Lynch Mob Rule

 

The Ideological Cornerstone of Modern Republican Political Theory

Despite the trotting out of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords last Monday night in what has to be the most cynical and shameless bit of political theater since George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier, the great debt ceiling crisis was the nadir of the ongoing decline of the Der Homeland. Mrs. Giffords, who was nearly murdered by a deranged little freak at a public appearance in rootin’ tootin’ Tuscon has been reinvented as some sort of icon of hope in the era of Obama’s chump change. The shooting, of which Giffords was only one of victims (the dead included a federal judge and a nine year old girl) grabbed headlines in that the act of wanton murder went down in a Congressional district that Sarah ‘lock and load’ Palin’s PAC just happened to have featured a gun site over in an recent solicitation for money. While Jared Loughner could never definitely be tied to the violent haters that comprise the teabaggers and fascist Republican base (and likely never will be due to his insanity) it was treated by many as a wake up call to the potential for mayhem spurred on by the general climate of anger, hatred and toxicity in American politics.

So it was Gabby Giffords who would provide the necessary human interest cover story for the grand scale, red white and blue, dipped in Tabasco ass-fucking delivered to America by the terrorist Republican party. A terrorist Republican party that has benefited enormously by the cover provided by their repackaged and rebranded Tea Party base, a mass of embittered pasty white folks who have meshed well with the standard collection of American Taliban religious crazies and have been able to wrap their radicalism in a Gadsden flag as some bizarre symbol of revolution against tyranny. A terrorist Republican base that is largely funded by plutocratic, anti-American tax chiselers like the Koch Brothers with their immense activist networks. A terrorist Republican party that is promoted by veteran Republican operative Roger Ailes and and the FOX news propaganda machine as well as tens of thousands of radio stations run by Christian fanatics to reach the haters. A terrorist Republican party that has been fed even more money by the vile pig Karl Rove who was able to escape prison thanks largely to the actions of the nebulous Patrick Fitzgerald to build a super money laundering machine. A terrorist Republican party that effectively has hijacked the entire fucking judicial system but especially the thoroughly polluted Supreme Court courtesy of the RATS (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas) who forever punched the ticket of American fascism with their landmark Citizen’s United ruling enabling corporations to openly buy elections. A terrorist Republican party that in true fashion, our feckless quisling leader Barack Obama never fails to surrender to.

One can nearly forgive the terrorist Republican party for their blistering hatred of the American public, that is after all what they are all about and despite the cheesecloth thin facade provided by their Tea Party they wear their fascism on their sleeves. What is unforgivable is the ongoing selling out of the country by the detestable rat that is Obama, a man who is rapidly carving out a niche for himself as the worst president in American history. Were Obama to have held office during the critical years of World War II we would all be speaking German today. Other than being a cheese eating surrender monkey the terrorist Republican party have hit the mother load with Obama because their neo-Confederate, racist teabagger shock troops will never relent while there is a Negro in the White House. Obama can capitulate on every demand, accommodate every desire to bust the backs of the middle class by destroying the social safety net and in will NEVER be enough. The bigots will still hate him, they will hate him with a burning white hot incandescence because that is in their blood. The would only be happy were the infidel Obama to be lynched at the fifty-yard line in Lucas Oil Stadium, on national television during the halftime show of Super Bowl XLVI accompanied by a Lee Greenwood-Toby Keith duet.

Obama, is still an enigma to a large degree. His presidency, an endless series of disasters that mount by the minute has in some sort of a sick way made me wistful for Bush and Cheney, at least then I knew who the fucking enemy was. Obama has been so consistently awful that he is either a complete ignoramus or he is in on the con. The fact that he packed his administration with Wall Street insiders and the worst type of recycled Clinton era scum would seem to indicate the latter but perhaps it is even worse. What if Obama reckons himself a transformational type of reformer who is going to co-opt the greatest hits of that old fraud Ronald Reagan and change the entire system into a magical post-partisan land of milk and honey? From Obama’s earliest days and his fawning admiration for the Doris Keans Goodwin book on the presidency of Abraham Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals he seemed to have this wild hair up his ass about ignoring reality and building a new bipartisan coalition in a land that is arguably more divided than what even Lincoln faced. The one great problem with this is that the fascist Republican hydra would sooner see Obama tarred and feathered and then dragged down Pennsylvania Avenue behind a team of Ford F-150s than make peace. That Obama was black only made the reactionary haters and tenth generation racists in the red states hate him even more.  I recall that one of the lines of attack on Obama by the fascist right-wing was that he was a disciple of the late great radical Saul Alinsky but this is now as ludicrous as the other attack line that he is a socialist. Alinsky likely wouldn’t piss on Obama were he on fire today due to the Pope of Hope’s history of rolling over without a fight and then giving away more than the original demands to the GOP terrorists.

With this morning’s blessed (and cooked to a fine fricassee) stock markets being watched very closely by the Obama administration, the terrorist Republican party and the financial cartels that own BOTH of them to see how ‘investors’ react to Friday’s surprise Standard and Poor downgrade of the U.S. there is yet another sense of surrealism about. The fix is already in folks, Mr. Obama and his pet Wall Street racketeer insiders Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner will do whatever is necessary to keep the game going – get ready to become really familiar with the word austerity. The American economy will continue to crater – other than the rigged markets that have come to represent the financial health of the nation despite the inconvenient truth that they don’t have dick to do with the real economy. Since the Reagan reign of greed and illusion the swine and vermin on Wall Street have pulled off the big con of convincing the average American schmuck that they have a stake in the markets and the paper dealers have used millions upon millions in advertising and propaganda to get them into the pen for the shearing. The rolling out of 401k retirement plans and other investment vehicles have provided a very nice cover for corporate plunder, the dismantling and offshoring of the American manufacturing base and the ongoing war against labor that has led to the virtual extinction of the traditional company retirement and pension plans that built what was once the strongest middle class on the planet. You can bet that no matter what the opening bell of the DJIA (Dick Jammed In Ass) triggers that the hated big gubmint will be there to bail the bankster bloodsuckers and their stock churners out again. On the backs of already busted out and desperate Americans who are still oblivious to their plight and still for the most part believe in the legitimacy of their corrupted institutions.

The mockery of a “debate” on the debt problem, and it is one hell of a fucking problem is that it has zero basis in reality because it never, ever addresses the primary reason for America’s borrowing – to finance war and more war. This is where the terrorist Republican party and their mouth-breathing pasty white lynch mob will always be in the catbird seat. You see, the angry raised on John Wayne revisionist history dolts love war, especially when they don’t have to fight it and even more so when the war is being wage against the dirty brown skinned devil “a-rabs” or in a previous era “gooks”, they have an insatiable taste for human misery and a list of enemies that will ensure that there will never be a lack of those to wage war upon. The idiot masses are also being conned into buying the brilliant con job of destroying “entitlements” which is the word that has now come to describe Social Security and Medicare, programs that working Americans fucking PAID into for years and are now being cut to fund more war and money shuffling. The just plain mean nimcompoops who fly the Gadsden flag while manning the front lines for the terrorist Republican party are too buttfuck stupid to understand that while they are still waging cultural war against “welfare queens” and other Negroes sucking off of the big gubmint dole that the use of “entitlements’ to now include programs that they themselves benefit from that they have been given the knives to cut their own throats – and their gullibility ensures that they will do just that.

The real problem in this country with money and debt is that the entire “debate” is dishonest, other than the failure to include the costs of waging endless and costly corporate wars the real menace of big gubmint run amok, the post 9/11 national security state is also never addressed. Teabaggers are perfectly down with a high-tech surveillance network unlike anything seen in human history, the state sanctioned molestation of children and bullying of old ladies wearing medical diapers by TSA Nazis and the militarizing of local police departments because after all, if you didn’t do anything wrong why should you be afraid? There also can’t be any form of higher taxation on the rich pigs and chiselers (or to crib from a well known amphetamine gobbling Russian emigre “looters” and “moochers”) who have benefited astronomically from the three decades running class war that kicked off when Dutch Reagan fired those goddamned air traffic controllers. There is a rapidly declining tax base due to rigged laws that allow those who least deserve tax amnesty to avoid paying their fair share, millions of unemployed who can’t participate in the consumer economy and the glue that holds the entire thing together is the big lie that anyone can become rich in America, thanks to our benevolent rich job creators – horseshit! Tax the fuckers until they grow hoarse from squealing and loose the RICO laws on pigs like Grover Fucking Norquist, Karl Rove and the treasonous Koch Brothers.

So as the band plays on and the continues to sink, the rails manned with angry white lumpen Republicans waving their Gadsden flags and cheering while the glorious winners of the looter capitalist class war commandeer the life boats. Never mind the rest of us who are trapped in steerage, already up to our fucking necks in water.

 

The Real Reason To Damn Obama

“They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.”

-Huey P. Long

The only reason that I ever bothered with the so-called librul [sic] New York Times, a paper that mind you pushed as many falsehoods as others in selling the Iraq invasion was to read the regular Sunday column of Frank Rich. Rich was a prince among toads like the street pimp for globalization Thomas Friedman, the country club Jew snob David Brooks, the occasionally brilliant Paul Krugman, the bizarre Maureen Dowd and a cast of lesser bloviators. When Rich, after decades with the Times left this spring to become a regular at the less prominent New York Magazine I had little use for the NYT. The Times by the way despite the ongoing standard bitching and moaning from the fascist right-wing that has seized control of the media precisely because of the Hitlerian big lie of the liberal media is anything but liberal. The Times is just another propaganda organ of the status quo and like all newspapers are headed for the tar pits, shuffling off like the doomed dinosaurs that they all are. The dismal state of the media in this country is largely to blame for our collective march into the history books as an example of the latest empire to self-immolate, when news began to be managed so as to present “both sides” even when one side was obviously bullshit it ceased to be credible. The ongoing dismantling of investigative reporting, the closing of overseas bureaus and the necessity to dumb down reportage to appeal to a public (few of whom even bother to read anything) that continues to regress intellectually and the profit motive have all combined to push the newspaper industry toward it’s inevitable extinction. That however is a story for another time.

I haven’t read much from Rich until this week, just prior to the orgy of flag-sucking and raw gluttony that is the Fourth of July when he launched his own barrage of fireworks that is the dead-on piece that is entitled Obama’s Original Sin. Rich writing with his standard brilliance lays out the exact reason why Obama, despite the collection of brainless ass clowns who will spend the better part of the next year trying to out-Nazi each other to run against The Pope of Hope will likely be a one term president. Despite all of the moronic spew vomited up by the Koch Brothers funded band of costumed imbeciles that is the ridiculous Tea Party, the racist nonsense, the Israeli fifth column black propaganda about the secret Muslim horseshit and the even more absurd labeling Wall Street’s savior as some sort of Socialist or Commie the real reason why Obama is likely doomed is for his administration’s ongoing bailout and manipulating of the markets with Ben Bernanke’s funny money. Obama, from the beginning has been nothing more than a corporate media creation, a triumph of deceptive marketing right up there with the canonization of the old dunce that was Ronald Reagan and a foot stool for Wall Street’s avaricious gambling casinos. He had a historical opportunity to regulate these monstrous institutions of looter capitalist greed and failed utterly and abysmally, in the true Democratic party fashion.

Rich’s piece is about this very failure and I excerpt the following:

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet’s father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they “are burnt and purged away.”

After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department’s bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes. You almost have to feel sorry for the era’s designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky “Fabulous Fab” Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else. It’s as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.

Even now, on the heels of Bank of America’s reluctant $8.5 billion settlement with investors who held its mortgage-backed securities, the Obama administration may be handing it and its peers new get-out-of-jail-free cards. With the Department of Justice’s blessing, the Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, is pushing the 49 other states to sign on to a national financial settlement ending their investigations of the biggest mortgage lenders. What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up. Time reported in April that the lawyer negotiating with Miller for Moynihan’s Bank of America just happened to be a contributor to his 2010 Iowa reelection campaign. If the deal is struck, any truly aggressive state attorneys general, like Eric Schneiderman of New York, will be shut down before they can dig into the full and still mostly uninvestigated daisy chain of get-rich-quick rackets practiced by banks as they repackaged junk mortgages into junk securities.

Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords. The administration’s much-hyped Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being sabotaged by Washington Republicans intent on blocking any White House nominee, whether Elizabeth Warren or some malleable hack, to lead it. “We can’t let special interests win this fight,” said Obama when he proposed the agency in October 2009. Well, he missed his moment to fight for both it and Warren, and the special interests won without breaking a sweat.

Rather than purge the crash’s crimes, Wall Street’s leaders are sticking to their alibi: Everyone was guilty of fomenting this “perfect storm,” and so no one is. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and ­Masters of the Universe swagger is back. Even Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, about the only bank chief not to be caught with a suspect balance sheet or a $1,400 office trash can, has taken to channeling Schwarzman. In June, he publicly challenged Ben Bernanke about the intolerable burdens of potential regulation—this despite a 67 percent surge in JPMorgan’s first-quarter profits and a 1,500 percent raise in his own compensation from 2009 to 2010. As good times roar back for corporate America, it’s bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash—much of it parked out of the IRS’s reach overseas—instead of hiring. (How many jobs can you buy for $1.9 trillion? America’s total expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over a decade has been $1.3 trillion.) But what’s most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.

The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind. No good deed he’s done for Wall Street has gone unpunished. He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it? All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street”—an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as “very savvy businessmen.”

 AND –

personal Zelig, the former Clinton Treasury secretary and Harvard Corporation stalwart Robert Rubin. In The Audacity of Hope, published in late 2006, Obama called Rubin, then busily cheerleading the excessive risk at Citigroup, “one of the more thoughtful and unassuming people I know.” Two years later, when Citi cratered and threatened to take the economy with it, Rubin demonstrated his unassuming thoughtfulness by denying that he had anything to do with the toxic investments that cost taxpayers a $45 billion bailout and 52,000 Citi employees their jobs.

In his unseemly revolving-door career, Rubin not once but twice sped the Citi apocalypse—first in government, where he and his eventual successor as Treasury secretary, Larry Summers, championed the deregulatory policies that facilitated the consolidation of too-big-to-fail banks, and then in his $15 million-a-year role as Citi’s “guru,” where, by his own later account, he had no idea what was in the worthless paper the bank peddled to greedy dupes. You’d think Obama would have dumped him faster than he did the Reverend Wright, but that’s misreading him. Obama is preternaturally secure on thorny matters of race—as his magnificent speech on the subject made clear—and could distance himself from his preacher with no ambivalence. It’s “unassuming” braininess that’s his blind spot.

And so a parade of Rubin acolytes entered the White House, led by Geithner, a nearly lifelong civil servant so identified with the financial Establishment that even Mayor Bloomberg mistakenly introduced him as a Goldman alumnus at a public event in New York last year. It’s Geithner’s influence on policy, however, not his persona, that proved fateful. Not until March 2010 did the White House get its first explicit, modest jobs bill through Congress.

Obama had taken office at a true populist moment that demanded more than this. People were gagging over their looted 401(k)s and underwater homes, the AIG bonuses, and the bailouts. Howard Dean rage has never been Obama’s style—hope-and-change was an elegant oratorical substitute—and had he given full voice to the public mood, he would have been pilloried as an “angry black man.” But Obama didn’t have to play Huey Long. He could have pursued a sober but determined execution of justice and an explicit, major jobs initiative—of which there have been exactly none, the too-small stimulus included, to the present day.

By failing to address that populist anger, Obama gave his enemies the opening to co-opt it and turn it against him. Which the tea party did, dishonestly but brilliantly, misrepresenting Obama’s health-care-reform crusade as yet another attempt by the elites to screw the taxpayer. (The Democrats haplessly reinforced the charge with marathon behind-the-scenes negotiations with insurance and pharmaceutical-­industry operatives.) Once the health-care law was signed, the president still slighted the unemployment crisis. A once-hoped-for WPA-style public-works program, unloved by Geithner, had been downsized in the original stimulus, and now a tardy, halfhearted stab at a $50 billion transportation-infrastructure jobs bill produced a dandy Obama speech but nothing else.

Obama soon retreated into the tea-party mantra of fiscal austerity. Short-term spending cuts when spending is needed to create jobs make no sense economically. But they also make no sense politically. The deficit has never been a top voter priority, no matter how loudly the right claims it is. At Obama’s inaugural, Gallup found that 11 percent of voters ranked unemployment as their top priority while only 2 percent did the deficit. Unemployment has remained a stable public priority over the deficit ever since, usually by at least a 2-to-1 ratio. In a CBS poll immediately after the Democrats’ “shellacking” of last November—a debacle supposedly precipitated by the tea party’s debt jihad—the question “What should Congress concentrate on in January?” yielded 56 percent for “economy/jobs” and 4 percent for “deficit reduction.”

AND –

There’s not much Obama can do to alter the economy by 2012, given the debt-ceiling fight, the long campaign, and nihilistic Capitol Hill antagonists opposed to any government spending that might create jobs and, by extension, help Obama keep his own. But the central question before the nation couldn’t be clearer: Who pays? The taxpayers bailed out the elite; now it’s the elite’s turn to return the favor. Massive cuts to the safety net combined with scant sacrifice from those at the top is wrong ethically and politically. It is, in the truest sense, un-American. Obama knows this, and he hit a welcome note last week when he urged some higher corporate taxes for hedge funds and the like. But his forays in this direction are tentative and sporadic. You have to wonder why he isn’t seizing the moment to articulate and fight for the big picture instead of playing a lose-lose game of rope-a-dope with the Republicans on their budgetary turf.

