Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears

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

– Janwillem van de Wetering

Money doesn’t talk, it swears

-Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising signs they con

You into thinking you’re the one

That can do what’s never been done

That can win what’s never been won

Meantime life outside goes on

All around you

-Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just my two cents

EE

Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears

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

– Janwillem van de Wetering

Money doesn’t talk, it swears

-Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertising signs they con

You into thinking you’re the one

That can do what’s never been done

That can win what’s never been won

Meantime life outside goes on

All around you

-Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Day After Yesterday and the Road Ahead

As promised, Helicopter Ben Bernanke and the temple of avarice at the Marriner S. Eccles Building officially launched QE2 yesterday afternoon. The propaganda pimps in the corporate media are bandying bout the sort of hyperbole like BOLD and UNPRECEDENTED to spin this soon obvious catastrophe. Not that any of the average shmucks give a flying fuck, the elections are over, the scumbaggers have minted their new champions and sent them to D.C. with a mandate to do some serious nigger hunting. More on that in a bit but QE2 will provide the temporary hit that the crack ho economy needs and keep the zombie banks shuffling along just a bit longer allowing chumpland USA to be strip-mined while the finance oligarchs enter the final stages of their imminent relocation to heavily fortified compounds in countries without extradition treaties. I was over at one of my favorite blogs this morning, the wonderful Zero Hedge and found this interesting little tidbit that by the end of November or before the last piece of Thanksgiving sweet potato pie has been eaten that Bernanke’s Fed will have surpassed China as the biggest holder of U.S. debt.  Yessir, the coordinates have now been locked in for the final descent into the abyss, the Palinazis will soon control the gulags, camps and crematoriums that will be used to deal with the rabble once the shit hits the fan and hit it it will. I really liked this comment on the linked post by “putbuyer”:

WHAM! The stock market collapses because there is no one to buy any of the stock for sale, at any price. It happens in the morning and the word gets out quickly. People know that something big is going on. By noon Eastern Standard Time the whole country is awash in the news. By two o’clock in the afternoon the big box stores are starting to sell out of groceries. All gasoline, food, and ammo are sold out that day. The unthinkable has happened. America has gone to her bunkers and awaits the anarchy that is sure to come. And the next day it begins. Those too stupid or unheeding are out and about looking for what they did not have to begin with. Violence breaks out all over the country, with warehouses in major cities being especially abused. Within a couple of days there is organized looting and robbing taking place. The bigger the marauding gang the more vicious they are. Power begets cruelty and lack of compassion.

The total social breakdown is something that I and others have been talking about for quite some time now, what happens when this putrescent, rotten and bloated to straining corpse known as the American Empire finally bursts and unleashes the maggots. Maggots whose viciousness is about to be fully protected by the state itself which will through it’s multimillionaire media demagogues like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and of course Hitlerina Palin will begin issuing the orders for the pogroms. Bernanke’s QE2 which will be followed by more and more conterfeiting will ultimately result in the hyperinflation that will trigger anarchy in the streets as the average American idiot typically doesn’t have more than a day or so’s worth of groceries on hand at any given time. Once the balloon goes up and the commodities speculators bid oil, corn, wheat and porkbellies to the fucking moon Alice the trucks will stop rolling in all but the essential zones were strategic Military Industrial Complex operations are housed. Gonna be a bad winter when there is no way to afford heating oil or food and substitutes like the furniture and the animals begin to be used instead. It’s not much of a reach to see that in many rural or economically gutted rust belt areas that the family dog will be deep fried in one of those big turkey cookers that rednecks dig so much and served for Christmas dinner. Gonna get real ugly, butt ugly and I would advise Americans of two things 1) stock up on non-perishable foods, batteries, over the counter meds and ammo and …2) like Clint Eastwood as the outlaw Josey Wales once famously remarked …

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

And that is what it is going to take to hold off vicious swine like the scumbaggers along with the otherwise criminal elements of society who will use the coming descent into barbarism to install themselves as warlords over local fiefdoms. The key is to be able to hunker down long enough to let the mass chaos and looting play out and with any luck at all a good amount of the motherfuckers will end up slaughtering each other, let’s face it, the scumbaggers really don’t like the darkies to begin with and I am sure that the feeling is mutual. Let them go to war in the early days after collapse. It is I suppose too much to hope for that dumbass Americans of all colors and creed would finally get a clue and see the big picture and instead of looting the local neighborhood they could join up and head towards the gated communities and the McMansions to conduct their raping and pillaging. It may sound like Marxism to some but goddammit, what the fuck is wrong with expropriating and stealing back that which was stolen to begin with? So fuck it, it’s gonna be a big whoop de doo when the time comes, it would absolutely wonderful to see Bernanke’s head on a pike and every lightpost and tree limb in Manhattan and Washington used to hang bankers, swindlers and politicians.

