Tag Archives: Banking

Daily Gaza fishing flotilla blockaded by Israeli Navy, no fishing to supplement carefully measured aid starvation diet

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Gaza fishermen being attacked by IDF gunboat with water cannon
The fishermen of Gaza are harassed daily by IDF gunships which shoot them outright when there are no Western witnesses present. The late Vittorio Arrigoni was one of the International Solidarity Movement who regularly accompanied fishing boats, forcing the Israelis to set aside their machine guns for water cannon when he was around. Of late activists have their own boat, the Oliva, to escort the fishing fleets. And today the Oliva was accompanied by another skiff commissioned by the Guardian. Their Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood tweeted the following adventure just now:

On boat heading out from Gaza port. Fishermen regularly fired on by Israeli military. Going to check.

Getting close to 3 mile limit for fishing. Israeli gunboat speeding towards us.

There are 7 boats in our group. 4 fishing boats, 2 press boats, 1 human rights group boat.

Israeli gunboat circling around. Siren sounding. Machine gun mounted at rear.

IDF coming very close. Sirens. Banking hard causing a lot of backwash for our small motor boat.

6 or 7 troops on bridge, all armed. We have cut our engines.

We are 2 or 2 and a half miles from shore so within fishing zone. IDF preventing us going further.

Phone signal going in and out. A 2nd IDF boat heading towards us.

Fishing boats are throwing lines. But very few fish this close to shore.

Guardian boat is flying under Barcelona FC flag….

Now 2 gunboats stopping us going further.

This is our GPS location: N31.5727176 and E034.37703. Can someone work out exactly how far we are from Gaza City?

Fishermen saying there are no fish. They want to go out another 50 metres. But that could provoke reaction. No boat willing to go first.

One fishing boat heading further out. But the guys are asking us (Guardian) to go in front for protection.

One IDF boat just circling our boats about 50m away. Other boat a bit further away.

A lot of resources devoted to a few tiny fishing boats.

Sea is calm today – except our little bit. Backwash creating lot of waves. They keep sounding siren. But we have all cut engines.

I’m told that the point of the IDF continually circling us is to create continuous waves and noise. Makes fishing harder.

One fishing boat just been swamped by backwash. They are giving up and going back to port.

One IDF boat appears to be heading away. The other coming closer.

Water canon military boat in distance. Maybe heading towards us. Hope not.

Both gunboats have moved off as water canon boat approaches.

Water canon boat maybe 200m away. Heading straight towards us. May have to put comms away for a bit.

Boats being water canoned. Very dangerous. The NGO boat almost went under.

Was mini hi-speed boat chase as we cut and run and the IDF chase.

IDF still firing on Oliva the human rights boat. They are trying to drown it says my translator.

We are keeping distance. Feel cowardly.

Amazing that the Oliva is still afloat.

We are within 3 mile limit so why is IDF doing this?

I will call them later to ask.

Other fishing boats yelling at us what are you still here. Go in, go in!

We are heading in. Water canon boat close behind.

All boats okay and heading back to port. No one hurt – but no fish either.

Water canon boat still firing its water into an empty sea.

Correction – one fishing boat passes and shows me its haul. 6 tiny ones. They are angry says my translator.

Water canon boat now firing on another group of fishing boats.

These fishermen are strangely euphoric – singing clapping dancing on their boats. Glad simply to survive I guess.

Back on dry land. 9.55am. Welcome back to safety says my translator, laughing ironically.

The Oliva, the water canoned boat, coming into port now with the other fishing boats.

The Oliva was rammed by the water canon boat and its engine damaged. The captain says all boats were within the 3 mile limit.

The fishing boats have gone back out. The Oliva’s captain is still bailing out his boat.

Captain says the engine fan is broken. It will cost around $4-500 to repair.

The gear is also damaged. This is the 3rd time the crew say.

Captain says they will go out again tomorrow if they can repair the engine. They have to find the parts, not easy in Gaza.

He says every time he goes out he expects to be attacked by water canon, live bullets, ‘whatever.’