Some Obama fans think it’s tactical genius that’s holding him back—his fabled long ball. Americans are no longer as angry as they were in January 2009 so much as they are defeated, depressed, and jaded by the slow recovery and by four decades of raging inequality that tells them the deck is stacked no matter who’s in Washington. Better, then, not to ruffle these still waters—or those easily rattled independents fetishized by political consultants—and instead scare seniors about imminent Medicare cutbacks and plot deep-think policy initiatives that (like health-care reform) might fix America over time. But the voters’ placidity hardly augurs well for Democratic turnout in 2012. And it may not last. All that’s required is one more economic panic to shatter the phony peace and whip the rage back to center stage, once again to the right’s advantage.

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

The Obama presidency has been one endless series of failures, cave-ins, half-measures, broken campaign promises, capitulations and pissed away opportunities for change. The only good moment for the man who failed to close Gitmo or even better yet send Lloyd Blankfein and the rest of the Wall Street criminals there was the hit on the bad assed bogeyman of the past decade Osama bin Laden, days after a blistering dressing down of the pompous ass that is Donald Trump. Even that was a failure in that Obama failed to use the bully pulpit once again to wave our Emanuel Goldstein’s bloody scalp, perhaps it had something to do with the missing body but you get the point. That the fascist GOP is actually looking like an alternative to Obama in the form of Mitt Romney prancing about I his magic red, white and blue underwear is a stunning example of how badly that Obama has been up to this point. I really loved Rich’s line about the O-Bots, those who are the same type of apologists for Barry O. that drove the left so batshit during the Bush years. Rich wrote “ Some Obama fans think it’s tactical genius that’s holding him back—his fabled long ball.” To this I quote myself from a previous post entitled Money Doesn’t Talk: It Swears:

Big Sister Says Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.

My first thought was that I was watching some bizarre sort of cabaret show with Tom Ridge in drag, only with some sort of weird looking grey skunk pelt wig. Then much to my horror it was Big Sister, the top Nazi at at Der Department of Heimat Security doing her damned level best to further drive home the horrible truth that there is virtually no difference between the ousted Bush-Cheney administration and the current one presided over by Barack Obama. Hell, the argument can be made that Obama is worse than Bush in that his velvet smooth demeanor, his syrupy siren song of a sales pitch makes it possible for him to get away with things that Bush never would have dreamed of trying. For example, all of those wonderful and costly naked cancer causing body scanners that have been installed in the nation’s airports and coming soon at a shopping mall and sports venue near you. There is no way on God’s green Earth that Bush could have ever pulled that off nor could he have gotten away with the government mandated sexual assaults given to travelers all under the pretense of security. Now Janet Napolitano is dredging up every scare tactic from years past, invoking every phony and scary bogeyman that has been used as justification for the transformation of this once free country into a lockdown mode, torture worshipping, civil liberties zone where connected corporate and banking vampires feed freely to bursting on the plentiful supply of cattle and sheep.

The terrorism fear card was the most kick ass club in the bag during the Bush years, while Obama and his people have yet to match the strident rhetoric of his criminal predecessor it isn’t because of Big Sister and the massive expansion of Homeland security which she is obviously using to accumulate chits for her post-DHS career. Most obviously are the nifty naked body scanners and zealous TSA pedophiles thanks to the cynical and lucrative fear-mongering of former DHS capo Michael Chertoff (Big Sister’s predecessor) in the dread soaked, media-hyped aftermath of the Christmas Day underwear bomber hoax. The snaked body scanners, which Chertoff’s lobbying group made millions off of are another massive boondoggle that serves two needs, one being the obvious necessity to keep the corporate money rolling an and secondly building a firewall between the unwashed masses of asses and the oligarchy for the day that the shit finally hits the fan.  We also have the Orwellian campaign to have Big Sister herself  on Wal-Mart checkstand telescreens urging citizens to rat each other out to the government for vaguely defined suspicious behavior. Despite the naive hope that the incoming Obama administration would implement reforms to reverse some of Bush and Cheney’s most blantant violations of civil liberties it is only getting worse. Ace blogger Glenn Greenwald sums it all up in his recent piece The Tea Party and Civil Liberties:

The establishments of both political parties — whether because of actual conviction or political calculation — are equally devoted to the National Security State, the Surveillance State, and the endless erosions of core liberties they entail. Partisan devotees of each party generally pretend to care about such liberties only when the other party is in power — because screaming about abuses of power confers political advantage and enables demonization of the President — but they quickly ignore or even justify the destruction of those liberties when their own party wields power. Hence, Democratic loyalists spent years screeching that Bush was “shredding the Constitution” for supporting policies which Barack Obama now enthusiastically supports, while right-wing stalwarts — who spent years cheering on every Bush-led assault on basic Constitutional limits in the name of Terrorism — flamboyantly read from the Constitution during the Obama era as though they venerate that document as sacred. The war on civil liberties in the U.S. is a fully bipartisan endeavor, and no effective opposition is possible through fealty to either of the two parties.

For most civil liberties incursions over the last decade, there’s been at least some glimmer of opposition on the Left — exemplified by people like Russ Feingold in the Senate and the Congressional Black Caucus and Dennis Kucinich in the House. But they’ve been easily overwhelmed by the civil-liberties-hating mainstream of the Democratic Party, and particularly hampered by the lack of any meaningful partners on the Right (where Ron Paul has been a solitary voice on such matters). What has been most needed — and most harmfully non-existent — is some minimal amount of intellectual honesty and consistency from America’s conservatives, whose rhetoric of “limited government” and “individual rights” has translated into nothing other than lockstep support for ever-increasing government power and a highly authoritarian political mindset. It is that dynamic that has marginalized civil liberties advocacy — and rendered civil liberties erosions inevitable — no matter which party is in control.

Very nicely put. That the same people who would have shrieked for Bush’s blood over the naked body scanners are down with having our national airports turned into East German style goon-manned checkpoints exposes the phoniness and lack of conviction of the O-Bots now that their team has the ball. Greenwald rightfully gives credit to the number of newly minted House Republicans who in an astonishing display of recalcitrance bordering on outright sedition rebelled against the renewal of the anti-American USAPATRIOT Act. Could this be a sign that the Sarah Palin/Dick Armey parasites are losing influence over the Tea Party? Is a restoration of the REAL Tea Party, the Tea Party that had roots in the Ron Paul movement in the works and in these times an anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties movement would have broad crossover appeal if the death panel dummies are excommunicated. It’s no wonder that Big Sister would announce that the threat of a terrorist attack is at the most “heightened state” since 9/11. If the holy grail of the USAPATRIOT Act is challenged then the whole house of cards of the phony war on terror could come crashing down and with so much money to be made in the Nazification of America business we sure as hell couldn’t have that could we?

We are at a precarious period in history today, U.S. monetary policy which has been rigged to back up the Wall Street jackals has led to record food prices through commodities speculation. This in turn is leading to the uprisings of those who are as mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore in a number of countries, the most important one of course being Egypt where the revolution only grows in strength by the day. It is now at the point where after the visit of the imperial bagman Frank Wisner that CIA puppet torture expert and now Egyptian defacto ruler Omar Suleiman is issuing veiled threats if the uprising continues. The tipping of Egypt would upset the entire Middle East applecart and trigger the most feared thing of all, a global revolution against corrupt American looter capitalism. And then there is the matter of Israel, the second wave of Zionist propaganda is now hitting America with the idiotic and inevitable comparisons of Iran to Egypt, the threats of those savage Islamic killers in the Muslim Brotherhood and the big lie that Israel, that theocratic fascist hellhole is the region’s only ‘democracy’ and is facing yet another esistential threat if Egypt falls. With Senator Rand Paul actually having the balls to come right out and call for cutting off of foreign welfare paid for by the U.S. taxpayers to underwrite Israeli human rights abuses and the Israel Lobby already scrambling their American fifth column (see CUFI) the coming GOP primaries are going to be ugly as never before. With Big Sister hitting the right chords to assign blame to al CIAda in the event of a new false flag terror attack and the history of Mossad black ops squads it would be very prudent to be on the lookout for what is truly suspicious behavior and groups, take for instance Israeli art students and mall vendors.

Anyway…..
Here’s an idea for all of the allegedly anti-big government, co-opted teabagger if you truly want to practice what you preach why not DISMANTLE THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY? break it into millions of pieces and scatter it to the winds? There is no better illustration of big government run amok, drunk on power and inept beyond comprehension bureaucratic waste on the planet than DHS. An agency hastily assembed while Americans were still scared shitless of those scary Muslims who hated us for our blessed way of life and allegedly blew up our buildings. The Department of Homeland Security is an out of control, blood-sucking abomination that exists solely for the need to perpetuate itself and a huge network of crony contractors who hit the jackpot with the American Reichstag Fire and have been using fear as a justification to extort, bully, shakedown and otherwise rob the American taxpayers blind in order to feed itself. DHS and it’s cottage industry of surveillance experts, ex-spooks, sadists, perverts, hucksters and propaganda pimps for a decade now. DHS and all that it has spawned NEED that fear to continue to grow exponentially and to justify its existence by finding bogeymen and useful idiots. So come on now people, why not start concentrating on dismantling this Frankenstein monster once and for all because before much longer we are ALL going to be on the terrorist watch lists, human grist for the mills that will grind our bones to make their bread. Now that is an idea whose time has come.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

The Last Circle: Welcome to the Spookloop

“Nothing is as it appears to be.”


-Robert Booth Nichols


Be patient, spread the word among friends, do your little bit. The system will self-destruct because it is funded on corruption and untruth.


-Anthony Sutton

 

It was evident that when the body of freelance writer Danny Casolaro was found in a bathtub of bloody water on August 10, 1991, his wrists deeply slashed multiple times that it was already a highly unusual ‘suicide’. That he was in the final stages of wrapping up his investigation of an association of mobsters, government officials and rogue intelligence figures grown out of a dirty CIA “Old Boy network that he had dubbed The Octopus and that his body was discovered in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel room where he had gone to pick up the final piece of evidence for his story made his death all the more suspicious. The fact that his briefcase and files (always present during his work) were missing, his body prematurely and illegally embalmed prior to the notification of his family and room 517 of the Martinsburg Sheraton professionally cleaned, making any sort of law enforcement forensic investigation prohibitive are not signs that would indicate a typical suicide. Casolaro, according to sources was not despondent but rather quite elated that his investigation was nearing completion when he had made the trip to “bring back the head of the octopus” where he was reportedly set to meet a key figure and to trade information that he had in his possession. There was a ‘suicide’ note found at the scene but it was short and cryptic, not what a professional writer would likely leave as his final words. There was however, another piece of paper that was found tucked inside of his discarded shoe that would be far more compelling . The mystery surrounding Casolaro is still to this day unsolved and largely forgotten but through the dedicated work of others who were able to pick up the trail and to continue his research into this most important of matters there have been enough pieces of a very elaborate puzzle put together, and the picture is extremely disturbing.

One of the researchers, who has worked tirelessly over the years, at times under great risk to get the real story is author Cheri Seymour, a California based writer who picked up the baton and carried it further and continued to interview Casolaro’s sources as well as to expand his scope. Her laboriously researched and now completed book entitled The Last Circle (published by Trine Day) was recently released and provides what is to date the most detailed and damning analysis of The Octopus. Seymour provides a fascinating account of events surrounding not only Casolaro’s investigation but also takes a look at the trickery and deceit of figures within the Reagan Department of Justice and the theft of the Inslaw Corporation’s highly sophisticated PROMIS software program. Described as a precursor to artificial intelligence and the highly technical computer systems of today the story of PROMIS would come to figure prominently in many of the most disturbing aspects of our current system of what is at least for the moment, a soft fascism where Big Brother style surveillance and control, financial chicanery of the highest order and the ominous contingency plans for government reactions to potential domestic unrest are ubiquitous yet they remain largely unnoticed by the average American citizen. Thanks to a cunning and relentless shadow government and a controlled media, most have no idea that they are inside of a rapidly closing trap. Seymour’s book, which is subtitled Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal is a must read for those who truly have a serious understanding that something in this country has gone terribly wrong.

The Last Circle of the title refers to the bottom level of Dante’s pits, the area that is populated by the real scum, those who were traitors to their country, friends and lords; at this point in late 2010 this pit must have a multi-year waiting list given the wanton and systemic criminality in our rotting Empire. For a subject as important as the Casolaro research, the PROMIS software story, The Octopus and the huge reverberations forward into our current and thoroughly corrupt high-tech militarized surveillance state there has been little written outside of dated magazine and newspaper articles and one book. While bits and pieces are scattered throughout many books based on larger subjects such as BCCI and Iran-Contra, Casolaro’s Octupus has only prominently been featured in one book to my knowledge that even attempted to do it justice, Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith’s The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. While a draft internet version of The Last Circle which has been available on the internet for years and has provided invaluable material to serious researchers the completed version of The Last Circle is a must read, not only for the updated additional information but for the large appendix of well over 100 pages of images and documents including some of Danny Casolaro’s own handwritten notes. It is such a detailed and meticulously researched book that it is truly impossible to even begin to do it justice in any sort of short review. I will however try to offer up a high-level overview of the incredible story presented by Cheri Seymour.

The Last Circle begins with the story of how Seymour who was at the time working as a reporter for the Mariposa Gazette came to realize that local law enforcement figures were involved in drug trafficking. The dark, snaking trail that is described runs through our hidden history and corrupted institutions like the roiling river Styx. Cheri Seymour picks up the trail with a bizarre accident during the Queen of England’s 1983 visit to Yosemite National Park when a routine scouting of the Queen’s motorcade route resulted in a head on collision between a local Sheriff’s car and a car driven by members of the U.S. Secret Service. The accident resulted in the deaths of three Secret Service agents. The Mariposa County Sheriff’s officer, Sergeant Roderick Sinclair was found to have been under the influence of illegal drugs. Three years prior to the accident, Sinclair also had previously investigated the disappearance and presumed drowning of whistleblower deputy Ron Van Meter, a law officer who had been outraged at having discovered drug trafficking within the department. Cover-ups occurred as they typically do in such matters and Van Meter’s death was attributed to a boating accident (he had borrowed the boat to arrest fellow deputies at Lake McClure), the body was not recovered at the time of the incident. Ten years after the “accident”, his body was recovered, wrapped in a fish net and weighted down by several objects including a fire extinguisher.

Subsequent research revealed that Sinclair had connections and powerful ones at that. His father had been an aide to General Douglas MacArthur, the vaunted WW II leader of forces in the Pacific who became a hero to the more virulent elements of the far right after being dismissed by President Truman during the Korean War. Members of the general’s staff, most prominently Charles Willoughby in the postwar period became integral in the Cold War and the ‘ends justify the means’ ideology that would define the jihad against the Red Menace of Communism that served as blanket justification for immorality and lawlessness from which The Octopus would be birthed. With anti-Communism as a cover and with the postwar creation of the National Security State and the CIA it very quickly became possible for connected insiders to engage in great acts of criminality and atrocity in order to fund off the books operations and enrich themselves while expanding their dark reaches into the global narcotics and drug trade. The fight against Communism provided justification for alliances with former Nazi war criminals who were assisted in escaping justice by U.S. intelligence and then sent to the Eastern Bloc as well as Latin America to protect the ability of U.S. corporations and banking interests to ensure that countries would stay ‘business friendly’ which translates into torture, coups, black ops and most importantly riches. But I am getting ahead of myself.

With growing evidence of the collaboration of local officials and the out of control drug trade that included burgeoning methamphetamine labs and a strange connection through a subsidiary of mega-corporation MCA (the Curry Company was the largest concessions company in Yosemite National Park, hit hard by drug distribution activities at the time); concerned residents of Mariposa County mobilized and attempted to use the legal system to address the very serious problems of illegality that existed. Local groups were formed and lawsuits filed, a letter was written to then President Ronald Reagan by the wife of attorney Ben Wagner who was to represent citizen’s group D.I.G. (Decency in Government) in District Court. In one of the more eerie passages from this very disturbing book Ben Wagner received a response from a “Chuck” at the Reagan White House who scheduled a meeting with him, a secret meeting per White House request. Seymour writes that “However, the day after meeting with “Chuck”, Wagner unplugged his phone and walked out on his law practice and his home in Jackson California, taking nothing with him except his clothes and has wife, never to be seen again”. There are many similar stories of those who have gotten too close to the truth when investigating this intricate web of spooks, mobsters, corrupt government officials and their activities, some have simply disappeared, others have met with strange demises, suspicious accidents and ‘suicides’, the pattern is a consistent one.

