The Land of "Fuck You, I Got Mine"

Game...Set...Match!! The Pigs Win Again!! Listen though, it's only the second quarter and they are going to be running up the score, it's like Warden Rudolph Hazen in The Longest Yard, after he has bullied rebel Paul Crewe into shaving points so that the prison guards can win against the inspired cons when he hisses to Captain Knauer to "inflict as much physical punishment on the prisoners as humanly possible" once there was a 21 point lead. Well here we are in that great big prison known as Murka, Goldman Sachs, The Federal Reserve and the Wall Street Oligarchs are Warden Hazen and we are now getting our asses kicked and kicked brutally.

Isn't that the way that it always goes in the Land of Fuck You I Got Mine?

I mean what kind of saps were we to think that we could actually change things through the existing and thoroughly corrupted system? We were played for chumps once the Democrats had decided that the nascent Obama change movement had to be brutally put down, smashed into a billion pieces before the oligarchy itself was threatened. But of course that is making the assumption that Obama wasn't a fraud from the get go, perhaps he was well intentioned but the second that the filthy little weasel Rahm Emanuel was annoited as his gatekeeper the fix was in and the foul-mouthed ballet dancing vermin would make sure that there would be nothing but status quo with him in charge of the keys to the feeding trough. As the Clintonite Emanuel so proudly proclaimed, "Never let a good crisis go to waste" and true to his word he has used the financial cataclysm to feather his nest by building a government protection racked for cheats, scoundrels, money grubbers, schemers, TARP fund welshers, four-flushing paper dealers and the rest of the scum of the earth. Coming next is the betrayal on health care reform, pocket man Harry Reid will ensure that no meaningful change that threatens the money of the powerful is EVER seriously debated by his Senate den of iniquity.

The Republicans are coming back too, emboldened and ready to use their bread and butter play of firing up the white trash and blaming it all on the darkie in the White House but shit, what difference does it really make anymore? Both parties are thoroughly corrupted by money and as much as I hate to admit it I am actually starting to miss George W. Bush - at least then we knew who the enemy is. Anyway, to close this short morning rant I am posting this wonderful little dittie from a piece by Darryl Robert Schoon over at Dollar Collapse called Goldman Sachs: A Vampire on the Jugular of America - check out the entire thing but I found this particularly amusing:

GOLDMAN SACHS -THE KING PIMP OF WALL STREET

Goldman Sachs is today the pre-eminent paper player in today’s paper markets, the king pimp of capitalism, Wall Street’s equivalent of Harlem’s fabled players of the past who lived opulently off the considerable labors of female prostitutes.

But the pimps on Wall Street have done Harlem’s pimps one better. Goldman Sachs and their fellow pimps benefit not just from the labor of women but from the labor of men as well.

The following is dedicated to the hard-working men and women of America:


Goldman Sachs’s your pimp

Who’s put America on the street

You do the bidding of Wall Street

Paying their bonuses and their keep



The bankers get your money

No matter what you say

Then they cut your credit

And charge you more for it each day



What’s a two-bit whore to do?

Complain to the pimp who’s pimping you?

What’s a two-bit whore to do?

Complain to the pimp who’s pimping you?



The bankers print your money

And charge you while they do

But the bankers at the Federal Reserve

Are no more Federal than me ‘n you



You may not like the pay

And the streets are awfully bad

But you’re gonna keep getting worked to death

‘til you know that you’ve been had



What’s a two-bit whore to do?

Complain to the pimp who’s pimping you?

What’s a two-bit whore to do?

Complain to the pimp who’s pimping you?


When Wall Street pimps take their cut of America’s money, they’re not alone. Without the US government, the pimps of Wall Street couldn’t do you like they do. There are two hands in your pockets—and they’re not yours.

With job losses mounting and families still needing to eat keep this in mind when y'all are out there pimping off your wives and children just like they do in the third world.

God Bless Murka!!!

