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.

 

Eugenics American Style: Welcome to Trump’s

I just wanna say one thing! God Bless America.

-Biff Tannen

In the garish and decaying empire of asinine triviality, raw greed, political corruption and brain jellying, TV induced dumbness perhaps there is no more fitting figure to ascend to the throne of king of the dipshits than Donald Trump. With his assumption of the mission of the holy mission to expose the black devil Obama as the hidden Muslim that he has so far gotten away with lying about, the man with the roadkill pelt on his noggin has scrambled his ace staff of ‘private detectives’ and sent them to the Aloha State ala Hawaii Five-O to track down the illusive birth certificate. One can only imagine the motley crew on Trump’s payroll and bereft as they likely are of any sense of decency will likely find themselves spending more time on Hotel Street smoking da kine bud and spending their ill-gotten cash on hookers, perhaps Trump can even dispatch Charlie Sheen who is looking for a new gig these days and has plenty of experience with the ladies of the night. While millions of ignoramuses, nitwits and mouth-breathing red state fascists view outing Obama as the Antichrist as their holy mandate a scoundrel like Donald Trump knows damned well that he is doing it for publicity and the support of the dregs of society that are the Birthers, a fringe-faction of the ridiculously over-hyped Tea Party (aka the re-branded post Bush GOP base) so moronic that are mocked outright and kept locked away in the attic like a vicious retarded child by most Republican politicians. This mission, which will enthrall not only an ugly part of the subculture that should be universally shunned but also a good many other electronic crackpipe addicts will surely boost the Donald’s cred and vault him into position for his run at the presidency in 2012. In a perverse sort of way Trump would bring much experience to the job, his string of bankruptcies would be a huge asset in a country that is on the brink of insolvency and his arrogance combined with a flamboyant way of coming across as a professional horse’s ass would be like George W. Bush only with more entertainment value.

Like so many other of the putrid misfits, stone-crazy ideologues, financial swindlers and just plain dunces that have wrecked the country the festering wart on our national ass that is Donald Trump is largely a product of the 1980s and the Reagan era. Trump burst onto the national scene while parlaying his ownership of the now defunct United States Football League’s flagship franchise the New Jersey Generals into media coverage. In an era where one of the seven deadly sins known as greed became an exalted form of virtuousness in the USA thanks to Reagan’s cadre of tax chiselers, weasels and full-blown crooks fictional characters such as J.R. Ewing and Gordon Gekko became icons as a nation of hard workers who actually produced physical goods began the long and miserable slouch into the future where they would become burger flippers (fast food jobs were transformed into manufacturing jobs under Bush II) and paper pushers who managed to in a high tech version of King Midas transform shit (bad mortgages) into gold (mortgage backed securities) and then into shit (post-housing crash) again. When Saint Ronnie fired the air traffic controllers it was the opening fusillade of the class war, the casualties of which are still being tallied and along with a blistering crackerjack propaganda campaign designed to dupe Americans into thinking that they could actually hit it big in the Wall Street casinos real virtues such as innovation, entrepreneurship and actually building a business were dumped for the get rich quick fantasies purveyed by pigs like Donald Trump.

To use a cultural analogy from the Reagan era one could easily imagine Trump’s America straight out of the smash hit Back to the Future II. When Marty McFly and Doc Brown ride the flying DeLorean int the future where Marty procures a copy of a post 20th Century edition of Gray’s Sports Almanac which has the results of all sporting events from 1950-2000. An elderly Biff Tannen gets ahold of the book, travels back into the past and gives it to his younger self thereby altering the future. When Marty and Doc return to 1985 Biff has parlayed the book into vast wealth and fame from his amazing run of luck in picking the winner of sports events or in other words, Biff became mega-rich the true American way, by cheating and gambling. A great metaphor for the Reagan years and a perfect one for the ascent of ‘the Donald’ as well. I could think of no one individual who better exemplifies the true America than Donald Trump, as H.L. Mencken once wrote, Imagine a gentleman and you will have imagined everything that he is not. However I digress … when Marty McFly returns to 1985 he comes back to a changed world thanks to Biff’s parlaying of his immense gambling winnings into an ugly empire of gauche sin and spectacle while the entire city of Hill Valley devolved into a hellish, third world land of gangs, crime and poverty while “Biff’s”, the gleaming towering casino jutted skyward above the filth and fury, poking up like a blood engorged, rock-hard penis. It doesn’t take much to conjure up visions of Donald Trump’s America and it ain’t pretty.

Trump’s real estate developments already blight the landscape like an ugly recurrent strain of Herpes lesions and as far as the poverty, crime and general state of economic deterioration, well just take a look around. The teabaggers have allowed Ayn Rand cultists and political criminals to once again successfully roll Obama with crushing cuts in social programs to fund the malefactors of great wealth like 1985 Biff Tannen and Donald Trump with his cave in on the government shutdown. Worse, even more savage cuts in essential services and ‘entitlements’, that great term that has been successfully used by the think tanks and the monied political whores to diminish what was once a social safety net that was the envy of the world are facing an even more cruel evisceration with the coming raising of the debt ceiling to accommodate more borrowing from China to fund the endless wars and subsidize tax cuts for the rich and corporations. And of course Social Security is in the crosshairs as the economic royalists smell blood with Obama a cornered and terrified animal who is about to have his head ripped off and then suffering the indignity of the oligarchy pigs shitting down his throat and kicking his decapitated dome around like a soccer ball as they destroy FDR’s hated New Deal on his watch. That is of course assuming that the Pope of Hope hasn’t been in on it all from the beginning which given the ongoing decimation of economic conditions and civil liberties on his watch could make a strong case for. As George Carlin remarked in his famous rant, “it’s a big club and you aren’t in it”. With the 2012 presidential election looming and Americans facing a three-headed monster in Obama-Trump-Romney, a ferocious and fearsome hydra, any of which would further destroy the lives of millions at the behest of the plutocrats and corporate thugs that finance their campaigns perhaps the Mayan predictions of apocalyptic doom are in the future here in Der Heimat. 

Of course none of forces that have successfully driven America slowly down the road to a fascist third world banana republic could have succeeded without the help of a massively stupid electorate. While the teabaggers are the corporate media darlings for their ability to easily be mustered against phantoms and duped into voting against their own economic self-interests they are only a recent phenomenon. To really see just how bereft of intelligence, rationality and logic that this country has become one needs to jump into Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine and take a trip back to the Reagan years which is exactly where the demarcation point between fantasy and reality occurred.  I have been saying this for years as have others who get it yet as in the national orgy of reverence to the old fool as was evident in the celebrations a few months back in honor of Ronald Reagan’s Centennial birthday, the big lie of the Gipper as some sort of father of the country has become the truth to millions, especially the poorly educated and electronically lobotomized generations who came to age after Reagan was elected. The schools have been under assault for decades by not only the corporate class that wants obedient workers but assisted largely by the fanatical Christians seeking the implementation of a real theocracy in America. Now as never before teachers are under assault by the looters who rule the roost, in another spot-on column this week Chris Hedges writes on Why the United States is Destroying it’s Education System from which I excerpt:

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating.

Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those who march to the beat of their own drum—are weeded out.


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The demonizing of teachers is another public relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities.

“Not only have the reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher, who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching. As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving teachers autonomy and respect. They use merit pay in which teachers whose students do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at work in both of these.”

Or as George Carlin so eloquently put it:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking… They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. … … They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. … … They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. … And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it,

The dumbing down of America was essential for the hostile corporate takeover, the banishment of critical thinking skills and a knowledge of history, true history that is, had to be stifled. Creativity and questioning of idiotic people and policies are not things that are desired in the corporate state and no dissent is brooked let alone tolerated. Today’s average office settings are top down authoritarian entities where a group identity that is far more akin to classical Stalinist communism rather than the grand capitalism that they trumpet is the norm. Asking questions is denounced as heresy or gasp…”negative thinking” and the poor souls packed into cubicles slightly smaller than the cells at Gitmo are policed with ruthless efficiency by networks of finks, stooges and goons straight out of Solzhenitzen’s Gulag Archipelago. Any violation of the corporate thought police is the cause for scorn from one’s co-inhabitants of cubicle hell, ostracism and in situations with psychotic mid-level straw bosses lead to collective punishment and eventually exile. These people are the lucky ones in corporate Amerika because at least they have jobs in air-conditioned settings, the less fortunate who have been culled out at an earlier production stage in the educational process end up as harangued Wal-Mart clerks, prison guards, manual toilers and food service workers. It’s the ownership society and the snorting porkers who run it own all of our asses, high-rolling, four-flushing pigs like Donald Trump. The prototypical ugly American is now rocketing to the top of the polls largely due to his brazen I’m an asshole and proud of it! attitude, his pandering to the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet who are the racist birthers and scumbaggers and having a hit show on the tee-vee to boot! Only in America, a land where one now evolves into a grunting cave person over time, bred to worship their rich masters always at the expense of themselves and the closer their understanding to the primitive concept of “God’s will” the better. While the Germans aspired to the perfect Aryan Übermensch 21st Century Americans are blessedly ignorant, filled with primal hatred and fear and devolving by the minute thanks to the electronic dreck vomited forth from their televisions. It is truly eugenics American style.

One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organized religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.

-Trent Reznor

Eugenics American Style: The current pathetic state of this shambling into historical infamy, god-kissed, flag-swaddled giant lemming farm would seem to make Mike Judge’s vastly underrated satire Idiocracy prophetic.Unlike Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, Brazil ,Blade Runner or any other cinematic vision of a dystopian society, Idiocracy is far more terrifying because it is actually in the process of becoming reality. With the ongoing assault on the American education system, the electronic lobotomizing of the populace thanks to the mind rot that is television, government lies about pretty much everything, the metastasizing of a vile anti-intellectual cancer promulgated by the Christian institutions of the land and the transformation of citizens as consumers the march towards the society of morons, by morons and for morons as portrayed in the film is already well underway. Much like fear in the post 9/11 era, willful ignorance and entrenched magical thinking are now as American as apple pie. As the educational system is dismantled, public schools decimated by money changers waving private vouchers and the cost of college becoming unaffordable the country has already lost far too much ground to China and other rising economic powers that value innovation and creative thinking. As the U.S. wails away like a mastodon being sucked under in a tar pit other more civilized and forward looking nation states are shoveling money into alternative energy, stem cell research and advanced systems of transportation, these nation states place a high value on an educated citizenry that can turn projects into reality. As the Republican party has continued to rely on the vicious religious right as a means to attain political power they must provide the requisite shovels of bloody red meat to keep their shock troops marching to the polls. Therefore schools are bullied into not teaching science and evolution, stem cell research is disregarded and rational thinking is exorcised in favor of biblical dogma that only appeals to simpletons, cretins and lunatics. In America stupidity is not only tolerated but exalted as long as it continues to enable the war profiteers, greed heads, Wall Street gambling houses and Big Pharma not to mention ‘allies’ like Israel who only feed the fantasies of those drunk on Jesus juice and waiting for Armageddon and the Rapture when they can get dirty, nasty nekkid and fly up to join God to watch the heathens rip themselves apart for their entertainment. 

The plot for Idiocracy features a U.S. Army dullard Joe Bowers (who could just as well be Joe the Plumber), a man of completely average intelligence and a prostitute named Rita who are the subjects of a secret military hibernation experiment of limited duration. Well of course things go awry and the officer in charge, Lt. Col. Collins is ensnared by a sex scandal bringing shame and a base closure and a much longer nap for Joe and Rita who sleep until they are freed from their test chambers during the great garbage avalanche of 2505. They wake up to find a world that is totally FUBAR, the infrastructure is crumbling and looks as though it were designed by idiots (or privatized out to greedy contractors skimming their cut at the expense of quality – see privatization), the commercialization of society has been completed with corporate logos everywhere and characters named after fast food items and commercial products like Dr. Lexus, Frito and Beef Supreme. The populace speaks in crude tongues, hurls insults and pejoratives at everything and berate Joe for “talking like a fag” because in the 26th Century a numbskull speaking in 20th Century dumbed-down lingo sounds like an egghead. It’s as though Koch Brothers funded social engineering along with Karl Rove demographic wizardry created a Republican party dream of a reverse master race of abject morons with hair trigger tempers and a birthright of simplicity – think of Sarah Palin’s anti-intellectualism only on steroids. The entire population has become twentieth generation white trash who in a gross parody of Social Darwinism have outbred those with any intelligence or discretion. The opening few minutes that show how this happened are as classic as they are painfully true with the educated putting off reproduction while the rednecks breed like rabbits. The exponential growth of toxic trailer park peckerwoods, bitterly angry teabaggers and just plain dangerous Christian fascists seems to me to be the strongest possible argument for abortion that could ever be presented. It is no wonder that the fascist Republican party and those who control it want to do away with a woman’s right to choose because more poor, dumb and futureless babies eventually grow up to be loyal voters and party activists.

