Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
The unit processed about half a dozen suicides. The suicide notes, she said, almost always cited hazing. Women, she said, were constantly harassed, especially sexually, but it often did not match the systematic punishment and humiliation meted out to men who were deemed to be inadequate Marines. She said that Marines who were overweight or unable to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and physical abuse. They were called “fat nasties” and “shit bags.” The harassed Marines would be assigned to other individual Marines and become their slaves. They would be sent on punishing runs in which many of them vomited. They would be forced to bear-crawl—walk on all fours—the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by sets of monkey fuckers—bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching down like a baseball catcher and then standing up again—followed by a series of other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.
“They make these Marines do what they call ‘bitch’ work,” Goodell said. “They are assigned to be someone else’s ‘bitch’ for the day. We had a guy in our platoon, not in Iraq but in California, and he was overweight. He was on remedial PT, which meant he went to extra physical training. When he came to work he was rotated. One day he was with this corporal or this sergeant. One day he was sent to me. I had him for an hour. I remember sending him outside and making him carry things. It was very common for them to dig a hole and fill it back up with sand or carry sand bags up to the top of a hill and then carry them down again.”The unit was sent to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves, usually by putting rifles under their chins and pulling the trigger.“We had a Marine who was in a port-a-john when he blew his face off,” she said. “We had another Marine who shot himself through the neck. Often they would do it in the corner of a bunker or an abandoned building. We had a couple that did it in port-a-johns. We had to go in and peel and pull off chunks of flesh and brain tissue that had sprayed the walls. Those were the most frustrating bodies to get. On those bodies we were also on cleanup crew. It was gross. We sent the suicide notes home with the bodies.”—“One of the first convoys we went to was one where the Army had been traveling over a bridge and an IED had exploded,” she said. “It had literally shot a seven-ton truck over the side and down into a ravine. Marines were already going down into the ravine. We were just getting out of our vehicles. We were putting on our gloves and putting coverings over our boots. I was with a Marine named Pineda. I was coming around the Humvee and there was a spot on the ground that was a circle. I looked at it and thought something must have exploded here or near here. I went over to look at it. I looked in and saw a boot. Then I noticed the boot had a foot in it. I almost lost my lunch.”“In the seven-ton truck the [body of the] assistant driver, who was in the passenger seat, was trapped in the vehicle,” she said. “All of his body was in the vehicle. We had to crawl in there to get it out. It was charred. Pineda and I pulled the burnt upper torso from the truck. Then we removed a leg. Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting out hands together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso but you need to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was very common to have body bags that when you picked them up they would sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh. The contents did not resemble a human body.”The members of the mortuary unit were shunned by the other Marines. The stench of dead flesh clung to their uniforms, hair, skin and fingers. Two members of the mortuary unit began to disintegrate psychologically. One began to take a box of Nyquil tablets every day and drink large quantities of cold medicine. He was eventually medevaced out of Iraq.“Our cammies would be stained with blood or with brains,” she said. “When you scoop up the meat it often would get on the cuffs of our shirts. You could smell it, even after you took off your gloves. We weren’t washing our cammies everyday. Your cuff comes to your face when you eat. Physically we were stained with remains. We had a constant smell like rotten meat, which I guess is what it was since often the bodies had been in the sun and the heat for a long time. The flesh had gone bad. The skin on a body in the hot sun slides off. The skin detaches itself from the layer beneath and slides around on itself.”
—Her unit once had to recover two Marines who had drowned in a lake. It appeared one had leapt in to save the other. The bodies, which were recovered after a couple of days by Navy divers, were grotesquely swollen. One of the Marines was so bloated and misshapened that the body was difficult to carry on a litter.“His neck was as wide as his bloated head, and his stomach jutted out like a barrel,” she writes in the book. “His testicles were the size of cantaloupes. His face was white and puffy and thick. Not fat, but thick. It was unreal. He looked like a movie prop, with thick, gray, waxy skin and the thick purple lips. We couldn’t stop looking at these bodies because they were so out of proportion and so disfigured and because, still, they looked like us.”It was hardest to look into the faces of the dead. She and the other members of the mortuary unit swiftly covered the faces when they worked on the bodies. They avoided looking at the eyes of the corpses.Once, the unit had to process seven Marines killed in an explosion. Seven or eight body bags were delivered to the bunker.“We had clean body bags set up so we could sort the flesh,” she said. “Sometimes things come in with nametags. Or sometimes one is Hispanic and you could tell who was Hispanic and who was the white guy. We tried separating flesh. It was ridiculous. We would open a body bag and there was nothing but vaporized flesh. There were not four hands or a whole leg in a bag. We tried to distribute the mush evenly throughout the bags. We were trying to do the best we could sorting it out. We had the last body bag come in. We opened up the body bag and it was filled with the heads. I looked at four before looking away. Not only did we have to look at them, we had to pick them up and figure out who it belonged to. The eyes were looking back at us. We got used to a lot of it. But the heads worked the other way. They affected us more strongly as time passed. We saw on the heads the expressions of fright and horror. It made us wonder what we were doing here.”She processed one Marine whose face was twisted at the moment of death by rage. The face of this Marine began to haunt her.“I had this feeling that something awful had occurred,” she said. “The way he had come in and stiffened he had this look to his face that made my stomach curl. It looked angry. Often expressions on bodies would look fearful and hurt. The faces looked as though they had received death. But this face looked like he had given death.”
She and the other members of the unit became convinced they could feel and hear the souls of the dead Marines they had processed and housed in their reefers.
You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That’s their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.
Hmmmm..But what do the dead say?Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say that I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is either a fool or a liar because he doesn’t know what death is. He isn’t able to judge. He only knows about living. He doesn’t know anything about dying. If he is a fool and believes in death before dishonor let him go ahead and die.
A Fascist Bully Finally Pisses off the Wrong Person
The cold civil war is about to go hot, in an astounding but in my opinion commendable shooting on Friday a hateful, vile pornographer named James Pouillon was removed from this mortal coil. In another of those increasingly frequent incidents in this roiling cauldron of hate known as Der Homeland a worn down, pushed to the limit, fucked over and stressed out man went on a rampage – another human time bomb exploded in Owosso Michigan. Responsible for blowing away Pouillon, a real piece of human (and I use the term extremely loosely) filth was one Harlan James Drake who killed at least one other person and was likely going to go on a score-settling rampage were he not caught. Drake was offended at the pornographer Pouillon and his display of obscene imagery (had he whipped out and wiggled his dick it would have been less offensive)in front of children so he pulled up in front of the old lard ass and sent him on to his great reward. If there is such a place as Hell may the devil already have his pitchfork three-quarters up porky Pouillon’s ass.