Greedy Pigs Launch Counter Offensive

Having brought our reality show TV prez to heel, stolen trillions from the taxpayers through their moles in the government and fat and happy from their record bonuses the evil empire that is Goldman Sachs is now fighting back. Bloomberg announced that Wall Street (aka Goldman Sachs) has enlisted two lackeys of the Frankenstein of financial chicanery Hank Paulson to take their propaganda and shove it down the throats of the American sheeple. The timing is a bit off though and so is their overestimation of the ability of the American Idiots to disengage from their electronic crackpipes, Whacko Jacko kicked the bucket yesterday so a lot of money for this sewage could be saved - but hey, it's mostly TARP mad money anyway ain't it. Anyway, while the corporate media vultures are picking the meat from Jacko's still warm corpse the story that I refer to is Wall Street Sets Campaign on Populist Overreaction. Seems like the anger directed at AIG's plundering and Jim Cramer and CNBC's lies has the financial oligarchs a bit restive although that anger has been tamped down by the three months running Green Shoots public relations campaign.

Here is an excerpt from the Bloomberg piece:

June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Wall Street’s largest trade group has started a campaign to counter the “populist” backlash against bankers, enlisting two former aides to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to spearhead the effort.

In memos of confidential meetings with top financial executives, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association said it began this month the “execution phase” of the operation, which pledges to “embrace change” and accountability. The plan targets policy makers and the media in New York, London, Washington and Brussels and calls for a “city-by-city, grass roots” approach.

The securities industry “must be perceived as part of the solution, which will allow it to better defend against populist overreaction,” the documents, prepared for a June 17 meeting of SIFMA’s board, said.

The board meeting minutes and staff-written papers, obtained by Bloomberg News, outline the program crafted by polling, lobbying and public relations companies paid at least $85,000 a month. The memos provide a glimpse, in often candid language, into how Wall Street is grappling with its pariah status.

“It is imperative that in this historic period of reform, the industry be recognized as playing a positive role in seeking change and providing solutions to the problems we face,” one of the documents said. “There is currently widespread skepticism about the industry’s commitment to this needed change.”

In other words LIES...LIES..LIES to lure the suckers back into the casinos that were propped up by the Pope of Hope rather than the serious structural problems that caused the implosion to occur be corrected. What Goldman Sachs did is best explained by Matt Taibbi in his latest piece from Alternet Suck On Our Yachts.

This isn't really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn't have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald's and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We're eating it, they're counting the money.

That is the best explanation of the swindlers' financial alchemy that I have ever seen and one that even 200 million Michael Jackson mourners could understand. Now as I stated in a post that I did last week about the fascination over Iran's phony 'Green Revolution' (Green shoots, Green Revolution.....yada fucking yada, you would think that for as much money as they are paid that the public relations shops would at least have some originality) that Americans love a good revolution as long as they don't actually have to arise off of their sofas, put down their remotes and participate. What Goldman Sachs, the Great Satan has done to us all should have millions of pitchfork and torch bearing taxpayers marching on Wall Street demanding mass lynchings. They certainly have time on their hands now that they are fucking unemployed and homeless.

But American capacity for outrage is limited to silly wedge issues, who was it that once said that he could hire half of the working class to kill the other half. Anyway, in wrapping up I want to bring attention to this delightful little piece from the foreign press on what our vastly more sophisticated European cousins are capable of when ripped off by the greedmongers.

German pensioners ‘kidnap and torture their investment adviser’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6565206.ece

A group of well-to-do pensioners who lost their savings in the credit crunch staged an arthritic revenge attack and held their terrified financial adviser to ransom, prosecutors said yesterday.

The alleged kidnapping is the latest example of what is being dubbed “silver crime” — the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world.

“As I was letting myself into my front door I was assaulted from behind and hit hard,” the financial adviser James Amburn, a 56-year-old German-American, said. “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. I thought I was a dead man.”

He was freed by 40 heavily armed policemen from the counter-terrorist unit last Saturday. The frightened consultant was in his underwear, his body lacerated by wounds allegedly inflicted by angry pensioners.

It appears that two couples had entrusted Mr Amburn’s investment company with €2.4 million (£2 million), which he ploughed into Florida’s boom-and-bust property market. The properties became forfeit during the sub-prime mortgage crisis but the couples wanted their money back.