Centuries of consumerism and way too much television have reduced the citizenry to the point of borderline retardation and the greatest advances in technology are huge multi-screened televisions that allow for multiple reality trash programs to be presented simultaneously while the viewer is ensconced on a huge plush chair sucking down goo from a tub while reveling in the delights of shows the likes of Ass, Ow! My Balls and the Masturbation Channel. Those three examples are the descendents of current era moronic programming like American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, The Biggest Loser and the explosion of potty humor as entertainment provided by movies featuring such Earthly delights as diarrhea daiquiris, cacophonies of farts and belches, flying wads of semen used as hair gel and horny teenager boners buried in mom’s homemade apple pie that have made the society dumb and dumber as well as ruder and coarser. Corporations like Starbucks now offer handjobs as an enticement to buy a latte and Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers – the corporate satire is as hilarious as it is mostly absent from the media and society today and the scene that takes place at St. God’s Memorial Hospital with the health care system being reduced to a combination fast food joint/casino is down and out classic.

The society that Joe finds himself in is mean, greedy and stupid and the police are drooling overly aggressive thugs (much like they are now) who must have viewed Judge Dredd as a training film. After a series of mishaps and an IQ test he is summoned to the White House by President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho because he is now the most intelligent man on the planet and more than up to the task of solving the food crisis that plagues America. The crops are dying because instead of using water (that stuff in the toilet) they are irrigated by mega selling sports drink Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. Joe suggests using H2O and is met with incredulity by cabinet members reciting Brawndo’s  advertising mantra of “It’s got electrolytes.” After causing massive social unrest and unemployment after replacing Brawndo which just happens to be the nation’s biggest employer  Joe is taken to an arena for a gladiatorial style event that is a wild combination between Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the local monster truck extravaganza that is televised on FOX which to no surprise is much the same as it is today other than the appearance of the anchors. Joe eventually triumphs and saves the day when the crops grow again and becomes a truly honored hero of Uh-merica. His best advice is to turn off the TV and read something once in awhile and everyone lives happily ever after.

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

-Ayn Rand

Atlas Yawned, Jesus Wept: The high priestess of the religion of “fuck you I got mine” who is novelist and cult leader Ayn Rand has always been a driving force for the destroyers of economies and the anal raping of the working class. Rand, who emigrated to America from her native Russia suffered from a delusional worldview resulting from her families experience during the rise of communism during the revolution days. Rather than learning a valuable lesson from the oppressive thugs who rose to power and then murdered with impunity and stole whatever the hell they wanted to all under the guise of a corrupt ideology instead became some sort of intellectual prophet of a ridiculous school of thought called objectivism which can be boiled down into bumper sticker simplicity as FUCK THE POOR. Rand worked her way up by writing screenplays and eventually novels which took on an increasingly political theme that demonized the state and basic human cooperation and decency which endeared her to the sort of high-rolling assholes that wrecked the country and while waging class war under the battle flag of free market capitalism they are nothing more than the parasites, looters and moochers that Rand condemned. Rand hit it big with her novel The Fountainhead in which the selfish prick hero Howard Roark waged battle and triumphed over an evil socialist system, although the book was rejected by twelve publishers it as all dreck does eventually finds a sucker, usually a self-interested one. The book was published and Rand was well on her way to becoming a cultural icon with a cause celebre. While Rand is often praised as a libertarian idol by selfish dolts it was prominent libertarian thinker Murray N. Rothbard who wrote on The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult, the glassy-eyed members would go on to use the work of Rand to justify the strip-mining of American society through removing the regulatory restraints on financial sociopaths whose crony capitalism is far closer to textbook style fascism than the cynical individuality that Rand often invoked.


An article from Mother Jones magazine pegs the goddess of greed dead on, the piece is entitled And the Rand Played On states that:

Rand’s particular genius has always been her ability to turn upside down traditional hierarchies and recast the wealthy, the talented, and the powerful as the oppressed. This topsy-turvy philosophy has echoed through the blame-the-victim ranting of CNBC host Rick Santelli and the tax-day tea parties. In this world, it is not possible to admit that the rich and the Republicans may have been undone by their own greed and cluelessness.

While Ayn Rand falls short of Ronald Reagan in being invoked by the bazoonies and nutjobs on the right but her lunacy is always floating in the air like a slowly dissipating fart. Teabagger hero, the ambitious little twerp Rand Paul praises her efficiency when justifying the removal of energy standards for appliances. Now while I myself have always been an admirer of Ron Paul for his anti-imperialist, anti-Federal Reserve and pro-civil liberties views as well as his outspoken nature I have none of the feelings towards his son who is a jabbering loose cannon with zero principles. Rand (actually short for Randal not named after the goddess of gibberish) was quoted in a recent article as invoking Ayn Rand while submitting the amendment “On the energy efficiency standards, I think that in order to be consistent with a free society we should make them voluntary”. Well Eichmann was   praised for his “efficiency” as well at one time but the real idiocy in that statement as well as all others pimped by the Rand acolytes is that they are so ridiculous in their reliance on humans (especially Americans) to act in a socially beneficial manner were there to be no rules that they can’t possibly be taken seriously. The entire concept of laissez-faire capitalism and an honest self-regulating system is absurd, absent rules the big fish will eat the little fish and as in today’s America will soon begin eating each other. Look at the Wall Street vermin and the devastation that they wrought in the name of self-regulating markets and crackpot economic philosophy thanks largely to Alan Greenspan who incidentally was a Rand worshipper who regularly was in attendance at the great one’s tony New York digs. Greenspan under whose guidance of of the Federal Reserve was instrumental in wrecking the economy with his idiotic Randian policies was absolutely lit up by writer Matt Taibbi in a must-read chapter of his latest book Griftopia. The chapter, which deals with Greenspan is entitled “The Biggest Asshole in the Universe” and delves into ‘the Maestro’s’ infatuation with Ayn Rand and her influence on his thinking.  Taibbi writes of Greenspan:

Greenspan’s rise is instead a tale of a gerbilish mirror-gazer who flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attentions of Wall Street for twenty consecutive years – in the process laying the intellectual foundation for a generation of orgiastic greed and overconsumption and turning the Federal Reserve into a permanent bailout mechanism for the super-rich.

—


Greenspan met Rand in the early fifties after leaving Columbia, attending meetings at Rand’s apartment with a circle of like-minded intellectual jerk-offs who called themselves by the ridiculous name of “The Collective” and who provided Greenspan with the desired forum for social ascent.

Rand’s magnum opus of bullshit was the massive tome Atlas Shrugged, a 1,200 + page hunk of rancid tripe and sanctimonious garbage so incredibly boring that I was never able to finish the damned thing and I am well accustomed to plowing through tedious volumes of writing. Hell…I couldn’t stand it after the first couple of hundred pages, it is not only as large as a phone book but as entertaining as well. Rand wrote it while holed up in her New York digs jacked up on amphetamines which could explain the length of her screed. The plot is based on the wealthy being portrayed as social victims and seeking out a cultish figure named John Galt as though he is the messiah who can deliver them absolution for their self-centered, sociopathic natures and justification for their throwing a tantrum and withdrawing their ‘gifts’ from a society that doesn’t deserve them primarily because they are not turned into demigods like Donald Trump. Galt has bolted from a society that he like all snobs see no common interest in being good citizens of despite such concepts as basic human decency and morality. Rand uses a climactic speech from Galt that runs from 60-75 pages long depending on the edition as the centerpiece for Shrugged which is very nicely summed up by Taibbi as:

Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, for instance, remains a towering monument to humanity’s capacity for unrestrained self-pity – it’s a bizarre and incredibly long-winded piece of aristocratic paranoia in which a group of Randian supermen decide to break off from the rest of society and form a pure free-market utopia, and naturally the parasitic lower classes immediately drown in their own laziness and ineptitude


The book fairly gushes with the resentment these poor “Atlases” (they are shouldering the burdens of the whole world!) feel toward those who try to use “moral guilt” to make them share their wealth. In the climatic scene the Randian hero John Galt sounds off in defense of self-interest and attacks the notion of self-sacrifice as a worthy human ideal in a speech that lasts seventy-five pages.


It goes without saying that only a person possessing a mathematically inexpressible level of humorless self-importance would subject anyone to a seventy-five page speach about anything. Hell, even Jesus Christ barely cracked two pages with the Sermon on the Mount. Rand/Galt manages it, however, and this speech lays the foundation of objectivism, a term that was probably chosen because “greedism” isn’t catchy enough.”

Amen! The oligarchy has Rand down and is currently in the process of propagandizing the costumed idiots that are the teabaggers into adopting Randian philosophy in promoting the filthy Republican 2012 budget and the destruction of Medicare and Social Security in order to give more tax cuts to the “Atlases”. There has been a recent campaign by the front group for tax chiselers, Dick Armey’s Orwellian named Freedom Works to promote a low-budget film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged using a guerilla marketing campaign designed to circumvent the librul [sic] media and mobilize their mouth-breathing brownshirts to bully theater chains into showing the flick. How effective the introduction of the real Rand into a disorganized, anti-intellectual, semi-literate gaggle of angry rabble whose fourth grade level reading skills are challenged by the ghost written books of Glenn Beck is unknown. The movie has gotten for the most part poor reviews outside of the normal neocon propaganda organs thus reason for the end run around the traditional marketing methods that would normally promote such epics. It is all just more of the same crap though, there will likely be many meetup groups in which selective portions of Rand’s book will be spoonfed to the lemmings much like the constitution was after the GOP co-opted the movement. It’s going to be just like bible study groups where the peaceful and humane messages of Jesus Christ are twisted like inflatable balloon animals into justification for prejudice, servitude, war-mongering and idolatry of the money changers and since so many of the scumbaggers overlap between the churches of false prophets it should be at least marginally successful. Sales of Atlas Shrugged will surely skyrocket although I suspect the majority of those buying will be bored to death after a few dozen pages and simply park it in a place where it can be easily observed by fellow miscreants and travelers.




Regarding Ayn Rand, I will give the devil her due for one thing – she was a devout atheist who allegedly once admonished the iconic neoconservative propagandist William F. Buckley by telling him that “you are too intelligent to belive in God.” That the teabaggers and right-wing freaks in general have latched onto Rand’s rapacious looter theology while they pound their bibles and caterwaul about the evils of liberalism, altruism and scientific advancement is just another example of both their hypocrisy and their imbecility. But the fascists are relentless, well-funded and with Ayn Rand and God on their side are determined to once and for all overthrow the system and the secret Muslim in the White House who doesn’t have a birth certificate. There are no shortage of con-artists, grifters, liars, cheats and flim-flammers who don’t understand the great political benefit of having millions of easily hoodwinked and malleable useful idiots at their disposal which is why a guy like Donald Trump has such appeal. In the end of course we all lose but there is no shortage of nincompoops and jackasses who are happy to wage war against phantom menaces and have no problem whatsoever in putting their children to bed at night cold and hungry as long as they can stick it to the enemy du jour that is rolled out by the plutocrats who depend on their remaining ignorant as an insurance policy.