As far as the so-called Republican wave election goes there are a few things to ponder as the alternative to the fake story that the yellow dog punditry already has as their narrative in place. The mid-terms were indeed a referendum on OBushma but NOT because he is a Commie, Muslim, Socialist Kenyan Manchurian Candidate who seeks to use his militant negro army ACORN to enslave the white race. OBushma and his feckless Democrats were sent packing NOT only because of the plutocrat funded and sanctioned Tea Party uprsings but because he and his administration are garden variety charlatans, liars, cheats and scum – in short they are politicians. While the corporate cash funnelled into negative advertising thanks to the fascist Roberts SCOTUS was astronomical, equally critical was the inconvenient fact for the corporate capitalist system that anyone who is predisposed to sympathizing with the REAL left and not the fag worshipping, butterflies, moonbeams, zebras and fairy tales wimps and nuke Iran for women’s rights types that make up the pathetic excuse for the U.S. left – stayed home. The Obama betrayals are many and substantial, from his annoting of the insipid Rahm Emanuel as his top aide (translation: handler) to the lying about the closure of Gitmo, the escalation of the wars, the refusal to hold the Bushreich war criminals accountable, the phony health care reform charade that only benefitted the insurance parasites, the failure to back out of NAFTA and GATT and the tepid jar of leftover vomit that was the financial reform package were just too much for too many to swallow so they just said fuck it and didn’t vote. Perhaps the one thing that we all can thank Mr. Hope and Change for is that he is living proof that the entire system is a sham and the game is rigged.

Not that any of this is going to matter when Bernanke’s doomsday device has us all on a course straight out of Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, just trying to stay alive in a ruined country and one step ahead of the cannibals.

Mr. Obama’s Chump Change

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.



H. L. Mencken
 
By now it should be painfully apparent to all but the most befuddled, celebrity worshipping O-Bots and their asinine counterparts in the malodorous and fraudulent Tea Party movement that there is really very little actual difference between the regimes of President Barack Obama and those of his predecessors. While I admit that the Bush-Cheney regime and the neocon ghouls that filled it has a special place in historical infamy and while there is little substantive policy difference Obama is an improvement over that confederacy of dunces, he has slid very easily into the suit of the American Emperor. Some of my more cynical friends on the far left called it as it was and I regret alienating them during the primary process. If I could take back my words on Hillary Rodham Clinton as being the “Joan of Arc of the dry pussy demographic” and other nasty comments I would do so today. Not that Mrs. Rodham-Clinton isn’t a corporatist warmonger of the highest order but at least there is some semblence of being qualified while Mr. Obama is clearly not up to the task. Fortuately for him the real power in the US of A rests with the financial oligarchy, the big energy cartels and the uber rich and of course the state of Israel and it’s hordes of fifth-columnists in the Pentagon, Christian churches and most importantly the U.S. mainstream media.
 
During the first year and a half of the Obama administration, the Pope of Hope has presided over the largest and most obscene taxpayer funded bailout of Wall Street criminals, hedge fund hyenas and the degenerate gamblers who have detroyed the global economy with their derivatives. There is nothing that Obama could have possibly done, short of beheading small children on the front lawn of the White House that could even remotely top the gross criminality of the Wall Street swindler bailout. Granted that it began in the final months of the Bush administration under Henry Paulson, another of the Goldman Sachs financial predators who are allowed to regularly slither into the halls of government power no matter who the president or party in control is but it was Obama’s ongoing failure to hold any of the thieves accountable. Not that accountability is very big with any U.S. leader, were this a sane and moral country Richard B. Cheney would currently be rotting in a prison cell, Clinton would have never allowed the Iran-Contra traitors to get off of the hook to save the ass of Poppy Bush and Ford would have never pardoned Nixon. But this is not any sane (not even remotely so) or decent society rooted in any sort of a moral value system. That being said, prepare for the screws to continue to be put to the average American schmuck by the likes of Wall Street moles like Timothy Geithner and Helicopter Ben Bernanke.
 