Not that I am advocating acts of violence or anything but it just brings me great delight to see one of these rotten fuckers finally get his. Of course the Christofascists, the rubber fetus army, the Beckers, Deathers, Birthers, peckerwoods, haters and assorted other miscreants who are the strongest argument for retroactive abortion that I could ever conceive of are all shrieking in outrage, an emotion that they just can’t muster when a doctor is murdered in his own goddamn church, jackbooted thugs deliver stompings to gays or a black man is dragged behind a pickup truck until his body comes apart. Goddamned hypocrites are they and yesterday’s righteous kill of the vermin in Michigan is only going to make them increasingly angry and looking to settle the score with the damned libruls. While perusing the darker corners of the internet this morning I have already seen FREEPERS, Stormfronters and their ilk braying for blood. And today is of course the day of the fascist march on Washington – eerie how history always repeats itself although not exactly. Look for more of this sort of treason as there is no short supply of morons, dupes, walking retards and FOX lobotomized zombies showing up like jagoffs at these ridiculous fucking tea parties and in a historical context throwing their bodies in front of liberty in order to protect the interests of the British Monarchy. Hell, if Obama had any balls he’d call out the guard and have them turn the firehoses on the scum, wash em back into the sewers where they belong and then weld the manhole covers shut to keep em therse. Maybe chuck in a few cannisters of cyanide gas to exterminate the rats.
But this is Amerika and the oligarchy and corporate rulers must ensure that they stay in power so their neutered little puppet president will continue to dance and the useful idiots in the streets whose insipid and pathetic little lives allow them to be used as tools by the highly paid stooges and propagandists who serve as the oligarchy protection racket. I would bet that at least 3/4 of them have good intentions but as sheep being led to the slaughter haven’t a clue on who the true enemy is, but of coure the Democrats turned their back on such folks long ago for political expedience and corporate graft. The poor, stupid dopes actually believe the garbage that they watch on television and are fed a diet of feckless liberal scapegoats who are scared of their own fucking shadows, reek of cowardice and decry the Second Amendment when they should be arming themselves to the teeth for the day that the hordes are unleashed and General Bethlehem Beck decress that it’s open season on them. It’s coming soon too idiots and the gunning down of Porky Pig Pouillon may very well be the spark that sets the whole fucking thing ablaze. The fascist scum have already canonized Gerbil Joe Wilson for his “You Lie!” breach of etiquitte during the Pope of Hope’s address on Wednesday and neoNazis like Randall Terry will surely be plotting a counter response while turning the pornographer Pouillon into a martyr.
I predict that the marches on Washington will increase and that if the Beckers don’t succeed in doing a JFK on Obama that there will be similar conditions to those back in 1933 when economic despair was channeled by corporatists and oligarchs to attempt a fascist coup against FDR, they made the grave mistake of trying to get the wrong man to lead it and General Smedley D. Butler instead ratted them out like the loyal American that he was – this won’t appear in any history books that preach the revisionist gospel of John Wayne’s America and indoctrinate our youth to be little Eichmanns, good Germans who will grow up to be perfect workers in the bloody bidness of expanding the Empire abroad and smashing dissent at home.
Just my two cents over the mornin’ cup o joe
EE
“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!
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.
How complicit are the establishment hatemongers in the crimes that they have done so much to endorse and in many cases encourage? In my personal opinion, and I have brought this up recently in my own writings – the propagandists and the whores in the media should no longer be able to cower behind the defense of free-speech as a shield as they and the oligarchy that employs their sordid services use the First Amendment as a shield from behind which they can use their money as ‘free speech’ while seeking to destroy the rights of everybody else.
So without further adieu, I present the following with the request that it be taken into account just how complicit that the purveyors of hatred are in the crimes of those that they encourage to commit.
Denial is no excuse, not any longer, not when the stakes are this high. The smell from those smokestacks downwind from Auschwitz wasn’t from freshly baked apple pie.
By William Cormier
During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II when Julius Streicher was convicted and subsequently hung for “Jew Baiting” we were provided with the legal precedent for prosecuting those that incite others to violence. I have been contemplating this essay for quite some time, but today I read a revealing article on Op-Ed News that provides direct proof that purveyors of hate can and are directly responsible for the deaths of innocent Americans! Those who agitate and constantly spew their hate and prejudice in print and on America’s airwaves constantly hide behind “Freedom of Speech.” However, it is already an established rule of law that if you yell “fire” in a crowded theater, Free Speech can and will not protect those who abuse this right which results in the harm of innocent civilians. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia which details the trial of Julius Streicher, and please remember the circumstances of his conviction as you read the remainder of this essay:
Trial and execution
Julius Streicher was not a member of the military and did not take part in planning the Holocaust, or the invasion of other nations. Yet his pivotal role in inciting the extermination of Jews was significant enough, in the prosecutors’ judgment, to include him in the indictment of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal – which sat, ironically, in Nuremberg, where Streicher had once been an unchallenged authority.
During the trial, Gustave Gilbert, an American Army psychologist, was allowed to examine the Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg for war crimes. Among other tests, a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test was administered. Julius Streicher scored 106, the lowest among the Nazi leaders tested.
During his trial, Streicher displayed for the last time the flair for courtroom theatrics that had made him famous in the 1920s. He answered questions from his own defense attorney with diatribes against Jews, the Allies, and the court itself, and was frequently silenced by the court officers. Streicher was largely shunned by all of the other Nuremberg defendants, who thought him a vulgar, despicable man (Göering’s hostility toward him was well-established). He also peppered his testimony with references to passages of Jewish texts he had so often carefully selected and inserted (invariably out of context) into the pages of Der Stürmer.
Streicher was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and sentenced to death on October 1, 1946.[13] The judgment against him read, in part:
“…For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as ‘Jew-Baiter Number One.’ In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution… Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.”