Really, in the end what it all boils down to is people who base their entire lives and form their belief systems based on one book should not only be ignored but should be shunned like lepers. Whether that one holy book happens to be The Bible, Atlas Shrugged or even Gray’s Sports Almanac for that matter it makes no difference, given man’s capacity for learning and the availability of information if one just gets the fuck off of the couch and turns off the television people who live in an impenetrable bubble of willful ignorance that limits their worldview to the delusions of primitives, madmen, snake oil salesmen (or women) and money grubbers is a misfit. Why is it that in our creeping empire of idiocy that such simpletons and bags of shit bursting at the seams with false morality and certitude are accepted as rational people? It is only in the doomed and dying former land of plenty that rationality could be perversely turned upside down and idiocy worshipped. 

As Leonard Cohen once proclaimed, I have seen the future and it’s murder….


Just my two cents


EE

Mr. Obama’s Chump Change

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

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



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

 

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

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

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

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

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ Joe

 
EE

In Defense of Joe Stack

Joe Stack did more than just go to the window and scream “I’m as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore”. He chose to make a statement against a tyrannical government long ago pried loose from any semblance of morality. Not that I would personally recommend flying an airplane into a government building full of people to make a statement but it takes a lot to shake the television lobotomized sheeple these days. Of course since Stack wasn’t one of those dirty Muslim devils, therefore making his ‘terrorist’ attack no asset to the Zionist coddling corporate media to fuel the frenzy for endless wars of imperialism his story was simply flushed down the memory hole in favor of the grand spectacle of Tiger Woods’ press conference the very next day.

Stack’s ‘manifesto’ was pure dynamite, the stuff that would represent a serious threat to the fascist oligarchy were it to get much play because quite frankly I agreed with a majority of it and so would millions of others who have gotten the shaft by this rotten to the core system. The authorized parrots for the establishment, Beck, Olbermann, Maddow, Limbaugh and their ilk did their jobs by spinning their gossamer webs of half-truths, obfuscations and outright balderdash to avoid addressing the real issues. They labeled him as a crank, a dangerous misfit who unbelievably hated our benevolent government and the patriotic and well-intentioned Internal Revenue Service. He was one of those foaming at the mouth rabid dog constitutionalists who dared to question those whose disdain for the Founding Fathers and their document protecting the people of the United States of America from the tyranny of a government that could too easily be subverted by the moneyed interests and used to suppress liberty. The reverence for the Constitution is evident in honorable men like George W. Bush who once referred to the document as “a goddamned piece of paper” or of former constitutional law professor Barack Obama who has failed to hold accountable the torturers, murderers, thieves and war criminals of the Bush administration.

At first some on the ‘left’ were trying to link Joe Stack to the insipid, long co-opted by neocon tea party movement, but Stack’s ‘manifesto’ didn’t fit nicely into the pre-defined cartoon stereotypes of the average Becker or Palinazi. Not to mention that the average ‘tea partier’ useful idiot only spouts talking points about small government and lower taxation, what they represent is just the reallocation of control of the massive government to serve THEIR needs, real or perceived and when outright totalitarian fascism does come to America it will be these shock troops who will be the first ones screaming for the torture and imprisonment of their enemies. Were this type of brutal, uneducated thug to ever gain control of the system then there will be no end to the stinking piles of naked, dead bodies of those that will provide the meat for their Caesar to feast upon.

Nor did the great Rush Limbaugh or the other multi-millionaire demagogues call him out as a ‘Socialist’ for daring to criticize our beautiful and blissful system of American ‘free-market’ capitalism that has eviscerated the free-enterprise system and busted the backs of small businesses. Joe Stack’s ‘manifesto’ could easily have been sold to the knuckle draggers as proof, yes my friends proof that the demon of communism was present in America. The ‘manifesto’ closed with “The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed” and red-baiting neo-McCarthyist scum like Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly would have had no problem rousing their rabble in the same manner that they did after the strange shooting incident at Fort Hood but Stack didn’t fit into their trite cookie-cutter storyline. The fiends in the corporate media and their paymasters understood that in hyping Stack’s ‘manifesto’ that they were playing with fire given the climate of fear, desperation, dread and rage that they have so merrily assisted in creating.

But what did Joe Stack really say?

He had problems with the IRS and the government just like millions of others do but who aren’t driven to violence out of pure desperation. Americans are ripped off by the IRS on a daily basis to provide the money to cover the blown-up schemes of the treasonous financial oligarchs, to finance illegal and immoral wars, CIA terrorism, foreign aid to Israeli to carry out genocide and to metaphorically dig our own graves and pay for the shovels to do so. The IRS and the tyranical government are currently extorting our money to implement a monstrous anti-American high-tech police state that provides food for a massive for profit prison system that any of you who are reading this could one day end up in.The nation’s airports are abominable examples of just how little privacy and the presumption of innocent until proven guilty matter in the new American century. Nude body scanners are now being funded with taxpayer dollars and the same scanners will in the future be coming to shopping malls as well, all under the big lie of fighting terrorism which will soon be defined to include even people with grievances against the IRS, the wars and the government who don’t fly airplanes into buildings.

And there is also Stack’s criticism of the loathsome Catholic Church, we sure as hell can’t have any sort of idea take root questioning the legitimacy of those in the God business to use their tax exempt status to weasel out of paying Caesar. The Catholic Church has for centuries been a murderous conclave of bloodthirsty power whores intent on enforcing their narrow-mindedness on the poor dupes who need religion as a crutch for their fear and innate savagery. Name me one institution with as long a history of slaughter, rape, theft and greed as the Catholic Church. The immorality of their former Nazi Pope and their pedophile priests is only surpassed by their worship of mammon and the tax exempt status pisses on the Ten Commandments rule of ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ as surely as their crusades and inquisitions spat upon ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. Stack’s condemnation of this pox on human history could not be tolerated for it may lead to similar questioning of the filthy ‘Christian’ churches and their like theft while the goat barn megachurches from where pulpits are used as perches where finely clothed charlatans preach political purely right-wing fascist Republican messages of hatred for the fellow man, exhortations to wage war and commit genocide in the name of Zionist Israel and to bastardize the holy book by twisting the message of Jesus Christ to transform him into nothing more than a pimp for the money changers and blood barters.

The right-wing ‘Christian’ churches in America are an obscenity and the blasphemy that is belched forth during the demonic sermons and over tax-exempt propaganda networks of hundreds if not thousands of television and radio stations is an abomination. Not only are these organizations able to benefit from avoiding the I.R.S. while ordinary Americans are taken to the wall over the slightest ‘violation’ they contribute to the foul rottenness of our corrupt political system by laundering and funneling money to demagogic stooges who are then sent to the big Washington D.C. whorehouse to serve corporate interests and stick it to the poor dumb bitches and bastards whose superstition and need for sanctioning of their hate and fear that bought into that swill and send them there. Not only should religious organizations be stripped permanently of their tax-exempt status but the Justice Department should send forth an army of investigators to enforce the RICO act against those found to be unfairly benefiting by acting as de facto arms of the criminal Republican party. But that would be an action of a government that serves the interest of the common good of the many instead of the corrupt few.

Joe Stack also called out the death panels that are the territory of the American insurance parasites and their bean counters who make the call on whether to pay or deny a claim and anyone familiar with the U.S. corporate communist collective knows all too well the hive mentality of boosting the blessed profits for the benefit of CEO pharaohs. Too much money has been spent in the past year by the lobbyists for big Pharma, the health care profiteers and the foulest of all, the insurance racket to upset the applecart. Obama and the DemocRAT party’s foul smelling bailout of the insurance industry marked as some sort of actual reform instead of just another massive fleecing of the American taxpayer to grease the wheels of the finance oligarch’s perpetual scam machine was an atrocity at best from the beginning. There was no chance that any humane form of a single payer system as could be expected in a civilized society was ever going to have a chance in hell, there is too much money to be made in profiting off of the misery of the sick and doomed. Even a piss-warm, watered down bill with some sort of public option was never going to happen and with lucrative post-politics lobbying jobs on the line our cowardly and corrupt Congress people and Senators would surely not dare to go against the financial interests of those who own them. What Obamacare really amounted to at the end is the use of the full force of the state as a threat to forcibly mandate an already beggared by the corporate looting spree populace to buy overpriced, shitty insurance from the same bloodsuckers that have destroyed the system. The teabaggers came in handy during the media circus of the ludicrous town hall meetings during last summer’s recess when they descended en masse like Hitler’s own Sturmabteilung to disrupt and threaten already gutless elected officials. The media of course played this into a full blown lie of some sort of great populist revolt when the elements that receive the most attention were in actuality Astroturf fronts for pigs like the scurrilous Dick Armey and the insipid neocons of Newt Gingrich. Most recently seen uniting behind neocon darling Sarah Palin who is exhorting them to sign up for lifetime membership in the Republican cult.

Joe Stack wrote of the rigged game that is American capitalism, anyone who has paid attention to the bailouts of the bankers by Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs moles burrowed deeply into both the Bush and Obama administrations understands that the deck was stacked in favor of the pigs from the get go. You didn’t see any of the teabagger swine marching on Wall Street or reacting in outrage to the militarizing of the city of Pittsburgh to protect the global elite during last year’s G20 summit did you? The massive crimes by the speculators and banksters like AIG, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and the rest of the looters should have been punished, there should have been prison terms and expropriations of pilfered loot to return to the victims who these criminals fleeced to finance their extravagant lifestyles. Again, that is what would have happened in any decent society with a government that wasn’t thoroughly corrupted and hijacked and we poor, fucked-over and fucked-out Americans certainly don’t have the privilege of living in one, at least not anymore. The United States of America is going bankrupt, the choice between Empire and republic has been made and when Generals McChrystal and
Petraeus were given free reign to escalate in Afghanistan the Rubicon was crossed. There cannot be guns and butter and the ploughshares are worth nothing in comparison to the swords that can be sold by the Military Industrial Complex to all sides of any conflict, our top exportable commodity is death and our emperors fiddle while Der Heimat crumbles. Crumbling infrastructure, millions of sick, homeless and jobless, the sad and hollow-eyed diaspora of the zero sum game of ‘fuck you, I got mine’ capitalism and they are pissed off but so many are so easily given illogical scapegoats for their all too logical rage. Where were the teabagger swine when all of this went down, an even bigger question is where were the teabagger swine when Bush and Cheney had the national credit card and the keys to the war machine? The same place where the bleeding heart types were when the Obamessiah escalated the carnage in Afghanistan and were given cover by Medea Benjamin of Code Pink who was down with it all because it was now a war to liberate oppressed women, the myth of liberal pacifism is just another big lie when they are the ones who can bask in the glory of the latest and greatest imperialist war.

The government and the system it serves know all too well how much legitimate anger is currently out there, I can hear it daily whether it be in grocery store checkout lines, gas stations or restaurants, a growing realization that the system itself is the enemy. Joe Stack struck a blow against that system in the way that he hoped would shake it and awaken the zombies from their fitful sleep but sadly it won’t because the ever glowing televisions, the ultimate drug delivery device (the Nazis were in awe of the capabilities of TV and were experimenting with the medium when Berlin fell) for that sweet, narcotic E-crack will ensure that they will continue to shuffle one after another into the steel chute, they may or may not realize what has happened when they reach the end and the captive bolt pistol comes to rest between their thousand yard staring eyes to bring an end to their pathetic excuse for what passes for consciousness. Hell, in a land where any serious comprehensive definition of democracy has come to be exemplified by American Idol and Jack Bauer has become a national icon maybe the coming damnation is deserved. The Founding Fathers knew all too well the dangers of a willfully ignorant and easily duped populace and a perfect example of eugenics American style would be in a call that I heard Friday morning on the Bill Press Show during the morning commute in which some clueless ass proposed eliminating the First Amendment as a remedy to more Joe Stacks deciding that they are as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

Now in wrapping up this rant I want to unequivocally state that I do not agree with stack when he stated that violence is the “only” answer for that is NOT the solution. Firstly the government has bigger guns, armies of militarized police goons and a crackerjack high-tech police state that has been put into place using the phony ‘terrorist’ attacks of 9/11 as justification. If those who choose violence are numerous enough then it would be a simple matter of the president picking up the phone and invoking his powers to declare martial law, the power that the dumb bastard Republicans gave to George W. Bush and his NSPD51 that Barack Obama has not rescinded. If you choose violence you will be crushed, never, ever should you underestimate the ability of a tyrannical state to reciprocate with extreme prejudice and maximum brutality against those that threaten it with violence. The REAL answer is to delegitimize the state, withhold your willing consent, protest against the war machine and debunk the ultimate lie that is faith in this monstrous system. The political system is nothing more than two dueling and largely interlocking criminal parties that will grind your bones to make their bread in order to serve the oligarchs.