That’s it from Gaza City port. I will be writing a piece for the Guardian and we have shot video. Over and out, as they say.

We’ll link to the Guardian article as soon as it’s out.

UPDATE: Rad the CPSGaza account.

Temporarily embarrassed millionaires cursing guilty Casey Anthony, as theft of Social Security and Medicare begins

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Thinking about the Tea Party Poor:
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” — John Steinbeck
 
Think our judicial system is broke? It is, but not because it gave young Bad Mom Casey Anthony a chasmic benefit of the doubt. It’s broken because of Walmart, Citizens United, and all the corporatist, anti-democratic rulings that guarantee that ordinary Americans no longer have recourse in the courts.

IMF pick Christine Lagarde-Obamette updates beau mot Cherchez La Femme

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One of the boys, literally
IMF DSK replacement Christine Lagarde assumes leadership of the International Monetary Fund today, the world’s most powerful woman. Will she be the spoonful of sweetness to make austerity cuts go down? How’s your blood-sugar crashing on Obama? My guess is this fairy grandmother gambit will go down in Europe like an Obama Smurfette. To further my sexist analogy, imagine Lagarde the stereotypical bank loan officer, absolutely immovable. But Lagarde is personable, kindly, and maternal, and she’s willing to extend your loan, on the condition that you forfeit your house and all your possessions, and rent them from her. In the end you have nothing, but you don’t starve. By the way, the sheriff outside work for her. The IMF and the paramilitary riot police -that’s whose army. It’s a contract re-up you can’t refuse. That’s “austerity,” larceny with the improbably-legitimated veneer of usury, and it’s her last best offer.

Cherchez la femme or “get the woman”, used to be an investigative phrase meaning, find the extra-marital affair behind the political intrigue. The effect of this strategy was so absolute that it came to mean looking for the obvious. And so, isn’t the appointment of the silver-coiffed woman to front the severely PR-challenged, greed-saturated IMF, the obvious choice for a facelift?

Look at the IMF, an old boys network rivaled perhaps only by the World Bank. The solitary Lagarde is the next best thing to the superior exotic, one black man. They didn’t have one, and that novelty might be playing itself out already across the pond.

Augustin Carstens Fat BastardSpeaking of the New World, with Lagarde, the IMF avoided the challenger touted as the champion of emerging nations, Bank of Mexico nomineee and corpulence personified, Augustin Carstens. You might remember Carstens as the obesity-suited Fat Bastard from Austin Powers, who kept begging to be given Mini-Me for a snack.

What an unfortunately apt personification of the banking system Augusten Carstens would have been. Try to find a single photograph that wouldn’t have made the IMF aims plain: the bankers are licking their chops not only for your last penny, they want your ribs.

Mexicans have to brave illegal status in the United States to flee the economic policies enforced by their Fat Bastard.

The Lakota saw six grandfathers where Mt Rushmore fests expansionist four

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A recurring discussion at the base of Mount Rushmore is whose face next belongs alongside America’s fantastic four. There’s room for more obviously, as the mountain’s Lakota name was the Six Grandfathers. They saw resemblance enough in the rocks without the Denver Mint faces. Visitors can be excused not recognizing Theodore Roosevelt, the only cameo without a coin –he lacks a DC monument too, but Teddy most certainly belongs here. To determine who else might qualify, we have to wonder at what exactly Mt Rushmore means to memorialize.

Mount Rushmore immortalizes above all a New York lawyer who persevered for half a century to assure the not inobscure landmark was named after him. The government approved carve-up was intended to draw visitors to South Dakota. Concurrent tourist spot projects included the cement dinosaurs of Rapid City and Wall Drug. The icon-fashioned mountain became its own icon, casting a Cliff Notes summary of American History into stone. Whatever posterity would have to say about their legacy, these presidents would remain an unscalable height above reproach.

George Washington was father of our country, if not what today we hold as our ideals. Washington wanted to liberate colonial profits from the tiers owed its royal investors. He fought only for the independence of the American propertied class, and faced revolt from the common soldiery who bore the brunt of fighting off the British.