 

 

Obama has made it very clear that he understands who he represents and despite the lip service that he and others in his position pay to the little guy the average American is shit out of luck when it comes to expecting any sort of a level playing field when it comes to the mockery that is democracy. The corporations long ago bought and paid for this place and to borrow from the late, great George Carlin “it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Face it people, the game is rigged! Any resistance has been co-opted, for example the media suckling of the ridiculous teabaggers who are nothing more than a bunch of pissed-off white people completely assimilated by the criminal Republican party to in a true historical context take to the streets in protest to support the British Monarchy. Obama’s second term is practically guaranteed unless he gets some kind of wild hair up his ass about actually going FDR and goes off of the reservation but that ain’t gonna happen. While his popularity rating will soon be plunging there is zero real alternative and a bunch of fish-belly white, pig-headed, racist idiots dancing around with their Gadsden flags isn’t any sort of a real political movement, tens of thousands of angry white males may want to cum on Sarah Palin’s tits but the oligarchy has no use for an idiot like that. Obama will be our Herbert Hoover, his bailout of the banking criminals has the economy on the precipiece of a double-dipper as the phony stock bubble pimped by Vikram ‘the Bandit’ Pandit, Helicopter Ben and armies of payroll pundits like the jackass Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer will eventually pop and after so much electronically created funny money has been pumped into the already rotting corpse of American capitalism that there will be nothing left save hyperinflationary measures and crushing austerity to save the blessed Wall Street banksters. We here in Der Heimat will need the proverbial wheelbarrow full of Reichmarks to buy a loaf of fucking bread. The global economy is unsustainable, Europe’s financial system is continuing to come unwound and already there is social unrest unlike anything that is seen here on the world’s biggest lemming farm.

Obama’s reign will be just one more downgrade in the once great prestige of America, the brand name has been so thoroughly dipped in shit even the ultimate product as president can’t save it. Hello third world status! The imperialist, budget busting wars of choice not only continue but have been escalated by Obama who has neither the balls nor the experience to stand up to the war freaks in the Pentagon. I have already spoken of the Wall Street strip-mining, there is a mega-enviornmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico thanks to the dicking around by the Obama administration in bringing B.P. to heel and it’s only going to get worse as the precious black gold spreads thoughout the Gulf and out into the Atlantic. It’s ironic in a very funny sort of way that the Republican party convention has picked Tampa for the site of their 2012 convention, the “Drill, Baby, Drill!” chickens are coming home to roost in the soon to be oil-coated diseased penis of America that is the state of Florida. Still there is zero chance of a legitimate contender rising from that pack of swine, rats and roaches to challenge Obama. He has about six and a half more years now to finish the job that Bush and Reagan started, Clinton abetted and has been blessed by bankers, polluters and war criminals everywhere.

And when all is said and done, the economy is in depression, the police state is in place, half the planet is occupied by U.S. troops and mercenaries and the ability of the biosphere to support human life has been damaged beyond repair Americans can be left to do that one thing that they have always been able to do so well: blame it on the nigger.

Next up: Jeb Bush in 2016 – to be coronated in front of an army of Tea Party brownshirts

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ Joe

 
EE

Geithner And Government Protect Wall Street And Dump Main Street For India

Geithner And Government Protect Wall Street And Dump Main Street For India

By William Cormier (featured with our good friend Bill’s permission – Just Another Coverup)

In a speech that will not surprise anyone, Timothy Geithner, while on a two-day visit to India, pledged that our government would “not (to) harm India’s IT outsourcing sector as it battles to create jobs at home in the worst labour market since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” He went on to state that “protectionist measures to prevent jobs from migrating outside the country would do more harm to the US than good.” As he rambled on, placing international relations and Wall Street profits ahead of millions of unemployed American workers, Geithner dug in his heels and stated:

“protectionist measures to prevent jobs from migrating outside the country would not seek to curb the investments of US companies overseas as “our fortunes are tied with the world”.”

“We are not going to go down that path,” promised Mr Geithner. “We know that it would make us weaker, not stronger.” LINK

To make matters worse, Timothy Geithner stated that the Obama Administration:

“would not seek to curb the investments of US companies overseas as “our fortunes are tied with the world”.

Who exactly is Timothy Geithner speaking for when he states that “We know that it would make us weaker, not stronger?” We need to press the White House and Mr. “Globalist Geithner” to explain exactly who he is referring to when speaking about “us.” We also need to know how and why it would make the United States weaker if we quit outsourcing American jobs and pay our citizens decent wages rather than supporting the economies of other nations throughout the world.