The politically connected scum like for example Goldman Sachs and GM get bailouts while regular Americans who have played by the rules get their jobs offshored to India, China or some lousy third world shithole where there are no labor unions nor laws to protect the slave populations. How many jobs have been lost since NAFTA started the ball rolling and the criminal Bush administration cloaked itself in the flag under the phony war on terror and escalated the strip-mining of the American economy in the name of greed? President Obama lied when he campaigned for the presidency by indicating that these rotten trade pacts that screw hard working, decent and honest Americans into lives of privation and strip away their dignity would be re-examined. Globalization has been a disaster for all but the wealthiest Americans and the pigs that run the corporations that are given more human rights by our putrid and corrupted to the core legal system that was long ago bought and paid for and now has sold out those that it was theoretically supposed to protect for pennies on the dollar. The change that Obama promised is chump change and those jobs are NEVER coming back just as the vile moneychangers on Wall Street will NEVER be held accountable for crashing the economy but rather bailed out with the pound of flesh from every American that is extracted by the Big Brother IRS man. That Obama is a liar should be a shock to nobody who is awake, a poison tree produces only poison fruit and in America in 2010 the entire fucking orchard is infected. Obama, like his predecessors is by every definition a war criminal and a tyrant, this is the system, the Empire and it is all wrapped in the flag and sent out carrying a cross to give it legitimacy when it has none. As George Santayana once famously warned “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” and anyone who knows anything at all about history understands that power ALWAYS corrupts and tyranny is the norm.

No, I do not agree with Joe Stack about violence, ideas are much more powerful than bullets and bombs or airplanes flown into buildings. To spread the truth, the idea that there is no legitimacy to be found in this monstrous system of greed, murder and a prison industrial complex that rivals that of Joseph Stalin’s gulags and that in America there are really only two life forms – vampires and cattle – is far more dangerous to the system. This is why Joe Stack’s words were washed away immediately by the truly relevant and all-important news of the holy words of Tiger Woods, the Jesus Christ of the American church of wonder-working celebrity crucified and arisen anew while the fires at the Echelon Building were still smoldering. The truth is what the political prostitutes, professional con-artists, schemers, butchers and bankers fear the most for it is the only thing that will end the reign of tyranny and allow the people to regain control over their own destinies, their own government and the future of their children.

Expose the bastards, the time is ripe for a non-violent revolution but it is running out…

EE

Joe Stack’s ‘Manifesto’ fished out of the memory hole.

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ’80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.

That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.

On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.

Return to the early ’80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.

For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.

(a) IN GENERAL – Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:

(d) EXCEPTION. – This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. – The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.

Note:

· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.

· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.

· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.

Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.

After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.

Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.

Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.

Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.

To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.

So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.

When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.

This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)

02/18/2010

Eichmann’s Widgets

It was Colder than a witch’s tit here again this morning on the Suncoast. Another day of record cold temperatures, there is ice on the windows again, the local crops are about halfway to fucked which will result in rising food prices and according to the scum and swine at Progress Energy the resultant heat usage is putting a strain on their capability to deliver power consistently. In these bitter days of Florida winter there is nothing quite like venturing out into it to grab the morning paper and reading something like this.

Freezing temperatures push Tampa Bay power demand to record

Progress Energy Florida issued a public plea just after 5:30 a.m. — amid hot showers, lights flipping on and heaters revving up — asking customers to avoid, say, starting a load of laundry.

The rare request — the company’s first in 21 years — shielded customers from rolling blackouts as the entire state got close enough to its electrical capacity to trigger the advisory.

Capacity is important because electricity generally can’t be stored. It must be made when it’s needed.

Morning demand that hit more than 52,000 megawatts in an hour pushed Florida within about 2,000 megawatts of its required reserve, said Sarah Rogers, president of the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council, which helps utilities manage peak times.

The state’s last peak demand record was set in summer 2007. It hit new records on Thursday, Sunday and Monday morning. The 52,000 megawatts is 11 percent higher than the 2007 record.

Two factors conspired to push demand to the brink of blackouts: the length of the chill, and the way we heat our buildings.

Most people are willing to tough out a few cold days, Rogers said. But as the discomfort stretches on, they break down — and turn up the heat.

Meanwhile, electric heat pumps we rely on in Florida work with great efficiency. Until it freezes. Then backup heating kicks in, so-called “strip” or “resistance” heat that draws far more power. When temperatures at last drive us to touch the thermostat, that’s when systems work worst.

Power companies’ goal is enough power generation for peak demand. Other times, they can sell the excess.

Note the line that I highlighted and this sums up the whole sordid piece, the bastards profits are being threatened! Interestingly enough simply because I don’t believe in coincidence theories there was a hearing yesterday where Progress Energy’s rate hike what was being jammed down our throats was at least temporarily reigned in with their blessed profits being capped. Which gets to the larger problem in that essential services should NEVER be for profit enterprises, there was a law at one time, The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 that put the shackles on the parasitical scum like Enron’s predecessors but Daddy Bush did away with that one back in 1992 before he slithered out of the White House. So now we are at the mercy of pigs who have no qualms about homeless elderly and children freezing to death in the streets just as long as their precious returns keep growing which is a particular problem with this bastardized form of American Capitalism, it MUST keep growing forever but like all cancers it is terminal.

It is grossly immoral what is happening in this country in 2010, after OBushma’s bankster bail outs and the coming forced purchase of shitty, overpriced health insurance from the penultimate bloodsuckers in the insurance industry what we have here is an economic system that creates nothing other than misery and then profits off of the suffering of the powerless (which means just about all of us who don’t have political connections) to drive up the phony, manipulated markets. Today’s CEO’s and other corporate bean counters, hacks and shills have reduced every damned thing to profit and productivity is just another word for slavery in Gulag America. Rather than get into the entire sordid history of how this all happened other than to say it has gone on for decades and the money pumped into brainwashing scared little sheep Americans into being happy consumers and chasing after that which can never be attained has been masterful, shit salespeople from Dale Carnegie to Ayn Rand to Ronald Reagan to Gordon Gekko to Jim Cramer to Obama himself have all played a part in the ransacking of the American worker. Personally I liken the institutionalized behavior of the looters to that of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann who like modern America’s corporate overclass was obsessed with production, it’s just that in his case the widgets happened to be Jews who were gassed and incinerated instead of sales figures on say megawatts to pizzas to porn videos. By accounts Eichmann was more of a bureaucrat than a raving anti-Semitic ideologue and by fucking God he was going to make his numbers! The term for this man was the banality of evil which I believe can be attributed to Hannah Arendt and is applicable to the corporate rulers of this lemming colony today.

But I digress…

What is encouraging (although dismaying in that it is misdirected) is that many Americans are at the boiling point and are finally starting to get what the late George Carlin was trying to say in his career capping rant on who really owns America:

Forget the politicians. They’re irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. They own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls!

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. That’s right.

You know something? They don’t want people who are smart enough sitting around the kitchen table to figure out they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

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

By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long, beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard working people. Blue collar, white collar, doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue… these are people of modest means… continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice. And nobody seems to care.

That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will remain wilfully ignorant about the big red, white and blue dick that is being shoved up their ass every day. Because the owners know the truth. It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Here is some thinking outside the box when it comes to the financial criminals and Wall Street pigs, I heard some guy on a radio show awhile back (perhaps it was the Lynn Samuels Show) musing about how he had just seen Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and that our financial terrorists should be treated as the Nazi victims of the Basterds were (at least the ones they didn’t scalp), swastikas were carved onto their foreheads so that when the war was over EVERYONE would know that they were once Hitler’s little winged monkeys once they took off the uniform, the caller suggested that perhaps it would be justice if $ signs were similarly carved into the heads of the looters. Now not that I would ever do such a thing or even advocate it but you have to admit, it’s thinking outside of the box like that that could bring America back from the toilet. And I would like to know who the vermin who put it there are once this catastrophe is over, they can start with the top pricks over at Progress Energy if there is a blackout like the terrorists are threatening.

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

Wall Street to Obama: Go Fuck Yourself!

Monday’s White House meeting/public relations spectacle with the recalcitrant greedheads and other assorted banking miscreants was a mockery. As the orgy of American capitalist excess that is Christmas nears and millions of children won’t be visited by Santa Clause unless of course he is bearing a foreclosure notice on Daddy and Mommie’s overpriced, underwater shitbox the banksters are back in business big time thanks to Obama and Raht Emanuel. At some point last year when the financial services parasites were holding a gun to our collective heads and loudly threatening to ‘blow the roof’ like in Die Hard unless their bad bets were covered by taxpayer dough the overly cunning new administration, already funded by Wall Street looters made a calculated political decision to crucify the schmucks on a cross of Goldman Sachs. Hell, it’s no surprise, that is the way that it always works in an oligarchy and any O-Bots who are out there still defending this lying sack of shit administration are as clueless and morally challenged as those who swore on a stack of bibles that George W. Bush was the second coming of Jesus Fucking Christ and anyone who dared to question him was a terrorist sympathizer or traitor.

So the Pope of Hope’s vaunted White House meet with the destroyers of the country may have been good for the rubes and childish fools still drinking the Kool Aid of the Obamessiah to those of us that have been on to the big con can had our bullshit detectors going off full blast just as they have been doing often as the grifter in chief continues every fucking vile policy of the Bush junta only with a less ostentatious manner. Escalation of the war in Afghanistan to protect the energy and drug routes that are the lifeblood of the American ruling class, the continuation of torture as policy (although under Obama Jack Bauer is no longer the official spokesman), the ongoing Stasi style surveillance of law abiding citizens, shitting on gay rights, failing to pull the U.S. out of disastrous trade pacts and retaining Bush pigs like Robert Gates and Helicopter Ben Bernanke build a pretty damning case against Obama. Hell, after that speech last week in front of the Noble Prize Committee where the bastard actually had the chutzpah to get up and use the forum as a justification for neverending war it’s really only a matter of time until the neocons are back in the DemocRAT party where they came from. Oh, and about that health care reform? Face it suckers, you have just been buttfucked by the quisling Congress, the Israeli mole Joe Lieberman and the collective might of the insurance industry who are now about to strip out the only goddamned good thing – moving the Medicare age up to 55. Welcome to chumpland fools, thanks to the Obama administration and mobbed up Harry Reid the state is about to be empowered to force an impoverished citizenry to pay protection to the insurance gangsters or face the full fury of the law.

Were it not for legions of buffoons and Judas goat assclowns like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga on the so-called ‘left’ who provide cover for the gross criminality of the sitting government the Obama administration would be one and done but the cult of personality will be good enough to reelect the rotten bastard, especially since the only choice is Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck any of whom are starting to look like better options than the Big O because shit, let’s face it, how much power would any of them be able to wield anyway? This lemming colony is owned lock stock and barrel by the Military Industrial Complex, the Wall Street cloud dwellers and Big Oil Nazis like the Koch Family and the Texas Mafia, always has been and always will be, the Prez is just a frontman and Mr. Obama is the most successful product since Ronald Reagan, another colossal phony whose acting ability was a cherished trait as he bamboozled our way into what is now the coming national bankruptcy.

So Monday’s sit down with the banking criminal elite, just like the rest of Obama’s putrid first year was just more stagecraft, especially considering that Lloyd ‘doing God’s work’ Blankfein and Shitibank’s top vulture Vikram ‘the bandit’ Pandit didn’t even bother to show up. That the entire bailout is now going up like a rancid flaming bag of dogshit parked on the front doorstep of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the banksters aren’t lending but rather hoarding the money to fund more gambling and of course pay out those wonderful holiday bonuses is merely an ugly and slightly embarassing matter and only because the Republicans are suddenly screaming like stuck pigs about populism to rile up the rabble in the hope that they can return to running the spoils system – fat fucking chance. After Christmas has past and the teflon coated shit salesman that is Barack Hussein Obama and his fealty to Wall Street is forgotten by flea brained Americans it will be back to the business of finishing the job of implementing the new feudalism. Matt Taibbi who has been on Wall Street like a starving pitbull recently wrote about Obama’s Big Sellout and I would strongly recommend it to all.