Seymour’s investigation led her to a retired FBI agent named Ted Gunderson, a figure who seems to often appear in some of the most sordid and scandalous investigations in recent history who in turn led her to The Octopus. On the basis of earlier material that was provided by Gunderson on the drug trade to the disappeared Wagner for use in the case against drug trafficking cops Seymour called him and a meeting was set up at Gunderson’s home in Manhattan Beach. After the meeting, Gunderson gave the author a series of newspaper clippings and documents, many of which dealt with Danny Casolaro and his investigation of The Octopus. There was also material on Inslaw and PROMIS, Iran-Contra activities, financial scandals including the Savings and Loan crisis and defense contractor the Wackenhut Corporation. The next day Seymour received a collect call from a man named Michael Riconosciuto and he had a tale to tell. Calling from jail in Tacoma, Washington Riconosciuto provided her with the names of people who were in charge of methamphetamine operations in Mariposa and Fresno Counties. When asked who was behind the ring he revealed something much larger and more sinister than would have been imaginable:

“It’s the Company. Arms get shipped to the Contras, the Afghanistan rebels [Mujahaden], the Middle East. You know, to fight the Soviet influence. But the Contras and Mujahaden don’t have the money to pay for the arms, so they pay with drugs, cocaine or heroin. The Company handles the drug end of it in the U.S. …”

The bombshell unleashed by Riconosciuto cut right to the heart of The Octopus, and his entanglements with it were numerous. He divulged that was incarcerated as a result of corrupt Justice Department figures seeking to discredit him for his affidavit provided to Inslaw’s attorney Elliott Richardson for the purpose of providing the House Judiciary Committee that was investigating the theft and illegal modification of Inslaw’s PROMIS software with pertinent. In the affidavit, Riconosciuto admitted that it was he who had modified the software to include a “back door” which would allow for remote users to access information on the host computer. The software, once modified was then sold by Reagan administration cronies to foreign governments where it was used for reasons of espionage. Prior to the affidavit, Riconosciuto had been contacted by a Peter Videnieks of the Justice Department threatening him if he were to cooperate with the Judiciary Committee probe that there would be consequences. Eight days after the affidavit was filed Riconosciuto was arrested for allegedly running a meth lab. Videnieks would himself come under scrutiny in a U.S. Customs Department Internal Affairs probe for potential perjury and other activities. He had also been at DOJ as a contract administrator during the time of the PROMIS theft and modifications and had alleged but never completely proven ties to dirty figures in the Reagan administration.

Riconosciuto stated that he had altered the software largely on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California where the Wackenhut Corporation and the tribe had a joint-venture to use the sovereign lands for weapons testing, for sales to Latin America and other overseas destinations. It was a perfect situation, the reservation provided cover for variety of endeavors including the development and testing of arms including a fuel air explosive, biochemical warfare agents and other armaments that could be provided to third world regimes, primarily to right-wing governments in Latin America. It was an oversight free zone and a haven for spooks, paramilitary figures including Contra leaders such as Eden Pastora during Reagan’s dirty wars south of the border during the 1980s. In his book The Crimes of a President , author Joel Bainerman described the reservation as a “CIA cutout” which would be consistent with the type of activities that were conducted there. Riconosciuto was a technical wizard, a child prodigy who at the tender age of 10 had wired his parents neighborhood with a private telephone system and who won numerous science fairs in his youth. A computer expert who at some point became attractive to intelligence figures and who later became a critical figure in the dark trades practiced by the shadowy operatives of the National Security State. Riconosciuto was also a major source for Danny Casolaro.

The story of the PROMIS software, an abbreviation for Prosecutors Management Information System is complicated and full of the sort of intrigue that would normally be found in something like a Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy novel. Developed by Inslaw Corporation’s Bill Hamilton, it was designed as a legal case management tool where cases could be tracked and with over half a million lines of computer code was an innovative and unprecedented piece of high-technology for its time. The program was capable of integrating numerous databases and was to have been sold by Inslaw to the U.S. Department of Justice to replace the antiquated system in use at the time. However, Inslaw’s contract with the government was subverted by corrupt figures within the Reagan Justice Department who conspired with a Reagan and Edwin Meese crony named Earl Brian (long alleged to be associated with the October Surprise) who then used legal trickery to steal the PROMIS software and drive Inslaw into bankruptcy. The software, after being stolen was modified by Riconosciuto and then distributed by Brian and others to various foreign countries including Israel with the modification allowing intelligence figures to engage in espionage using the back-door feature. The flag waving, drug-running Reagan National Security Council aide Colonel Oliver North also saw much potential in using PROMIS for the surveillance of American citizens as a function of the infamous REX 84 program, a subsidiary of FEMA and the Continuity Of Government contingency plans that were solidified during the Reagan years. Recently, there were two critical articles that referenced the use of PROMIS and derivatives in regards to current day shadow government contingency plans for the tracking and rounding up of potential dissidents, these being Christopher Ketcham’s The Last Roundup and Tim Shorrock’s Exposing Bush’s Historic Abuse of Power, both referenced in my own series on the abuse of the software by the shadow government entitled Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government.

The use by extreme reactionaries to assist in the implementation of a fascist police state infrastructure, the spying on foreign countries including allies (which has just been confirmed once again as a matter of policy with the recent Wikileaks data dump and the mandate to collect biometric and credit card data on United Nations officials) and the use of surveillance for control and political blackmail were not the only functions of PROMIS. More darkly, the program could work very well in the laundering of money from illegal narcotic trafficking, the manipulation of financial markets and to the benefit of corrupt government officials in providing intel to organized crime figures. Another Casolaro source, Robert Booth Nichols, a suave dashing sort of a no-holds barred super spook whose activities and work facilitated some of the most sinister elements of what prominent author Peter Dale Scott refers to as the “Deep State” figures prominently in the saga. Nichols, a man who had connections between both legitimate government, shadowy intelligence figures and organized crime figures is a key figure in The Last Circle. Smooth enough to be retained for sensitive foreign intelligence affairs by the U.S. government and ruthless enough to hang a man upside down in front of a running airplane propeller as a method of persuasion Nichols is like a character straight out of central casting, more on him in a little bit.

The Cabazon Indian Reservation, where PROMIS was modified, is a critical piece of the story; it is the nexus point where many of the elements of the shadow government and its underworld cohorts all intersect. In thoroughly examining Cabazon, it is possible to trace decades of criminality, black operations and the accompanying subversion of the democratic institutions of this nation both backwards into the post WW II era as well as forward to events of late 2010. The clouds of intrigue swirling around the reservation begin with the 1981 execution of Cabazon Indian Tribal Council vice-chairman Fred Alvarez along with friends Ralph Boger and Patricia Castro. Alvarez was appalled at the use of the reservation for sinister purposes and the corruption of then administrator John Phillip Nichols, a connected man whose juice had been instrumental in the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture; Alvarez was about to blow the whistle at the time of the triple murders. Shortly afterwards, there were weapons testing demonstrations held for Iran-Contra leaders at Lake Cahuilla and attended by the aforementioned Earl Brian who in an official document in the appendix of Seymour’s book, was identified as a CIA employee.

As Seymour continues to untangle the web of deceit there are more disturbing revelations regarding the Cabazon Reservation and those who used it as a base for operations. Through contact with Riconosciuto and access to a treasure trove of his files kept hidden away in a trailer in Death Valley, she was able to expand her research. In addition to the Alvarez murders, there was another strange death associated with the Cabazon Reservation. The body of Paul Morasca, a Riconosciuto associate, was found in his San Francisco condo hog-tied and slowly strangled with a telephone cord around his legs and neck. He was also pretty good, as was Riconsciuto at moving money around through the SWIFT-CHIPS financial clearing houses utilized by banking institutions. Morasca, who had been appointed to a management position with the Cabazon Reservation casino, was dead months later. He was a financial wizard when it came to moving money through the interbank clearinghouse systems; according to some he may even have been involved in the transfer of funds out of the notorious Australian CIA connected drug-money laundering Nugan Hand Bank as it collapsed; Morasca allegedly had access codes to several accounts used to launder funds at the time of his murder and may have been tortured to provide the information to his killer (s). Another strange death, a school teacher named Mary Quick, the aunt of a Morasca/Riconosciuto associate who may have mistakenly been involved with the access codes was shot in the face during what was ostensibly made to look like a robbery. The Cabazon Reservation’s casino, according to a San Francisco Chronicle article received seed money from the Gambino Crime Family.

Now here is a bit of food for thought, the note that was found inside of Danny Casolaro’s shoe in Room 517 of the Martinsburg Sheraton had the names of Fred Alvarez and Paul Morasca were among the information that was written on it. It was known that Casolaro had planned a trip to Indio and the Cabazon Reservation as a continuation of his research, a trip that he never was able to make thanks to those who had one hell of a lot to lose were they to be exposed. They would have revealed a very ominous connection between intelligence figures and off the books ops, mob figures and political figures burrowed deep inside the bureaucracy and working hand in hand with criminal elements. I excerpt from the press release for The Last Circle:

During the last week of his life, Danny had discovered a connection between a former director of international affairs for the Justice Department, the Cali Drug Cartel and Robert Booth Nichols, an international intelligence operative whom he had been interviewing extensively for months. Danny’s last phone bills indicated he’d spent hundreds of hours on the phone with Nichols, most of the calls averaged one to two hours. This in effect was one tentacle of Danny’s Octopus.

Danny had confronted Nichols about the former DOJ director and the Cali Cartel while staying in Martinsburg. It was the last conversation Danny ever had with Nichols and with Bob Bickel, a friend whom Danny Confided in. Bickel subsequently confirmed the conversation, but for reasons unknown, the Cali Cartel connection was never published in any of the official investigative reports on Danny’s death. These included the DOJ report of September 27, 1994.

Said Justice Department official was a man named Mike Abbell, a top ranking bureaucrat who after leaving the Justice Department where he once headed the Office of International Affairs, was indicted in a massive drug racketeering case against the Cali Cartel. Casolaro’s research had touched upon many corrupt and powerful interests and their long-running illicit schemes but his tracing the criminality directly into the United States Department of Justice may just have been the third rail. The Last Circle provides a substantial amount of information on just how dirty that elements of the nation’s top law enforcement institution may have been and provides plenty of information including wiretaps, interviews with the good guys who were trying to get to the bottom of it all and in perhaps the most chilling statement of all, that there are extremely high-ranking officials who may have been involved in obstruction of justice and who are still at the DOJ where their duties now have come to include providing legal cover for torturers and war criminals such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee and frantically working to prevent Wikileaks from publishing information on Bank of America by revising the 1917 Espionage Act. Given the ugly hidden activities of the banksters and a history of fraud and money laundering such a leak could expose the whole game and shine a light on the longtime institutional corruption in this country, especially the collusion between banks, drug traffickers and government figures and we certainly can’t have that can we?

Now to return to the previously mentioned Robert Booth Nichols, the intelligence man who was a major source of Danny Casolaro (Casolaro’s last days included numerous calls to Nichols) as well as a business partner of Michael Riconosciuto. Nichols was also a board member of FIDCO (First Intercontinental Development Corporation) which includes such interesting luminaries as former Howard Hughes aide and known CIA employee Robert Maheu as well as Texas oil billionaire and former NFL franchise owner of the Dallas Cowboys Clint W. Murchison Jr., a man whose father has been linked by some to the power cabal that would have a hell of a lot to gain were President John F. Kennedy to end up dead. Nichols was a big time player, according to accounts he had done independent contract work for the CIA, the NSA and had been tied to figures in both the Japanese Yakuza as well as the Gambino Crime Family. He dealt in military grade weaponry and had been under Federal investigation for international money laundering at one time. Nichols, it appears was a crucial go-between for darker elements of the U.S. state and organized crime. Former business partner and head of MCA Home Entertainment Eugene Giaquinto, a man with known mob ties was recorded on wiretap as saying that Nichols was his “government man” and that he could be counted on to provide official government documents pertaining to investigations. That figures within the government would have cozy relationships with the mob is really nothing surprising, and I must offer up my standard disclaimer regarding such collaborations. As in previous work that I have done on the subject of mob influence with U.S. government activities and figures I make no moral judgment regarding mob activity, it’s a business to these people and the costs associated are of no regard to me. What I DO have a serious problem with are corrupt or compromised government officials allowing themselves to be used by organized crime or to misuse their positions of trust as public servants to enrich themselves and their organized crime partners. For these rats truly belong within Dante’s last circle or in a Supermax prison at the very least.

There is a long history of the CIA/OSS in working with organized crime figures, the traceable beginning point would be World War II and the government’s deal with Charles “Lucky” Luciano and other bosses to assist the American war effort, notably Operation Underworld. War was war and such alliances were deemed necessary during a time of great national crisis and mobilization, that sort of alliance is much different than the criminality that grew out of the ongoing marriage of the CIA and other intelligence arms with organized crime figures. Such collaborations have a tendency over time to pollute and corrupt the ideals and objectives that they at one time purported to justify, for another example one need look no further than the CIA/OSS providing amnesty to Nazi war criminals, for example General Reinhard Gehlen who was brought in to the U.S. intelligence apparatus, ostensibly to wage the war against demonic Communism. This is a story for another time though, I just needed to make it clear that I have no personal bone to pick with organized crime, only with the officials who betray the country and the public trust by abusing their positions to enrich themselves by working with them.

Nichols seems to be one of those who benefited immensely by playing both sides and through parlaying his connections and interests into a very nice career. He was so important that as recently as 2004 was still a big time go to guy when he was involved in a scheme with chasing down a $250 billion treasury note (Serial Number SC 3040-20) that was allegedly backed by 2,500 metric tons of gold stored at the Atlanta Federal Reserve. Nichols, described in a lawsuit brought by Bayou LLC hedge fund’s Samuel Israel against Nichols for his role in an alleged scam involving the note was said by his attorney as:

“He was asked to find something, and he found it,” Nichols’s lawyer, Joseph Bainton, told Bloomberg, declining to elaborate. “There are very few people capable of performing this service, for which he was paid a lump sum of $10 million”

Nichols was vouched for by one John P. Ellis, a cousin of then President George W. Bush whose long family history of intelligence ties is hardly a secret and whose moral traditions would be consistent in those who would have no qualms about engaging in alliances with organized crime figures. After all, it was George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush whose Wall Street firm was closed down by FDR back in 1942 under the Trading With The Enemies Act for helping to launder money for the Nazis, not that Prescott Bush was unique, plenty of Wall Street bankers and American industrialists cashed in by helping to build the Third Reich. Other than to use those sort of alliances to illustrate the lack of morality, principals or loyalty to their own countries which are exactly the sort of traits that are present in The Octopus and it’s disregard for anything even remotely resembling honor, decency and traditional American values, I will leave that story to be told in the future. Nichols by the way is now deceased, he died in Geneva, Switzerland; a victim of a massive heart attack and interestingly enough there was evidence of a blow to the head. It would seem that he had outlived his usefulness and in my personal opinion, considering his history and the type that he ran with I personally am skeptical as to the official cause of death. In The Last Circle, Cheri Seymour describes a harrowing visit to interview a chain-smoking and wily Nichols, after which she, for reasons of personal safety, decided to take an extended vacation away from her home. The creepiest part of the visit being when he broke out his version of the Zapruder film from his personal video collection.

A hugely important part of Seymour’s book is the section where she meets with investigators Sean McDade of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and California Homicide Detective Sue Todd (who was investigating another potentially connected murder of a father and son) at her home. McDade was investigating the PROMIS software story on an official national security assignment for Canada and contacted Seymour for information given his research of the draft version of her book on the internet. An arrangement was made for McDade to visit Seymour in order to gain access to her research materials and he and Detective Todd met with her, and in the process of culling and copying documents he dropped a couple of bombshells. First being a reference to a December 1999 meeting at the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico attended by heads of the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, Israel and Canada over the potential for disruptive shared computer problems due to the Y2K period. McDade had a source that alluded to all four countries using the PROMIS software. He offered up a scenario that the “Israeli Mossad may have modified the original PROMIS modification, or back door, so that it became a ‘two-way’ back door allowing the Israelis access to U.S. weapons secrets at Los Alamos and other installations.” and according to Seymour, McDade “hinted through innuendo that the Israelis may now possess all the nuclear secrets of the United States.” There would seem to be some additional evidence that may support this sort of Israeli espionage in a London Times story on whistleblower Sibel Edmonds entitled For Sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets. McDade also stated that : “The details of my findings in Canada could cause a major scandal in both Canada and the U.S. If my investigation is successful, it could cause the entire U.S. Republican party to be dismantled, and more than one presidential administration will be exposed for their knowledge of this.”

McDade returned to Canada along with a load of copied documents and the investigation continued. The probe continued and eventually progressed enough to become sufficiently disturbing to those affected. The FBI as well as the Israeli Mossad were monitoring him as he progressed through the process of conducting interviews with potential witnesses and building the case. He had obtained several tapes that according to Riconsciuto contained the boot up versions of the modified PROMIS software. He planned to fly Bill Hamilton of INSLAW to RCMP headquarters to assist in accessing the tapes when a Toronto Star article was published in late August 2000 that resulted in the shutdown of the 8 month investigation. Chapter 21 of The Last Circle details a long conversation between Detective Sue Todd and the author on what the findings had been and which she wanted published were anything to happen to her. A subsequent investigation of the closed down RCMP investigation was undertaken by journalist Kelly O’Meara of Insight Magazine and the four parts are available here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Despite the official stonewalling, obfuscation and danger involved, the author reveals that both Sue Todd and Kelly O’Meara developed a proposal in 2001 to continue to work to expose The Octopus, let us hope that we have not heard the last from them and their dedication to justice serves as an inspiration to all.