Streicher was hanged in the early hours of October 16, 1946, along with the nine other condemned defendants from the first Nuremberg trial (Göering, Streicher’s nemesis, committed suicide only hours earlier). Streicher’s was the most melodramatic of the hangings carried out that night. At the bottom of the scaffold he cried out “Heil Hitler!” When he mounted the platform, he delivered his last sneering reference to Jewish scripture, snapping “Purim-Fest 1946!” The Jewish holiday Purim celebrates the escape by the Jews from extermination at the hands of Haman, an ancient Persian government official. At the end of the Purim story, Haman is hanged.[14] [15] Streicher’s final declaration before the hood went over his head was, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!” MORE
O’Reilly’s Hate Factor: ‘Venom Boys’ Blamed for Shooting Spree
The right wing hate machine fails to recognize its own hypocrisy. Even worse, its hate speech has been directly linked to a mass shooting.
Bernie Goldberg’s list of fans includes Jim David Adkisson, the nutjob who last year shot up a liberal church during a children’s musical. The killing was “symbolic” because he really wants to kill everyone mentioned in Goldberg’s Screwing up America book. I can’t imagine writing something that would inspire murder, but the right wing hatemongers do it all the time. Knoxville News Sentinel published the full manifesto, excerpted below:
“Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals…. This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book.”
Sara Robinson provided this analysis, noting that “police searched Adkisson’s apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.”
She goes on to say: “Nicely done, Messrs. Hannity, Goldberg, Limbaugh, Savage and O’Reilly — and all your lesser brethren who keep the hate speech spewing 24/7/365 across every field and into every shop in the country. There is no more debate to be had, no more doubt about it: What you did in the name of ‘entertainment,’ and for the sake of the almighty ratings, raised and animated a monster like Jim Adkisson, gave him a list of targets … and was directly responsible for the deaths of two brave and decent people. Adkisson was clearly angry and crazy — but his ‘manifesto’ draws the clearest, brightest line possible between the media he consumed and his actions that terrible Sunday morning.” MUCH MORE
Ten years ago this month, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was severely beaten, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming. He died only a few days later from his injuries on October 12, 1998. His attackers, Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney are now serving consecutive life sentences. But although Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, says justice was served against her son’s killers, she still continues to fight on to protect the gay sons and daughters of other parents across the nation.
Matthew Shepard, son of Judy Shepard and Dennis Shepard, was a political science major at the University of Wyoming in October of 1998. On the night of October 6, Shepard accepted a ride from Russell Arthur Henderson and Aardon James McKinney, whom he had met in a local bar. McKinney and Henderson drove Shepard to a remote area, where he was beaten, tortured, robbed and finally tied to a fence and left to die. A passing cyclist discovered Shepard still tied to the fence 18 hours later. On October 12, Shepard was pronounced dead, never having awakened from a coma.
During the trial against McKinney and Henderson, both defendants attempted to claim a “gay panic” defense, claiming they had acted under “temporary insanity” in killing Shepard. They alleged that Shepard had made sexual advances toward them and they had reacted by killing him. However, their stories were inconsistent and the men’s girlfriends testified under oath that Henderson and McKinney had previously plotted to rob a ‘gay man.’ The prosecutor in the case claimed that McKinney and Henderson had pretended to be gay in order to lure Shepard into their car to be robbed. MORE
One thing is certain; I’m an American and believe in equal protection under the law, and that includes everyone, Black, Brown, Gay, Lesbian, you name it! People have a right to choose their own lifestyles, and regardless of whatever the purveyors of hate may say – if you support the rule of Law and our Constitution, then all people, no matter what their lifestyle is, as long as it’s legal, have the right to worship as they choose, and someone’s sex life is no one’s business except for that individual. In the same breath, we don’t have to approve of another individual’s lifestyle; however, when that disapproval becomes public and incites violence against any segment of our population, I believe that it’s an actionable crime against humanity.
One of the most shocking instances of fear-mongering and inciting people to violence was a segment on Fox News by Glenn Beck. Read it yourself and you be the judge; do we need this type of propaganda that incites people to violence? We do not need a civil war or a “revolution” to bring forth change – and in my opinion, Fox News is advocating revolution in America which will supply the Neo-conservatives with the violent actions they seem to advocate that will usher in martial law in the United States:
FOX News Suggests America is Doomed, Civil War May Be Justified
Those “we like America” folks at FOX News sure have a funny way of showing their esteem sometimes. Take, for example, Glenn Beck’s February 20, 2009 show in which he did his darnedest to scare viewers into thinking that the country is on the road to Apocalypse. In a paranoid fantasy spun out over several segments, Beck and a series of guests set forth a number of dire “worst-case scenarios” for the United States in 2014. During each segment, Beck gave viewers the disclaimer that the apocalyptic visions he and his guests presented were not predictions of what would happen but merely what could happen. And yet Beck and his guests spoke as though the doomsday scenarios, including civil war, were a likelihood, if not a fait accompli.
In “Worst-Case Scenario” No. 1, Beck and his experts imagined the impact of a complete financial meltdown. In this scenario, as Beck described it, all the banks were nationalized, the Dow was at 2800, unemployment at 12%, the commericial real estate market collapsed, the USA’s credit rating was downgraded and government and unions control most businesses.
Again, the guests bumped up “maybe” to “likely.” Former CIA officer Bob Baer described the “probability” scenarios as “prolonged depression,” and warned of trouble with Iran. According to Baer, the Gulf countries would suffer and Iran therefore would “move into the Gulf and take it. We have a hostile regime in control of our resources. That is not that far away (my emphasis).” A MUST READ ARTICLE!
GOP punishing members who cross party lines
by Rachel Oswald
Determined to enforce the party line, the GOP has taken new steps to punish those members who have crossed the aisle in recent weeks to vote in support of the federal stimulus package and to send the message to any party moderates – turncoats will not be tolerated.
In a Monday interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele said he was open to primary challenges to the three Republican senators who voted in favor of the federal stimulus package –Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania and the two senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Spector is up for re-election in 2010.