Anyway, that’s it for now

Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe

EE

DOOR BUSTERS!

All you zombies hide your faces
All you people in the street
All you sittin’ in high places
The pieces gonna fall on you

(Editor’s note – this piece was delayed from Friday due to a series of bizarre circumstances including the author having a bout with a particularly nasty strain of some sort of gastrointestinal virus…or perhaps too much sweet potato pie and deviled eggs)

It is the last hurrah before the economic catastrophe, thanks to the Obama bankster rescue and the multi-billion dollar propaganda blitz it has been coitus interruptus for the grand scale fucking that began with last fall’s collapse of capitalism. Better get it while the getting’s good folks, I would implore all Americans who are receiving those nice little interest rate gouging notices from the bloodsucking vampires like Chase, HSBC, Citi and the rest of those high fallutin whorehouses that will allow one to keep the generous 19 % interest rate being charged if they voluntarily opt out and close their accounts or else face 30 % and higher usury level rates to just go ahead and max those fuckers this holiday shopping season. Get everything that you want and then opt out and stiff the motherfuckers in 2010 when the blessed market illusions can no longer be maintained. The shit is on a collision course with the whirring blades and yes my friends, the fan is on high. The pre-Thanksgiving ‘shock’ of the Dubai World debt default was a nice big turd in the holiday punchbowl for the greedheads and more definitive proof that we are all still fucked and the next shockwave is coming soon.

Anyway, Ed Encho has received those dirty little notices from his own credit cards and has been in the process of spending like a drunken sailor on the first Friday in a new port. Not that I am one to hit the doorbuster sales, especially after last year’s bloody Black Friday Wal Mart mosh pit, quite honestly I don’t care about the deals nor the unwashed rabble who will be engaged in mortal combat in the aisles like something out of that $12.99 Braveheart Blu Ray. My mind is made up that all of the shit’s going to end up in bankruptcy court next year anyway (at least in my case) so it’s time to finish building the library, upgrade all of the electronics and lay in enough non-perishable goods, bullets and whiskey for the perfect storm (to borrow a term from the lovely and effervescent Diane G.) that is about to make landfall. I have no intention of paying those rancid cocksuckers (other than the ones who were honest and honored their end of the bargain who I will pay – hint – none of them got the Obama and Bush billions) nor should anyone else, fuck them, I piss down their throats. The joke’s on us folks, meet the new boss same as the old boss and the pigs won again…..at least for now.

Other than the stampede on Black Friday with the Door Buster deep discounts the holiday shopping season is going to be bleak indeed. When people are living hand to mouth (IF they have an income) they are not likely to spend their money on XBoxes, Blu Ray players or whatever silly toy of the year happens to be the big fad, other than Call of Duty Modern Warfare which is being hyped to no end and will program future killers for endless wars of imperialism. Nope, it’s gonna be a lean Xmas for maxed out Murkans, the credit cards are being cut off and it’s coming down to heat or eat with the cold weather bearing down. As always though the forced austerity doesn’t extend to Goldman Sachs who will be receiving their huge bonuses any week now and the management over at Lloyd Blankfein’s den of iniquity has put out the order through the public relations department that Great Satan employees are forbidden from gathering in groups of more than 12 for parties. Perhaps it’s damage control to tamp down an already outraged public that the moneychangers won betting with house money or perhaps they fear some sort of reprisals, funny that the financial terrorists are breaking up into cells.

For the peasants as you say there are always canned goods, my pantry has been filled up for over a year now and I would advise everyone to do likewise. The one place that you DO NOT want to be is out there fighting for food with the rabble Palinazis and Beckers when the shit really does hit the fan and the economic tsunami makes a direct hit that none of the shills in the corporate media will be able to spin. I would not want to be a dog or cat in an impoverished household this Christmas when the cupboard is bare and the stockings are on freezing feet instead of hung by the chimney with care and the furniture is taking the place of the yule logs in the fireplace to prevent the kiddies from freezing to death.

But I digress…

As always in Oceania the Ministry of Truth is putting out conflicting spin on the economic results from Black Friday, some say it was “encouraging” and others like the vaunted bible for the four flushing capitalist swine Wall Street Journal say what seems to be the opposite or “Ho-Hum”. I find it sardonically amusing that we now live in a country where the ‘media’ is not much different than some of the old Soviet territories where it all seems to be centrally produced, the prescence of the same variation of hyperbole in stories like “picking up steam”, “storms ahead”, “surging” yada yada yada are a dead giveaway. At least the dissidents understand that it’s ALL bullshit, just window dressing to keep the rubes from running amok before the police state is set up and the military in place domestically to quash rioting. Make no mistake, this fucker is still going to go down and Captain Ben Bernanke and First Mate Timmy Geithner are dialing down the engine room and calling for full power as the ship of fools picks up steam and nears ramming speed with a dead bead on that pesky iceberg that our arrogant and fat financial elitists are going to smash to smithereens with the bow.

I personally made a reconnaissance run to a few of the local stores on Friday, while I dared not venture out early to avoid the clamor by noon or so when the doorbuster sales had expired I felt that it was safe. First off I went to Best Buy, there was a mass of people there and the parking lot was jammed, people were circling waiting for cars to pull out but I was able to find a parking spot down by the Babies R’ Us, it was a nice hike to Best Buy but the day was pleasant and the exercise was nice. Once inside there was no chaos, full of people and the prized early sale items and cheapest Blu Rays (at least 5 per store as the ad said) were gone. Neither The Wrath of Khan or The Departed (both $7.99) were in stock and those were the ones I wanted so I just walked around and checked out the shoppers. There was strangely no sort of festive mood, more like zombies going through the motions, no hostility and an orderly GASP setup to lead the customers in a corral like setup of pylons (kind of reminded me of a cattle pen or whatever the setup is like where they lead sheep to the slaughterhouse), it wasn’t Wal Mart where being a greeter on the great American running of the pigs is only less dangerous than kicking in doors as a soldier in Afghanistan.

After I departed Best Buy I stopped by the Super Target, there was parking within about fifty yards from the door and the rest of the stores in the huge outdoor mall were really no busier than they normally are on any given Saturday. The same atmosphere pervaded inside where there was no chaos whatsoever although the 39.99 camcorder special was long gone there was plenty of other swag available at discount prices. They even had a $97 GPS tracker on sale (is this a great country or what? Now YOU can pay to buy the device that the NSA will use to track you), all in all though it was very underwhelming and nothing like last year. One report that I did get yesterday though was that many were paying with cash, it would actually be a good way to fight the banksters were everyone to start doing this as a blogger over at OpEd News suggests. It’s the way that I am going to be going once my plastic is maxed and my creditors told to go and fuck themselves, it’s harder to track and you can deprive the rotten bastards of their fees.

Anyway, that’s it for now, better late than never.

EE

Blessed Be The Moneychangers

The town hall terrorism perpetrated by extreme right-wing goon squads is going to erupt into violence any day now, the front groups and fascist fifth columnists just keep pouring gasoline on the fire and soon it will be set ablaze. The American SA thugs have taken on an increasing aura of malevolence post the announcement by their beloved crazy queen Sarah Palin that that damn Muslim, nigger communist Obama would be creating death panels to snuff old folks and children with handicaps. Of course this sort of vile and perverse propaganda is best absorbed by those who already hate with the intensity of an apocalyptic fireball, are already conditioned to submit to authoritarianism through their religous indoctrination and whose understanding of the very complex nature of life is equivalent to that of a cave dweller – UGH – cause God did it….

So today, rather than go off on a rant what I want to do is to feature the talking points that were sent out to the flockers, mouth-breathers and gullible sheep by an ultra-fascist group that is affiliated with the late Reverend Jerry Falwell (still roasting on a spit in the bowels of Hades) with the standard Orwellian name The Liberty Counsel. I am posting it in its full vomitous entirety with the most outrageous morsels of lemming food:

Obama Administration’s Health Care Plan

HR 3200 currently under consideration in the House of Representatives

Reviewed, revised and adapted on July 29, 2009, by Liberty Counsel from the original authored by Peter Fleckenstein and posted on FreeRepublic.com and his blog, http://blog.flecksoflife.com/.

Sec. 113, Pg. 21-22 of the Health Care (HC) Bill MANDATES a government audit of the books of ALL EMPLOYERS that self-insure in order to “ensure that the law does not provide incentives for small and mid-size employers to self-insure”!

Sec. 122, Pg. 29, Lines 4-16 – YOUR HEALTH CARE WILL BE RATIONED!

Sec. 123, Pg. 30 – THERE WILL BE A GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE deciding what treatments and benefits you get.

Sec. 142, Pg. 42 – The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your benefits for you. You have no choice!

Sec. 152, Pg. 50-51 – HC will be provided to ALL NON-US citizens.

Sec. 163, Pg. 58-59 beginning at line 5 – Government will have real-time access to individual’s finances & a National ID health care card will be issued!

Sec. 163, Pg. 59, Lines 21-24 – Government will have direct access to your bank accounts for electronic funds transfer.

Sec. 164, Pg. 65 is a payoff subsidized plan for retirees and their families in unions & community organizations (ACORN).

Sec. 201, Pg. 72, Lines 8-14 – Government is creating an HC Exchange to bring private plans under government control.

Sec. 203, Pg. 84 – Government mandates ALL benefit packages for private Health Care plans in the exchange.

Sec. 203, Pg. 85, Line 7 – Specifications of benefit levels for plans means that the government will define your HC plan and has the ability to ration your health care!

Sec. 205, Pg. 95, Lines 8-18 – The government will use groups (i.e., ACORN & AmeriCorps) to “inform and educate” (sign up) individuals for government plan.

Sec. 205, Pg. 102, Lines 12-18 – Medicaid-eligible individuals will be automatically enrolled in Medicaid. No freedom to choose.

Sec. 223, Pg. 124, Lines 24-25 – No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No “administrative of judicial review” against a government monopoly.

Sec. 225, Pg. 127, Lines 1-16 – Doctors – the government will tell YOU what you can make. “The Secretary shall provide for the annual participation of physicians under the public health insurance option, for which payment may be made for services furnished during the year.”

Sec. 312, Pg. 145, Lines 15-17 – Employers MUST auto-enroll employees into public option plan.
Sec. 313, Pg. 149, Lines 16-23 – ANY employer with payroll $400,000 and above who does not provide public option pays 8% tax on all payroll.

Sec. 313, Pg. 150, Lines 9-13 – Businesses with payroll between $251,000 and $400,000 who do not provide public option pay 2-6% tax on all payroll.

Sec. 401.59B, Pg. 167, Lines 18-23 – ANY individual who does not have acceptable care, according to government, will be taxed 2.5% of income.

Sec. 59B, Pg. 170, Line 1 – Any NONRESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay for their health care.)

Sec. 431, Pg. 195, Lines 1-3 – Officers and employees of HC Administration (government) will have access to ALL Americans’ financial and personal records.

Sec. 441, Pg. 203, Lines 14-15 – “The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax.” Yes, it says that.

Sec. 1121, Pg. 239, Lines 14-24 – The government will limit and reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors, low income and poor are the ones affected.

Sec. 1121, Pg. 241, Lines 6-8 – Doctors, it does not matter what specialty you have; you’ll all be paid the same. “Service categories established under this paragraph shall apply without regard to the specialty of the physician furnishing the service.”

Sec. 1122, Pg. 253, Lines 10-23 – The government “validates work relative value units” (sets value of doctor’s time), professional judgment, methods etc. (defining the value of humans).

Sec. 1131, Pg. 265 – Government mandates and controls productivity for private HC industries. “Incorporating Productivity Improvements into Market Basket Updates that Do Not Already Incorporate Such Improvements.”

Sec. 1141, Pg. 268 – The government regulates rental and purchase of power-driven wheelchairs.

Sec. 1145, Pg. 272 – Treatment of certain cancer hospitals: Cancer patients and their treatment are open to rationing!