“Organized crime will put a man in the White House someday – and he won’t know it until they hand him the bill”


-Ralph Solerno, NYPD (from Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob)

The Last Circle also devotes considerable space to the relationship between former President Ronald Reagan and the MCA Corporation, his agent. Drawing on Dan Moldea’s book Dark Victory, subtitled Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob. It isn’t well publicized that the hallowed national icon of those who dabble in the black arts of revisionist history, Ronald Reagan is a man with more than a few skeletons in his closet. Reagan was in the 1940-50s a struggling B-movie actor and Democrat who campaigned for Harry Truman in 1948 (this link is as priceless as it is stunning). Reagan, at some point realized that the real future laid in his willingness to sell out whatever ideals that he may have had and join the Republican party, ratting out his Hollywood peers as Communists to a McCarthyist nation braying for blood while president of the Screen Actors Guild and building up the necessary resume and connections for his ascension to America’s throne. Long before Saint Ronald Reagan was authorizing criminals like Edwin Meese and Oliver North and their ilk to destroy the national regulatory structure, wantonly subvert the Constitution, and engage in a global spree of weapons and drug trafficking to fund torturers and murders in Latin America he made his pact with the devil.

Reagan’s rise to power and later, canonization by the conservative movement was helped along enormously by his affiliation with MCA and the accumulated chits that he would receive which would serve him in his rise to the presidency. MCA, originally a talent agency that became the 800 pound gorilla of Hollywood as well as a partner of organized crime figures had benefited greatly when Reagan, as SAG president played an integral role in negotiating a deal that would allow the corporation to circumvent antitrust laws in order to enter into television production as well as talent. Reagan was subsequently targeted by a federal grand jury for his role in the “sweetheart deal” between MCA and the actor’s union. According to a Justice Department memorandum from the case described a Hollywood source as saying that “Ronald Reagan a complete slave of MCA who would do their bidding on anything.” Reagan changed his political affiliation to Republican, citing a newfound contempt of big government, became wealthy and increasingly strident in his ideology and rhetoric, so much so that General Electric Theatre, he was a host became uncomfortable with his on air reactionary rants. Reagan then ran for and was elected Governor of California where he continued to hone his act and pile up favors that would serve him for his enthronement at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Reagan, like all presidents came into power surrounded by cronies and lackeys, one of course was Edwin Meese who rose to Attorney General and according to information obtained from FBI wiretaps on Gambino crime family figures may have intervened in order to foil a federal investigation into MCA and alleged mob connections that could have torpedoed the sale of MCA to Japanese interests. On the wiretaps, Eugene Giaquinto who was a board member of the MCA Corporation who had a lifetime relationship to Gambino boss John Gotti had stated that “he would call Edwin Meese and have the FBI’s investigation of MCA stopped.” The Reagan era Justice Department was not only engaged in corrupt practices such as the theft of Inslaw’s PROMIS software but also was actively engaged in the obstruction of justice in order to protect Reagan’s longtime benefactor MCA. The investigation was of course shut down and the MCA deal went through, principled and honest public servants resigned out of disgust and the bad guys won again. The litany of crimes and unethical practices of the Reagan administration is long and his Octopus’s tentacles have slithered into too many scandals and institutions to list here but there are two very important and serendipitous connections. Giaquinto had bragged about his “government man” Robert Booth Nichols who provided him with critical information and Danny Casolaro was also investigating MCA connections to The Octopus at the time of his death.

“After a six-year hitch in the military, I became a professional hit man for the Mafia. I collected money, hurt a lot of people and saw a lot of blood. I know what it’s like to cut the throat of a man, see a man die, or throw a man in the trunk of a car and take him to his death. I did many horrible things. I allowed myself to do whatever was necessary.


-Jimmy Hughes: Admitted killer

An Authorized, Government Backed Covert Action: The final chapter in The Last Circle deals with the quest for justice by Rachel Begley, whose father Ralph Boger was murdered along with Fred Alvarez, the man who was about to blow the whistle on the illicit activities at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in 1981. Begley relentlessly pursued the truth about the murders and her story was chronicled in the work of Emmy Award winning reporter Nathan Baca’s 35 part series on the Octopus Murders for Palm Springs KESQ-TV. Also known online as Desertfae, she at great personal danger considering the malevolent figures that she was dealing with successfully worked to expose the truth about her father’s murder and her tenacity led to the cold case being re-opened by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Her courageous efforts led to the arrest of admitted hitman Jimmy Hughes, now running a pseudo religious organization in Honduras.

Detective John Powers of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was investigating the cold case of the Alvarez murders, having been led in that direction as a result of a more recent probe into the 2005 murder- suicide of David McGowan and his family. McGowan, a Riverside County District Attorney investigator who may have been digging too deeply. According to Baca (whose links have all apparently been disappeared down the memory hole at KESQ now that he is working for a Las Vegas station but fortunately desertfae has posted many of the videos on her You Tube site) in his work on the story that:

The murder case has been reopened and closed multiple times in the past 27 years. Sheriff’s investigators have asked friends and former partners of District Attorney Investigator David McGowan whether he was working the case in 2005. An investigation concluded that McGowan murdered his family of five before shooting himself on May 10th, 2005. Surviving family members tell News Channel 3 they believe the investigation was rushed and incomplete.

Detective Powers and Rachel Begley were working on seeking justice for the murders when they met with Cheri Seymour who assisted them in gleaning important information on the case. She strongly encouraged Powers to get copies of the Paul Morasca Homicide Investigation File of which no electronic copies existed and access was restricted. The file, Case No. 82-1052505 was being stored with the San Francisco Police Department records and contained long missing files on the Alvarez murders which he has now backed up lest it be conveniently misplaced. An arrest warrant for Hughes was issued and he was apprehended in September 2009 as he was boarding a plane in Miami.

Hughes, a former head of security at the Cabazon reservation has admitted to being a hired gun for both the mafia and the CIA. Hughes incidentally was the guy who Financial Times reporter Anson Ng was allegedly chasing down when he himself was murdered in Guatemala in July of 1991. His organization, very originally named Jimmy Hughes Ministries is a testament to the adage of religion being the last refuge of scoundrels and provides cover by serving as a front for black ops such as the 2009 Honduran coup d’etat against president Manuel Zelaya who had to be deposed for being an ally of Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez. Chavez is a man the U.S. power structure despises and has already moved against and failed and whose ability to stand up to the United States plutocracy cannot be allowed to spread regionally lest the rivers of blood that have been loosed by dictators, their thugs and their CIA facilitators, most trained at the torture institute The School of the Americas stop flowing so that lust for money and power can be slaked. In The Last Circle it is noted that Hughes, sponsored by the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI) provided support for the overthrow. Hughes never ceased being a thug for hire, he just changed venues.

Hughes has stated in a 1985 television interview that the Alvarez murders were “an authorized, government backed covert action” and was caught on video by Rachel Begley and Fred Alvarez’s son Mikel during his February 2008 appearance at an FGBMFI dinner event in Fresno stating that:

“I was trained in the military. I killed people all of the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to. Your dad and I were friends. He touched somebody…they gave an order and that’s what happened to him. It’s a lot bigger than the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. It’s big …. You’re talking political people. “

Hughes also made veiled threats like the chilling “you’ve got to be crazy…you’re knocking on some very dangerous doors..just think about your children..they need a mother” to Begley. Once arrested and extradited to California to stand trial Hughes was due to finally face the judgement of the law but then in

another one of the travesties that plague the rotten to the core judicial system of this corrupt empire the case against Hughes were dismissed, and with a deft twisting of the knife, the charges were dropped on the very anniversary of the murders. Jimmy Hughes walked, perhaps he knew fully well where too many bodies were buried, that and he continues to serve the dark forces of The Octopus. As of this writing, Rachel Begley is not giving up, she has justifiably filed a formal complaint against Deputy Attorney General Mike Murphy, just another one of the charlatans masquerading as servants of the law in this terminally damaged republic.

Who Watches the Watchers?

The dismissal of the case against Jimmy Hughes is just another example of the vast corruption that has slowly eaten away at the once strong interpinnings of the American system of justice. Today, there is no consistent enforcement of the law, there exists a system that has been throughout the years rigged in order to allow those who have the financial means or the political connections to circumvent justice. In the post-9/11 era in which our once vibrant democracy has turned into something perversely un-American that has now very appropriately been named the HOMELAND, our true birthright, the civil liberties as set forth in the Bill of Rights have been eroded and are on the verge of extinction. All due to systemic corruption and the actions of The Octopus and those who serve it.

We have seen the gradual erosion of such long-standing legal principles such as Habeas Corpus disposed, under the guise of course of fighting ‘terrorism’. Posse Comitatus has been struck from the books with the establishment of NORTHCOM and the surveillance colossus that grew out of PROMIS is rendering obsolete the right to privacy. Our airports have turned into something out of post Stalin Russia with the TSA ‘pat-downs’ and naked body scanners and just this week word comes that Janet Napolitano, top apartchik of the Department of Homeland Security will be appearing on TV screens in the nation’s Wal-Marts with the “If You See Something, Say Something” inducement to report ‘suspicious’ behavior. The noose is tightening and as has been predicted by many of us, the entire facade of the War On Terror was only a ruse, every oppressive tactic, every torture chamber and secret prison was being prepared for the real enemy: patriotic Americans demanding the truth. The entire system has now been transformed in order to protect the interests of criminals, looters and the progeny of The Octopus. You will see no serious investigation of the heads of Wall Street banks, their profits largely derived through fraud, money laundering and other ill gotten gains from cash cows such as drug trafficking. Nor will you see any war criminals, war profiteers or the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who cover up for them, rig the laws and engage in acts of subterfuge for money be prosecuted. This is the country in which we now live.

As Cheri Seymour writes:

“Every government official I talked to, every journalist, told me that nothing can be done to dismantle The Octopus, there is no one in office in this great nation that has the power to prosecute the Octopus criminals because the tentacles have become an integral, and accepted culture within our society, and indeed within our economy.”

So the responsibility in stopping this all lies with us. I opened this essay with the quote from Anthony Sutton that appeared in The Last Circle : “Be patient, spread the word among friends, do your little bit. The system will self-destruct because it is funded on corruption and untruth”. This much is essential, for the only way to regain our freedom, dignity and liberty and to ensure that those who are guilty of a myriad of crimes is to be tenacious in researching – and reporting on their crimes. It is true that the only things that The Octopus, now fully assimilated into the system understands is power and money, the only thing that it fears is the truth.

Joseph Daniel Casolaro 1947-1991

The Octopus: Eight people who have changed the course of the world, a real life “Mission Impossible” team whose gifts exploited the secret empires of rogue spy networks, big oil and organized crime.

-From Danny Casolaro’s notes

EE

Joe Stack, a Rising Tide and a Restless Oligarchy

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

-H. L. Mencken

There is something in the air in America, something very big is happening. With the already lame duck Barack Obama administration having done more to delegitimize the myth that the government is there to serve the people and that the Bush years were but an aberration. Now after the Wall Street bailouts and the continuing exporting of American jobs to juice corporate profits, the undermining of serious health care reform and the escalation of both wars and the police state an extremely ominous undercurrent is rippling through the land and while still in the early stages it has the establishment terrified and circling the wagons.

The weekly column by Frank Rich of the damned librul [sic] New York Times is one of the first things that I read every Sunday morning and today’s offering is a mish-mash of conflation, myths and propaganda designed of course to protect the establishment. The piece, mockingly entitled The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged starts off with the foreboding two paragraphs which I excerpt:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

First off, I don’t really think that you can fairly lump all of the teabaggers into one group quite so easily, for example Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Ron Paul is a consistently principled man who has done more to stand against the imperialist gangster state in the last several years than anyone elso other than maybe Dennis Kucinich who is much easier marginalized than Paul. Glenn Beck is a half batshit crazy multimillionaire former shock jock turned FOX propagandist and the faction of the Tea Party that he represents are largely igoramuses, racists and useful idiots who lack the principles of Ron Paul. Mega-star Sarah Palin is largely a creation of the Weekly Standard/Commentary crowd and has already come out to herd the teabaggers to the GOP and has the allure to reinvigorate the ‘Christian’ fascists of the Religous Right whose militant shocktroops served the Bush administration and the Republican party so well until the disastrous overreach of the Terry Schaivo debacle followed by the exposure of Ted Haggard’s secret life and the death of Jerry Falwell.

Hell, I guess you can count me in with the anti-government types now that the government no longer exists as an entity to maintain infrastructure, act in the common good and maintain a level playing field but instead has been hijacked and weaponized against the people as we can see in the police state that is being built. Any government that has become that poisoned really has to go in my opinion, the path that was taken after JFK’s execution has led us here and we can thank the internet for allowing those of use who are awake to rage against the machine. But the internet is soon going bye-bye, at least in its current incarnation and it will as usual be under the guise of protecting the sheeple from those big bad terrorists that are in actuality running our own government and have been doing so for a good long time now. I know of many liberals and progressives who are slowly starting to lose their idea of a big benevolent government and coming to the belated realization that in 2010 the government IS the enemy.

Per Rich’s column I also see the John Birch Society being dragged out again. The JBS has quite often been mentioned these days as a painted up fake devil. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, when not doing his moronic falsetto imitations of his opposite numbers on FOX and horseface Rachel Maddow have both been going after the JBS for months. I would not be understating it in saying the Birchers have been getting more free publicity from the comedians and corporate hacks on what passes for the liberal media than they have in decades, I would not be surprised if their membership numbers are up as well. Now as I have mentioned before, I have worked at times with the JBS in fighting intrusions on civil liberties which seem to scantly bother either the teabaggers who were nowhere to be found during the worst years of the Bushreich or the bleeding heart types whose great crusade in these times of tyranny, endless war and economic devastation seems to be forcing gay marriage initatives down the throats of a populace that just isn’t quite evolved enough to swallow it therefore only feeding the freaks on the extreme right more bloody red meat. But really, the JBS, while there are many things where I disagree with them are actually far more liberal than the Obama administration on civil liberties issues so perhaps therein lies the need to demonize them. God knows that we can’t have what was stripped away in the aftermath of the American Reichstag Fire by Bush and Cheney restored.

As for quoting off of anything from the Southern Poverty Law Center I would take that very warily. It is only natural for skeptics to question the agenda of the institution (just as that of the ADL) as any sort of a really legitimate source of information. They too are masters at conflation and depend on the presence of demons to exist, the more demons the better. The piece by Frank Rich in a prominent paper that builds on a previous New York Times Tea Party story by David Barstow entitled Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right that conjures up the specter of Timothy McVeigh shows that they are going to be conducting a witch hunt across the internet and chances are a good deal of the people who come to this site and many, many others are going to be the prey.

As I recall, the Tea Party actually began with the 9/11 Truth movement and then also the Ron Paul people, it was only after Obama’s election that the establishment hacks like Rick Santelli, Wall Street pimp and the insipid multi-millionaire Beck hijacked it with Republican backing. Now I would also suspect a certain level of hard-line Zionist infiltration like the laughably transparent Birthers (leader Orly Taitz is yet another Israeli right-wing shill) to discredit Obama for not nuking Tehran, you could see that when Sarah Palin appeared in Nashville for the high-roller version of the National Tea Party Convention wearing that Israeli flag pin and later said that Obama could be reelected were he to attack Iran. I know the way the Israelis operate and there is no way that they are not stirring the pot with at least the Beckers and Palinazis with lot of assistance from the American neocon propagandists but those useful idiots aren’t the ones that scare the bejesus out of the greedy swine who run this place.

Rich and the rest of the elite establishment seem to be extremely scared of the actions of Joe Stack who flew his plane into an IRS office. Now I am neither a right winger nor a teabagger but I did read the Stack ‘manifesto’ and it had a contempt for the entire rotten system as a whole and could not be easily stuffed into any pre configured cartoon character. I even wrote a piece called In Defense of Joe Stack where I condemned the use of violence but agreed with the anti establishment message. There is undeniably a growing sense of anger in America and with the left being pretty much a non-factor in directing the rage towards serious and constructive change it creates a vacuum which unfortunately has filled up with some of the worst type of miscreant that this country has to offer….along with a lot of others who just have nowhere else to go and are being used as human shields.

The fear of a Joe Stack whose grievances transcend the traditional left vs right paradigm by not only calling out the IRS but the the rancid piece of crap that is the national health care system, the crony capitalist government and closes with a line out of the Communist Manifesto sends shivers up the spines the real rulers of this country. The one thing about what Rich refers to as an inchoate movement is that it could very easily evolve into something that is a serious threat to the looters and blood barters and their tax the hell out of the rest of us to build their police state, fund their illegal wars and enrich their criminal buddies on Wall Street.

The thing about the guy killed in the IRS office, Vernon Hunter is also something that has been making the rounds a good deal lately, kind of reminds me the sort of raw cynicism when during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was trolling the wreckage looking for a corpse that could bolster the case for the estate tax to protect multimillionaire chiselers. I had more than a few of the corpse humpers and ambulance chasers attack my piece on Stack over what was in essence collateral damage.