After being bundled into the boot of an Audi in the west German town of Speyer, Mr Amburn was driven southwards to Chieming, close to the Austrian border, where one of the couples Roland K, and his wife, Sieglinde, 79, had a holiday home.

The financial adviser claims he was held there in a cellar for four days almost naked, fed soup twice a day and beaten. Another couple, Gerhard F, 63, and his wife, Iris, 66, both retired doctors, allegedly helped to torture the prisoner.

“I was beaten. They threatened again and again to kill me,” Mr Amburn said. At least two of his ribs were fractured.

Mr Amburn says he tried to escape once when he was permitted to smoke in the garden. He scaled the wall and ran though the rain in his underpants calling for help.

The pensioners pursued him in their car, shouting: “Stop that man! He’s a burglar!” Two locals pinned him to the pavement and he was taken back to the cellar, where he claims he received another beating.

The investment consultant’s break came when he was allowed to send a fax to a Swiss bank asking for the transfer of the funds demanded by the gang.

On the fax he pretended to refer to call options and to insurance policies (the German word for a financial policy is police). This came out as “call.pol-ice.”

They didn’t notice it but someone at the bank was bright enough to spot it,” Mr Amburn said.

The pensioners are under arrest on suspicion of deprivation of liberty, torture and inflicting grievous bodily harm. These charges carry a maximum of 15 years in prison.

“They were angry because they invested money in propertites in Florida and he lost it all,” Volker Ziegler, chief public prosecutor in Traunstein, said.

The numbers of attacks by elderly people had been rising fast even before the financial crisis hit savings. A three-man gang of pensioners is serving long jail terms for mounting 14 bank robberies across Germany to boost their retirement funds.

Rudolf Richter and brothers Wilfried and Lothar Ackermann were entitled only to modest state pensions of between €100 and €400 a month.

They became enraged by the size of bankers’ bonuses and over nine years — ending in their arrest in 2005 — netted more than €1.3 million. Police recovered only half that sum.

“It is unbelievable how easy it is to rob a bank,” Wilfried Ackermann, 73, boasted during the trial. The men held carrots in their pockets pretending that they had pistols.

On one of the raids Richter, 74, slipped on an icy pavement, dropped the loot and had to be carried to the getaway car.

I can't happen here.

Crack Ho Economics

Let's get one thing straight right out of the gates - Wall Street is the enemy of America. These financial terrorists continue to ravage the country, yesterday's announcement of February job losses of nearly 700,000 brought a spike in stock prices, another mainline hit to the crack ho economy. With the misery mounting the Obama administration and the entrenched Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve bandits who really run the system are mounting a withering counter attack on any plans to dismantle the existing system of avarice by watering down the stimulus (an ass fucking with a reacharound) package and calling in the markers with all of their whores in Congress and the media to preserve the existing spoils system. When the sock puppet occupant of the White House, our shining new Jesus even emerges as a shill for Wall Street you can rest assured that the fix is in and the only change that you will be getting is chump change.

It now appears that the naysayers were right. While the new frontman and his gaggle of recycled Clintonistas and Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve moneychangers are asking for austerity from everyone else but the pigs on Wall Street continue to have their piggie troughs filled with more and more stolen loot. I have heard a lot of stuff on how this is just another opportunity for the oligarchy to bust everyone else and then consolidate. This sadly seems to be the case and once the entire middle class has been butt-fucked into bankruptcy the malefactors of great wealth are going to swoop in to buy up everything for pennies on the dollar.

Some people are saying that this is only another step towards the ‘one world government’ that has always been discussed by the paranoid elements of the far right as a communist or socialist takeover. They are wrong though, the driving force behind this would be financial kingpins of capitalism and the one world system would be corporate fascism.

The Obama administration is not going to reign in either the bankers (who really run this system) or to stop the wars of imperialism, the population will be beggared and the police state brought in to put down the rabble so that the big con goes on.

I don’t know if anyone has ever ever heard of Carroll Quigley but you need to check out what he says on finance capitalism and global banker control – it’s too complex to go into at lenght right now but is worthwhile background information. A good read is a post by blogger Tocque Deville entitled History: How the U.S. Government Was Overthrown in Three Easy Steps.