Sec. 1151, Pg. 280 – The government will penalize hospitals for what government deems preventable readmissions (incentives for hospital to not treat and release).

Sec. 1151, Pg. 298, Lines 9-11 – Doctors, treat a patient during initial admission that results in a readmission and the government will penalize you for that action.

Sec. 1156, Pg. 317, Lines 13-20 – “PROHIBITION on physician ownership or Investment.” Government tells doctors what/how much they can own.

Sec. 1156, Pg. 317-318, Lines 21-25, 1-3 – “PROHIBITION on Expansion of Facility Capacity.” The government will mandate that hospitals cannot expand (“number of operating rooms or beds”).

Sec. 1156, Pg. 321, Lines 2-13 – Hospitals have opportunity to apply for exception BUT community input required.

Sec. 1162, Pg. 335-339, Lines 16-25 – The government mandates establishment of outcome-based measures. Rationing.

Sec. 1162, Pg. 341, Lines 3-9 – The government has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans (Part B), HMOs, etc. This will force people into a government plan. “The Secretary may determine not to identify a Medicare Advantage plan if the Secretary has identified deficiencies in the plan’s compliance with rules for such plans under this part.”

Sec. 1177, Pg. 354 – Government will RESTRICT enrollment of special needs people! “Extension of Authority of Special Needs Plans to Restrict Enrollment.”

Sec. 1191, Pg. 379 – Government creates more bureaucracy – “Telehealth Advisory Committee.” HC by phone or the Internet – dial 1 for your health care advice?

Sec. 1233, Pg. 425, Lines 4-12 – Government mandates Advance (Death) Care Planning consultation. Think Senior Citizens and end of life. END-OF-LIFE COUNSELING. SOME IN THE ADMINISTRATION HAVE ALREADY DISCUSSED RATIONING HEALTH CARE FOR THE ELDERLY.

Sec. 1233, Pg. 425, Lines 17-19 – Government WILL instruct and consult regarding living wills and durable powers of attorney. Mandatory end-of-life planning!

Sec. 1233, Pg. 425-426, Lines 22-25, 1-3 – Government provides approved list of end-of-life resources, guiding you in death.

Sec. 1233, Pg. 427, Lines 15-24 – Government mandates program for orders for life-sustaining treatment (i.e. end of life). The government has a say in how your life ends.

Sec. 1233, Pg. 429, Lines 1-9 – An “advanced care planning consult” will be used as patient’s health deteriorates.

Sec. 1233, Pg. 429, Lines 10-12 – “Advanced Care Consultation” may include an ORDER for end-of-life plans – from the government.

Sec. 1233, Pg. 429, Lines 13-25 – The government will specify which Doctors (professional authority under state law includes Nurse Practitioners or Physician’s Assistants) can write an end-of-life order.

Sec. 1233, Pg. 430, Lines 11-15 – The government will decide what level of treatment you will have at end of life, according to preset methods (not individually decided).

Sec. 1302, Pg. 468, Lines 16-21 – “Community-Based Home Medical Services means a nonprofit community-based or state-based organization.”

Sec. 1302, Pg. 472, Lines 14-17 – PAYMENT TO COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZATION: One monthly payment to a community-based organization. Like ACORN?

Sec. 1308, Pg. 489 – The government will cover Marriage and Family therapy. This will involve government control of your marriage.

Sec. 1308, Pg. 494-498 – The government will cover Mental Health Services including defining, creating and rationing those services.

Sec. 1401, Pg. 502 – Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research Established. Big Brother is watching how your treatment works.

Sec. 1401, Pg. 503, Lines 13-19 – The government will build registries and data networks from YOUR electronic medical records. “The Center may secure directly from any department or agency of the United States information necessary to enable it to carry out this section.”

Sec. 1401, Pg. 503, Lines 21-25 – The government may secure data directly from any department or agency of the US, including your data.

Sec. 1401, Pg. 503, Lines 21-25 – The “Center” will collect data both “published and unpublished” (that means public & your private information).

Sec. 1401, Pg. 506, Lines 19-21 – An “Appointed Clinical Perspective Advisory Panel” will advise The Center and recommend policies that would allow for public access of data.

Sec. 1401, Pg. 518, Lines 21-25 – The Commission will have input from HC consumer representatives.

Sec. 1411, Pg. 524, Lines 18-22 – Establishes the “Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund.” More taxes for ALL.

Sec. 1441, Pg. 621, Lines 20-25 – The government will define “NEW Quality” measures in HC. Since when does government know about quality?

Sec. 1442, Pg. 622, Lines 2-9 – To pay for the Quality Standards, government will transfer money from “qualified entities” (government Trust Funds) to other government Trust Funds. More Taxes.

Sec. 1442, Pg. 624, Lines 19-23 – Qualified Entities: “The Secretary shall ensure that the entity is a public, nonprofit or academic institution with technical expertise in the area of health quality measurement.”

Sec. 1442, Pg. 623, Lines 5-10 – “Quality” measures shall be designed to assess outcomes and functional status of patients.

Sec. 1442, Pg. 623, Lines 15-17 – “Quality” measures shall be designed to profile you, including race, age, gender, place of residence, etc.

Sec. 1443, Pg. 628 – The government will give “Multi-Stake Holders” pre-rulemaking input into selection of “quality” measures.

Sec. 1443, Pg. 630-31, Lines 9-24, 1-9 – Those Multi-Stake Holder groups include unions and groups like ACORN deciding what constitutes quality.

Sec. 1444, Pg. 632, Lines 14-25 – The government may implement any “Quality measure” of HC services that bureaucrats see fit.

Sec. 1444, Pg. 632-333, Lines 14-25, 1-9 – The Secretary may issue nonendorsed “Quality Measures” for physician and dialysis services.

Sec. 1251 (beginning), Pg. 634 to 652 – “Physician Payments Sunshine Provision” – government wants to shine sunlight on Doctors but not government. “Reports on financial relationships between manufacturers and distributors . . . and between physicians and other health care entities.”

Sec. 1501 (beginning), Pg. 659-670 – Doctors in Residency – government will tell you where your residency will be, thus where you’ll live.

Sec. 1503 (beginning), Pg. 675-685 – Government will regulate hospitals in EVERY aspect of residency programs, including teaching hospitals.

Sec. 1601 (beginning), Pg. 685-699 – Increased funding to fight waste, fraud, and abuse. (Like the government with an $18 million website?)

Sec. 1619, Pg. 700-703 – If your part of HC plan isn’t in the government’s HC Exchange but you qualify for federal aid, you don’t have to pay.

Sec. 1128G, Pg. 704-708 – If the Secretary determines there is a “significant risk of fraudulent activity,” on HC provider or supplier, the government can do a background check.

Sec. 1632, Pg. 710, Lines 8-14 – The Secretary has broad powers to deny HC providers and suppliers admittance into HC Exchange. Your doctor could be thrown out of business.

Sec. 1637, Pg. 718-719 – ANY Doctor who orders durable medical equipment or home medical services is REQUIRED to be enrolled in, or eligible for, Medicare.

Sec. 1639, Pg. 721 – Government MANDATES that Doctors must have face-to-face with patient to certify patient for home health services.

Sec. 1639, Pg. 723-24, Lines 23-25, 1-5 – The same government certifications will apply to Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s health plan: Your kids).

Sec. 1640, Pg. 723, Lines 16-22 – The government reserves right to apply face-to-face certification for patient to ANY other HC service.

Sec. 1651, Pg. 734, Lines 16-25 – Proposes, for law enforcement sake, that the Secretary of HHS will give Attorney General access to ALL medical data.

Sec. 1701 (beginning), Pg. 739-756 – The government sets guidelines for subsidizing the uninsured (and you have to pay for them).

Sec. 1704, Pg. 756-761 – The government will shift burden of payments to Disproportionate Share Hospitals (DSH) to states (your taxes).

Sec. 1711, Pg. 764 – The government will require preventative services – including vaccinations (no choice).

Sec. 1713, Pg. 768 – Government-determined Nurse Home Visitation Services (Hello union paybacks).

Sec. 1713, Pg. 768, Lines 3-5 – Nurse Home Visit Services – Service #1: “Improving maternal or child health and pregnancy outcomes or increasing birth intervals between pregnancies.” Compulsory ABORTIONS?

Sec. 1713, Pg. 768, Lines 11-14 – Nurse Home Visit Services include determinations of economic self-sufficiency, employment advancement and school-readiness.

Sec. 1714, Pg. 769 – Federal government mandates eligibility for State
Family Planning Services. Abortion and government control intertwined.

Sec. 1733, Pg. 788-798 – Government will set and mandate drug prices, therefore controlling which drugs are brought to market. (Goodbye innovation and private research.)

Sec. 1744, Pg. 796-799 – Establishes PAYMENTS for graduate medical education. The government will now control your doctor’s education.

Sec.1751, Pg. 800 – The government will decide which Health Care conditions will be paid. Say “RATION!”

Sec. 1759, Pg. 809 – Billing Agents, clearinghouses, or other alternate payees are required to register. The government takes over private payment systems too.

Sec. 1801, Pg. 819-823 – The Government will identify individuals “likely to be ineligible” for subsidies. Will access all personal financial information.

Sec. 1802, Pg. 823-828 – Government sets up Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund. Another bottomless tax pit.

Sec. 4375, Pg. 828-832, Lines 12-16 – Government will impose a fee on ALL private health insurance plans, including self-insured, to pay for Trust Fund!

Sec. 4377, Pg. 835, Lines 11-13 – Fees imposed by government for Trust Fund shall be treated as if they were taxes.

Sec. 440, Pg. 837-839 – The government will design and implement Home Visitation Program for families with young kids and families that are expecting children.

Sec. 1904, Pg. 843-844 – This Home Visitation Program includes the government coming into your house and teaching/telling you how to parent!

Sec. 2002, Pg. 858 – The government will establish a Public Health Fund at a cost of $88,800,000,000 (That’s Billions).

Sec. 2201, Pg. 864 – The government will MANDATE the establishment of a National Health Service Corps.

o Sec. 2201 – “Fulfillment of Obligated Service Requirement”

o Sec. 2201, Pg. 864-875 – The NHS Corps is a program where Doctors perform mandatory HC for 2 years for partial loan repayment.

Sec. 2212, Pg. 875-891 – The government takes over the education of Medical students and Doctors through education and loans.

Sec. 340L, Pg. 897 – The government will establish a Public Health Workforce Corps to ensure an adequate supply of public health professionals.

Sec. 340L, Pg. 897 – The Public Health Workforce Corps shall consist of civilian employees of the United States as Secretary deems necessary.

Sec. 340L, Pg. 897 – The Public Health Workforce Corps shall consist of officers of Regular and Reserve Corps of Service.

Sec. 340M, Pg. 899 – The Public Health Workforce Corps includes veterinarians. Will animals have heath care too?

Sec. 2233, Pg. 909 – The government will develop, build and run Public Health Training Centers.

Sec. 2241, Pg. 912-913 – Government starts a HC affirmative action program under the guise of diversity scholarships.

Sec. 2251, Pg. 915 – Government MANDATES cultural and linguistic competency training for HC professionals.

Sec. 3111, Pg. 931 – The government will establish a Preventative and Wellness Trust fund, with initial cost of $30,800,000,000 (Billions more).

Sec. 3121, Pg. 934, Lines 21-22 – Government will identify specific goals and objectives for prevention and wellness activities. More control of your life.

Sec. 3121, Pg. 935, Lines 1-2 – The government will develop “Healthy People & National Public Health Performance Standards.” They will tell us what to eat?

Sec. 3131, Pg. 942, Lines 22-25 – “Task Force on Community Preventive Services.” More government? Under the Offices of Surgeon General, Public Health Services, Minority Health and Women’s Health.

Sec. 3141, Pg. 949-979 – BIG GOVERNMENT core public health infrastructure includes workforce capacity, lab systems, health information systems, etc.

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

Sec. 399Z-1, Pg. 993 – School-Based Health Clinics will be integrated into the school environment. More government brainwashing in school.

Sec. 2521, Pg. 1000 – The government will establish a National Medical Device Registry. Will you be tracked?