Thomas Jefferson pushed us west and invented the facade of democracy based on an illusory “all men created equal” utopian agrarian society. Jefferson would have known that no farms can operate without farmhands, and that peasant revolts have never sparked revolution. Above all, who was Jefferson to pretend that you can keep everyone down on the farm once they’d seen Paree? A farmer can imbibe education and culture only if he’s got slaves doing the work.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and held the union together. An America divided would have been vulnerable to resorption by the European powers. More important, the engine of our export economy was the South. Cotton and tobacco dwarfed fur.

Theodore Roosevelt championed conservation, like the national parks, but he’s on the mountain because he took America’s Manifest Destiny international. Roosevelt oversaw industry extend its empire-building offshore in search of cheap labor, resources and markets.

When conversation turns to whose face should adorn the pantheon of American expansionists, we are not lacking for capitalist do-gooders. I overheard “Obama”, “Henry Ford” or “Bill Gates,” perfectly in keeping with the theme.

In chronological order after the Rough Rider, to my mind, JP Morgan could be the beginning and the end, as father of the malevolent banking monopoly which has fated the world to Potterville.

Improving Rushmore would naturally be to efface it. How much longer really are the sculpted heads going to look like a “feat of engineering” and not simply a defilement of nature? Already what’s praised as a “work of art” looks more like a bad tattoo. Native American voices oppose the nearby Affirmative Action Crazy Horse Monument because no Indian they say would want his image superimposed on landscape.

If we can’t take it down, I have a suggestion for an additional face that neither perpetuates the enshrinement of our patronizing leadership, nor pretends to reflect a rehabilitated self-awareness. I propose we conduct an essay contest among American school children. From the dead-last, dumbest entry we select a child’s face to represent our nation’s failed intellectual promise, product of poor schooling, propaganda and poisoned spirit. That would be the face to commemorate America’s hard-headed, dumb as a brick, jackboot future.

Vulcanic and biomass eco-terrorism?

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EarthWhat of suspicions that the BP Macondo Well blowout was an act of ECO TERRORISM? What curious timing that Iceland is dealt full weight of world banking crime and retaliates with a natural resources blowout! Well, where Eyjafjallajokull blew its top could be coincidental, but these calamities of escalating proportion may not be Acts of God. Perhaps this is veritable wanton destruction wrought by an environmental zealot speaking with the gravity of an enraged planet. Doom and gloomers can foretell of oceans polluted beyond recognition and skies rendered opaque and impassible; I’m with BP defender who say this denoument was inevitable; Earth daring us to stare into our eleventh hour, Mother of all Jihadists.

16-year-old Jessica Watson completes solo circumnavigation, flunks geometry

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When 16-year-old Jessica Watson arrives in Sidney tomorrow, she will be the youngest person to sail around the globe alone. The precocious Aussie will be denied an official record however, for the same reason the Olympics enforce a minimum age for gymnasts, protecting suggestible minors from overzealous parents ostensibly. The snubbing might seem an unenforceable formality, but it turns out Jessica comes up short on another technicality, the same principle which holds that girth is measured at the waist.

The “circum” in navigate refers to circumference. Let’s take nothing away from the young adventurer who’s proven herself plenty brave, a capable sea-person, and undeniably a class act. Criticism of her geometry or vocabulary is aimed really at her internet fans who are now raining expletives on sailing officials who would deny her a world record.

Just as we credit her home team for media, communications, and consultation, readers of her blog know that Jessica set her autopilot to daily coordinates provided to her. Thus it was Team Jessica which charted the interesting compromise.