Maybe it makes me a bad person because I could give a rat’s ass about the guy who got killed in the building, just like the people who got blown up in 9/11 (I pretty much share Ward Churchill’s sentiment about the Little Eichmanns) whose deaths at the hand of the shadow government justified a new century of raw tyranny because in a way we are all guilty of participation in this monstrous system. Hell, I could get killed in my damned car on the way to or from work every day, I always had this problem with the big contradiction of the average American life being worth more than the brown and non-Christian women and children who have our tax dollar funded bombs dropped on them. Americans have a peculiar reverence for life, the trainer that got killed by the whale at Sea World is practically causing a national outpouring of mourning but how many people were eradicated by U.S. drone strikes, bombs gone off target or people who are dying right here in the good ole US of A due to poverty, starvation and lack of health care?

So basically the IRS is a representative form of a larger tyranny and Joe Stack happened to strike a blow against it , we can argue all day about ideology but when it all comes down to it there are only two life forms in America post 9/11, vampires and cattle. I do find it more than a bit cynical that the ‘left’ is canonizing poor Vernon as some kind of national victim in order to try to affix the ‘terrorist’ label that is used so often as a bludgeon against them by the fascist elements of the right. Failed crusades have a way of wearing people down especially when the pigs who run the system only care about who is yoking the slaves and delivering them to the man.

Rich seems to be keeping alive a certain storyline that is going to be used in order to justify Cass Sunstein style infiltrations, more police state measures (maybe even naked boy scanners in shopping malls) and a demonizing of many law abiding American citizens who are inadvertently being sucked into groups of potentially violent individuals including racist white supremacists that the GOP and the neocons have used as shock troops in the Tea Party Movement.

I believe that if it were cleaned up with a lot of the scum sent packing, Glenn Beck turned off and more of an anti-establishment, anti-war, anti-Wall Street and pro-restoration of civil liberties along the lines of a Ron Paul only with an acceptance of angry progressives and liberals who don’t drink the FOX fascist Kool Aid that the Tea Party Movement could become a formidable threat to the whole corrupt system.

Which is of course why it must be seen by a populace growing madder by the minute as nothing more than through a lens of demonizing the more ostentatious and vile elements.

Just my two cents

EE

A Farewell to Arms: Why I Left ‘the Left’

Barack promised change — and sure enough, things changed for the worse

-Joe Bageant

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

During an extended break from over four years of constant writing, activism, some radio and a lot of anger that was being absorbed that was due to health reasons I had some time to reflect and reassess matters and I realized that a lot of what made it necessary to step back was at the root cause of my problems. It was no near death experience or anything but after four and a half years of balls to the wall, take no prisoners warfare against the deranged elements of the right, the Bushreich and the liars, crooks and war freaks who have destroyed this country it was an opportunity to observe for a change. And when peering into that abyss I saw much of what I despised as not unique to the right-wing extremists, they had their doppelganger counterparts who were every bit as cynical, corrupted and morally rotten their own special ways. While I have been heading in this direction anyway, the mass panic over the false flag underwear bomber and the renewal of post 9/11 bloodlust and fear is what finally did it. The ‘left’ and the Obama administration had the opportunity to exorcise these demons from America, to punish the war criminals, bail out the common folks and to stop the mass looting but didn’t so liberalism has failed. Leo Strauss was right after all, liberalism is an enabler of totalitarianism in that it allows it to grow by an utter failure to do what is necessary to behead the snakes on the hydra or to cut the cancer out prior to it metastasizing.

A man whose work I greatly admire and who has the actual credentials to call out anyone that he damned well pleases, author Chris Hedges made me realize that my decision to leave the failure of liberalism was absolutely the right thing to do. His fairly recent piece that earned him much scorn from the courtiers of Obama and the Rahm Emanuel corporatists and their apologists on the left entitled Liberals Are Useless brings it all home and I excerpt from this work by a longtime beacon of morality in our blood soaked and bogeyman infested Fantasy Land:

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

And

What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

And

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.
I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Brilliantly driven home by Mr. Hedges, I will now excerpt from the great Joe Bageant whose piece The Devil and Mr. Obama is a must read:

As you may know, Obama’s public approval ratings are taking a beating. Millions of his former cult members have awakened with a splitting hangover to find their pockets turned inside out and eviction notices on the doors of their 4,000 square foot subprime mortgaged cardboard fuck boxes. Many who voted for Obama out of disgust for the Bush regime are now listening to the Republicans again on their car radios as they drive around looking for a suitable place to hide their vehicles from the repo man. Don’t construe this as support for the GOP. It’s just the standard ping ponging of disappointment and disgust that comes after the honeymoon is over with any administration. Most Americans’ party affiliations are the same as they were when Bush was elected. After all, Obama did not get elected on a landslide by any means; he got 51% of the vote.

Right now his approval ratings are in the 40th percentile and would be headed for the basement of the league were it not for the residual effect of the Kool-Aid love fest a year ago. However, millions of American liberals remain faithful, and believe Obama will arise from the dead in the third year and ascend to glory. You will find them at Huffington Post.

This frustrating ping pong game in which the margin of first time, disenchanted and undecided voters are batted back and forth has become the whole of American elections. That makes both the Republican and Democratic parties very happy, since it keeps the game down to fighting the enemy they know, each other, as opposed to being forced to deal with the real issues, or worse yet, an independent or third party candidate who might have a solution or two.

Thus, the game is limited to two players between two corporate parties. One is the Republican Party, which believes we should hand over our lives and resources directly to the local Chamber of Commerce, so the chamber can deliver them to the big corporations. The other, the Democratic Party, believes we should hand our lives and resources to a Democratic administration — so it alone can deliver our asses to the big dogs who own the country. In the big picture it’s always about who gets to deliver the money to the Wall Street hyena pack.

Americans may be starting to get the big picture about politics, money and corporate power. But I doubt it. Given that most still believe the war on terrorism is real, and that terrorists always just happen to be found near gas and oil deposits, there is plenty of room left to blow more smoke up their asses. Especially considering how we are conditioned to go into blind fits of patriotism at the sight of the flag, an eagle, or the mention of “our heroes,” even if the heroes happen to be killing and maiming Muslim babies at the moment. Patriotism is a cataract that blinds us to all national discrepancies.

The entire long-running reality show that was the Obama deception and his administration’s cold and calculated Judas betrayal also has eroded any sort of identity that I had with the ‘left’. This especially goes for the apologists for the same damned things that they wanted to string up Bush by his balls for by cruise missile liberals makes me want to vomit. Really, those who defend Obama for the continuation of most of Bush’s policies, or “kept the machine set on kill” are not very different than the glazed eyed monsters who canonized Bush, the only substantive difference being that they haven’t embraced full blown torture….yet and it’s coming with the mass hysteria that is creeping through this lemming colony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revisiting the Tea Baggers: If there has been one group that I have been especially critical of it is the Republican co-opted Teabaggers, as the movement is currently infested with the dregs of American society, foul racists, neo-Nazis, Dick Armey of Darkness operatives, Palinazis, Beckers and religious fanatics my derision of them is justifiable. However, this fails to take into account the fact that there are millions of real pissed off Americans who are mobilizing and just lack the right guidance and knowledge. If you recall, the original tea parties were being held in the darkest years of the Bush-Cheney Axis of Evil reign of terror and were largely comprised of Ron Paul and 9/11 Truth Activists, this already in existence movement was then used by the establishment Republicans as an exo-skeleton into which they installed the insipid Glenn Beck as the face and promoted relentlessly on RNC propaganda television network FOX. From the intel that I receive there is actually a struggle for identity going on within this movement although you would never know it from the Democrat controlled propaganda organs. So there is some promise in a mass movement that liberals and the left are incapable of producing if the bigots, ignoramuses and operatives can be cast out as misfits, charlatans and shameless opportunists and this seems to be as good a place as any for an independent minded anarchist like me. Hey, Jesus hung with prostitutes, lepers and losers because they could actually be saved right?

While this movement is at least temporarily under the control of the vilest of swine that the oligarchy right-wing faction can dig up and who are firing up the dead enders, TV lobotomized zombies and easily fooled and made into useful idiot joiners it must be emphasized that the whole thing is still in play. There is a lot of righteous anger out there and it’s growing by the day and this whole thing could blow up like a MOAB on those who are seeking to exploit it. My very good friend Diane G, a hard core leftist journeyed into the snakepit at a teabagger rally in her homeground up in Michigan last year and found a bunch of pissed off people afraid and being manipulated by veterans and RNC style stooges. The vitriol was real but it was easily misdirected, largely because most of us are nothing more than ignorant sheep and manageable ants but were this sort of energy ever be redirected, say at Wall Street, the Pentagon, the insurance bloodsuckers, the corporations and the real rapists of America then watch the fuck out. The Republicans are playing with dynamite, for every misbegotten and fucked over by the system soul that worship the phony Glenn Beck as though he were some sort of modern day prophet instead of a real life Lonesome Rhodes, a career loser on the ultimate stage whose shelf life is only limited by his own propensity for self destruction there are others who realize that the man is an assclown and a fraud. I have to hand it to Alex Jones who denounces Beck on a regular basis as a tool who has only stolen his shtick and distilled it down for the masses of asses. This is a volitale mix and any foolish GOP huckster who doesn’t realize it is a fool on a megalomaniac level right up there with Karl Rove and the cartoonish house nigger Michael Steele.

One who seems to understand, at least on the level that an elitist swine who has long made a damned good living as a shit salesman for the privileged and connected can is columnist and media figure David Brooks of the phony librul New York Times. While not quite as successful as the pimp of globalization Thomas Friedman, Brooks is a reliable little lap doggie who can always be counted on to yap upon command. His latest piece, The Tea Party Teens is a fine example:

The Tea Party Teens

By DAVID BROOKS

The United States opens this decade in a sour mood. First, Americans are anxious about the future. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. Only 27 percent feel confident that their children’s generation will be better off than they are.

Second, Americans have lost faith in their institutions. During the great moments of social reform, at least 60 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. Now, only a quarter have that kind of trust.

The country is evenly divided about President Obama, but state governments are in disrepute and confidence in Congress is at withering lows. As Frank Newport of the Gallup organization noted in his year-end wrap-up, “Americans have less faith in their elected representatives than ever before.”

Third, the new administration has not galvanized a popular majority. In almost every sphere of public opinion, Americans are moving away from the administration, not toward it. The Ipsos/McClatchy organizations have been asking voters which party can do the best job of handling a range of 13 different issues. During the first year of the Obama administration, the Republicans gained ground on all 13.

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.

The movement is especially popular among independents. The Rasmussen organization asked independent voters whom they would support in a generic election between a Democrat, a Republican and a tea party candidate. The tea party candidate won, with 33 percent of independents. Undecided came in second with 30 percent. The Democrats came in third with 25 percent and the Republicans fourth with 12 percent.

Over the course of this year, the tea party movement will probably be transformed. Right now, it is an amateurish movement with mediocre leadership. But several bright and polished politicians, like Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico, are unofficially competing to become its de facto leader. If they succeed, their movement is likely to outgrow its crude beginnings and become a major force in American politics. After all, it represents arguments that are deeply rooted in American history.

The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

Moreover, the tea party movement has passion. Think back on the recent decades of American history — the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.

In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement. But I can certainly see its potential to shape the coming decade.

Of course Brooks is playing the game, he is another Mockingbird, his suggestion of Jeb Bush protégé Marco Rubio as a potential leader of this movement is just more of the same mental masturbation that we are accustomed to and of course what is more important to the establishment than in keeping Nazi collaborators like the Bush Family and their operatives in power? It is no surprise that these stealthy elitist swine want that little greaseball Rubio, just like they trotted out Glenn Beck to co-opt the Ron Paul movement (and to a large degree crib from the Alex Jones show only run through a food processor for a better consistency of lemming food. This is the game people, Brooks like his cohorts over at the Washington Post like Howie Kurtz (hatchet job on Gary Webb) and Dana Milbank (Skull and Bones) ALWAYS side with the oligarchy all the while denying that such a thing even exists and poo poohing us commoners as so much rabble and tin foil hatters. ENOUGH ALREADY, the JIG IS UP.

The comments are great, Brooks is a country clubbing elitist swine masquerading as a journalist and I have long been on his case, check some of these out.

David, thank you for being honest in the last paragraph and admitting that you are not fond of what you call the tea party movement. Republican like you and Democrats like Obama are the same to most of us. You really think that your superior credentials grants you social wisdom and intelligfence. It doesn’t.

And

I, too, feel betrayed by “elite” institutions, policy makers and businesspeople! And I am a relatively well-educated individual.

Globalization has not been a force for good, has not raised poor foreigners, has not benefited average US people, has not benefited any western nations’ national security. Deregulation? Likewise.

Why? Well, I guess, you’d have to ask the “crème de la crème” who have used average limitations and foreign poverty to aggrandize themselves and, thus, lined their own pockets with money at the expense of the broader world. It is an exceedingly short-sighted goal; n’est-ce pas? You cannot fool even them all of the time.

Certainly, globalization and deregulation might have worked. But, really, it seems that something must be done before it is too late. If we do not act to protect our way of life, to prop up the western middle-class and assure our standing, we will cede our place to peoples in whom we cannot trust and invite violent conflict at home and abroad.

And

Who do you think the tea party voters are, Mr. Brooks? I am middle aged, post-graduate degreed and financially independent. I support full gay rights, including gay marriage. I believe in decriminalizing drugs, I believe in being a good steward to the environment, and to the less fortunate in my own community. But, I will probably vote with the tea partiers. I might even vote for one of their national candiates

You want to know why? The Bail-outs.

I will never support a political candidate who voted for or supported the bail-outs, and I will support any movement that is against the politicians who supported the bail-outs. I will donate money to candidate, even in other states, who loudly opposed the bail-outs.

I don’t consider myself a tea partier. I am not a joiner and I’ve never marched or demonstrated. But the bail-outs meant that capitalism and free market rules no longer applied in america. It meant that those with political connections were saved and allowed to grow and prosper, while those who had played by the rules suffered and paid.

This anger at the bail-outs will never go away for people like me. Obama supported the bail-outs. Most of the Democrats supported the bail-outs. Some of the Republicans supported the bail-outs. The real statesman; The politicans who cared enough to do right ; they loudly and vigourously opposed the bail-outs.

If the tea party people continue to be the people who oppose the bail-out people; then, the enemies of my enemies, are my new best friends.

AND

I may add this self-serving oligarchy is picking winners (ask Blankfein of GS, and other bankers), seizing wealth by having their buddies in the right place (Bernanke, Paulson, Summers, etc), while unemployment keeps rocketing up and middle class gets decimated.

The other day I read somewhere that the bailouts under both Obama and Bush most likely transferred more wealth to the rich than the tax cuts under Bush. Just think about that!

Both parties are identical; only the names/ faces change. The nation is slowing waking up to it, which is reflected in the growing popularity of the tea party followers.

I just pray that this campaign don’t get hijacked by some Republican nutcase politician, because this is really about looking for a third voice, an independent voice.

AND

The tea party folks and the political independents have at least one very significant thing in common: members of neither group want to be identified with either of the “established” parties. The rise of a third party is a possibility.
AND

Disappointment with President Obama is clear and justified. There is a defacto war in Pakistan in addition to the fighting in Afghanistan and Irag. Health care reform looks to be a boon to the large drug and insurance companies. The opportunity for serious financinal reform seems to have been lost. The dire need for creating jobs is ignored. Why wouldn’t any movement the promises something different be growing in popularity?

And one VERY IMPORTANT COMMENT which illustrates the problem with this movement, it has been hijacked by elitist payroll swine and foul GOP operatives. Perhaps some principled folks who are disillusioned by the ongoing big con can assist in weeding these swine out.

As long as the Tea Party folks allow Glen Beck and Sean Hannity to be their chief spokesmen, they will remain an interesting but unimportant political footnote.

And those are just a sampling from the first 20 or so of the 400 + comments that were left on the so-called liberal, former Judith Miller employing NYT site. Now as anyone with any common sense understands, David Brooks is a fraud, a boot licking pecksniffian puke, a mangy lapdog and an on-call shill for the oligarchy for those bullshit Sunday morning bloviation circuit shows when the establishment trots out the ‘experts’ along with veteran whores like John McCain and his butt buddies Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham to piss down the backs of clueless regular Americans and swear to got that it’s raining. The handful of Sunday morning inside baseball swill drive the weekly media spin on any given issue, ensuring that the now standard left vs. right paradigm stays in place despite the fact that there is NEVER any substantive change in policy nor shift away from the elitist based society that we exist in. It’s all a dog and pony show, a big game of three card monte played on Main Street in a Potemkin Village renamed The Homeland and David Brooks is one of the chief shit shovellers who provide cover for the oligarchy. A man named Carroll Quigley once wrote in his massive historical book Tragedy and Hope that:

And there may have at the time been some truth in that statement but I doubt that Quigley ever envisioned the thorough rottenness of the political system, especially here in the United States. The necessity to maintain stability in any civilized form of society is not something that can be argued, we have seen through history what happens absent order when demagogues and lunatics can bring violence and suffering to millions based on lingering ethnic grudges and delusions of grandeur. Quigley’s statement relies on the idea that there is some sort of dignity present within the system not the widespread corruption that has us all at the mercy of a predatory state that serves those who have worked with relentless precision for decades to gain a stranglehold on political power through bribery, blackmail, intimidation and even assassinations. Our current two-party system is in the process of branding and yoking us all for delivery into bondage to the bloodsuckers and fiends that have hijacked the republic and turned it into a rancid spoils system with order kept by a burgeoning police state and a veritable gulag system of for profit prisons for all who dare to complain about it.