It is obvious the us Mr. Geithner is speaking of is Corporate America and Wall Street investors, not millions of highly qualified American workers that have had their livelihoods stripped from them by greedy corporations who have placed profit above the health and welfare of the American people. The Obama Administration’s acquiescence to corporate profits and power is nauseating and directly conflicts with his campaign promises. This is the most outrageous and misleading statement that Geithner has made to date, IMO, and we must challenge this need of President Obama to support Corporate America while stating that his administration is doing their best to prop-up our jobs market. You can’t do both Mr. President; our work force is competent and to pull us out of this “jobless recovery,” we have to create more high-tech jobs and quit outsourcing our economy and future to other countries.

How much has corporate greed aided other nations while helping to destroy our own economy? Just in India, the article referred to herein states:

IT outsourcing, which is heavily dependent on business from the US, is one of India’s flagship economic sectors. Companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Genpact helped propel the economy to growth rates of 9 per cent before the global financial crisis and was responsible for creating 45 per cent of new jobs over the past 10 years.

I haven’t seen these statements circulated in our Mainstream News Media, and as usual, they are reporting upon anything and everything other than what concerns the welfare of our own country. We need to spread the word that President Obama is selling out American workers and pledging to support other economies rather than our own, and this is absolutely unacceptable!

William Cormier

Original Source Link

Editor’s Note – The story referenced from the Financial Times requires registration, for those who cannot afford to subscribe to this most important economic news in this time of national crisis I am posting the article below:

Geithner vows to block protectionism
By James Lamont in New Delhi

Published: April 7 2010 10:39 Last updated: April 7 2010 17:31

The US government has vowed not to harm India’s IT outsourcing sector as it battles to create jobs at home in the worst labour market since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Tim Geithner, US Treasury secretary, said during a two-day visit to India that protectionist measures to prevent jobs from migrating outside the country would do more harm to the US than good.

“We are not going to go down that path,” promised Mr Geithner. “We know that it would make us weaker, not stronger.”

He also said that the administration of Barack Obama, president, would not seek to curb the investments of US companies overseas as “our fortunes are tied with the world”. There have been proposals to trim the tax privileges of US companies that operate internationally.
“American companies are long in the world,” Mr Geithner told Indian business leaders at a discussion hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry.

“They are good at what much of the world needs. A huge part of the basic economic challenge we face is to give stronger in- centive for private investment, help support innovation and try to make sure there is more investment and stronger exports globally.”

Mr Geithner said Mr Obama was “deeply committed” to trying to build a consensus among Americans for more open trade to support the recovery.

“We have got the worst labour market since the Great Depression,” the Treasury secretary said. “Most Americans are still going through an incredibly difficult economic series of challenges and yet we’ve been very successful in working to keep our markets open under all that pressure.”
IT outsourcing, which is heavily dependent on business from the US, is one of India’s flagship economic sectors. Companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Genpact helped propel the economy to growth rates of 9 per cent before the global financial crisis and was responsible for creating 45 per cent of new jobs over the past 10 years.

Last year the global IT outsourcing market was estimated to be worth as much as $250bn (€187bn, £164bn).

“Some of the sounds coming out of the US have caused concerns here,” said Tarun Das, the president of the Aspen Institute in India. Local businesses were wondering whether “the authors of globalisation are turning to protectionism”.

Senior policymakers say that the Indian economy is fast becoming more export-oriented and more vulnerable to protectionist action by other large economies.

“If we want to get to 9-10 per cent growth it’s in our interest that the US should get back to growing as soon as possible,” said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of India’s powerful planning commission.

“It’s also [important] that [the] market remain open.”

Fozzie Bear Fascism

“The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.”

-Unknown

Despite some wonderful rhetoric in a major speech given in the a police state in total lockdown last week when he visited Cairo newly crowned President Barack Obama is by the nature of his position of figure head of the American Empire a major disappointment to this point. The Cairo speech was astonishing in that an American President actually went into the heart of the Muslim world, admitted U.S. culpability in the 1953 CIA coup to overthrow democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddeq. Now of course, in the age of the internet (prior to the coming Chinese style censoring of it) the Iranian coup and the installation of the blood drinking puppet the Shah of Iran and his savage torture regime there is really no sense in denying this anymore, it was a hell of a gesture and he deserves credit for it, especially since it puts a gigantic bug up the asses of the dark forces and their nearly half-century reign of malevolence on behalf of big U.S. corporations and the financial oligarchs.

