Showing posts with label Idiot Nation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idiot Nation. Show all posts

3.31.2011

Money Doesn't Talk: It Swears



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


- Janwillem van de Wetering


Money doesn't talk, it swears


-Bob Dylan


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

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

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

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

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

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





Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you

-Bob Dylan

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


7.03.2010

Fourth of July on the Great American Lemming Farm



All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.


-I. F. Stone

Greetings to all you fellow prisoners trapped amongst the world's largest lemming colony as the ship of fools continues to take on water, oily water that is.  Encho checking in, been ahwile since I have had the motivation to put anything out but as the man once sang, "the times they are a changing". It's been a nice form of hiatus and semi-retirement but given the sad state of affairs I feel that it's time to get off of the bench and back into the game. I felt that a perfect time to relaunch would be flag-suckers weekend, the fetid stench of the hot air that will be belched out by Becked up faux patriots screwing up their misdirected outrage at the war criminal Obama government for all of the wrong reasons is in the air. The Fourth of July always brings out the biggest turds in the cesspool where they desecrate their beloved stars and stripes by wrapping their corpulent and idiotic carcasses in cheap Chinese made clothing adorned with it, overloading their red, white and blue picnic plates with potato salad, beans and fatty meats and flying it in front of profit starved retail outlets to lure the already maxed out consumers (Jesus, what an inhuman term) into their emporiums of marked-up, sweatshop produced wares. The Fourth has taken on an especially loathsome and menacing nature in 2010 that has been metastasizing like a cancer through this sickened society since the American Reichstag fire of September 11, 2001 and has confirmed for all time the words of Sinclair Lewis about fascism being delivered wrapped in the flag. The Teabaggers will be out in force this weekend, armed to the teeth and plotting their revolution or to those who are knowledgable of history their American Gladio. They will bray for the blood of the hated Muslims, Commies and Libruls [sic] in between stuffing food into their rancid pieholes, belching beer and singing God Bless America. That much is a given.

Yes, my friends, I have been away far too long and much has gone on that I have not been on record about, the one thing in Der Heimat that is consistent is the decline, the descent into morbid obesity, indolence, wrath and just plain dumbness has if anything since that helicopter hauled away George W. Bush like so much garbage only gained momentum. By now we can all see that Barack Obama is a fraud, an amateur, a pussy and a man in over his head. In the abysmal failure to use a substantial Democratic Congressional majority to produce anything even remotely resembling meaningful change OBushma will go down as one of history's greatest fuckups, with a full head of steam coming out of the 2008 election, a nation hungering for a new direction after the ruination of the Bushreich and a world desperate for the United States to once again become a moral (more accurately a less trenchant bully) example the inexperienced usurper blew it. With the appoint of the sleazy operator Rahm Emanuel as the new Chief of Staff it was apparent early on that in reality, all that really happened is that the great whorehouse at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a bit of cosmetic cleaning and a new shingle that said "UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT", the fucking would of course go on as it always does in the land of fuck you I got mine.







WAGING THE GOOD WAR FOR THE RIGHT REASONS



Obama's regime has been an abject catastrophe, to such a degree that even a return of Bush and Cheney would be an improvement. In short order the feckless Obama administration and the even more pathetic Harry Reid led Senate were terrorized into capitulation by mobs of FOX sponsored teabagger brownshirts that descended enmasse to shriek incoherently at town hall meetings to ensure that any sort of health care reform would be D.O.A. The final bill was a mockery, a thinly concealed bailout of the rapacious insurance ghouls and the mandate by the state to use government power to force busted out Americans to purchase shitty overpriced coverage from the same diseased pigfuckers responsible for the worst health care system in the industrialized world. Obama followed up that gem with his escalation of the long since lost Afghanistan occupation, getting suckered into that murderous, money sucking black hole under the ludicrous premise that it was the "good war". With the recently ugly cashiering of General Stanley McChrystal, Obama's own hand-picked assassin over comments made in a Rolling Stone magazine expose that put a bug up the Commander in Chief's ass for reasons that I am still unable to figure out after reading the damned thing twice the damned war has so obviously been lost that even an assclown like RNC Chairman Michael Steele is able to slime out from under whatever lesbian bondage club's bar that he has been hiding under and calling out Obama for this growing mega-clusterfuck that is truthfully his war of choice. Obama is nothing more than Lyndon Baines Johnson without the progressive social agenda and the Afghanistan disaster will be his Waterloo.