WOW! what a gene splicing of tin foil hats with white sheets, note how the devil ACORN appears frequently. While this is the textbook example of throwing out a monsterload of shit and seeing what sticks this can really be distilled down into it’s most potent message guaranteed to whip the rubes into a frenzy: The Commie Obama is going to use a nigger army to abort your babies, empower the homosexuals as government police and exterminate the white race.

Jesus fucking Christ, what a sick and twisted document, these freaks are the strongest argument for euthanasia that I have yet to see in my tenure on Planet Shit.

Goldman Sachs Sucks Our Marrow

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


– Jan Willem Van De Wetering

The battle has now been joined by the Great Satan (aka Goldman Sachs) as the brilliant Matt Taibbi piece has fortunatly gone viral thanks to bloggers. When the pigs on Wall Street, their legal armies and on call public relations propagandists turn into pirannhas as they are with this piece the fuckers are on the run. The seige on CNBC’s drooling house baboon Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer that was kicked off by comedian Jon Stewart was beaten back with a disinformation laden blitzkrieg and the moneychangers regained control of the temple. It’s all been the hogwash of the GREEN SHOOTS ever since. And despite the dismal news contained in yesterday’s jobs report the long weekend couldn’t come at a more fortuitous time as the gold plated cocksuckers will regroup once again and launch a saturation bombing campaign of more goddammed lies.

Give some credit where it is due to Rolling Stone magazine, after initially witholding Mr. Taibbi’s withering takedown of Goldman Sachs entitled The Great Bubble Machine from internet users it has finally seen fit to put it online. Probably sound business on their part since the absence of it on their site only fueled the fire. Now today, the agents of the ivory tower piggies are in full attack mode, there is certainly no shortage of sewage flying in Taibbi’s direction – the good ole pejorative of choice to those who dare to ask questions “conspiracy theorists” has been nailed into his skull like a crown of thorns (some might find the delicious irony in this since Taibbi was the one who punched his ticked by sliming 9/11 truthers) and he is very likely being measured for one of those wooden crosses that are erected whenever the whores in the establishment media are summoned to perform a public crucifiction on an out of line journalist or other ill mannered whistleblower. Here is just a sample of the early stages of the barrage that is directed at Taibbi for his transgression. The reputedly liberal New York Times (the former employer of Iraq war pitchwoman Judith Miller) has one entitled Goldman and Rolling Stone Writer Trade Barbs, Time has Goldman Sachs vs. Rolling Stone: A Wall Street Smackdown, BNET has one entitled Uncovering the Goldman Sachs Myths, a particularly gut wrenching piece as it is from a looter capitalist apologist organ. I could list more but why fucking bother, the common talking point is that it is all conspiracy and that Taibbi is of course, not even a real journalist to begin with. Typical rancid establishment swill from all the garbage churned out of America’s so-called journalism schools who chose corporate shillhood as a career over honest reporting.

I have to admire Taibbi’s balls, he has come out in defense of his brilliant, Pulitzer Prize worthy piece with some nice rebuttals to the Great Satan and all of it’s well paid catamites. Here are two of them:

Goldman Sachs is Reeling Under Public Pressure

You acknowledge that we may monitor your use of the Services for our own purposes (and not for your benefit). We may use the resulting information for internal business purposes or in accordance with the rules of any applicable regulatory or self-regulatory body and in compliance with applicable law and regulation.

via Is Goldman Legally Frontrunning Its Clients? zero hedge.

After watching its thoroughly maladroit handling of several p.r. problems this week, I’m absolutely convinced that Goldman Sachs can be hurt if enough people keep piling on with the pressure. The latest evidence of this is its abject collapse in the face of questions from Zero Hedge about the possibility that it is using the data its takes from users of its website to front-run those same people.

Front-running takes place when a bank or broker-dealer– say, Goldman, Sachs — executes a trade for its own account before filling its customer’s order. Since a large enough trade (executed by institutional investors, for instance) can actually move the price of the security in question, front-running can be a very profitable activity. It’s sort of like fast-food insider trading. It is common knowledge that front-running on Wall Street is rampant, and I interviewed more than one person for my recent Rolling Stone story who accused Goldman of front-running its big clients in all sorts of arenas, from the internet IPO years to the commodities markets.

What caught Zero Hedge’s attention was a curious disclaimer uncovered on Goldman’s website, which includes a trading platform that visitors can use to execute trades. At one point the disclaimer read:

Monitoring by GS: Your use of the products and services on this Web site may be monitored by GS, and that the resultant information may be used by GS for its internal business purposes or in accordance with the rules of any applicable regulatory or self-regulatory organization.

Subsequently readers uncovered an even more sinister disclaimer that appears on other Goldman documents (see the quote at the top of this post with the key line “and not for your benefit”). So Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge wrote to Goldman to ask if this meant what it quite obviously seems to mean, and got this response from the bank’s Senior Vice Scoundrel, Ed Canaday. Note the way he seems to be addressing Dick Durbin, which looks like a case of wish-fulfillment to me:

Dear Mr Durbin:

This is in response to your recent blog about our web site disclaimer. It is quite usual for websites to have disclaimers that refer to the monitoring of site usage. Most web sites, including yours we noticed, track usage by their visitors. This is primarily used for marketing and to help inform decision about enhancing content.

Your suggestion that we monitor our web site to facilitate front-running is untrue and offensive.

Sincerely

Ed Canaday
Vice President
Goldman, Sachs & Co.

In exactly the same manner that Goldman demonstrated with regard to my story, Canaday avoided any of the factual concerns that Zero Hedge presented about the curious disclaimer; in fact his letter, if anything, is such a classic non-denial denial that it really just confirms everyone’s worst suspicions. Most notably, he doesn’t specify what “internal business purposes” the company is talking about, and while he insists it is not front-running, it’s a very thin, curiously worded denial.

That a company as rich and powerful as Goldman would stoop to peering through the web version of a locker-room peephole to make a few extra pennies either front-running random trades or somehow using visitor data “not for their benefit” shows how completely and utterly morally absent this company is. There is not an ill-gotten dollar they will not chase, no matter how small or insignificant the sums might be.

Word should be spread about this and anyone who used the Goldman 360 portral for trading should seriously investigate this situation, as it is entirely possible you’ve been ripped off — legally, perhaps, although how much “legality” a disclaimer like that can confer is a serious question in my mind.

More to the point, the fact that Goldman is getting enough public pressure that it feels it has to respond to these queries shows that the company is reeling. And the fact that their public statements have been so hilariously transparent and clumsy shows that they’re rattled and don’t know how to handle this kind of heat, which they’re not used to getting. Kudos to Zero Hedge for applying the pressure; readers who want to see Tyler’s very funny response to Canaday should read here.

And in another piece…Taibbi punches back hard yet again!

On Giving Goldman a Chance

After my recent piece about Goldman, Sachs hit the newsstands last week, I started to get a lot of mail. Most of it was thoughtful and respectful criticism, although there was an amusingly large number of people writing in impassioned defense of their right, under our American system, to be ripped off by large impersonal financial companies. “If my pension fund is buying [crap mortgages] from Goldman, and my pension fund loses lots of value, that’s not Goldman’s fault,” wrote one reader. “No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. The only thing Goldman is guilty of is making profits.”

I’m not even going to go there – the psychology of a human being who would take the time to actually write in a complaint like that is so bizarre that it would take more time than I have today to even begin discussing it. One other complaint that I will address quickly, though, is the notion that I didn’t tell Goldman’s side of the story. “Not exactly a balanced approach,” complained one reader. “You should take an ethics class. You have to give the other side a fair shot.”

Actually I did contact Goldman and gave the bank every opportunity to respond to the factual issues in the article. I’m bringing this up because their decision not to comment on any of those questions was actually pretty interesting.

We figured ahead of time that Goldman was probably not going to respond to many of the allegations in the article, since its MO in the past with regard to hostile journalists has usually either been to make bald denials or to simply avoid comment (that’s when they’re not using the carpet-bomb litigation technique, as in the case of GoldmanSachs666.com). So what I decided to do the first time I approached them was to send a short list of simple factual questions. If the bank decided to engage us and educate us as to its point of view on these simple questions, we would send more queries and expand the dialogue.

Given this, I tried to make that first list of questions as basic as possible. I asked if Goldman would have turned a profit in Q1 2009 if it hadn’t orphaned the month of December 2008. Then I asked if Goldman had made changes to its underwriting standards during the internet boom years; if Goldman’s position was still that the steep rise in oil prices last year was due to normal changes in supply and demand; and if it could explain its 1991 request to the CFTC to have its subsidiary J. Aron classified as a physical hedger on the commodities market. Citing various sources, I also noted that some people had complained that its move to short the mortgage market in 2006 even as it was selling those same types of instruments proved that the bank knew the weakness of its mortgage products, and asked if the bank had an answer for that. And I asked if the bank supported cap-and-trade legislation, and if it was fair to say (as we planned to in the piece) that the bank would capitalize financially if such legislation was passed.

I intentionally put a lot of yes/no questions on that list. If the underlying thinking behind any of those questions was faulty, it would have been easy enough for them to say so and to educate us as to the truth. Instead, here is the response that we got:

“Your questions are couched in such a way that presupposes the conclusions and suggests the people you spoke with have an agenda or do not fully understand the issues.”

You have to have swallowed half a lifetime of carefully-worded p.r. statements to see the message written between the lines here. That this is a non-denial denial is obvious, but what’s more notable here is that they didn’t stop with just a flat “no comment,” which they easily could have done. No, they had to go a little further than that and – and this is pure Goldman, just outstanding stuff – make it clear that both I and my sources are simply not as smart as they are and don’t understand what we’re talking about. So the rough translation here is, “No comment, but if you were as smart as us, you wouldn’t be asking these questions.”

So now word filters through that Goldman has issued yet another statement in response to the piece, this one by amusingly-named mouthpiece Lucas Van Pragg. Again, the company does not take issue with any of the facts in the piece – not one. Here’s what he says:

Taibbi’s bubble case doesn’t stand up to serious scrutiny either. To give just two examples, even with the worst will in the world, the blame for creating the internet bubble cannot credibly be laid at our door, and we could hardly be described as having been a major player in the mortgage market, unlike so many of our current and former competitors.

Taibbi’s article is a compilation of just about every conspiracy theory ever dreamed up about Goldman Sachs, but what real substance is there to support the theories?

We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance of being a force for good.

Okay, let’s look at that bit piece by piece. Van Pragg takes issue with the bubble argument by citing two “examples” of the case not holding water, the first being:

… the blame for creating the internet bubble cannot credibly be laid at our door…
I kept waiting for the “because…” clause here, but there wasn’t one. He just says so and leaves it at that. Now there is obviously some measure of hyperbole in solely blaming Goldman Sachs for something like the internet bubble, or any of the other recent Wall Street disasters, for that matter. But you’d have to be absolutely crazy (and you wouldn’t need “the worst will in the world,” either) not to accept the notion that Goldman shouldered a significant portion of the blame for the internet mess. They were, after all, the leading underwriter of internet IPOs during the internet boom years. In 1999, at the height of the boom, they underwrote 37 internet companies, most of which had little or no history and were losing money at the time of the launch. By late 1999 Goldman was underwriting one out of every five internet IPOs. They were repeatedly caught and punished for manipulating the prices of their IPOs, either via laddering or spinning. Van Pragg doesn’t deny any of this, and just blithely says that one can’t credibly blame them for the internet bubble. I’m almost insulted by the lameness and half-assedness of that comeback, but that might be part of the point, to be insulting. He moves on:

…and we could hardly be described as having been a major player in the mortgage market, unlike so many of our current and former competitors.

Again, not to beat this into the ground, but in 2006, at the height of the housing boom, Goldman underwrote over $75 billion in mortgages, over $59 billion of which were non-prime. That represented 7% of the entire market, which seems like a pretty “major” slice to me. It is true that they did not jump so completely ass-first into the market as Lehman and Bear did (note Van Pragg’s bemused reference to “former competitors”), but if you read the piece, we noted why that doesn’t take them off the hook at all. Because while their “former competitors” (one of whom is clearly “former” in large part because a former Goldmanite, Hank Paulson, elected to save Goldman’s hide instead of Lehman’s) were dumb enough to hold their mortgage paper and be sunk by it, Goldman shorted their own crap, which means (and I know I’m repeating myself here) they knew that what they were selling was a loser. So while they maybe weren’t the biggest player, they were still a major player, and one can easily make the case that they were the most obnoxious player, given that they dove into this muck with their eyes wide open, unlike so many other idiots on Wall Street.