Obama also dared to speak harshly of our very ’special friend’ Israel which is refreshing given the long history of their involvement in propagandizing America, shaping foreign policy through their vicious, take no prisoners intimidation tactics of a vast lobby here in The Homeland. The agents of Israel have long been engaging in spying on Americans, buying and blackmailing the Congress to ensure that they retain the upper hand and that the Palestinians are treated as sub-humans and terrorists in the U.S. media. The tough talk with Israel (let’s see some action instead of words now) is welcome and very ballsy and Obama is now going to face the withering attack of the fascist Republican neocons, the dead-ender brownshirts of their knuckle-dragging Rapture death cult base and the knives of the bought and paid for Democrats in a Congress that arch-conservative pundit Pat Buchanan referred to as “Israeli occupied territory”. With enemies like these diseased pigs I would certainly hope that Mr. Obama has some pretty damned good (and loyal) security. With the Newt Gingrich-Rush Limbaugh angry army being whipped into a foaming at the mouth frenzy the assassination plots will grow exponentially as the extremists grapple for the right conditions for their return to power in 2010 or 2012.

The speeches aside, as of this day it is beginning to look increasingly apparent that once again Americans have been suckered, duped, swindled and bent over at the ballot box. The grand campaign trail rhetoric of CHANGE is just another empty slogan as Mr. Obama continues to not only flip-flop like an oxygen starved carp on the shore of the sewage collection facility known as Washington D.C. but to slyly reinforce some of the worst transgressions of the more openly fascist Bush-Cheney Axis of Evil. Despite the promises of CHANGE we still live in a high-tech police state that has not been reigned in an inch, the Obama administration is still down with illegal domestic spying and is even going to the extreme in pushing for the ability to shut down the internet, the framework for an authoritarian system of oppression beyond anything ever dreamed of in America is not only being kept but it is being augmented with twisted Stalinist legal mechanisms like preventative detention. He reneged on the release of the torture photos (they reputedly include graphic images of the rape of children) under pressure from fascist elements in a contradiction (LIE) that his government would be open. The wars of course go on, only the venues change, drones are blasting civilians on a near daily basis and with the ruthless assassination specialist General Stanley McChrystal taking command in Afghanistan it looks like the Phoenix Program has been resurrected and of course the big lie of Al Qaeda as global villians invoked to justify the ongoing imperialism. The restarting of military tribunals is also a stab in the back.

Of course Obama screwed us all by saving the Wall Street looters, the presence of some of the most notorious fixers on the planet Tim Geithner and Larry Summers among others should never have been confirmed due to their conflicts of interest to the financial oligarchs. The price that you are now paying at the pump is a direct result of Obama’s refusal to close the casino window and instead of nationalizing the crooked banks, cleaning them up and then returning them to private hands they were allowed to survive. The ballyhooed stress tests were a fraud and the recent Lazarus style rise of the markets is more attributable to a ‘The Surge is Working’ style of propaganda campaign as well as the chaning of the mark to market accounting rules that allowed derivatives with the worth of used toilet paper to be booked at whatever value that the Wall Street jackals happened to pull out of their asses to show phantom profitability. Now the oil speculators are back in business and 4 bucks a gallon is on the way. With a great fix like that for the economy (the real collapse is still coming) one has scant hopes that any sort of a legitimate first world style national healthcare system is coming, it is a certainty that the insurance industry leeches will still be attached to our backs.

Obama has also slagged the so-called radical left (actually they are anything but in fascist USA) elements of his base by failing to implement liberal/progressive policies. The feckless shoot down of ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ being the latest. Being a veteran myself and having served with gays (who were closeted out of necessity) I must say that they served with honor and that I would share a foxhole with a gay soldier any day rather than with a dickless, cringing Republican chickenhawk. The corporatist Democrats treat the base the same way that the fascist Republicans do the Jesus juicing ‘Christian’ base, they fire them up and then once elected throw them under the bus. I voted for Obama, it was the threat of Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency that made that choice for me, I kept seeing pictures of Hitler and Hindenberg in my mind. Now I wish that I had only done the right thing and voted for Nader or Cynthia McKinney, at least my dignity would be intact.