"We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."


-General Stanley McChrystal


Back to the McChrystal firing. I realize that Stan da Man is a murderer, a hired thug and actively participated in the coverup of the murder ot Pat Tillman (if not carrying out the command of the assassination of the man who would prove to be a very embarassing voice against the wars were he allowed to return home) for which he should have been busted down to buck private and sent to Leavenworth over, however, the entire uproar over the Rolling Stone piece has a funny smell to it. Notice how nearly all of the establishment pundits and assorted press plants, mockingbirds and highly paid propagandist shithacks were universally down with it, it was something much more serious than mocking the morons running the war, including Joe "Bite Me" Biden, Bibi's personal footstool. McChrystal's guys were pretty much spot on from what I read but the most serious transgressions would appear to be that McChrystal had dialed down the rules of engagement in order to keep the civilian death toll down. Not popular with our trigger happy little green 'heroes' who want blood, most specifically the blood of Muslims given the presence of so many murderous 'Christian' fascist fanatics in the U.S. military to fight the new crusades. I seem to recall from back when I was running with the phonies on the 'left' that there was a lot of weeping and gnashing of the teeth tht General McChrystal was GASP an ascetic zealot but it would seem like the Rolling Stone article blows that little piece of agitprop away as so much horseshit, were he an ascetic he wouldn't be getting fucking shitfaced drunk and then cutting loose in the presence of a reporter who was not on the official dole. According to some sources he banned FOX News from his headquarters, a cardinal sin for the drooling war freak neocons and according to another story was a flaming librul [sic] who was tolerant towards gays.  McChrystal also criticized the use of mercenaries, a big no-no in the third term of the Bush administration, especially when Blackwater/Xe just scored a big contract to conduct their unaccountable black ops duties in Afghanistan. It would seem like all of this would already had the general on the shitlist but the unspeakable blasphemy that the war was lost is what I truly suspect ultimately did him in. McChrystal was on record as referring to the territory of Marjah as a "bleeding ulcer", eerily similar to remarks made by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who called Afghanistan a "bleeding wound" as it became increasingly apparent that it was sticking a fork in the ass of his Empire.





ENTER GENERAL WINSTON WOLF


Are we any smarter than the Russians who never recovered from their disastrous Afghan misadventures? It would seem not with Obushma now having to turn to the sainted General David Petraeus to engineer a similar propaganda campaign to the now famous SURGE that turned the Iraq debacle from chicken shit into chicken salad in the eyes of the chronically misinformend and celebrity infatuated American sheeple. We may not be any smarter but thanks to the cancer that is American Capitalism we sure as fuck are more greedy than those damned godless Commies were. Not only has a recent New York Times 'scoop' revealed that the hills of Afghanistan are just filled with trillions of dollars of untapped mineral resources that the unscrupulous pigs who have stripmined the industrial capacity of America and eliminated countless millioins of jobs through labor arbitrage to third world shitholes but there is always the hidden agenda of the opium crops. Anyone who is at least somewhat competent in geopolitics fully knows that the U.S. of A has long been involved in the international narcotics trade. The Wall Street banks especially love drug profits and there is no way of being to accurately estimate the amount of drug money that is laundered through the same fiend-filled shithouses that the Obama administration just bailed out with trillions in U.S. taxpayer dollars that could have been better utilized in creating jobs for the poor schmucks at the bottom of the trickle-down economics outhouse hole but it is a lot. I will save that ugly, convoluted, dangerous and sordid tale for a future time but suffice it to say, the laundering of drug money through the big banks during the recent collapse in the massive ponzi scheme saved the bacon of the banksters. So Petraeus is now sent to Afghanistan, has already gone on record as saying that he is going to change the rules of engagement in order to allow for the implementation of the "kill em all and let God sort 'em out" American style of combat which will allow him to retain his media created heroic image and stick the final dagger into the back of the pathetically overmatched Obama in the process. Perhaps even wrapping it all up to return to glory and worship back here in Der Heimat in time to run against the Pope of Hope in 2012. The neocons are betting on it already, the Republicans already having ridden the co-opted Tea Party lightning to the point where the exoskeleton will be shed leaving the racist maggots to tear each other to shreds and for the leader of the New American Century to emergy like a chrysalis from the cocoon. Pat Buchanan's recent post The Prisoner of General Petraeus hits it out of the park.






IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY OR WHAT?


But enough about the lost war in Afghanistan, we here in between the shining seas have other wars to worry about that have more urgency. I primarily refer to the lopsided class war during which the state uses the full power of the militarized police to ensure that the upwardly redistribution of wealth continues. The ballyhooed Wall Street/Financial Reform bill is nothing more than a rotten, rigged and borderline criminal defense of the big banks whose Gordon Gekko worship and chronic gambler mentality have effecively nuked the entire global economy. What will remain of this travesty by the time that the bumbling boob Obama finally signs it will be the proverbial band aid on the sucking chest wound. The derivatives casinos will continue to hum along, there will be only the illusion of any sort of change that helps the average peasants and the stage is being set for the last catastrophic economic blowup of all time. The next one will be where the pigs retreat into their stocked and heavily fortified compounds, install a buffer zone of militarized police and private security thugs and then let the poor dumb bastard rabble rip each other's throats out in what will be something of a cross between The Road Warrior and the savage battle for the last can of Milwaukee's Best at a teabagger July 4th bund rally. The end is coming people and you all would do best to prepare yourselves for it by stocking up with canned food, water, batteries and guns with plenty of ammo. You are going to need to hunker down and try to survive while the less prepared are out beating each other into pulp with whatever they can find to use as a bludgeon. Do you really think that the average American asshole is cognizant enough of anything on any sort of a level where they are able to comprehend the implications of a Malthusian level catastrophe? Shit, during my time away from blogging the primary topics of conversation and news coverage all were about the exhuming and raping the corpse of poor Natalee Holloway with the story of some Dutch degenerate named Joran Van Der Sloot. It's what works here in Murka, keep the monkeys fascinated with these idiotic lurid scandals while the entire fucking world collapses. Next up, Van Der Sloot will be trotted out on CNN, FOX and MSNBC as the latest suspect in the long-running Jon Benet Ramsey child murder case...that is if the shameless sequel to the great Clinton blowjob inquisitions involving the alleged semen stains of Al Gore doesn't swallow them whole. So take my advice, these stupid bitches and bastards likely don't have enough food in their refrigerators to get them through half a week let alone a prolonged collapse in the social structure. Food, Guns and Ammo....you will thank me for this advice one day. 






RULE #1: THINGS CAN ALWAYS GET WORSE


Lastly, since I have already been rambling on extensively today I will keep it short I am going to keep with the cheery news in that the speed of the collapse could be escalated. I speak of the colossal environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico courtesy of British Petroleum with a big assist to our corrupt American style of Capitalism that continues to worsen by the day. There is really no accurate way to assess the magnitude of this catastrophe, the media is only being given bits and pieces of the bad news - not that the suckers of the corporate and government elite would bother to report the fucking truth anyway. This is going to be a long term, life-altering event and there has been little to no mention of what is going to happen when one or two hurricanes roar into the gulf, pick up all of the toxic goo and deliver it inlands with 120 + mph winds and a massive storm surge. Think that New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina (ok, it was the chronic inability of anyone to build a modern levee system that magnified the damage) just wait until a heavily populated area is not only torn to bits by a savage storm but all of the property, vegetation, roads and other infrastructure, personal property, vehicles and animals wake up covered in oil sludge and deadly chemicals. That is coming and that is what the government is NOT telling anybody about. I don't blame this all on Obama though, the gutting of the environmental protections began long before he found himself enscsonced upon the throne. Sure he has dicked aroud by coddling the corporations and his decision to not only retain corrupt officials (see Tim Dickinson's great Rolling Stone article The Spill, The Scandal and the President) and playing nice with BP, probably due to the fact that they are a huge supplier of fuel to the Imperial U.S. military but at least he isn't practically sucking the cocks of BP executives like the fascist Republican assholes in Congress are doing, retrograde goons the likes of Joe Barton of Texas (where else?) but it is still another massive fuckup on his watch.