“My retribution is the retribution of the voters in their state. They’re going to have to go through a primary in their state,” Steele said, adding that the RNC would follow the lead of the state parties in choosing which Republicans to back with campaign money. “When the state party says we’re going to endorse a candidate, the RNC is behind them. When the state party says we have a problem with them, so does the RNC.” <a href="http://rawstory.com/news/2008
/GOP_punishing_members_who_cross_party_0224.html”>MUCH MORE
There is a difference between free speech and inciting people to violence. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Riley are prime examples of those who constantly agitate and promote hate in print and on our national airwaves. There are also several rabid “Evangelicals” who also promote hate and actually promote war in the Middle-East to bring forth the second coming of Christ so they can be “raptured” while the rest of us are “Left Behind.” Their religious beliefs are OK with me; however, some of these Evangelicals promote the violent takeover of the United States if they cannot achieve it through politics – and in my book, that’s treason! LINK LINK LINK LINK LINK
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, or an Independent; if you promote violence and hate and attempt to incite violence in these United States, in my opinion, you’re committing an actionable crime, and hiding under “Free Speech” should not be allowed! I vividly remember several statements made by Ann Coulter, and the article below lays-out another legal strategy and cites laws that are already on our books to prosecute those who promote violence; I am only posting a brief part of the article, however, it is excellent, and demonstrates why we need to stop the hate purveyors in our country before they can incite more violence and as Fox News seems to advocate, a civil war:
The True THREAT Of Ann Coulter And Her Ilk
by thepen
Judging intent in a criminal case often turns on a pattern of behavior. And here the record is not friendly to Ms. Coulter’s stance. She has a HISTORY of such statements, having previously cracked these other “jokes”, targeted at those she disagrees with politically:
“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee.”
“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
“We need to execute people like (John Walker Lindh) in order to physically intimidate liberals.”
The last quote is especially significant in the climate of fear which has deliberately been inflamed by the Cheney administration and the vast right wing echo chamber that the corporate media has become. We are constantly bullied with name-calling of the most offensive sort, for the sin of having a differing political opinions. And people like Coulter well know that their physical threats are a form of intimidation. ANOTHER MUST READ ARTICLE
-William Cormier
http://justanothercoverup.com/
I am nothing more than a patriotic American that is doing whatever I can to further the cause of democracy, the rule of law, and am absolutely outraged on how the Bush administration is defying our Congress, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights! (more…)
A bitter and recalcitrant bunch led by a red state rat pack including career scoundrel and now the overly corpulent governor Mississippi Haley Barbour. The cornerstone of peckerwood nation that Barbour reigns over deserves recognition as the 2008 winner of the dubious honor of being the fattest state in America that is Mississippi, their third title in a row. Just think of the 1970’s Pittsburgh Steelers and Joe Montana era San Francisco 49ers in terms of NFL football dynasties and you get an idea at exactly where Mississippi (answer to the joke: what has four eyes and can’t see?) ranks in the obesity hall of fame. With leadership like Barbour, the Magnolia State may yet see a Bill Russell era Boston Celtics decade long stranglehold on the title were it not for the economic decay that threatens to bring widespread hunger to the Homeland. Along with Barber were Gov’s Mark Sanford of South Carolina (who did offer to pray for the people needing the aid), the oily Rick Perry of Texas and GOP rising star Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a glad-handing little twerp of a deceitful charlatan who looks like he could be a rug merchant in the Mumbai slums. After B.J.’s embarassing response to Obama’s rousing speech on Tueday night perhaps he should consider whether or not such a career change is in order, there is nothing like being butt-fucked live on national television that is the kiss of death for political aspirations, other than that there is always American Idol or Dancing With the Stars. He reminded me of a talking Pinocchio style puppet version of Bob Denver, only with a much better tan and without Gilligan’s trademark hat.
The gumption of the reactionary fascist bloc is indicative of a savage and rabid cornered rat, still stinging over the massive public rejection of last November the red-ass party is now unified in opposing the impending nationalization of the failed banking system. I say impending because despite lobbyist pressure, a vast media propaganda apparatus, right-wing think tanks that pop up like incurable herpes genital warts and a frothing at the mouth underclass looking for scapegoats because the chain reaction has already been set off and nothing is going to stop the collapse of the Ponzi economy. Game’s up jack, it ain’t ever comin’ back and the planet killer asteroid that are the derivatives aren’t even on the radar screen yet. The derivatives are the doomsday machine coming home like the prodigal son of looter capitalism turned Hannibal Lecter and with Oedipal revenge on the mind to fuck mommy up the ass and whack daddy into McNugget sized snack treats for later on when watching The O’Reilly Factor on TIVO.
The derivatives are the insanely complicated hedges, side bets, grand scale financial chicanery that should be illegal so dangerous are they. The wizards and masters of the universe like their scientific madman geniuses who build machines that could create an Earth destroying black hole have in their greed, arrogance and the smugness that could only come from having the entire political and judicial system in their pockets along with the trump card of a bought and paid for media built what capitalist hero Warren Buffett once called financial weapons of mass destruction. We aren’t even hearing about these fuckers yet and that my friends should scare the shit out of everyone. As the muckraker Upton Sinclair once remarked “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”, and the derivatives monster albeit insanely complex and convoluted will no sooner be addressed by the “experts” and “many economists” that you regularly see mentioned in financial news than the fact that the house of cards of the Ponzi economy was in the crosshairs of a category five shitstorm. Always remember that these same “experts” and “economists” failed to acknowledge the problem in the first place, choosing to mock the experts like Nouriel Roubini who dared to call bullshit and earned the nickname Dr. Doom as a result of his heresy. It was as recently as nine or so months ago that the carnival barkers and shit salesmen were saying that the economy was still “fundamentally sound”.
There will of course always be distractions and the suckers in ample supply as always will continue to bite. In the great 1980’s Bruce Willis movie Die Hard an international group of thugs invade and take over Nakatomi Plaza, holding hostages and all under the pretense of terrorism. The real truth is that the terrorist ploy was designed to provide cover for a massive robbery and in the end all the hostages would be marched up to the roof of the building which mined with C4 explosives would be blown up, killing all of the hostages and allowing the perps to escape to their beaches of choice where they could bask in the sun collecting interest on their plundered loot. What is going on now with the terrified oligarchy and the manufactured distractions from their propaganda parrots is reminiscent of exactly that.