The one unmistakable aspect of Brooks’ column is FEAR because there IS something in the air and the key is what will eventually come of the tea party movement once the scum has been purged. I have been extremely critical of these people in the past, mockingly critical but I am guilty of generalizations and falling for the media propaganda of finding the most extremist elements and then hyping them as being indicative of all who are involved. Remember the Nixon era and the Vietnam era, it was always easy for the media to find the most radical leftists, the real bomb throwers, dirty hippies and acid juiced freaks and to use them as symbols of the antiwar movement. This of course was a lie, there was widespread opposition to Vietnam throughout the nation and as Nixon found out it extended to none other than Walter Cronkite whose proclamation that the war was “unwinnable” was devastating to the war freaks who nonetheless continued to feed the youth of America into an immoral charnel house to kill and be killed for the benefit of the Military Industrial Complex, the rising shadow government of the rogue CIA and their profiteering off of the illegal narcotics trade in the Golden Triangle and the political expedience of the predecessors to the swine and vermin who are this very day deeply entrenched as enemies of the American people in Washington.

I have recently gotten a chance to correspond with some people who I had not long ago (before the great Obama betrayal and the removal of the scales from my eyes) considered to be foes, nemeses and enemies including a man who I vilified as a “right wing Nazi”. There is nothing like a dagger in the back to assist with a change in perception. While there will always be areas of disagreement ideologically there are common grievances that outweigh all else. Principled conservatives are against big government and with the rise of the Homeland Security state that is just getting warmed up it is easy to understand why. As Barry Goldwater once put it “… a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have” and really, considering the direction that this monstrously corrupt system is growing exponentially and the Caesars that need meat for their ongoing wars just how long do you think it is going to be until confiscations, imprisonment and executions (preceeded by that good ole Jack Bauer style tough love of course) will be reality? The belief that America should mind our own business (wrongly slurred by propraganda pimps as isolationism and equated with the rise of Hitler..yawn) and stay the hell out of the rest of the world is another common cause as is the meddling of the government in the economy (there is a difference here in that I would not oppose government leveling the playing field rather than rewarding the wealthy with political connections) which in the past year has only put Wall Street high rollers back in the gambling business only with house money. I believe that the ‘left’ is making a huge mistake in not reaching out, I mean if Jane Hamsher of Firedog Lake and Grover Norquist (for Christ’s sake) can team up to call for that slimy little prick Rahm Emanuel’s resignation and Alan Grayson and Ron Paul can join forces to demand an audit of the Federal Reserve why not put aside the differences and work together towards fighting something important to all of us?

I recently remarked that Obama is nothing more than Lyndon Baines Johnson without the social programs, I now believe that was wrong, he is more like a modern day incarnation of Woodrow Wilson, warmonger and domestic tyrant whose iron fisted opposition to dissenters destroyed many a life and unjustly imprisoned those who dared to challenge the divine right of American imperialism to murder in the name of God, mother, country and theapple pie authoritarianism that has again reared it’s ugly head in the past decade, not that it ever left.

But I digress, back to my break with the ‘left’….
I have had it with the ‘left’ or what passes for it today, all of the fighting, the activism, the hard work and the heartache and for what? So that the DemocRAT party can sell us all out with a ridiculous farce of a health care reform bill that does nothing but deliver all of our asses into bondage to the insurance industry parasites? So that not only can the war in Afghanistan be escalated at the expense of any domestic resuscitation of the dying economy but additional conflicts in Pakistan, Iran and now Yemen can be opened? So that the Obama administration behind arch-criminal Rahm Emanuel can sip from the gold-plated money spigots and bestow government largesse on their crooked buddies in the financial services industry and on Wall Street? So that the ultimate indignity of seeing the Pope of Hope, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who used his acceptance speech as a forum for justifying more imperialism, wars of aggression and murder now resort to the same phony war on terror rhetoric of the Bushreich in sowing the seeds of fear in this diseased country of cowards? Congratulations liberals, while sitting at the card table continuing to double down on a pair of threes in the hope that your pathetic grasp on political power can be preserved while you flush every principle down the toilet while leering TSA goons are salivating over the prospect of masturbating themselves into unconsciousness at the naked little boys and girls that they will be ogling on those fancy new airport full body scanners. Pat yourselves on the backs, your cultural crusades are garbage, just as much rot as your counterparts on the extremist right and you too have never met a war that you couldn’t justify when it served YOUR interests and all of that unchecked power that is massed in the surveillance state, well it’s just not so important to fight it when your guy’s ass is ensconced upon the throne at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What is really the difference between Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, blow job loving pothead Bill Maher, Rachel Mad Sow [sic] or poor old Mike Malloy, slowly and painfully going mad, eaten alive by his anger at not being able to stop any of this, a veteran of the psychic wars who as the BOC song goes has used up all his weapons and is helpless and bereaved – and my two cents worth of free advice to him is to just get the fuck out of this all, raise your daughter, enjoy your family and fuck the left, it’s just not worth it. Now the degeneration of the media darlings of the ‘left’ into nothing more than shills for the new order is as pathetic as it is predictable, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga once allegedly wrote a book called ‘Crashing the Gates’, but that is just too much work for once full of piss and vinegar liberals and progressives, now that they have won a few elections it is far easier to just have the castle master install a doggie door. Maddow, a damned good reporter whose nightly gig at MSNBC is as telling for a former Air America queen as the exiles of Randi Rhodes and Malloy into the wilderness is now dependent upon her ability to use her nightly platform to denounce intolerant bigots and buffoons and rail against phantoms like the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. Now I am very aware of the JBS history and dare I say that the current incarnation isn’t the great satan that it is portrayed as by some on the left. Hell, I am actually a lesser member (I don’t pay for the full ride) because I see more action from the JBS against the incursions of the fascist police state than I do from MoveOn and many of the other co-opted organs of the Democrat party. They came out against Bush’s abuses of the constitution and they do the same against O-Bushma and when I send out letters to my ‘representatives’ through their website I get responses, unlike from anything on the left which is simply laughed at by those in office, so toothless, neutered and ineffective have they become. There are some damned fine people in the John Birch Society despite some of the misguided crusades of the past and might I remind the liberals that the Democratic party’s history is not simon pure with racism, wars, Woodrow Wilson’s jihad against dissent and FDR’s internment of loyal Americans of Japanese descent in camps.
Again I digress….
While I have never been accused of being politically correct by anybody I fully support total equal rights for gays including the right to marry, my only problem is the focus on this rather than in a full effort to defeat fascism. I have many gay friends and as a former military member I knew closeted gays during my time of service and would rely on them any damned time over some dipshit Republican chickenhawk but the Democrat establishment is cynical, transparent and exploitative in their treatment of gays. It is pitiful and patronizing and the way that the powers that be on the ‘left’ use gays (they shit all over them and roll out set for life Rachel as some sort of nightly balm as though it suffices for the lashes on their backs) is exactly how the Republican faction of the money/war party jerks the chain of the Jesus freaks for their support for a vicous agenda that would crucify the long-haired troublemaker in a New York second if he were to return to earth tomorrow. That much was apparent when Obama rolled out the false prophet Rick Warren for the inauguration, too bad that Strom Thurmond wasn’t still alive or he could have made an official appearance as well. It’s a big tent with the DemocRATs, and it’s filled with clowns, geeks and hucksters, I mean fucking fat Eddie Schultz for Senate? Can it get any more surreal – and the ‘left’ has the audacity to complain about Fred Thompson, Curt Schilling or Arnold ‘son of a Nazi’ Schwarzenegger?

In fact the entire bogus system is a veritable self-licking ice cream cone (I borrowed that term from somewhere but I can’t remember) whenever the inflammatory distraction that is abortion is thrown into the ring and both sides immediately revert to their primal selves like the fucking caveman in Altered States and forget everything but a craving for fresh bloody meat. A pox of terminal, knee-jerk idiocy in America is the coin of the realm, my time spent in blogmark has taught me that one very important lesson if nothing else.

The left is at this moment in history busy disintegrating into a pool of illogical, conflicted toxic goo, the stench of terminal denial is as thick as the skulls of those who still deceive themselves that Barack Obama, the chess-master is just setting it all up to fall exactly right, like Michael Jordan in his prime tearing down the Piston defense with a cold and methodical precision, going through them to borrow from General George S. Patton “like shit through a tin horn”, it isn’t going to happen chumps. You voted for change and all that you got was a slicker version of William Jefferson Clinton who presided over NAFTA and the other anti-American trade deals like some peckerwood kahuna in years of yore swindling Injuns out of vast amounts of land for beads and baubles made out of paste. Slick Willie, I might add was a key in the corporate media consolidation that has allowed for the most kick ass propaganda machine since Goebbels and along with his Wall Street buddies sowed the seeds for the economic catastrophe that Obama and his financial ‘dream team’ now shoveling money into at the expense of the peasants in order to fill their campaign coffers for 2012.

Bill Clinton never should have been impeached for that vendetta by fascist fanatics like Richard Mellon Scaife and Kenneth Starr and their ilk over a fucking blowjob, the list of actual impeachable crimes started with giving Poppy Bush and his Iran-Contra cohorts a get out of jail free card. That little failure to enforce the laws came back to haunt us all for the American Reichstag Fire – 9/11 and the PNAC and every bastard mutation that evolved out of the afterbirth of Iran-Contra resurfaced to ensure that their dirty little coup d’etat and the eternal wars and subjugation has been out screaming TERRORISM ever since and now Americans must submit to having failed police officers who are just competent enough to latch on with TSA drool over their naked bodies and have the full power of the state to haul whoever the fuck that they want to into a private ‘screening’ room.

So now in early 2010, the second decade of the New American Century we are once again being cowed into a state of perpetual fear by a tyrannical government long ago taken over by blood barters and moneychangers and forced to give up even more of our dwindling liberty for temporary ‘security’. What in the fuck happened to this country? In the space of a decade it has become the largest colony of cowards, sheep and lemmings in the history of the planet.

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

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

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

The future depends on it.

Just my two cents

EE

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.”

A Farewell to Arms: Why I Left ‘the Left’

Barack promised change — and sure enough, things changed for the worse

-Joe Bageant

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

During an extended break from over four years of constant writing, activism, some radio and a lot of anger that was being absorbed that was due to health reasons I had some time to reflect and reassess matters and I realized that a lot of what made it necessary to step back was at the root cause of my problems. It was no near death experience or anything but after four and a half years of balls to the wall, take no prisoners warfare against the deranged elements of the right, the Bushreich and the liars, crooks and war freaks who have destroyed this country it was an opportunity to observe for a change. And when peering into that abyss I saw much of what I despised as not unique to the right-wing extremists, they had their doppelganger counterparts who were every bit as cynical, corrupted and morally rotten their own special ways. While I have been heading in this direction anyway, the mass panic over the false flag underwear bomber and the renewal of post 9/11 bloodlust and fear is what finally did it. The ‘left’ and the Obama administration had the opportunity to exorcise these demons from America, to punish the war criminals, bail out the common folks and to stop the mass looting but didn’t so liberalism has failed. Leo Strauss was right after all, liberalism is an enabler of totalitarianism in that it allows it to grow by an utter failure to do what is necessary to behead the snakes on the hydra or to cut the cancer out prior to it metastasizing.

A man whose work I greatly admire and who has the actual credentials to call out anyone that he damned well pleases, author Chris Hedges made me realize that my decision to leave the failure of liberalism was absolutely the right thing to do. His fairly recent piece that earned him much scorn from the courtiers of Obama and the Rahm Emanuel corporatists and their apologists on the left entitled Liberals Are Useless brings it all home and I excerpt from this work by a longtime beacon of morality in our blood soaked and bogeyman infested Fantasy Land:

Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.

And

What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”

And

I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.

Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.

I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.

I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.

I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.

Brilliantly driven home by Mr. Hedges, I will now excerpt from the great Joe Bageant whose piece The Devil and Mr. Obama is a must read:

As you may know, Obama’s public approval ratings are taking a beating. Millions of his former cult members have awakened with a splitting hangover to find their pockets turned inside out and eviction notices on the doors of their 4,000 square foot subprime mortgaged cardboard fuck boxes. Many who voted for Obama out of disgust for the Bush regime are now listening to the Republicans again on their car radios as they drive around looking for a suitable place to hide their vehicles from the repo man. Don’t construe this as support for the GOP. It’s just the standard ping ponging of disappointment and disgust that comes after the honeymoon is over with any administration. Most Americans’ party affiliations are the same as they were when Bush was elected. After all, Obama did not get elected on a landslide by any means; he got 51% of the vote.

Right now his approval ratings are in the 40th percentile and would be headed for the basement of the league were it not for the residual effect of the Kool-Aid love fest a year ago. However, millions of American liberals remain faithful, and believe Obama will arise from the dead in the third year and ascend to glory. You will find them at Huffington Post.

This frustrating ping pong game in which the margin of first time, disenchanted and undecided voters are batted back and forth has become the whole of American elections. That makes both the Republican and Democratic parties very happy, since it keeps the game down to fighting the enemy they know, each other, as opposed to being forced to deal with the real issues, or worse yet, an independent or third party candidate who might have a solution or two.

Thus, the game is limited to two players between two corporate parties. One is the Republican Party, which believes we should hand over our lives and resources directly to the local Chamber of Commerce, so the chamber can deliver them to the big corporations. The other, the Democratic Party, believes we should hand our lives and resources to a Democratic administration — so it alone can deliver our asses to the big dogs who own the country. In the big picture it’s always about who gets to deliver the money to the Wall Street hyena pack.

Americans may be starting to get the big picture about politics, money and corporate power. But I doubt it. Given that most still believe the war on terrorism is real, and that terrorists always just happen to be found near gas and oil deposits, there is plenty of room left to blow more smoke up their asses. Especially considering how we are conditioned to go into blind fits of patriotism at the sight of the flag, an eagle, or the mention of “our heroes,” even if the heroes happen to be killing and maiming Muslim babies at the moment. Patriotism is a cataract that blinds us to all national discrepancies.

The entire long-running reality show that was the Obama deception and his administration’s cold and calculated Judas betrayal also has eroded any sort of identity that I had with the ‘left’. This especially goes for the apologists for the same damned things that they wanted to string up Bush by his balls for by cruise missile liberals makes me want to vomit. Really, those who defend Obama for the continuation of most of Bush’s policies, or “kept the machine set on kill” are not very different than the glazed eyed monsters who canonized Bush, the only substantive difference being that they haven’t embraced full blown torture….yet and it’s coming with the mass hysteria that is creeping through this lemming colony.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revisiting the Tea Baggers: If there has been one group that I have been especially critical of it is the Republican co-opted Teabaggers, as the movement is currently infested with the dregs of American society, foul racists, neo-Nazis, Dick Armey of Darkness operatives, Palinazis, Beckers and religious fanatics my derision of them is justifiable. However, this fails to take into account the fact that there are millions of real pissed off Americans who are mobilizing and just lack the right guidance and knowledge. If you recall, the original tea parties were being held in the darkest years of the Bush-Cheney Axis of Evil reign of terror and were largely comprised of Ron Paul and 9/11 Truth Activists, this already in existence movement was then used by the establishment Republicans as an exo-skeleton into which they installed the insipid Glenn Beck as the face and promoted relentlessly on RNC propaganda television network FOX. From the intel that I receive there is actually a struggle for identity going on within this movement although you would never know it from the Democrat controlled propaganda organs. So there is some promise in a mass movement that liberals and the left are incapable of producing if the bigots, ignoramuses and operatives can be cast out as misfits, charlatans and shameless opportunists and this seems to be as good a place as any for an independent minded anarchist like me. Hey, Jesus hung with prostitutes, lepers and losers because they could actually be saved right?

While this movement is at least temporarily under the control of the vilest of swine that the oligarchy right-wing faction can dig up and who are firing up the dead enders, TV lobotomized zombies and easily fooled and made into useful idiot joiners it must be emphasized that the whole thing is still in play. There is a lot of righteous anger out there and it’s growing by the day and this whole thing could blow up like a MOAB on those who are seeking to exploit it. My very good friend Diane G, a hard core leftist journeyed into the snakepit at a teabagger rally in her homeground up in Michigan last year and found a bunch of pissed off people afraid and being manipulated by veterans and RNC style stooges. The vitriol was real but it was easily misdirected, largely because most of us are nothing more than ignorant sheep and manageable ants but were this sort of energy ever be redirected, say at Wall Street, the Pentagon, the insurance bloodsuckers, the corporations and the real rapists of America then watch the fuck out. The Republicans are playing with dynamite, for every misbegotten and fucked over by the system soul that worship the phony Glenn Beck as though he were some sort of modern day prophet instead of a real life Lonesome Rhodes, a career loser on the ultimate stage whose shelf life is only limited by his own propensity for self destruction there are others who realize that the man is an assclown and a fraud. I have to hand it to Alex Jones who denounces Beck on a regular basis as a tool who has only stolen his shtick and distilled it down for the masses of asses. This is a volitale mix and any foolish GOP huckster who doesn’t realize it is a fool on a megalomaniac level right up there with Karl Rove and the cartoonish house nigger Michael Steele.