There is no intention of providing Americans with anything even remotely resembling real choices in their political system, ‘leaders’ and government and this was stated by Professor Quigley in his outstanding and largely obscure book Tragedy and Hope which revealed the way that the system really worked in regards to the financial elite and the secretive round table groups who represent the puppeteers for the easily blackmailed, controlled and greedheaded arrogant buffoons who are the political actors who are trotted out for public consumption. Quigley in the extensive research that he did on the global elite states:

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.

And…

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

And…

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.

So the game is rigged already, it is supposed to be rigged and the only question is whether this financial catastrophe was set up or was being set up and was then triggered prematurely through greed, incompetence and the entire monstrosity just becoming unsustainable.

And the one-eyed idiot, Gordon Brown has just appeared before Congress to continue to push for the globalist dominination, the shock doctrine writ large, the grandest robbery in history. His editorial for the London Times on March 1st shows that the future is global consolidation and a new feudalism.

The Great American Hairshirt

Roosevelt is DEAD! His policies may live on, but we’re in the process of doing something about that as well

-Rush Hudson Limbaugh III

A while back at my local grocery store I noticed that there was a big sign with red letters taped to the front of the service desk that emphatically stated: WE NO LONGER ACCEPT ROLLED CHANGE. Sad to think that things are now so bad inflation wise that people are having to pay for food using scavenged rolls of pennies but some enterprising genius is going around down here in Florida putting in machines that convert such coinage to an easy to debit card – for a fee of course. Of course the official government line is that inflation is not a problem but most lies are of course comprised of half-truths mixed with outright lies and and one of the great lies is that core inflation doesn’t include either food or energy costs, it's right up there with capitalism and democracy being interchangable.

People are having to dig deeper these days, much deeper now that oil prices are setting records, a gallon of milk is even more than a gallon of gas and the dollar is falling faster than the test objects for Newton’s law of gravity. The financial sector has been gamed to the point of collapse by the economic chicanery of the same sort of scoundrels who George Washington once referred to as a “squadron of corrupt paper dealers" and Frankin D. Roosevelt called out the same unscrupulous bandits as “economic royalists”. There are of course other more profane things we can call them the pack of greed-headed traitors who sold out America for chump change like unscrupulous slumlords bleeding a depressed property before dumping it to find more suckers to leech off of but it was America’s delusional worship of such rapacious, monstrous psychopaths that allowed the grand fucking to occur.

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

The seeds have been sown and very soon we will be reaping the whirlwind for a quarter century of disastrously corrupt and fundamentally flawed neoliberal economic philosophy that rode in on the coattails of the great Ronald Reagan, or maybe it was the opposite but make no mistake, the average American will be the one left holding the proverbial flaming bag of dogshit while the looters laugh all the way to their offshore tax shelters and foreign banks. Americans have been indoctrinated to blame themselves for their lack of wealth and to view the poor as lazy lepers and the wealthy as superior human beings.

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


And just who are our national role models and heroes? Who is there that Americans should hold in the highest of esteem? Brittney and Lindsay and Tomkat and the Donald and Paris don’t do it. Our history has been scrubbed and sanitized by the economic royalists and the fascists to eliminate any mention of true heroes of the working class and of a real democratic society. The vast majority of those compliant little consumers that have for too long been churned out by a starved for funds and battered into submission school public school system that has been turned into a nationwide network of drone factories (one of the only things that we mass produce in America anymore) have never heard of those who sacrificed for those things that came to be taken to granted to the point where they are now being taken away.

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

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

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

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

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

And they have run their game plan to perfection, here is a snippet of the transcript of a recent Democracy Now interview with economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Krugman, can you talk -- I mean, in your book, The Conscience of a Liberal, you’re talking about the growth of the whole neoconservative movement over the years. Give us some historical context here and in parallel with the growth of the economic disparity between rich and poor.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah. A big discovery I made in doing the research for Conscience of a Liberal is that politics has actually led the economics. It’s not that we evolved into a new Gilded Age and we developed a right wing to support that. It’s that we developed a right wing that wanted a new Gilded Age, and they got it. Really, you know, a lot of this goes back -- there was always a back -- there were always people who hated FDR, who hated the New Deal, hated Social Security, but in the ’50s, they couldn’t get anywhere. Eisenhower once wrote a letter to his brother saying that this is a tiny minority and they are stupid.