Anyway, if I were to spend much time on putting together a laundry list of Obama’s lies, half truths and prevarications it would take me just too long and it’s off to the salt mine time. I will however post this delicious piece from Ted Rall in it’s entirety:

Desperate and Afraid, People Trust Leader

WASHINGTON, NORTH AMERICAN PROTECTORATE, GREATER GERMAN REICH–From Honolulu to Portland, Maine, North American citizens of the Greater German Reich gathered on June 6th to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the victory of Axis forces at D-Day, the battle that decided World War II. Fallen heroes of the Wehrmacht and SS were commemorated at solemn ceremonies and Party rallies throughout the Reich, but the day held special meaning in Washington, which until 1945 was the capital of the former United States.

Speaking at the Supreme Kommandatur, which was built at the site of the former American presidential palace, Chancellor Adolf Hitler III said the war against the Western Allies paved the way for the years of peace and prosperity that followed. “It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide,” he said.

Recollections of the National Socialist triumph at Normandy were clouded by several developments–a severe recession, a war with no apparent end in sight, and continuing concerns over human rights abuses.

Hitler III swept into power last November with a slogan–“change you can believe in”–that charmed members of the Reichstag across the political spectrum from far right to extreme right. Since that time, however, changes have proven either incremental or non-existent. For example, Hitler III promised during the campaign to help national comrades in danger of losing their homes–but instead spent trillions of marks to bail out feckless banks. He promised to withdraw from the Eastern Front, but has extended the pullout timeline by a year, is leaving tens of thousands of troops in place, and even plans to open a new front in South Asia.

Finally, he declared his intent to close Auschwitz (“Germany does not ‘do’ genocide,” he said) only to move the remaining inmates to other camps, which are being expanded.

Despite the lack of action, most people continue to support the charismatic new Leader. “He has a lot on his plate,” says Kristof Mathewsohn, the cable TV commentator. “Give the guy time.”

Indeed, five months into his chancellorship, the Leader remains the most trusted figure in North American politics. A new poll of homeless, recently dispossessed workers found that 72 percent trust Hitler III “to do the right thing.”

“In watching and listening to Hitler III’s press conferences, it’s easy to appreciate why people trust him,” said a man who preferred to remain anonymous because, as a Jew, he could be arrested and murdered by the state. “Sure, I wish he’d shut down the gas chambers and the ovens, but he has a lot of other problems to fix first. I’m sure he’ll get around to investigating the guys in the previous administration for their role in the Holocaust–nothing drastic, maybe a truth and reconciliation commission or something.”

Members of the media remain in thrall to the Leader’s suave persona, which is magnified by the glamour his statuesque wife and adorable daughters have brought to Germania (formerly Berlin). “Finally–parties we can believe in!” quipped a reporter as he slipped into a sold-out Wagner performance where Hitler III and his family appeared for a long-promised “date night.”

Few have forgotten that Hitler III offered the best alternative. “We live in a one-party system,” pointed out Rachel Maddoff, host of “The Rachel Maddoff Show.” “Can you imagine how much worse it would have been had Hitler III lost?”

We will be left with nothing but our mouths to laugh with due to the failures of this latest political administration of charlatans. Not that it wasn’t predictable given the vast amounts of Clinton era toxic waste that has been pumped back into Washington. The laughing may soon stop though as the Obama administration policies continue to totally alienate progressives and liberals by the thousands with each and every betrayal – hell, they seem to come every fucking day don’t they? The fascist Republican hydra is now in full regeneration mode, the blast furnaces of the hatred of the fucked, failed and doomed provide the fuel for the engine of this doomsday machine. Wanna think of something even worse than Obama’s Fozzie Bear Fascism? Imagine a return to power of a full blown fanatic party, boiled down to the purest and most potent form, like black tar heroin returning to power starting next November when progressives and liberals decide that they are finished having the big red, white and blue dick rammed up their poop chutes with a nice jellied red hot habanero pepper sauce for lube.

And the torture state apparatus is only being strengthened and institutionalized every day that Lord Obama and the shit eating Vichy Democrats allow it to exist.

Fozzie Bear Fascism

“The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.”