One who seems to understand, at least on the level that an elitist swine who has long made a damned good living as a shit salesman for the privileged and connected can is columnist and media figure David Brooks of the phony librul New York Times. While not quite as successful as the pimp of globalization Thomas Friedman, Brooks is a reliable little lap doggie who can always be counted on to yap upon command. His latest piece, The Tea Party Teens is a fine example:

The Tea Party Teens

By DAVID BROOKS

The United States opens this decade in a sour mood. First, Americans are anxious about the future. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. Only 27 percent feel confident that their children’s generation will be better off than they are.

Second, Americans have lost faith in their institutions. During the great moments of social reform, at least 60 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. Now, only a quarter have that kind of trust.

The country is evenly divided about President Obama, but state governments are in disrepute and confidence in Congress is at withering lows. As Frank Newport of the Gallup organization noted in his year-end wrap-up, “Americans have less faith in their elected representatives than ever before.”

Third, the new administration has not galvanized a popular majority. In almost every sphere of public opinion, Americans are moving away from the administration, not toward it. The Ipsos/McClatchy organizations have been asking voters which party can do the best job of handling a range of 13 different issues. During the first year of the Obama administration, the Republicans gained ground on all 13.

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.

The movement is especially popular among independents. The Rasmussen organization asked independent voters whom they would support in a generic election between a Democrat, a Republican and a tea party candidate. The tea party candidate won, with 33 percent of independents. Undecided came in second with 30 percent. The Democrats came in third with 25 percent and the Republicans fourth with 12 percent.

Over the course of this year, the tea party movement will probably be transformed. Right now, it is an amateurish movement with mediocre leadership. But several bright and polished politicians, like Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico, are unofficially competing to become its de facto leader. If they succeed, their movement is likely to outgrow its crude beginnings and become a major force in American politics. After all, it represents arguments that are deeply rooted in American history.

The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

Moreover, the tea party movement has passion. Think back on the recent decades of American history — the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.

In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.

Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement. But I can certainly see its potential to shape the coming decade.

Of course Brooks is playing the game, he is another Mockingbird, his suggestion of Jeb Bush protégé Marco Rubio as a potential leader of this movement is just more of the same mental masturbation that we are accustomed to and of course what is more important to the establishment than in keeping Nazi collaborators like the Bush Family and their operatives in power? It is no surprise that these stealthy elitist swine want that little greaseball Rubio, just like they trotted out Glenn Beck to co-opt the Ron Paul movement (and to a large degree crib from the Alex Jones show only run through a food processor for a better consistency of lemming food. This is the game people, Brooks like his cohorts over at the Washington Post like Howie Kurtz (hatchet job on Gary Webb) and Dana Milbank (Skull and Bones) ALWAYS side with the oligarchy all the while denying that such a thing even exists and poo poohing us commoners as so much rabble and tin foil hatters. ENOUGH ALREADY, the JIG IS UP.

The comments are great, Brooks is a country clubbing elitist swine masquerading as a journalist and I have long been on his case, check some of these out.

David, thank you for being honest in the last paragraph and admitting that you are not fond of what you call the tea party movement. Republican like you and Democrats like Obama are the same to most of us. You really think that your superior credentials grants you social wisdom and intelligfence. It doesn’t.

And

I, too, feel betrayed by “elite” institutions, policy makers and businesspeople! And I am a relatively well-educated individual.

Globalization has not been a force for good, has not raised poor foreigners, has not benefited average US people, has not benefited any western nations’ national security. Deregulation? Likewise.

Why? Well, I guess, you’d have to ask the “crème de la crème” who have used average limitations and foreign poverty to aggrandize themselves and, thus, lined their own pockets with money at the expense of the broader world. It is an exceedingly short-sighted goal; n’est-ce pas? You cannot fool even them all of the time.

Certainly, globalization and deregulation might have worked. But, really, it seems that something must be done before it is too late. If we do not act to protect our way of life, to prop up the western middle-class and assure our standing, we will cede our place to peoples in whom we cannot trust and invite violent conflict at home and abroad.

And

Who do you think the tea party voters are, Mr. Brooks? I am middle aged, post-graduate degreed and financially independent. I support full gay rights, including gay marriage. I believe in decriminalizing drugs, I believe in being a good steward to the environment, and to the less fortunate in my own community. But, I will probably vote with the tea partiers. I might even vote for one of their national candiates

You want to know why? The Bail-outs.

I will never support a political candidate who voted for or supported the bail-outs, and I will support any movement that is against the politicians who supported the bail-outs. I will donate money to candidate, even in other states, who loudly opposed the bail-outs.

I don’t consider myself a tea partier. I am not a joiner and I’ve never marched or demonstrated. But the bail-outs meant that capitalism and free market rules no longer applied in america. It meant that those with political connections were saved and allowed to grow and prosper, while those who had played by the rules suffered and paid.

This anger at the bail-outs will never go away for people like me. Obama supported the bail-outs. Most of the Democrats supported the bail-outs. Some of the Republicans supported the bail-outs. The real statesman; The politicans who cared enough to do right ; they loudly and vigourously opposed the bail-outs.

If the tea party people continue to be the people who oppose the bail-out people; then, the enemies of my enemies, are my new best friends.

AND

I may add this self-serving oligarchy is picking winners (ask Blankfein of GS, and other bankers), seizing wealth by having their buddies in the right place (Bernanke, Paulson, Summers, etc), while unemployment keeps rocketing up and middle class gets decimated.

The other day I read somewhere that the bailouts under both Obama and Bush most likely transferred more wealth to the rich than the tax cuts under Bush. Just think about that!

Both parties are identical; only the names/ faces change. The nation is slowing waking up to it, which is reflected in the growing popularity of the tea party followers.

I just pray that this campaign don’t get hijacked by some Republican nutcase politician, because this is really about looking for a third voice, an independent voice.

AND

The tea party folks and the political independents have at least one very significant thing in common: members of neither group want to be identified with either of the “established” parties. The rise of a third party is a possibility.

AND

Disappointment with President Obama is clear and justified. There is a defacto war in Pakistan in addition to the fighting in Afghanistan and Irag. Health care reform looks to be a boon to the large drug and insurance companies. The opportunity for serious financinal reform seems to have been lost. The dire need for creating jobs is ignored. Why wouldn’t any movement the promises something different be growing in popularity?

And one VERY IMPORTANT COMMENT which illustrates the problem with this movement, it has been hijacked by elitist payroll swine and foul GOP operatives. Perhaps some principled folks who are disillusioned by the ongoing big con can assist in weeding these swine out.

As long as the Tea Party folks allow Glen Beck and Sean Hannity to be their chief spokesmen, they will remain an interesting but unimportant political footnote.

And those are just a sampling from the first 20 or so of the 400 + comments that were left on the so-called liberal, former Judith Miller employing NYT site. Now as anyone with any common sense understands, David Brooks is a fraud, a boot licking pecksniffian puke, a mangy lapdog and an on-call shill for the oligarchy for those bullshit Sunday morning bloviation circuit shows when the establishment trots out the ‘experts’ along with veteran whores like John McCain and his butt buddies Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham to piss down the backs of clueless regular Americans and swear to got that it’s raining. The handful of Sunday morning inside baseball swill drive the weekly media spin on any given issue, ensuring that the now standard left vs. right paradigm stays in place despite the fact that there is NEVER any substantive change in policy nor shift away from the elitist based society that we exist in. It’s all a dog and pony show, a big game of three card monte played on Main Street in a Potemkin Village renamed The Homeland and David Brooks is one of the chief shit shovellers who provide cover for the oligarchy. A man named Carroll Quigley once wrote in his massive historical book Tragedy and Hope that:

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.”

And there may have at the time been some truth in that statement but I doubt that Quigley ever envisioned the thorough rottenness of the political system, especially here in the United States. The necessity to maintain stability in any civilized form of society is not something that can be argued, we have seen through history what happens absent order when demagogues and lunatics can bring violence and suffering to millions based on lingering ethnic grudges and delusions of grandeur. Quigley’s statement relies on the idea that there is some sort of dignity present within the system not the widespread corruption that has us all at the mercy of a predatory state that serves those who have worked with relentless precision for decades to gain a stranglehold on political power through bribery, blackmail, intimidation and even assassinations. Our current two-party system is in the process of branding and yoking us all for delivery into bondage to the bloodsuckers and fiends that have hijacked the republic and turned it into a rancid spoils system with order kept by a burgeoning police state and a veritable gulag system of for profit prisons for all who dare to complain about it.

The one unmistakable aspect of Brooks’ column is FEAR because there IS something in the air and the key is what will eventually come of the tea party movement once the scum has been purged. I have been extremely critical of these people in the past, mockingly critical but I am guilty of generalizations and falling for the media propaganda of finding the most extremist elements and then hyping them as being indicative of all who are involved. Remember the Nixon era and the Vietnam era, it was always easy for the media to find the most radical leftists, the real bomb throwers, dirty hippies and acid juiced freaks and to use them as symbols of the antiwar movement. This of course was a lie, there was widespread opposition to Vietnam throughout the nation and as Nixon found out it extended to none other than Walter Cronkite whose proclamation that the war was “unwinnable” was devastating to the war freaks who nonetheless continued to feed the youth of America into an immoral charnel house to kill and be killed for the benefit of the Military Industrial Complex, the rising shadow government of the rogue CIA and their profiteering off of the illegal narcotics trade in the Golden Triangle and the political expedience of the predecessors to the swine and vermin who are this very day deeply entrenched as enemies of the American people in Washington.

I have recently gotten a chance to correspond with some people who I had not long ago (before the great Obama betrayal and the removal of the scales from my eyes) considered to be foes, nemeses and enemies including a man who I vilified as a “right wing Nazi”. There is nothing like a dagger in the back to assist with a change in perception. While there will always be areas of disagreement ideologically there are common grievances that outweigh all else. Principled conservatives are against big government and with the rise of the Homeland Security state that is just getting warmed up it is easy to understand why. As Barry Goldwater once put it “… a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have” and really, considering the direction that this monstrously corrupt system is growing exponentially and the Caesars that need meat for their ongoing wars just how long do you think it is going to be until confiscations, imprisonment and executions (preceeded by that good ole Jack Bauer style tough love of course) will be reality? The belief that America should mind our own business (wrongly slurred by propraganda pimps as isolationism and equated with the rise of Hitler..yawn) and stay the hell out of the rest of the world is another common cause as is the meddling of the government in the economy (there is a difference here in that I would not oppose government leveling the playing field rather than rewarding the wealthy with political connections) which in the past year has only put Wall Street high rollers back in the gambling business only with house money. I believe that the ‘left’ is making a huge mistake in not reaching out, I mean if Jane Hamsher of Firedog Lake and Grover Norquist (for Christ’s sake) can team up to call for that slimy little prick Rahm Emanuel’s resignation and Alan Grayson and Ron Paul can join forces to demand an audit of the Federal Reserve why not put aside the differences and work together towards fighting something important to all of us?

I recently remarked that Obama is nothing more than Lyndon Baines Johnson without the social programs, I now believe that was wrong, he is more like a modern day incarnation of Woodrow Wilson, warmonger and domestic tyrant whose iron fisted opposition to dissenters destroyed many a life and unjustly imprisoned those who dared to challenge the divine right of American imperialism to murder in the name of God, mother, country and theapple pie authoritarianism that has again reared it’s ugly head in the past decade, not that it ever left.

But I digress, back to my break with the ‘left’….

I have had it with the ‘left’ or what passes for it today, all of the fighting, the activism, the hard work and the heartache and for what? So that the DemocRAT party can sell us all out with a ridiculous farce of a health care reform bill that does nothing but deliver all of our asses into bondage to the insurance industry parasites? So that not only can the war in Afghanistan be escalated at the expense of any domestic resuscitation of the dying economy but additional conflicts in Pakistan, Iran and now Yemen can be opened? So that the Obama administration behind arch-criminal Rahm Emanuel can sip from the gold-plated money spigots and bestow government largesse on their crooked buddies in the financial services industry and on Wall Street? So that the ultimate indignity of seeing the Pope of Hope, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who used his acceptance speech as a forum for justifying more imperialism, wars of aggression and murder now resort to the same phony war on terror rhetoric of the Bushreich in sowing the seeds of fear in this diseased country of cowards? Congratulations liberals, while sitting at the card table continuing to double down on a pair of threes in the hope that your pathetic grasp on political power can be preserved while you flush every principle down the toilet while leering TSA goons are salivating over the prospect of masturbating themselves into unconsciousness at the naked little boys and girls that they will be ogling on those fancy new airport full body scanners. Pat yourselves on the backs, your cultural crusades are garbage, just as much rot as your counterparts on the extremist right and you too have never met a war that you couldn’t justify when it served YOUR interests and all of that unchecked power that is massed in the surveillance state, well it’s just not so important to fight it when your guy’s ass is ensconced upon the throne at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What is really the difference between Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, blow job loving pothead Bill Maher, Rachel Mad Sow [sic] or poor old Mike Malloy, slowly and painfully going mad, eaten alive by his anger at not being able to stop any of this, a veteran of the psychic wars who as the BOC song goes has used up all his weapons and is helpless and bereaved – and my two cents worth of free advice to him is to just get the fuck out of this all, raise your daughter, enjoy your family and fuck the left, it’s just not worth it. Now the degeneration of the media darlings of the ‘left’ into nothing more than shills for the new order is as pathetic as it is predictable, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga once allegedly wrote a book called ‘Crashing the Gates’, but that is just too much work for once full of piss and vinegar liberals and progressives, now that they have won a few elections it is far easier to just have the castle master install a doggie door. Maddow, a damned good reporter whose nightly gig at MSNBC is as telling for a former Air America queen as the exiles of Randi Rhodes and Malloy into the wilderness is now dependent upon her ability to use her nightly platform to denounce intolerant bigots and buffoons and rail against phantoms like the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. Now I am very aware of the JBS history and dare I say that the current incarnation isn’t the great satan that it is portrayed as by some on the left. Hell, I am actually a lesser member (I don’t pay for the full ride) because I see more action from the JBS against the incursions of the fascist police state than I do from MoveOn and many of the other co-opted organs of the Democrat party. They came out against Bush’s abuses of the constitution and they do the same against O-Bushma and when I send out letters to my ‘representatives’ through their website I get responses, unlike from anything on the left which is simply laughed at by those in office, so toothless, neutered and ineffective have they become. There are some damned fine people in the John Birch Society despite some of the misguided crusades of the past and might I remind the liberals that the Democratic party’s history is not simon pure with racism, wars, Woodrow Wilson’s jihad against dissent and FDR’s internment of loyal Americans of Japanese descent in camps.

Again I digress….

While I have never been accused of being politically correct by anybody I fully support total equal rights for gays including the right to marry, my only problem is the focus on this rather than in a full effort to defeat fascism. I have many gay friends and as a former military member I knew closeted gays during my time of service and would rely on them any damned time over some dipshit Republican chickenhawk but the Democrat establishment is cynical, transparent and exploitative in their treatment of gays. It is pitiful and patronizing and the way that the powers that be on the ‘left’ use gays (they shit all over them and roll out set for life Rachel as some sort of nightly balm as though it suffices for the lashes on their backs) is exactly how the Republican faction of the money/war party jerks the chain of the Jesus freaks for their support for a vicous agenda that would crucify the long-haired troublemaker in a New York second if he were to return to earth tomorrow. That much was apparent when Obama rolled out the false prophet Rick Warren for the inauguration, too bad that Strom Thurmond wasn’t still alive or he could have made an official appearance as well. It’s a big tent with the DemocRATs, and it’s filled with clowns, geeks and hucksters, I mean fucking fat Eddie Schultz for Senate? Can it get any more surreal – and the ‘left’ has the audacity to complain about Fred Thompson, Curt Schilling or Arnold ‘son of a Nazi’ Schwarzenegger?

In fact the entire bogus system is a veritable self-licking ice cream cone (I borrowed that term from somewhere but I can’t remember) whenever the inflammatory distraction that is abortion is thrown into the ring and both sides immediately revert to their primal selves like the fucking caveman in Altered States and forget everything but a craving for fresh bloody meat. A pox of terminal, knee-jerk idiocy in America is the coin of the realm, my time spent in blogmark has taught me that one very important lesson if nothing else.

The left is at this moment in history busy disintegrating into a pool of illogical, conflicted toxic goo, the stench of terminal denial is as thick as the skulls of those who still deceive themselves that Barack Obama, the chess-master is just setting it all up to fall exactly right, like Michael Jordan in his prime tearing down the Piston defense with a cold and methodical precision, going through them to borrow from General George S. Patton “like shit through a tin horn”, it isn’t going to happen chumps. You voted for change and all that you got was a slicker version of William Jefferson Clinton who presided over NAFTA and the other anti-American trade deals like some peckerwood kahuna in years of yore swindling Injuns out of vast amounts of land for beads and baubles made out of paste. Slick Willie, I might add was a key in the corporate media consolidation that has allowed for the most kick ass propaganda machine since Goebbels and along with his Wall Street buddies sowed the seeds for the economic catastrophe that Obama and his financial ‘dream team’ now shoveling money into at the expense of the peasants in order to fill their campaign coffers for 2012.