In the middle of this weirdly substanceless retort, Van Pragg then goes on complain about the lack of substance in the article, makes the predictable charge that the piece was a compendium of invented conspiracy theories, then moves on to “reject” the notion that the company inflates bubbles and profits in busts (about that last part: I recommend checking out Goldman’s profit/bonus numbers in 2002, 2008, and 2009 to date. I’m not sure how they can refute the notion that they have profited during the recent financial calamities). Lastly, he says that the bank is “painfully conscious” of the importance of being a force for good, which I noted with amusement is not quite the same thing as saying that that bank is a force for good, or wants to be.

So to sum up, this all translates as:

“Taibbi’s bubble case doesn’t hold water. To use just two examples, Taibbi’s internet bubble case doesn’t hold water, and we didn’t sell as many mortgages as Lehman Brothers. Taibbi’s article is a compendium of every other story about Goldman that doesn’t hold water. We reject these theories that do not hold water, and are aware of the difference between right and wrong, making us legally sane according to the law.”
I’m aware that some people feel that it’s a journalist’s responsibility to “give both sides of the story” and be “even-handed” and “objective.” A person who believes that will naturally find serious flaws with any article like the one I wrote about Goldman. I personally don’t subscribe to that point of view. My feeling is that companies like Goldman Sachs have a virtual monopoly on mainstream-news public relations; for every one reporter like me, or like far more knowledgeable critics like Tyler Durden, there are a thousand hacks out there willing to pimp Goldman’s viewpoint on things in the front pages and ledes of the major news organizations. And there are probably another thousand poor working stiffs who are nudged into pushing the Goldman party line by their editors and superiors (how many political reporters with no experience reporting on financial issues have swallowed whole the news cliché about Goldman being the “smart guys” on Wall Street? A lot, for sure).

Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it. Given all of this, I personally think it’s absurd to talk about the need for “balance” in every single magazine and news article. I understand that some people feel differently, but that’s my take on things.

Such gross intransigence from a reporter in the age of the moneychangers is stunning, in fact it actually borders on outright blasphemy – shit, it brings to mind real muckrakers like the great Upton Sinclair. Talk about a David vs Goliath story for the modern era, Taibbi has put all the other so-called reporters that pollute our press, make excuses for the corrupt, milk the lurid excesses of the dumbed down cult of celebrity (currently on display with the necorphiliac corpse humping of Michael Jackson) and provide the bread and circuses that are necessary when our shiny newly minted (largely with Goldman Sachs money) reality show president come out and brags about saving the markets while millions are beggared to fucking shame and justifiably so.

Let’s hope that David has it in him to lob the killshot right into the testicles of the Goldman Sachs Goliath that has stomped on the necks of American’s for too long now.

Hooray! The Surge is Working…Again

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

-H. L. Mencken

The previously discredited CNBC ace shill Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer has now become the point man for the regenerated Wall Street hydra, launching into a sleazy Rovian war with a real life economist who actually got it right in predicting the collapse Nouriel Roubini. Roubini, a man who was from the outset mocked, scorned and derisively labeled ‘Dr. Doom’ by the same type of four-flushing assholes who brought us Deep Capture has been declared public enemy number one and must be taken out with extreme prejudice for the big con to succeed. The oafish court jester of looter capitalism is now back with a vengeance as he according to this piece by Frank Rich of the damned liberal New York Times states in his recent piece Awake and Sing!:

“I am pronouncing the depression over!” declared CNBC’s irrepressible Jim Cramer on April 2. The next day the unemployment rate, already at the highest level in 25 years, jumped yet again, but Cramer wasn’t thinking about the 663,000 jobs that disappeared in March. He was thinking about the market. Mad money. Fast money. Big money. The Dow, after all, has rallied in the weeks since Timothy Geithner announced his bank bailout 2.0. Par-tay! On Wednesday, Cramer rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of the 1,000th broadcast of his nightly stock-tip jamboree.

Roubini appropriately dismissed the man who acts like a baboon on crystal meth:

But “Cramer is a buffoon”, the professor countered, on the sidelines of a conference in Canada on Tuesday night. “He was one of those who called six times in a row for this bear market rally to be a bull market rally and he got it wrong. After all this mess, and after Jon Stewart, he should just shut up because he has no shame.”

The latest rally will fail when it becomes clear the economy is not improving and that several banks will be unable to pass the “stress tests” currently being carried out by the federal government, Mr Roubini says.

“Cramer keeps insulting me personally and saying a bunch of lies,” he told an Associated Press reporter. “He is not a credible analyst.”

Which of course didn’t stop the NYT from piling on Roubini in a Wednesday Op-Ed column by that unbiased source of wisdom William D. Cohan (a contributing editor for Fortune Magazine, the rag that featured a fawning hagiography back in the Depression years about Benito Mussolini and his fine corporate fascist system) that in upholding the finest traditons of Judith Miller poo pooed the questioning of the miraculous profits of Goldman Sachs as so much conspiracy theory even though Hank Paulson obviously had at best a conflict of interest in presiding over the TARP plan to socialize the losses of the looters to keep the big casino going. Similar sliming has been done to Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman in the insipid Newsweek cover story of a few weeks back by hack Evan Thomas who openly and brazenly admits his bias: “If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy.”. Stenographers for the elite like Thomas are largely responsible for this disaster to begin with in that they failed to perform their constitutional duties in ensuring that a free press would ensure that power be kept in check but he and his ilk are more interested in careerism, sucking up to the establishment and ensuring that they keep get invited to cocktail parties. No wonder that the regular corporate media is getting its ass kicked by the alternative media and the blogs, you just can’t trust the bastards on anything anymore.

But I digress…

It is asinine and childish to think that Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs did not abuse his position as the Bush regime’s Treasury Secretary to favorably rig the big bailout for the benefit of his cronies, just look at how the AIG bailout was used to further shore up the big Kahuna of the street and ensure that the revolving door between the temple of avarice and the White House remains fully operational. Seems like the blood sucking jackals at the real center of American political power, Goldman Sachs is sending it’s legal army after a Florida based blogger named Mike Morgan for daring to set up a website Info, Comments, Opinions and Facts About Goldman Sachs. The white shoe Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke has been set loose upon poor Mr. Morgan for his daring to question these criminal pigs and their ongoing assault on the American economy – you know it’s bad when they don’t outsource their wetwork to India but somehow the site which as the delightful url of http://www.goldmansachs666.com/ has really but a bug up the pasty white asses of the house of Paulson and Blankfein.

I would recommend that everyone take the time to not only check out Mr. Morgan’s site but to back him in his David versus Goliath stand against the mother of all moneychangers in Goldman Sachs. Let the buffonish tea baggers take to the streets at the behest of the deranged shill Glenn Beck, Dick Armey, uber crackpot Richard Mellon Scaife and the Texas oil Nazi Koch Foundation (see Think Progress for the scoop on who is really sponsoring this phony white populist mayhem) but the real enemy of America sits in the ivory tower at 85 Broad Street in lower Manhattan and it’s toxic tentacles extend directly into the highest realms of the new Obama administration. Putting Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of economic policy along with other dubious appointments (or in the case of real progressives non appointments) are an early indicator that the only change for Obama is going to be chump change. The hedge fund hyenas and derivatives alchemists and their pushers are going to have free reigh while an exponentially growing number of Americans are being rendered jobless, homeless and exiled to tent cities…hell, at least Reagan gave people surplus cheese.

In a remarkable interview on the PBS program Bill Moyers Journal former S & L regulator William K. Black gets right to the heart of things:

BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you’re talking about was created out of things like liars’ loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That’s why it’s toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it’s scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I’m quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, “the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined.”

BILL MOYERS: So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right, and the investment banker that — we call it pooling — puts together these bad mortgages, these liars’ loans, and creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80 percent losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste.

BILL MOYERS: You’re describing what Bernie Madoff did to a limited number of people. But you’re saying it’s systemic, a systemic Ponzi scheme.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, Bernie was a piker. He doesn’t even get into the front ranks of a Ponzi scheme…

BILL MOYERS: But you’re saying our system became a Ponzi scheme.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Our system…

BILL MOYERS: Our financial system…

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Became a Ponzi scheme. Everybody was buying a pig in the poke. But they were buying a pig in the poke with a pretty pink ribbon, and the pink ribbon said, “Triple-A.”

In a nutshell the system itself is rotten to the core and Geithner, Bernanke and the rest of Mr. Obama’s A Team of the best and the brightest are just more of the same dirty rotten scoundrels who have destroyed the global economy and are now being allowed to finish the job. For Christ’s sake, Obama is actually going out on television and pushing refinancing as if most people really qualify anyway for the simple reasons that (a) the banks aren’t lending (b) their existing loans are well in excess of the property value in most cases…and (c) you can no longer instantly qualify for a 400,000 loan if you have no job and about a million a month are being jettisoned as the real economy continues the freefall. I mean Jesus Fucking Christ, is this guy a president or a pimp?

Selling the Sizzle: The recent attempts to manage perception in order to reflate the bubble and save the squadrons of corrupt paper dealers is a propaganda masterpiece unseen since the bloodshed and chaos of the Iraq war was flushed down the memory hole courtesy of the great General Petraeus and THE SURGE. What is now going on is every bit as dishonest and even more monstrous in that the large scale thieves who run the system are using their media and pocket politicians to further entrap Americans in the shackles of debt slavery from which they shall never be free as long as the failure of unregulated looter capitalism is not dealt with and the cancer cut out once and for all. Don’t believe anything, it’s all a big lie of Hitlerian proportions, a public relations stew of deception that Goebbels would be proud of and you just have to love that little bumper sticker slogan Green Shoots.

Do NOT, I repeat do NOT put one nickel into the markets because in the end you will be sorry. I am advising people to take this postponement of the looming collapse as an opportunity to shore up your personal positions. Do not spend a dime you don’t have to spend, take all of your money out of your 401k once it has been reflated and put it into real assets. Pay down debt, start learning about how to garden, hey our grandparents did it didn’t they? Stockpile non-perishable food, buy a Lifestraw (provided you can find one) because they are coming to privatize your water soon, buy guns and ammo and most importantly be suspicious of anything that the assclowns who run the corporate media try to sell you with their propaganda.

Obama, tagged as the pope of hope by one blogger is just another errand boy for the big banks. Pope of dopes is more like it , it took Clinton and Bush years to cheapen the presidency but Obama has done it in record time, sliming around with the likes of Jay Leno on the electronic crackpipe, taking pot shots at cripples, escalating the war in Afghanistan, reneging on boatloads of campaign promises and in the absolute nadir shilling for the banks in imploring people to refinance their overvalued McMansions and other cheaply constructed shitboxes.

The Obamanoids eat it up too, they are legion and tripping over themselves in falling in line to shill for the most despicable of the Obama administration policies, like the failure to order the Justice Department to arrest Karl Rove for flouting subpoenas, continuing the illegal wiretapping, escalating the war in Afghanistan and most odiously as all choosing to back the banksters in the gutting of the American economy. Sure, there are the little feely good cosmetic changes like stem cell research and relaxing restrictions on Cuba (both by the way make economic sense and if there is one thing to commend Obama on it is the lack of ideology exhibited early on, which in a way is also damnable in that it only supports the status quo) and that ridiculous ‘pirates’ thing which is about as phony as Reagan’s defeat of that industrialized military juggernaut Grenada.

One thing is for certain though, no matter how well that Surge II works it is only going to make the inevitable collapse that much worse when it does come. And those vicious shitheads who worship the unholy trinity of Limbaugh, Palin and Joe the Plumber will only become meaner and more better positioned to take advantage when it becomes apparent that the only change that has occured is a new coat of paint on the whorehouse that is American capitalism.