-Unknown

Despite some wonderful rhetoric in a major speech given in the a police state in total lockdown last week when he visited Cairo newly crowned President Barack Obama is by the nature of his position of figure head of the American Empire a major disappointment to this point. The Cairo speech was astonishing in that an American President actually went into the heart of the Muslim world, admitted U.S. culpability in the 1953 CIA coup to overthrow democratically elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddeq. Now of course, in the age of the internet (prior to the coming Chinese style censoring of it) the Iranian coup and the installation of the blood drinking puppet the Shah of Iran and his savage torture regime there is really no sense in denying this anymore, it was a hell of a gesture and he deserves credit for it, especially since it puts a gigantic bug up the asses of the dark forces and their nearly half-century reign of malevolence on behalf of big U.S. corporations and the financial oligarchs.

Obama also dared to speak harshly of our very ’special friend’ Israel which is refreshing given the long history of their involvement in propagandizing America, shaping foreign policy through their vicious, take no prisoners intimidation tactics of a vast lobby here in The Homeland. The agents of Israel have long been engaging in spying on Americans, buying and blackmailing the Congress to ensure that they retain the upper hand and that the Palestinians are treated as sub-humans and terrorists in the U.S. media. The tough talk with Israel (let’s see some action instead of words now) is welcome and very ballsy and Obama is now going to face the withering attack of the fascist Republican neocons, the dead-ender brownshirts of their knuckle-dragging Rapture death cult base and the knives of the bought and paid for Democrats in a Congress that arch-conservative pundit Pat Buchanan referred to as “Israeli occupied territory”. With enemies like these diseased pigs I would certainly hope that Mr. Obama has some pretty damned good (and loyal) security. With the Newt Gingrich-Rush Limbaugh angry army being whipped into a foaming at the mouth frenzy the assassination plots will grow exponentially as the extremists grapple for the right conditions for their return to power in 2010 or 2012.

The speeches aside, as of this day it is beginning to look increasingly apparent that once again Americans have been suckered, duped, swindled and bent over at the ballot box. The grand campaign trail rhetoric of CHANGE is just another empty slogan as Mr. Obama continues to not only flip-flop like an oxygen starved carp on the shore of the sewage collection facility known as Washington D.C. but to slyly reinforce some of the worst transgressions of the more openly fascist Bush-Cheney Axis of Evil. Despite the promises of CHANGE we still live in a high-tech police state that has not been reigned in an inch, the Obama administration is still down with illegal domestic spying and is even going to the extreme in pushing for the ability to shut down the internet, the framework for an authoritarian system of oppression beyond anything ever dreamed of in America is not only being kept but it is being augmented with twisted Stalinist legal mechanisms like preventative detention. He reneged on the release of the torture photos (they reputedly include graphic images of the rape of children) under pressure from fascist elements in a contradiction (LIE) that his government would be open. The wars of course go on, only the venues change, drones are blasting civilians on a near daily basis and with the ruthless assassination specialist General Stanley McChrystal taking command in Afghanistan it looks like the Phoenix Program has been resurrected and of course the big lie of Al Qaeda as global villians invoked to justify the ongoing imperialism. The restarting of military tribunals is also a stab in the back.

Of course Obama screwed us all by saving the Wall Street looters, the presence of some of the most notorious fixers on the planet Tim Geithner and Larry Summers among others should never have been confirmed due to their conflicts of interest to the financial oligarchs. The price that you are now paying at the pump is a direct result of Obama’s refusal to close the casino window and instead of nationalizing the crooked banks, cleaning them up and then returning them to private hands they were allowed to survive. The ballyhooed stress tests were a fraud and the recent Lazarus style rise of the markets is more attributable to a ‘The Surge is Working’ style of propaganda campaign as well as the chaning of the mark to market accounting rules that allowed derivatives with the worth of used toilet paper to be booked at whatever value that the Wall Street jackals happened to pull out of their asses to show phantom profitability. Now the oil speculators are back in business and 4 bucks a gallon is on the way. With a great fix like that for the economy (the real collapse is still coming) one has scant hopes that any sort of a legitimate first world style national healthcare system is coming, it is a certainty that the insurance industry leeches will still be attached to our backs.

Obama has also slagged the so-called radical left (actually they are anything but in fascist USA) elements of his base by failing to implement liberal/progressive policies. The feckless shoot down of ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ being the latest. Being a veteran myself and having served with gays (who were closeted out of necessity) I must say that they served with honor and that I would share a foxhole with a gay soldier any day rather than with a dickless, cringing Republican chickenhawk. The corporatist Democrats treat the base the same way that the fascist Republicans do the Jesus juicing ‘Christian’ base, they fire them up and then once elected throw them under the bus. I voted for Obama, it was the threat of Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency that made that choice for me, I kept seeing pictures of Hitler and Hindenberg in my mind. Now I wish that I had only done the right thing and voted for Nader or Cynthia McKinney, at least my dignity would be intact.