JESUS LOVES YOU BUT EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE


So what now? I seriously considered wallking away from all of this shit forever for a good while because as I mentioned once before there is a chronic inability in America to hear the truth. The whole shittin' shebang is all going to collapse anyway no matter what I do. I am pushing 50 now and given my lifestyle over the years have at best and realistically (optimistically too) around 25-30 years left on planet shit. I have no kids so I really don't give a rat's ass about anything other than getting out of here before the worst hits, just run out the clock you know. But I just can't, damned as I may try to just stop caring, not that I am any great lover of humanity or anything, truthfully, I really dislike most people, they are stupid, selfish, mean-spirited and vain, they are believers in the most ridiculous things. Things like serious change, peace and justice in our time, that America is a great nation, exceptional and unlike every other empire in history that murdered, enslaved, pillaged and stole the resources of those of lesser strength, superstitious hogwash like the bible and worst of all faith in the wondrous economic system that is American Capitalism. I do not suffer fools kindly and Christ knows that I am seriously outnumbered by them. A grim sort of resignation is what I have and a serious case of revulsion and outright contempt for the majority of Americans. I can proudly say that I am ashamed to be an American so all of the flag swaddled, Becked up fucksticks can go out and gorge themselves on potato salad and patriotic nonsense this weekend, they deserve each other.

In closing I would like to bring attention to a man who is a modern day prophet, a writer extraordinaire and who has more compassion and wisdom in his little toenail than any randomly chosen 5 tons of junk food fed, obese and terminally fucked Americans. I speak of the great Joe Bageant and his tour de force essay that he just published entitled Live From Planet Norte. This is essential reading to all of use who are awake and aware. It has a poetic quality to it as does most of Joe's stuff but it's the closing that nails it and I will excerpt a short piece of the essay here - however do yourselves a favor and go read it at Joe's place, and his other stuff too, it will help you make some sense out of all of this.


Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream


Informed and globally conscious people are sickened, heartbroken by the spectral truth. But to use the same Neal Cassady quote for the second time this year: "To have seen a specter is not everything."

In fact, it even has a good side. Transformation. Once you honestly accept what you have seen, you are changed, released from the previous stress and fear. Like so many feared experiences, it is its own psychodynamic, and is about "coming out the other side" of the experience. Accepting such a truth -- especially for pathologically optimistic, cheer stressed Americans -- shatters many painfully held illusions. The chief one is that we are the animating force behind all significant change, and that the massive damage we do is "progress"). In their place grows a new inner awareness. Although it does not conform to any popular definition as such, the easiest way to describe it is "spiritual," Who in these times, you may ask, believes in the spirit as an animating force of mankind? My answer is: Those who can be still enough to see that spirit moving.

With it comes the awareness and acceptance of forces far more powerful than our puny anthropocentric illusions of planetary authority. We can arrive at this understanding by way of thinking, logic and reason. The mind is a cumbersome and inefficient way to go about escaping traps you build with your mind, but yes, it can be done. Most educated people in this science worshipping age prefer the convoluted path of logic and rational exercise, over calmly opening one's eyes and heart to the world before us, as wiser men have done for thousands of years.


There is more worthwhile in those two and a half paragraphs than others can write in volumes. You go Joe!

This is Ed Encho, signing off for now. I'll be back soon with more.