthiest of the greed mongers to further entrench themselves is one more day closer to the day that we will ultimately die in vain for their sins.
And in buying into the legitimacy of this lie of a system we ultimately lose our souls.
In a system that is designed to ultimately make losers out of all but the very few who are able to parlay their inordinate influence into being able to utilize it as a weapon of exclusion I found the following from the late, great Hunter S. Thompson to be words of wisdom, this in reference to the ultimate outsiders The Hells Angels:
Let’s just hope that there are still some outlaws left out there amongst the sheeple, they are all that we have when it comes down to whatever hope there may be left in an increasingly hopeless and hostile world.
There is an important difference between a ‘loser’ and an ‘outlaw’ . One is passive and the other is active and the main reasons that the Angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the daydreams of millions of losers who don’t wear any defiant insignia and who don’t know how to be outlaws.”
The Angels don’t like being called losers but they have learned to live with it. “Yeah, I guess I am” said one “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out”
This worked wonders during the boom of the past couple of decades, leading to rapid capital formation that underpinned a huge rise in lending. But when the music stopped, many investors were left looking for an empty chair as these products of financial “innovation” proved ruinously difficult to value.
What is history, really, but a turf war between manufacturing, labor and the banks? In the United States, we shrank manufacturing. We got rid of labor. Now it’s just the banks.
The hum of ambient noise in midtown Manhattan is several decibels lower than it was a year ago. Fewer black Town Cars idle outside the investment-bank offices on Park Avenue. The aisles of the flagship Saks Fifth Avenue are so quiet you’d think you were in a library. The restaurants and shops at Rockefeller Center are open as usual, but they seem oddly depopulated. Where are all the tourists and office workers, the hordes of junior analysts lining up in Starbucks?
Something less tangible is also absent: the spirit of caffeinated, heedless risk taking. For a generation, risk has been the adrenaline of the nation’s economy, the substance that made us all—from the denizens of midtown Manhattan to the residents of Manhattan, Kans.—run a little faster and stay up a little later. Now, with the economy in its 16th month of recession and the markets scythed in half, it seems we’ve all either switched to decaf or simply lost the taste for risk.
And
As consumers hibernate and investors hoard cash, the economy is withering. This new age of thrift is understandable. But for a recovery to take hold, Americans will need to start taking risks again.
And
Crack Ho Economics
March 5, 2009Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gates – Wall Street is the enemy of America. These financial terrorists continue to ravage the country, yesterday’s announcement of February job losses of nearly 700,000 brought a spike in stock prices, another mainline hit to the crack ho economy. With the misery mounting the Obama administration and the entrenched Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve bandits who really run the system are mounting a withering counter attack on any plans to dismantle the existing system of avarice by watering down the stimulus (an ass fucking with a reacharound) package and calling in the markers with all of their whores in Congress and the media to preserve the existing spoils system. When the sock puppet occupant of the White House, our shining new Jesus even emerges as a shill for Wall Street you can rest assured that the fix is in and the only change that you will be getting is chump change.
It now appears that the naysayers were right. While the new frontman and his gaggle of recycled Clintonistas and Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve moneychangers are asking for austerity from everyone else but the pigs on Wall Street continue to have their piggie troughs filled with more and more stolen loot. I have heard a lot of stuff on how this is just another opportunity for the oligarchy to bust everyone else and then consolidate. This sadly seems to be the case and once the entire middle class has been butt-fucked into bankruptcy the malefactors of great wealth are going to swoop in to buy up everything for pennies on the dollar.
Some people are saying that this is only another step towards the ‘one world government’ that has always been discussed by the paranoid elements of the far right as a communist or socialist takeover. They are wrong though, the driving force behind this would be financial kingpins of capitalism and the one world system would be corporate fascism.
The Obama administration is not going to reign in either the bankers (who really run this system) or to stop the wars of imperialism, the population will be beggared and the police state brought in to put down the rabble so that the big con goes on.
I don’t know if anyone has ever ever heard of Carroll Quigley but you need to check out what he says on finance capitalism and global banker control – it’s too complex to go into at lenght right now but is worthwhile background information. A good read is a post by blogger Tocque Deville entitled History: How the U.S. Government Was Overthrown in Three Easy Steps.
There is no intention of providing Americans with anything even remotely resembling real choices in their political system, ‘leaders’ and government and this was stated by Professor Quigley in his outstanding and largely obscure book Tragedy and Hope which revealed the way that the system really worked in regards to the financial elite and the secretive round table groups who represent the puppeteers for the easily blackmailed, controlled and greedheaded arrogant buffoons who are the political actors who are trotted out for public consumption. Quigley in the extensive research that he did on the global elite states:
There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.
And…
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.
And…
The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.
So the game is rigged already, it is supposed to be rigged and the only question is whether this financial catastrophe was set up or was being set up and was then triggered prematurely through greed, incompetence and the entire monstrosity just becoming unsustainable.
And the one-eyed idiot, Gordon Brown has just appeared before Congress to continue to push for the globalist dominination, the shock doctrine writ large, the grandest robbery in history. His editorial for the London Times on March 1st shows that the future is global consolidation and a new feudalism.