Anyway, if I were to spend much time on putting together a laundry list of Obama’s lies, half truths and prevarications it would take me just too long and it’s off to the salt mine time. I will however post this delicious piece from Ted Rall in it’s entirety:

Desperate and Afraid, People Trust Leader

WASHINGTON, NORTH AMERICAN PROTECTORATE, GREATER GERMAN REICH–From Honolulu to Portland, Maine, North American citizens of the Greater German Reich gathered on June 6th to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the victory of Axis forces at D-Day, the battle that decided World War II. Fallen heroes of the Wehrmacht and SS were commemorated at solemn ceremonies and Party rallies throughout the Reich, but the day held special meaning in Washington, which until 1945 was the capital of the former United States.

Speaking at the Supreme Kommandatur, which was built at the site of the former American presidential palace, Chancellor Adolf Hitler III said the war against the Western Allies paved the way for the years of peace and prosperity that followed. “It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide,” he said.

Recollections of the National Socialist triumph at Normandy were clouded by several developments–a severe recession, a war with no apparent end in sight, and continuing concerns over human rights abuses.

Hitler III swept into power last November with a slogan–“change you can believe in”–that charmed members of the Reichstag across the political spectrum from far right to extreme right. Since that time, however, changes have proven either incremental or non-existent. For example, Hitler III promised during the campaign to help national comrades in danger of losing their homes–but instead spent trillions of marks to bail out feckless banks. He promised to withdraw from the Eastern Front, but has extended the pullout timeline by a year, is leaving tens of thousands of troops in place, and even plans to open a new front in South Asia.

Finally, he declared his intent to close Auschwitz (“Germany does not ‘do’ genocide,” he said) only to move the remaining inmates to other camps, which are being expanded.

Despite the lack of action, most people continue to support the charismatic new Leader. “He has a lot on his plate,” says Kristof Mathewsohn, the cable TV commentator. “Give the guy time.”

Indeed, five months into his chancellorship, the Leader remains the most trusted figure in North American politics. A new poll of homeless, recently dispossessed workers found that 72 percent trust Hitler III “to do the right thing.”

“In watching and listening to Hitler III’s press conferences, it’s easy to appreciate why people trust him,” said a man who preferred to remain anonymous because, as a Jew, he could be arrested and murdered by the state. “Sure, I wish he’d shut down the gas chambers and the ovens, but he has a lot of other problems to fix first. I’m sure he’ll get around to investigating the guys in the previous administration for their role in the Holocaust–nothing drastic, maybe a truth and reconciliation commission or something.”

Members of the media remain in thrall to the Leader’s suave persona, which is magnified by the glamour his statuesque wife and adorable daughters have brought to Germania (formerly Berlin). “Finally–parties we can believe in!” quipped a reporter as he slipped into a sold-out Wagner performance where Hitler III and his family appeared for a long-promised “date night.”

Few have forgotten that Hitler III offered the best alternative. “We live in a one-party system,” pointed out Rachel Maddoff, host of “The Rachel Maddoff Show.” “Can you imagine how much worse it would have been had Hitler III lost?”

We will be left with nothing but our mouths to laugh with due to the failures of this latest political administration of charlatans. Not that it wasn’t predictable given the vast amounts of Clinton era toxic waste that has been pumped back into Washington. The laughing may soon stop though as the Obama administration policies continue to totally alienate progressives and liberals by the thousands with each and every betrayal – hell, they seem to come every fucking day don’t they? The fascist Republican hydra is now in full regeneration mode, the blast furnaces of the hatred of the fucked, failed and doomed provide the fuel for the engine of this doomsday machine. Wanna think of something even worse than Obama’s Fozzie Bear Fascism? Imagine a return to power of a full blown fanatic party, boiled down to the purest and most potent form, like black tar heroin returning to power starting next November when progressives and liberals decide that they are finished having the big red, white and blue dick rammed up their poop chutes with a nice jellied red hot habanero pepper sauce for lube.

And the torture state apparatus is only being strengthened and institutionalized every day that Lord Obama and the Vichy Democrats allow it to exist.

Usurious Bastards

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

-Carroll Quigley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And

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

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

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

And

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Move Along, Nothing to See Here…