Bill Clinton never should have been impeached for that vendetta by fascist fanatics like Richard Mellon Scaife and Kenneth Starr and their ilk over a fucking blowjob, the list of actual impeachable crimes started with giving Poppy Bush and his Iran-Contra cohorts a get out of jail free card. That little failure to enforce the laws came back to haunt us all for the American Reichstag Fire – 9/11 and the PNAC and every bastard mutation that evolved out of the afterbirth of Iran-Contra resurfaced to ensure that their dirty little coup d’etat and the eternal wars and subjugation has been out screaming TERRORISM ever since and now Americans must submit to having failed police officers who are just competent enough to latch on with TSA drool over their naked bodies and have the full power of the state to haul whoever the fuck that they want to into a private ‘screening’ room.

So now in early 2010, the second decade of the New American Century we are once again being cowed into a state of perpetual fear by a tyrannical government long ago taken over by blood barters and moneychangers and forced to give up even more of our dwindling liberty for temporary ‘security’. What in the fuck happened to this country? In the space of a decade it has become the largest colony of cowards, sheep and lemmings in the history of the planet.

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

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

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

The future depends on it.

Just my two cents

EE

Common Sense 2009

The word has come from on high, the economy is robust and recovering, Bernanke is GOD and the Obamessiah is well on the way to leading parasite health insurance companies to the promised land where they will join the usurers. Of course this is all nonsensical hogwash carefully shoveled like so much manure by a corrupt corporate media that primarily exists to protect the interests of the status quo. So as America now contines to sink into debt so as to preserve the status quo and the oligarchy, as Obama and Raht Emanuel have sold us all out for chump change and the screws keep getting tighter what is next? For one thing there is a huge oil price spike coming as speculators are driving up the price of the barrel proportionate to the reflation of the bailout bubble. Think of the economic devastation that $4.00 plus per gallon of gasoline and the accompanying upward spiral in food costs last year, this time there isn’t the phony dog and pony show election to keep the bastards in check. Soon it comes down to the people themselves. Today I am going to offer up this righteous piece by Hustler Magazine founder Larry Flynt, a crusader for civil liberties and freedom of speech and a man that stood up to the bastards and won.

Common Sense 2009
By Larry Flynt


The American government — which we once called our government — has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “economic royalists,” who choose our elected officials — indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment’s hesitation, they took our money — yours and mine — to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame.

They don’t care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as “useless eaters.”

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

“A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street.”

There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: “And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis — the Great Depression — was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy.”

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did — knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) — was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight — and we’ve all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action.

Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Obama’s failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:

“Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

Read Rockefeller’s words again. He actually admits to working against the “best interests of the United States.”
Need more? Here’s what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.” They’re gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn’t enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.

The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here’s what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father’s conquered.”

We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists’ attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays’ Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America’s farmers.

Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks’ predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Perhaps it’s time to consider that option once again.

I’m calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let’s set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn’t effective — if the politicians ignore us — we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It’s time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

Chump Change

By now it should be pretty apparent to all but the most ignorant (this means you Birthers)that the only type of change that has come to America courtesy of the Obama administration is chump change. Oh, the Wall Street financial mafia, especially The Great Satan (Goldman Sachs) has seen plenty of change for the better (with the government assisted hit job of rivals Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers) and bonuses for the parasitical scum will be approaching record levels this year while the a good amount of the rest of the populace is still jobless, homeless, hungry and fucked but hey..is this a great country or what? In fact, what really has changed from the more honest version of Fuck You, I Got Mine attitude of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil? Obama’s Chief of Staff, a foul-mouthed, ass-faced, stab you in the back cocksucker named Rahm Emanuel has come out and called ads by liberal and progressive groups against the corrupt Blue Dogs as “fucking stupid”. Now this has naturally incurred the wrath of many bloggers and justifiably so, Emanuel is nothing but a malodorous, dual loyalist agent of supreme corporate corruption, think Al Capone was a bad dude, well he had nothing on Rahm Emanuel when it comes to being a Chicago gangster. I remember a few years back when our local entrenched Republican, C.W. ‘Bill’ Young was ripe for a takedown during the 2006 mid-term elections and was being challenged by a scrappy insurgency by a very progressive, anti-war, independent minded ‘democrat’ named Samm Simpson. At that time, the vermin Emanuel was head of the DCCC and didn’t give her one fucking dime, not a fucking dime choosing to instead stay with the Republican more in line with corporatist values.

Now that the Democrats have proven to be every bit as fascist as their foaming at the mouth counterparts – albeit in a less overt fashion it’s time that people just deal with the fact that the existing system is rigged, it’s a two party game of 3 Card Monte being conducted on Main Street of a Potemkin Village and we are all the rubes. However, the big scam of having two parties that are substantially different is so embedded in the ant sized brains of Murkans that they contribute to their own economic demise by continuing to buy the lies. Case in point, the vicious thugs who are attacking health care town hall meetings, largely organized by front groups for the medical industrial complex, Big Pharma and the lobbyists like Dick Armey work for the high rolling tax chiselers. Drawing heavily from the dumbed down for Jesus ‘Christian’ demographic, mixing in the unrepentent and downright savage haters who just will never be down with a ‘nigger’ livin’ in the White House because of their generationally inbred stupidity, neo Confederacy and just plain old southern fried motherfuckerism and catching in their net a bunch of folks who are seriously just pissed off and frustrated and looking for the scapegoats that the fascist fifth column is always so eager to provide. The knuckle draggers then rail against SOCIALISM although it is only the sort of socialism that would actually benefit their own sorry asses instead of the big state socialism for oligarchs that has easily jumped from the Bush administration to the Obama administration like a parasite to another host. That is why I posted BOTH Joker posters, since the Obama one seems to be drawing so much controversy, Bush was portrayed as the arch villian back before Obama was even elected.

Now the Joker is a nice little example of just how the system games pop culture figures to sell to the masses of asses. Back when the movie The Dark Knight came out last summer there were actually some idiotic neocons (Bill Kristol and his swinish sort) were, and I shit you not out there shamelessly comparing their hero George W. Bush to Batman. I wrote about that in a post that I did called Neo Con Nocturnal Emissions. I eventually got around to seeing the movie which I liked, actually I thought that Heath Ledger’s Joker was actually a heroic sort of character but then again I am an admitted anarchist. But America loves fiction just as much as celebrity so we have the comparison, the caricatures and the symbolism to appeal to the television addicted here on the world’s largest lemming farm. But purpose of this effort is to empasize that we were all sold out bBy the Pope of Hope and all of his phony hype about change. The only change that we are seeing is chump change.

The fix was in as soon as he named that ass-faced little weasel Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff…game, set and match.

The wars continue, the illegal spying continues, the economic numbers are cooked to a fine fricassee by liars whose sole job is to obfuscate, spin and confuse the public – actual unemployment is likely closer to 20 percent and the only thing that has occured is that the Obama administration has reinflated the bubble. The Wall Street traitors and crooks have been bailed out and are now gambling with house money – OUR money.

Health care reform is a fraud, the same crooked scum lobbists and their bought and paid for whores like Max Baucus and his ilk are going to come out with the worst possible bill with no public option and forced coverage so that the pigs who run the insurance industry and the medical industrial complex can continue to reap obscene profits at the expense of the peasants.

While the idiot and dupes are out storming townhalls at the command of the demented Glenn Beck, a man with a serious history of mental illness and suicide in his family as well as a hard core former alcoholic with delusions of grandeur (hell, for all that anyone knows he probably grew up fucking his mother although that’s no excuse) and there will soon be violence at one of the organized bund attacks. Goddammit, I would piss my pants laughing if it weren’t such a joke. How on God’s green Earth do these imbeciles get duped into believing that when Obama has bailed out the parasitical financial oligarchs, continued to shovel money into the lucrative wars of conquest, has done jack squat to close down America’s vast for profit prison gulag and is now going to fistfuck us all into a scam of a health care ‘reform’ con job written by the capitalist swine who run the game?

Frank Rich of the damned librul New York Times had a great piece on the betrayal by Barack yesterday entitled Is Obama Punking Us? from which I exerpt the following:

Yet there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”

But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

No president can do that alone, let alone in six months. To make Obama’s goal more quixotic, the ailment that he diagnosed is far bigger than Washington and often beyond politics’ domain. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.

It’s a cynicism confirmed almost daily by events. Last week Brian Stelter of The Times reported that the corporate bosses of MSNBC and Fox News, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, had sanctioned their lieutenants to broker what a G.E. spokesman called a new “level of civility” between their brawling cable stars, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. A Fox spokesman later confirmed to Howard Kurtz of The Post that “there was an agreement” at least at the corporate level. Olbermann said he was a “party to no deal,” and in any event what looked like a temporary truce ended after The Times article was published. But the whole scrape only fed legitimate suspicions on the right and left alike that even their loudest public voices can be silenced if the business interests of the real American elite decree it.

You might wonder whether networks could some day cut out the middlemen — anchors — and just put covert lobbyists and publicists on the air to deliver the news. Actually, that has already happened. The most notorious example was the flock of retired military officers who served as television “news analysts” during the Iraq war while clandestinely lobbying for defense contractors eager to sell their costly wares to the Pentagon.

The revelation of that scandal did not end the practice. Last week MSNBC had to apologize for deploying the former Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe as a substitute host for Olbermann without mentioning his new career as a corporate flack. Wolffe might still be anchoring on MSNBC if the blogger Glenn Greenwald hadn’t called attention to his day job. MSNBC assured its viewers that there were no conflicts of interest, but we must take that on faith, since we still don’t know which clients Wolffe represents as a senior strategist for his firm, Public Strategies, whose chief executive is the former Bush White House spin artist, Dan Bartlett.

Let’s presume that Wolffe’s clients do not include the corporate interests with billions at stake in MSNBC and Washington’s Topic A, the health care debate. If so, he’s about the only player in the political-corporate culture who’s not riding that gravy train.

As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the former Congressman Dick Armey, now a lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.

But the Democratic members of Congress those hecklers assailed can hardly claim the moral high ground. Their ties to health care interests are merely more discreet and insidious. As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.

Then there are the 52 conservative Blue Dog Democrats, who have balked at the public option for health insurance. Their cash intake from insurers and drug companies outpaces their Democratic peers by an average of 25 percent, according to The Post. And let’s not forget the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which has raked in nearly $500,000 from a single doctor-owned hospital in McAllen, Tex. — the very one that Obama has cited as a symbol of runaway medical costs ever since it was profiled in The New Yorker this spring.

In this maze of powerful moneyed interests, it’s not clear who any American in either party should or could root for. The bipartisan nature of the beast can be encapsulated by the remarkable progress of Billy Tauzin, the former Louisiana congressman. Tauzin was a founding member of the Blue Dog Democrats in 1994. A year later, he bolted to the Republicans. Now he is chief of PhRMA, the biggest pharmaceutical trade group. In the 2008 campaign, Obama ran a television ad pillorying Tauzin for his role in preventing Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices. Last week The Los Angeles Times reported — and The New York Times confirmed — that Tauzin, an active player in White House health care negotiations, had secured a behind-closed-doors flip-flop, enlisting the administration to push for continued protection of drug prices. Now we know why the president has ducked his campaign pledge to broadcast such negotiations on C-Span.

The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.

His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys’ club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street’s latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner’s role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren’t going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.

It’s in this context that Obama can’t afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what’s in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn’t, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.

Admit it, we’ve been had. I have to admit, I voted for Obama and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t kick myself for not voting for Nader.

Hell, for what it’s all worth I miss Bush, at least everybody knew who the real enemy was.

A Glorious Feeling of American Euphoria

The propagandistic American corporate pocket media is in all of it’s putrescence heralding the wonderful news that yes indeedy, the recession is nearing an end. The latest is the splendiferous, shouted from the mountaintops news that the stagnating heap of overpriced garbage that is the housing market is back after Monday’s pre-opening bell announcement that new home sales were up 11 % – hallelujah! In more of that newspeak that ‘hey, our results suck but since they don’t suck as much as we had originally thought that they would suck stuff’s gettin’ better’ the Ponzi scheme stock markets are once again churning at a furious pace as the DOW, that mercurial God of the American fascist state is on the way back to 10k and beyond…who knows, with helicopter Ben and the full weight of the Obama administration pumping money by the bargeload into the F.I.R.E. economy on a daily basis it may still hit 30,000 as some optimism opium addicted fool once said.

But it’s all an illusion my friends, even as there are increasing calls for auditing The Fed, so much so that Ben Bernanke is taking to the hustings on a public relations/politics tour just to show how important that it is to not scrutinize the temple of the moneychangers and to keep it free from political matters (GAG). Now the protector of Wall Street scum and his foul and unaccountable central bank are under siege as never before as the wonders of the internet allow people to see just how much that the Federal Reserve has rigged the game for the finance oligarchs. There is at this time a huge bi-partisan bill in Congress that is being jammed up by the crooked pigs just like health insurance whore Max Baucus to audit the institution. The entire establishment and their guard dogs in the bought and paid for media are ready to move heaven and earth in order to stop the thing as according to a recent poll the Federal Reserve is now the LEAST popular ‘government’ agency – even lower than the demon IRS and the terrorist CIA. Will it be much longer until The Fed has a less favorable rating than genital herpes?

My local morning newspaper touted the great housing resurrection but to a veteran bullshit detector such as myself was instantly debunked by the headline “Glimmer of Hope as New Home Sales SOAR“, the inclusion of the word “SOAR” is what gives it away as more centrally constructed McNews just as the PICKING UP STEAM, ROBUST, GREEN SHOOTS and a myriad of others that are regularly used tag the story as a Blue Letter (see Hudsucker Proxy for the obligatory pop culture reference) directly from the bowels of the Ministry Of Truth. So, to cut to the chase the pigs are partying on the taxpayer dime once again. Nowhere in my morning McNews fishwrap was anything about the market manipulation of high frequency trading and the growing inquiries about the advantage that it gives the wolves over the sheep. It has to be pretty bad when a longtime water carrier for the banksters like Chuck Schumer is making noise about it. Such a practice if it ever was able to rise above the flotsam and jetsam of ginned up racist crap, Michael Jackson stories and tawdry sleaze that fills the media would be a devastating blow to the looters and perhaps for once show ordinary investors who are getting fucked six ways from Sunday by a massive floating crap game on Wall Street that they are being robbed and the cops on the beat to stop it are on the take.

Anyway….just wanted to chime in over the morning cup o’ joe. For the REAL news about the wondrous economic resurgence stop by Zero Hedge (now at his own site, blogger is only going to serve as an archive) and check out the ugly photoessay on the coming wave of commercial real estate defaults. Note, as a Florida resident I can attest to this, I live in a different part of the state than the guy who did this and it’s the same here, FOR RENT, FOR SALE, FOR LEASE signs are popping up like green shoots and multiplying daily.

The Florida CRE Implosion Visualized
Submitted by Tyler Durden on Tue, 07/28/2009 – 00:13

A reader submits the following photo essay on the absolute commercial real estate carnage in Florida. Has to be seen to be believed: you will not see these pictures anywhere in traditional media.

He also provides the following color:

I took a drive this evening from 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm and shot over 200 pictures of Florida real estate in crisis. What is really amazing if you notice the time and date on each picture . I was able to shoot a picture about every 45 seconds while all alone driving in traffic including stopping for traffic lights and gas and parking in a safe place each time for each shot . Everywhere you turn something is for lease or rent.

All these headlines in the media dont seem to have any effect on people so here is one road in one town ( out of thousands ) in Fort Lauderdale Florida up to Pompano Beach ( about 8 miles ) I pretty much only shot the right side of the street because I did not want to do any u turns . Some pics I shot across the street . This does not even include office buildings .

There is something for lease or rent in almost every single plaza or strip mall without exception . I also missed a lot more because of traffic and buildings set back from the street. This does not even include offices , homes , condos etc, this is just stuff abandoned or had a sign in front of it and I missed a LOT of signs . This is not even all the empty lots that sit because the developer abandoned the project after buying up the whole neighborhood .

This is Fort Lauderdale Florida . The Gold Coast , The Venice of America the Yachting capital of the world folks.The pictures start at the Fort lauderdale beach on Sunrise Blvd. and go west to federal Highway ( rte 1 ) north to Pompano Beach about 8 miles and finish in a random warehouse district off the main road . After that it got dark and I had to stop .

You will see Exotic car dealerships Burger King, Wendys , Fuddruckers , Hooters , Pier one , furniture stores , restaurants , clubs boat dealers, Business that have been there 20 + years , Supermarkets , Saks 5th avenue ( big white building in beginning ) Macks groves , Flaming Pit , the old 50’s diner . A Ford dealer and a Dodge dealer . A golf course in beginning of slideshow . All GONE in just one 8 mile strip . Folks this is the good side of town with the money I did not even go to the other side of the tracks or to other streets just one !!!

It’s morning in America and another day of being played for chumps is just beginning…