While no one expects round-the-world sailors to follow the equator, circumnavigation at minimum requires traversing an orb over its circumference. You cannot, as an extreme example, run a few paces off the South Pole and call yourself a circumnavigator. Soon we’d have swimmers circumnavigating the North Pole. The de-icing of the Northwest Passage likewise will be providing new shortcuts for would-be record breakers. Jessica Watson’s ability to traverse the south seas owed entirely to techncal innovations which have yielded stronger crafts and better storm avoidance. The latitudes formerly named for their impenetrability, the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties, are now open to sporting pursuits. Making the straight shot across all longitudes there is a distance a fraction of the equator. As a result, ocean racing adjudicators have decided that a proper circumnavigation should mean at least 21,600 nautical miles across the seas, a distance that approximates the width of our planet.

Did Team Jessica miscalculate? More likely it was an expeditious decision to enable a finish before the youngster’s 17th birthday. Going the extra distance would have added extra days to Jessica’s sixteen years. The course was thus plotted to make Sidney at greatest haste. Which meant setting their own interpretation of a circumnavigation.

To do this, Team Watson contrived a simplification of the minimum requirement: crossing all longitudes and passing over the equator twice, which their sailor dutifully did. Their explanation to Jessica’s fans sounds officious, but is not universally accepted as equivalent to a full circumnavigation. Can you measure a waistline by passing the tape around one leg so long as you extend it up through a belt loop? On a globe such an approximation comes up short. Level of difficulty to sail it, still enormous, but a foreshortened route.

Actually, Miss Watson’s Burmuda rig will have traveled 23,000 sea miles taking into account her drift and the tacks required to work the wind, but her charted course accumulates to only 19,000. Imagine shortening the Tour de France to substitute sections on stationary bikes. No less effort, but not quite the Tour.

Watson’s official start was delayed by a mishap that sent she and Ella’s Pink Lady back for repairs and may have sealed the fate of her world record.

Pink Lady’s departure made the news in a bigger than expected way over a half year ago. Concerns about allowing so young a person to attempt a solo circumnavigation appeared vindicated the next day when Jessica struck a freighter on her very first night. This meant a return to harbor for the Pink Lady and having perhaps to reroute the journey of shorter duration than initially planned.

Perhaps the racing officials are right to retire seafaring records based on age. With modern technology and remote systems having become what they are, what does it mean anymore to differentiate “assisted” or “unassisted”? 2009 witnessed the first Atlantic crossing of a catamaran captained by a quadriplegic. By any conventional understanding of seamanship that feat was impossible. Before long, who or what is put at the helm will be irrelevant, watercrafts will progress –“unassisted” meaning untouched– guided by unmanned vehicle operators at computer consoles. Perhaps the control could eventually even be crowdsourced online.

The crowd’s attention to Elle’s Pink Lady was owed undeniably to its captain being a 16-year-old girl. For a period on the official blog, public comments were closed off to shed followers whose infatuations may have been unflattering to the schoolroom audiences which Australian television news was drawing to the website. If I had to guess at what was jettisoned, it was probably fan fiction fantasies thinly veiled as hopeful advice to avoid Somali pirates. While some followers were no doubt titillated by the thought of a vulnerable young woman alone on the dark sea, to the average audience, the opportunity to check-in on the Pink Lady in 10-meter swells in near-real time, took vicarious adventuring to new heights.

On the other hand a 16-year-old captain’s log had obvious drawbacks. The facility to wax poetic hits at an age later than the teens apparently. Previous age-record holders like the teen who took five years to circle the globe in the Dove was in his twenties when he chose to write about it. Jessica’s narrative was extemporized and followed a pragmatic motif. Her notes reflected the singular focus of young specialist whose technical proficiencies might have crowded out wider observation skills. Preoccupied with her boat’s speed, in between, nothing. Her typical report was peppered thus:

“Yeah, so, nothing new to report really, so, yeah, so, that’s about it for me, so, yeah.”

When Captain Jessica wasn’t relating the progress the Pink Lady was making, or the occasional repair attempt she planned to revisit, her thoughts were on the day’s menu, the supplies packed for her which she opened like a Christmas chocolate calendar, supplemental gifts scheduled to lift her spirits at regulated intervals and the latest blog comments to which she relayed personal replies.