II: Games Without Frontiers, War Without Tears
The fascist controllers are in full recognition of the rising tide of anger that is the result of economic despair brought on by a rotted and failed system. I would suggest that any who may have some degree of doubt about the coming reaping of the whirlwind her in Der Homeland only take a look around them for signs. In a couple of recent articles that I personally find relevant, Michael Klare’s A Planet On The Brink and Chris Hedges’ Bad News From America’s Top Spy. The observation that the political unrest that is currently occurring outside our little flag draped cocoon of ignorance and denial will soon be coming to America. An additional reading assignment is this article from The Guardian entitled Summer of Rage.
Hedges’ piece is particularly disturbing in that he speaks of the Obama administration’s newly minted Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dennis Blair. During testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee Blair spoke gravely of the repercussions of the financial meltdown that could lead to domestic riots, mass protests and widespread civil disobedience. Blair, a man with a bit of a history of disregard for human rights (note his involvement in East Timor attrocities) as well as the monstrous, ever intrusive police state apparatus at his disposal. The latter surveillance and repression complex that still operates with total impunity and is not subject to any form of legitimate oversight or accountability despite the change in management at the Washington whorehouse.
Mr. Hedges in his aforementioned piece also links to a U.S. Army War College report entitled Known Unknowns: Unconventional “Strategic Shocks” in Defense Strategy Development that specifically recommends that the military be prepared to respond within U.S. borders against American citizens for the coming backlash as the economic deterioration quickens and the rising tide of anger reaches the boiling point. The big boys know that the cataclysm is coming and are ready to respond to it with extreme prejudice.
In layman’s terms, the state is soon going to be weaponized by the very parasites who have sucked the country dry and sold us all out for chump change and are going to make damned sure that the rabble is put down like rabid dogs when the time comes. Now that Posse Comitatus has been rendered irrelevant and the new programs that grew out of the shadow government’s prototype REX 84, Cable Splicer and Garden Plot martial law plans are ready to be implemented. The trap is about to slam shut just at the time that a growing number of the general public is finally starting to get the point that the late, great George Carlin articulated so greatly in his epic rant about 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.
Of course the ownership society always meant one thing and one thing only, they own our asses, the game is rigged alright and the oligarchy is going to ensure that it stays rigged even if they have to call in the jackbooted thug paramilitary types, the militarized police and even the fucking military itself to protect the looters. Anyone who has read Naomi Klein’s brilliant and seminal book The Shock Doctrine knows how the game works. The oligarchy could always count on massive public ignorance as long as the lemmings watched T.V. and went shopping, then there was the element of constant fear implemented post 9/11 by the Republican neo-Nazi thugs and their tool George W. Bush (himself the grandson of a Nazi enabler). Now though with the cataclysm still only in the early innings the zeitgeist is starting to turn on the pirates of plunder. This stunning ‘joke’ by comedian Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher series is as viciously audacious as it is dangerous to those who have presided over the biggest robbery in history:
Now I am saying…I don’t think we should put all the bankers to death, just two. I mean maybe it’s not technically legal but let’s look at the upside – if we killed two random greedy pigs…I mean KILLED – like blew them up at halftime of next year’s Super Bowl or left them hanging on the big board of the New York Stock Exchange with their balls in their mouths – I think it would really make everyone else sit up and take notice.
I can guarantee you that the ruling class is taking notice and is putting their protectors on notice, the horrifying little National Guard urban warfare training exercise in Arcadia, Iowa is an example of what is really going on, largely in a cone of media enforced silence, you don’t want the cattle to know that when they reach the end of the chute that the pneumatic air-hammer is going to smash their brains into jelly prior to the slaughter. The creation of NORTHCOM and the now infamous Army Times story about battle hardened troops being brought home from Iraq are puzzle pieces that are falling into place. Rob Kall, editor of the great website Op Ed News did a piece earlier this week called Coming Soon – Riots in America?, in which he speaks of many of the same things that I am addressing in this posting but this is the truly ominous piece from Mr. Kall:
I just spoke to a friend who knows someone who is trying to get out of the military because they are training returning troops for riot control to take over US cities and he doesn’t want to be a soldier dealing with US citizens. On top of that, these returning Iraq vets are burned out and “fried” with PTSD and exhaustion. And he doesn’t want to pick up arms against his own country.
This same source says the military is setting up a separate communication system. In the military, securing or taking out communications is one of the first steps. If you are an invader, you need to bring your own communication system because you have to assume that the existing system will be destroyed or compromised.
The future, as Leonard Cohen once put it, is murder. The Army War College study that I referenced earlier is reminiscent of a British Ministry of Defense report from back in 2007 that was written about in the London Article with the title: Revolution, Flash Mobs and Brain Chips and among many other extremely troubling predictions this one particularly seems to be of an increased degree of relevance given the current breakdown in the global social order:
Marxism
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.
Pressures leading to social unrest
By 2010 more than 50% of the world’s population will be living in urban rather than rural environments, leading to social deprivation and “new instability risks”, and the growth of shanty towns. By 2035, that figure will rise to 60%. Migration will increase. Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to “inter-communal conflict” – communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.
The article is subtitled A Grim Vision of the Future, that is the future for those who happen to be on the receiving end of the grand ass-fucking of globalization. Note that the MOD report ties the social upheaval due to the anger of those robbed by the globalists to that old devil Karl Marx whose writings have provide so much ideological cover in the past to those seeking to strip mine the planet. It is especially notable that any progressive or leftist attempts to take over the power structure are always painted up like the fake devil Marx when it comes to having to justify the systematic use of torture, murder and illegal internment that is the basis for fascist capitalism. We have seen this game before, we have seen it in Latin America, Africa, across Europe and the Asian continents, we have seen it in the Arab world and now it is being used to put down the citizens of the Anglo-American empire itself who are now victims of this corrupt system of institutionalized rape and thievery. Imperialism is nothing more than murder and slavery, it has always been that way.
III: The Summer of Rage – Hijacking the Revolution
Divide and conquer is the oldest tactic in the book. This strategy is playing out right now as the guardians of the oligarchy use their bought and paid for corporate media pulpits to propagandize and deceive. Notable is FOX News’ involvement in fomenting violence and seeking to splinter and confuse the victims of the grand Ponzi scheme into attacking each other rather than the real cause of their misery. Glenn Greenwald addressed this in his recent piece entitled Fox News “war games” the coming civil war.