But in the ’60s, they found their feet. Goldwater is actually less of a -- I mean, he seized the Republican nomination, but much more important is first Reagan is the first central figure, because he found a way to exploit, found a rhetoric to exploit the white backlash against civil rights without actually being explicitly racist. So he talked about welfare queens driving Cadillacs. He talked about welfare cheats. He talked about -- but he became governor of California largely by campaigning against the fair housing law. Nixon found the tactics. Nixon -- you know, the dirty tricks, and it’s amazing how many, not just the sort of legacy, but actually the people of the Bush administration are coming from the Nixon years. I mean, Roger Ailes of Fox News was Nixon’s media adviser, right? They found these tactics. They found the moneyed interests wanted -- supported the takeover of the Republican Party by people who really wanted to roll back as much of the New Deal as they could, but they were able to win elections by exploiting other issues, primarily race. And they were able to achieve about twenty-five years of political dominance in this country, largely by flipping the South and, to a certain extent, winning over, you know, the sort of Reagan Democrats in the North who were really upset about what amounts to the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. It’s an extraordinary story.

And they were able to transform the way -- look, my favorite example is just how much politics has mattered. We think of the decline of the union movement, which has all kinds of consequences, as being something -- well, you know, the world economy changed and unions just didn’t have a place anymore. But that’s actually not true. Every place else in the advanced world, unions are still a powerful force. In the 1960s, Canada and the United States had the same rate of unionization. Canada still has about the same rate of unionization that it had in the 1960s. In the United States, the movement has been -- you know, is a shadow of its former self, and that’s because of union busting, which was made possible by a permissive political environment, Ronal Reagan firing the air traffic controllers. The National Labor Relations Board turning hostile toward union organizers creates the possibility for massive union busting, and that, not the global economy, is why we are what we are.

A Time For Heroes

In an era of institutional decay wrought by a coordinated unrelenting assault on America by the looter ideology of the cult of Milton Friedman and the symbiotic relationship with the worst sort of domestic fascists it is imperative that heroes are either remembered or created to provide inspiration for a working class that has been herded into the chute by Judas goats before the kill shot is delivered. The very term heroes has been so cheapened and tarnished by constant invocation to serve the political needs of the corrupt, treasonous and morally devoid charlatans who run the scam and use it to describe everyone from victims of terrorism to the always expediently exploited troops so it also needs to be rescued and returned to it’s rightful place in the American lexicon. A hero is a person of morality, achievements and noble qualities, one who often sacrifices his/her own reputation or safety in order to pursue that which is right and those things that truly matter. It is time to reclaim history from the oligarchs, the looters and the blood barters and to recognize those from the past who took stands against power no matter how badly that the deck was stacked against them. They often suffered greatly but their cause prevailed and for a time, until the consolidated effort by a highly organized and deep pocketed fascist fifth column chipped away at progressive victories that built America into the envy of the world they made life better for subsequent generations who have now forgotten them. It is up to us, me and you dear reader to work together to return hope for positive change to this great country. It doesn’t take much, just a bit of courage, some knowledge on how things really work, a bit of a chip on your shoulder and a burning desire to set things right again.

But heroes aren’t limited to only those who achieved or paid the most, they include all who took a stand against injustice. They are largely anonymous but they numbered in the thousands if not millions. Their mettle is lacking in an America gone fascist and populated by fearful sheeple and hateful lemmings. While the economic diaspora of the looting spree and the ravages of globalization number in the millions there is no unity, no organization and until there is quite frankly there is little hope. It is up to us all to be heroes even if as David Bowie once sang “just for one day” and to educate, inform, prop up and instill some self-esteem in others. We must all work together in order to cast off the hairshirt and to take back that which has been stolen from us.

I am going to close with a poem by Marge Piercy called "Each Day One More" -


What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can't walk, can't remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can't stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.