In addition to the typical teenager sweets fixation was another unexpected first, although clearly enough foreseen by Team Jessica’s sponsors. Video blogging on a daily basis meant that Jessica had to worry about her makeup and hair. She holds the world record I’ll bet for first solo circumnavigator to concern herself with wardrobe and beauty products.

For the most part, Jessica impresses like the average gifted and talented, and disappoints where you’d expect it too. How interesting are the whims of a child of millionaire parents able to indulge a not-necessarily world-changing enterprise? Elle’s Pink Lady is a model of commercial endorsement banking on publicity spectacle. No different from most high profile sports, professional tennis for example, but of virtuoso certainly less athletic. It’s more like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, watch their children take to the sea.

With Jessica’s upcoming arrival garnering excitement, isn’t it fitting that an unpredicted non-sponsor is stepping forward to reap product placement. It turns out the Australian conglomerate responsible for the “Pink Lady” apple considers the name of Jessica Watson’s project a trademark infringement, but they’re ready to settle if she considers adding them to her endorsements.

Next to the White House

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While visiting Washington DC in March, I found it interesting to note the edifices closest to the White House.
The Executive Office Building

EAST, WEST
The neighbor to the immediate East of the Obama’s White House is the Department of the Treasury. Is that any surprise? Of course not, but how bourgeois! I could imagine Scrooge McDuck sneaking across the White House garden twice a day to check his reserves. To the West is what we now call the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It’s the site of the suspicious office fires which may or may not have masked a recent vice-president’s misdeeds. The edifice looks straight out of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and check out the plaque which commemorates what the building used to be called:

State War and Navy Departments

Probably that should be no surprise as well: the White house sandwiched between Treasury and War. “State, War and Navy.” How so much less duplicitous than the “Department of Defense.”

SOUTHWEST
Behind the former War offices, to the Southwest of the White House, lies the war memorial to end all war memorials. It’s the WWI Memorial, of considerably diminutive size compared to those commemorations of subsequent wars which have spilled unto the Mall, but its form followed the convention of the typical Great War monuments erected throughout Europe among the nations who had participated.

WWI monument to US Army Expeditionary Force

Except the American version is dedicated to the “Expeditionary Forces” which I just love. That’s what WWI was about for the US. The trenches of Europe were no place Americans needed to defend their freedom. The troops we sent, to relieve France and England, represented a foreign expedition, exactly that. More precisely, our troops were an R&D expedition for our blustering capitalists.

(This may be no time or place to note that history books do not link America’s WWI experience with the Influenza outbreak of 1917-18, which began in the barracks of US soldiers being mobilized for war. American soldiers took their flu to Europe and ultimately killed 50 million people. Those were not the days before we knew better to stay home to prevent infecting others.)

The US entry into WWI was bitterly opposed by a peace movement which the war-opportunist-profiteers maligned as isolationist. Selfish globalization-denying isolationism has been the slander ever since, used against anyone who tries to block military interventions in all their guises.

Ultimately WWI was no affair of ours, had the Huns emerged victorious, American foreign affairs would hardly have changed. Our foreign trading partners would have numbered more Germans, that’s all. But it’s useless to compare alternative outcomes of WWI, all things staying constant, because America participated and profited wildly.

If American investors had not jumped in Over There, the greatest business opportunities of blossoming industrialism would have been missed. The opportunities offered by the Europeans fighting amongst themselves, proved to have been momentous.

And here was the monument to those lost American lives, sacrificed so that American industrial might, in particular the new banking monopolists, could seize the European spheres of influence throughout the world. Of course the lost lives of the American Expeditionary Force were remembered thus:

“…WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WORLD WAR THAT LIBERTY AND THE IDEALS OF OUR COUNTRY MIGHT ENDURE”

It would take another World War for the US to appropriate the colonies and oil fields by means of contracts and loans, with the leverage of coming to their aid again, this time armed with lend-lease bills.

SOUTHEAST
To the Southeast of the White House, across the back lawn, lies the monument antecedent to the Great War. It’s the Civil War Memorial, atop which rides the triumphant General William Tecumseh Sherman. (Who, to be fair, presided over the War Department for a long stretch after the Civil War, actually this nation’s longest peacetime period.)