In a flaming Fox News extravaganza, bursting at the seams with more than the usual fascist bullshit dime store demagogue Glenn Beck (the former local Tampa Bay hack who used to specialize in staging ‘big eater’ runs prior to being called up to the hatemongering big leagues) spoke of a coming civil war. The GOP Gladio (the reference is to a famous fascist WW II stay behind operation) will be led by get this – “bubba” militias aka the dregs of WASP society out to get some payback against that Commie, Muslim ‘nigger’ in the White House, armed to the teeth and jacked up on a mixture of Jesus juice, horny goat weed and home brewed methamphetamine. The really slick and Rovian shrewdness of this dastardly black propaganda operation is the intent to fragment the growing resistance movement by attempting to peel off the anti-imperialist, anti-globalist, anti-Federal Reserve types that have most recently found a haven in the Ron Paul libertarian camp. The same sort of folks that Herr Beck had previously decried as kooks, dangerous extremists, terrorist sympathizers and anarchists back when the Bushreich was still in power.
Now Beck, the cheapjack opportunist that he is sees a golden opportunity to appease his war-freak masters and catapult the already bloated, putrescent and rotting carcass of Rush Limbaugh into a primo position as field marshal of the angry white army. It’s like the copy machine salesman turned conqueror General Bethlehem in the movie The Postman only with the moon-faced one being the fucking lunatic in this one. Beck has designs on grabbing a ride on the gravy train of think tank subsidized fascism with his national cable soapbox being the perch from which he can deliver his strident and inflammatory rhetoric and seduce the ignorant fucking bastards who are too goddamned dumb to realize WHO has really fucked them over into joining his dead-ender, zombie remnants of the armies of 16, all that remains of Republican power after a three and a half year train wreck that began at Terri Schiavo’s hospice, spilled over into a seedy hotel where Pastor Ted was smoking dicks, took a turn for the worst in the horrendous national fuckup that was the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, stalled further when Satan finally had an opening spot to call Jerry Falwell’s fat ass home and was splattered across the deflector shields with the insane, paranoid babbling of Mr. 9/11 Rudy Giuliani, the somnolent Fred Thompson and the disastrously botched McCain-Palin campaign.
The opportunity is there for a new face, and the jackboots are a very good fit on Beck, Rush is about ready to pick up his golden briefcase and spend the rest of his years stalking child prostitutes in the Dominican Republic and feeding his Oxycontin jones – the facists have grabbed that big fucker by his man tits and milked him dry. Glenn Beck is the future.
FOX’s War Games project has in addition to Beck recruited a veritable rogues gallery of racists, operatives and military industrial complex information warriors like the ‘former’ CIA agent and Osama bin Laden groupie Michael ‘kill ‘em all’Scheuer, on call Pentagon pimp Tim Strong and a gaggle of other so-called ‘experts’ who wear their fascism on their sleeves. Fox also cannily offers airtime to Congressman Paul along with trends forecasting guru and self proclaimed “political atheist” Gerald Celente (who I happen to be a big fan of) in order to launder their disinfo through a cheesecloth thin guise of semi-legitimacy. Make no mistake though, these people are the modern day heirs to the same fascist traitors who once tried to overthrow Roosevelt by recruiting former Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler to lead a coup d’etat (known as the Business Plot) against the legitimately elected government of the United States. Butler, a loyal American played coy, gathered intel and then ratted those disloyal scum out as the enemies within that they were then and their legacy remains to this day.
Glenn Beck is nothing more than a descendant to the sort of fascist pocket propagandist of which the prototype was a vicious demagogue named Father Charles Coughlin who was bought off during an economic crisis to foment violence, support the system of exploitation and lead an angry army that in all likelihood included the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of the modern day dittoheads. Now as history repeats itself in a slightly different manner as it is wont to do the economic royalists are using the same old methodology in the creation of a counter-progressive movement loyal to the oligarchy and the forces of American fascism. I excerpt the following from a 1939 pamphlet by Joseph Hansen –Father Coughlin: Fascist Demagogue:
Fascism is a combination of two things.
First, it is a wide mass movement of farmers and small businessmen who face bankruptcy, of youth denied a future under capitalism, of sections of the unemployed. All these layers of the oppressed who are seeking desperately to put their hands on the surrounding plenty become hypnotized by the silver-plated promises of a demagogue who regiments them into blindly obedient shock troops.
Secondly, it is financed and controlled by the very capitalists who above all are anxious to keep the revolutionary violence of the masses from turning against them. In America – the DuPonts, the Morgans, the Rockefellers – the Sixty Families.
To the rank and file followers of fascism, at first it seems a genuine revolutionary way out of their misery. They discover the truth too late.
The capitalists provide the money. The dictator provides the powerful slogans, the stirring names, the demagogic program, the organization, the lieutenants and the oratory.
That the fascist Republican rat-fuckers are unified in opposing the reforms of President Barack Obama, a man whose chief shortcoming is in failing to as yet realize the doomed naïve futility of a bi-partisan peace with those whose goal is the further destruction of the American working classes is likely to make him a one term wonder – if that long given the recent uptick in racism and violent threats coming from the extreme right. Charisma will only take a man so far as John F. Kennedy so brutally learned as a large chunk of his skull was blown off by the bullets of assassins, especially true when facing a relentless and driven enemy, a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy of fascist fifth columnists. The goal of the Republican neo-Nazis is nothing other than an aborted or otherwise botched Obama presidency which will then give way to a resurgence of their new dictator, this time they won’t choose a fool like George W. Bush and the full powers of a police state that the star-crossed Democrats are failing to dismantle at his or her disposal with which to utilize in a god-kissed, flag-wrapped version of a final solution. The deranged apple pie authoritarians are now plotting their resurrection, the failure to act now and with an iron will to destroy them will only result in a misery and suffering unheard of in this once great land of plenty.
The dupes who are recruited as shocktroops are always the last ones to get it and with these dopes it will be no different, they won’t realize that they have been played until they are broken and eventually targeted by those who had used them for being too dangerous – permanent revolution is not what the fascist pricks are looking for and these useful idiots will be expendable as history shows that they always have been. With reliable fascist tools like Beck and FOX revving up the shock troops, Admiral Blair openly musing about using the military in putting down the rabble and the job losses mounting could it be long before the four flushing looter capitalist oligarchs who run this shithouse put two and two together and realize that dissidents could be very easily converted into Sweeney Todd meat pies? Hell, the prototype for a pilot program already exists in China, the land of goons where greedy and amoral transnational corporations go to beta test their products for the day that they will be rolled out in Der Heimat. The gruesome and macabre Death Van story comes to mind, could it be long before these are painted up in red, white and blue, affixed with a big yellow smiley face and sent to pick YOU up?
IV: Revolutionary Moi
When the shit really doe shit the fan you can count me in with the folks who are smarter than the ones who are duped by the tinpot despots, their drooling demagogues and the ‘bubba’ militias who will be out there targeting libruls as the new Juden. Hell, bring the cocksuckers on, they will get a twelve-gauge enema form me and many others who are not too stupid to be suckered by the rulers of chumpland. Count me in with the people who pumped their fists in the air over Bill Maher’s ‘joke’ about killing two bankers. But as a sworn enemy of tyranny, fascist oppression and the looting bastard parasites that Thomas Jefferson warned of:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
And I might say…why only two?
Were George Washington, Jefferson and the rest of the revolutionary patriots who founded this country in casting off the yoke of slavery of the king and his paper merchants still around there wouldn’t be enough lampposts and trees to hang these fuckers from. Hell, let’s have a full-blown, storm the Bastille French style REVOLUTION!! Eat the rich, roll out the guillotines and let the fun begin. We can even ‘invite’ Glenn Beck, Rick Santelli and the other fascist stooges to help with the testing process. I mean, don’t we want to get the guillotine settings just right in regards to calibrating the blade drop for maximum efficiency before we get to the filthy looters themselves? Shit, why not ‘invite’ ALL of the mouthpieces for the four-flushing bastards who have destroyed this country and now are trying to implement their police state to ‘blow the roof’ while they slither off to Dubai or some other refuge with no extradition treaty? They hanged Julius Steicher at Nuremberg didn’t they? Did he really ever personally kill any Jews or did his propaganda rag Der Stürmer only make him an accomplice to the mass murders? Shit, Charles Manson killed fewer people than George W. Bush and one is on spending his fourth decade on death row while the other is already racking up future appearances on the speaking circuit.
What the fuck?
I will close now with this, I am not exactly sure of where exactly where it came from but I really like it:
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
1: SOAP
2: BALLOT
3: JURY
4: AMMO
Please Use in that order
(editor’s note, be sure to stockpile #4)
This is a revolution call, a call to arms and the scourging of the fascists, the conniving banksters and the oligarchy that has declared war on US, the American people. Heed this call and we can reclaim our legacy as a free people as well as our cherished birthright –
LIBERTY
By Ed Encho
Been laying low for awhile and working on bigger and better things but I just have to get past this burr up my ass on the latest polls that have the Mulatto Miracle on the ropes as a result of the jump starting of hostilities with the Russkies along with all other manner of nonsensical horseshit designed to pander to the morons in this dumbest fucking country in the history of humanity.
This was a reply to a post that I did on another blog that expresses my utter and complete contempt for a most contemptible mass media and their ridiculous fucking polls.
Fascist or Fascist Lite – you be the judge!
Just like those fucking tests that they do in your grocery store between frozen shit and the new and improved frozen shit.
Just a fuckin’ rant folks….
RE – Other than Sham Polls…
Like this one because if you read between the lines the polled are those who are at home sitting on their asses in front of their beloved electronic god in the living room vs. the more savvy and informed who choose not to rot in front of their TV you can see that the numbers are skewed and a scam as well.
Now WHY is this happening NOW
A cynic like myself smells a Clintonist overthrow at the Denver Convention next week by portraying Jesus Obama as unelectable – at the very least it is pressure for the V.P. slot and we all know how well that worked out for LBJ.
On the other hand, a lot of folks including myself are pissed as hell at Mr. Obama for his feckless pandering – screw the nauseating display of him prostrating himself in front of AIPAC the vomit reflex was triggered during that false prophet Rick Warren’s travelling salvation show last week – which has turned off those of us who are very serious about this change thing and aren’t going to be hornswoggled by some finely attired frontman for the looter capitalist empire.
Now here is the funny thing, an Obama advance research operative called me at home tonight asking me what I thought.
-I said that while I have ALWAYS been a registered independent I have always voted Democrat with the exception of Ross Perot in 96.
-I said that I am furious over busting my ass to elect Democrats in 2006 only to go Judas and refuse to live up to their implied contract in ending the war and holding the war criminals accountable.
-I told her that the minute that St. Barack threw Reverend Wright under the bus for telling the truth (although it could have been expressed better) that I smelled the big con coming again.
-And finally I said that my vote will NOT go to any Democrat from now until hell freezes over until that corrupt lie of an opposition party stands up for working class Americans again.
There was a long and uncomfortable silence on the other end of the phone and then I said please feel free to call back in October.
The polls lie as badly as the charlatans that the two party oligarchy trots out as legitimate choices.
UPDATED
RE: Frick and Frack aka Obama and McCain
They remind me of that old commercial for chicken mcnuggets or something done by a competitor (Wendy’s?) – pieces are pieces and parts are parts. Obama and McCain are interchangible ass clowns who will do nothing whatsoever to change the course of a disastrous foreign policy that now incredibly has the U.S. on a collision course with Russia who does have nukes and a shitload of them.
I defended Obama against that filthy whore Hillary Rodham Clinton against the protestations of others as well as their good advice at the time of people not as naive as I to believe that there was enough of a functional system left that it could still be changed through traditional means – I was wrong.
The Reverend Wright thing put a burr up my ass because every damned thing that the man said was spot on and the full pressure of the pocket media kingmakers was brought down on Mr. Obama including a brutal interview on Press the Meat by the prematurely deceased courtier and stooge Tim Russert. Obama could have used it as an opening to address the issues of American imperialism, racism, state sanctioned medical experimentation on blacks (see Tuskegee) and the blowback of 9/11 (which I am a skeptic of because I still believe that it was a highly coordinated Edward Luttwak style coup d’etat undertaken by a multi-national cadre of professionals). But he caved
Then there was the putting on of that stupid fucking beanie and grovelling at the feet of those extremist right wing pigs in Israel to prove that he was trustworthy enough to continue to turn a blind eye to their monstrous human rights violations, their infiltration of the U.S. government for the purpose of espionage and blackmail and their ongoing abuse of The Holocaust as justification to wage their own genocidal campaigns.