Sherman monumentCurious that I chose to crop his personage from my pictures, but my eyes were drawn to the lesser figures around the base of the monument, in particular, a half naked woman.

The memorial seemed to include various uniformed Civil War participants. How egalitarian to include a woman. But this woman was no French Revolutionary with breast bared oblivious as she rallied her comrades to victory. This delicate woman was unarmed and stripped to the waist, her children in tattered rags at her feet.

Could this statue be offering another conceit to the reality of war, to Sherman’s March to the sea, to the burning of Atlanta, to the shameful destruction he visited on the secessionist South? Was this a nod to the real role given to Women in war, their sons and husbands taken from them, a non-combatant left helpless to defend her children or herself. Did the shirt torn from her body confess to the woman’s rape?

More probably the feminine likeness personified man’s attraction to war, a soldier’s predilection for her beauty. How many war monuments memorialize as they also beacon?

Much of the terrain around the White House grounds is blocked off by secondary and tertiary security perimeters. But for the arrival of bus unloadng its visitors to see it, the Civil War Monument is normally cordoned off. When I had passed it earlier, a balaclava-clad guard was blocking the only entrance.

SOUTH
The grassy expanse immediately South of the White House, permitting the First Family an uninterrupted view of the National Mall, has actually been given over to parking permits. The loop of asphalt across the lawn, with cars strewn diagonally along the edges, gives the unfortunate impression of overflow event parking. In any other neighborhood, the crowd of cars would be a dead giveaway that someone on the block was having a party.

Ground Zero for The Empire’s Collapse- Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation?

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DTCCThe Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation or DTCC is possibly Ground Zero for the US Empire’s potential coming economic collapse, because it is the primary and dominant insuring company that guarantees pay outs for those who hold junk stocks, if they go belly up.

‘DTCC’s DTC depository provides custody and asset servicing for 3.5 million securities issues, comprised mostly of stocks and bonds, from the United States and 110 other countries and territories, valued at $40 trillion, more than any other depository in the world. In 2007, DTCC settled the vast majority of securities transactions in the United States, more than $1.86 quadrillion in value.’ Taken from wikipedia’s DTCC entry

Looking to see who is in charge at DTCC? Nice group of pics, right? Nice people I’m sure… lol… Good patriotic Americans and what all.

The DTCC history show 2 events that pushed this corporate outfit to the head. One was Bill Clinton’s deregulation of securities signed into law in 2000 at the end of his presidency, and the other was 9/11.

9/11 effectively was the death blow to paper securities, and DTCC was right there offering electronic securities instead. Here at DTCC’s site one finds this brief explanation of No More Paper: The Problems with Paper …see below

Q. I have heard that many securities were lost on 9/11. Is that true?

A. Yes, although they were eventually all replaced. Some $16 billion worth of certificates disappeared in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, and it took many months and nearly $300 million in industry costs to replace them. During this period, electronic records were used to ensure the owners of the securities could be identified. Meanwhile, shares held electronically were not harmed at all on 9/11.

OK, that’s nice…. And here, written in 1999 about the Clinton Administration’s proposed financial deregulation of that year that then later allowed the rise of even more speculative securities and the eventual domination of DTCC over the securities market, is the following…

***Threat to financial stability***

The proposed deregulation will increase the degree of monopolization in finance and worsen the position of consumers in relation to creditors. Even more significant is its impact on the overall stability of US and world capitalism. The bill ties the banking system and the insurance industry even more directly to the volatile US stock market, virtually guaranteeing that any significant plunge on Wall Street will have an immediate and catastrophic impact throughout the US financial system.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which the deregulation bill would repeal, was not adopted to protect consumers, although one of its most celebrated provisions was the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees bank deposits of up to $100,000. The law was enacted during the first 100 days of the Roosevelt administration to rescue a banking system which had collapsed, wiping out the life savings of millions of working people, and threatening to bring the profit system to a complete standstill.