FISA was what really soured me on the Magic Mulatto, the Democrats have NO intention whatsoever of restoring the rule of law to the land or our civil liberties and the cowardly cave in on Bush’s illegal spying (to GWB’s credit it was going on long before he arrived though through ECHELON and Main Core)and the granting of Telecom immunity for their crimes.
There have been a myriad of other things as well but the disgusting suckfest in front of the Raptureheads and misguided knuckledraggers who hate for Jesus at that fucking moronic false prophet Rick Warren’s goat barn was the final straw.
Fuck them all man, this thing is too far gone to be saved and I no longer advocate even participating in the con game by voting – it is a waste of time and bestows the aura of legitimacy on a corrupt lie of a process.
Now back to the transcription dungeon, I have about a hundred and a half pages of the Oglesby book to go but also am working on what I hope to be a dynamite piece on the surveillance state – can’t give too many details now though.
Just my two cents over the Morning Cup O’ Joe
EE
Onward to West Virginia! After duping fewer of the “white niggers” in the Hoosier state into believing that she is some sort of brawling, beer drinking, elbow wrestling, blue collar ‘one of them’ the bitter and recalcitrant monster that is Hillary Rodham-Clinton moves the goalposts one more time. The non-elitist who just happens to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of at least $ 109 million dug around in the sofa cushions in order to lend her never ending crusade another $ 6 million and change in order to remain solvent while the operatives work their chicanery and try to strong arm, sweet talk, cajole and bribe those superdelegates into getting with the fucking program and throwing in the Clinton restoration – when will those fuckers get it that Tracy Flick 2008 is entitled to the presidency goddammit?
The encouraging thing about the narrow Clinton ‘win’ in Indiana is that there seems to be a limit to the stupidity of at least enough of the people to have not bitten on the race baiting, the demagoguery and that idiotic fucking suspension of the gas tax over the summer as some sort of band aid on the sucking chest wound of the average American’s budget courtesy of the economic disaster brought on by a quarter century of deregulation, fucked up trade policies, the enshrinement of greed as the highest possible virtue (the giveaway on this was that television show where people actually competed for the honor of licking Donald Trump’s balls) and a flood of easy credit that unregulated Wall Street ivory tower ‘banking’ houses (casinos is a more appropriate word) then packaged into toxic debt instruments and sold to suckers worldwide. As the old saying goes ‘if something appears to be too good to be true then it is too good to be true’ or something along those lines and it was only a matter of time until the music stopped and now millions of saps who bought into the big con have suddenly discovered that they have no chairs.
American idiots can only blame themselves for being dumb enough to be swindled into ignoring reality and their own economic self interests in order to vote for the most dumb and superficial reasons while keeping their heads in the sand and the home equity credit lines open to buy all of the trinkets and baubles necessary for them to still go to bed at night miserable, unfulfilled and deeper in debt. I find it ironic that the degenerate pigman Rush Limbaugh is throwing out a rotator cuff patting himself on the back for inducing his army of angry idiots to crossover and vote for Clinton in the obviously Animal House inspired “Operation Chaos” that have given the bitter old bitties who see Hillary as their own personal version of Taarna the avenger enough backup to keep Obama on the ropes until the dirt diggers can find a big enough chunk of kryptonite to vanquish him once and for all. Limbaugh, the human (and I use that term very loosely) version of the giant gas filled pig balloon that Pink Floyd used as a prop during shows and who is a similar icon for the fascist Republican party is largely responsible for today’s economic misery that will only continue unabated under the neocon dream of McClinton. After all, it was his modern day Father Coughlin propaganda that harnessed the anger and misery of the economic diaspora that began to emerge during the 80s when Reagan’s war on the middle class was kicking into high gear with the farm crisis and the closing of the mills. The heartland and the rust belt were the first to be thrust upon the alter of greed for sacrifice to the gods of Milton Friedman style voodoo economics and the down on his luck loser Limbaugh was discovered and recruited to propagandize the hurt, scorned and angry to scapegoat minorities and liberals for their deteriorating lives.
Limbaugh’s act worked to perfection to the extent there the lazy, mainstream media public relations flacks who pass themselves as legitimate journalists in this sorry era of the fucked and dumb actually feel comfortable in citing him as some sort of legitimate public figure to be respected and quoted. Well, John Wayne Gacy once had a similar aura of respectability and we all know how that ended up so perhaps there is at least some hope that the drug addled, thrice divorced, multi-millionaire grand poobah of white populist propaganda will soon come crashing down as well. His insertion of himself into the perennially clueless and hapless Democratic party primary season of no end may be the petard upon which his mammoth carcass is finally hoisted. People start to look for different victims when gas is approaching four dollars a gallon, their overpriced homes are in pre-foreclosure, speculators driving up food prices make it harder to put food on the family and jobs are being sent by the thousands to whatever third world shithole has the cheapest slave labor gulag system. The fingers of blame are very slowly starting to be pointed upwards as indolent Americans begin to realize that the ultra rich four flushing asshole class that Limbaugh works for are the ones to blame for their misery and not the brown menace.
The failure of what was perceived to be the bread and butter of the massively overhyped by both the multi-millionaire Clintons and the Republican looter establishment Reverend Wright race card is by all indications from Indiana going up like a flaming bag of dogshit on the castle doorstep. When race baiting and fear mongering no longer work then the establishment is in big time trouble. It’s hard to blame the black man for everything during those long cold winters when the furniture is being burned for heat and the family pets begin to look like a cheap way to eat for a few days. Now I am not naïve enough to think that the American sheeple will ever be able to muster up enough gumption for a full fledged peasant revolt but their not being duped by the standard horseshit that politicians shovel out in order to distract and keep from talking about the real issues is at the very least a flicker of light in the darkness. That Clinton didn’t win Indiana by at least 30 points given the massive ignorant hick demographic and the temporary loan of battalions of Limbaugh’s angry army of dittohead drones proves that things just might be different this time and that would indeed strike deeply at the very heart of the oligarchy. Even that philandering little fascist dwarf Newt Gingrich is freaking out that the GOP mojo is no longer working.
So onward march the Hillemmings, a proxy army to defend the status quo who have much in common with their newfound brethren on loan from Lord Limbaugh, towards West Virginia, towards the edge of the abyss and with any luck ultimately off of the edge of the cliff.
By Ed Encho