As a recent history of that era notes: “The more than five thousand bank failures between the Crash and the New Deal’s rescue operation in March 1933 wiped out some $7 billion in depositors’ money. Accelerating foreclosures on defaulted home mortgages—150,000 homeowners lost their property in 1930, 200,000 in 1931, 250,000 in 1932—stripped millions of people of both shelter and life savings at a single stroke and menaced the balance sheets of thousands of surviving banks” (David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 162-63).

The separation of banking and the stock exchange was ordered in response to revelations of the gross corruption and manipulation of the market by giant banking houses, above all the House of Morgan, which organized huge corporate mergers for its own profit and awarded preferential access to share issues to favored politicians and businessmen. Such insider trading played a major role in the speculative boom which preceded the 1929 crash.

Over the past 20 years the restrictions imposed by Glass-Steagall have been gradually relaxed under pressure from the banks, which sought more profitable outlets for their capital, especially in the booming stock market, and which complained that foreign competitors suffered no such limitations to their financial operations. In 1990 the Federal Reserve Board first permitted a bank (J.P. Morgan) to sell stock through a subsidiary, although stock market operations were limited to 10 percent of the company’s total revenue. In 1996 this ceiling was lifted to 25 percent. Now it will be abolished.

The Wall Street Journal celebrated the agreement to end such restrictions with an editorial declaring that the banks had been unfairly scapegoated for the Great Depression. The headline of one Journal article detailing the impact of the proposed law declared, “Finally, 1929 Begins to Fade.”

This comment underscores the greatest irony in the banking deregulation bill. Legislation first adopted to save American capitalism from the consequences of the 1929 Wall Street Crash is being abolished just at the point where the conditions are emerging for an even greater speculative financial collapse. The enormous volatility in the stock exchange in recent months has been accompanied by repeated warnings that stocks are grossly overvalued, with some computer and Internet stocks selling at prices 100 times earnings or even greater.

And there is a much more recent experience than 1929 to serve as a cautionary tale. A financial deregulation bill was passed in the early 1980s under the Reagan administration, lifting many restrictions on the activities of savings and loan associations, which had previously been limited primarily to the home-loan market. The result was an orgy of speculation, profiteering and outright plundering of assets, culminating in collapse and the biggest financial bailout in US history, costing the federal government more than $500 billion. The repetition of such events in the much larger banking and securities markets would be beyond the scope of any federal bailout.

The complete article published back in 1999 at Clinton, Republicans agree to deregulation of US financial system Almost a totally prophetic article, as it turns out. So now we wait and see if all the government money thrown at these financial pirates…YES, financial pirates…’works’? Will it be capable of floating all this junk held insured by DTCC?

Russian Copy Cat Capitalism to lend bankers a helping hand

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Vladimir Putin
All that ‘Marxist Leninist’ education that Putin had in his youth so that he could now do as Obama does, and hand out ‘stimuluses’ to bankers to protect them from pitchforks and hammers and sickles! Putin Says $90B Stimulus Plan to Ease Hard Year It’s been a ‘hard year’ for the poor elites of Russia, so get out your hankies, Putin and friends.

‘Putin also said he supported consolidation among the country’s 1,500 banks and warned lawmakers to support, rather than “attack,” bankers because they are vital to the economy.’

And to think that many in the US still think of him as a tough, old commie! He’s a pussy cat really, don’t you think? Everybody will be guaranteed their usual caviar, and not just party bosses in this New Brave Russia!

Yes, Russia’s working class, just like America’s, has never had to suffer like these poor managers of financial funds have had to, and Russia’s leaders, just like America’s, must come first. America first! Russia first!

That’s ‘patriotism’ no matter where these days? Certainly a noble value compared to that nasty idea of international solidarity among the working class, and other such backward, retrograde commie nonsense. It’s just wrong to run out and help the worker when a poor, wealthy unhealthy banker is wobbling along in the street half crippled and all. They might even turn to alcohol if Obama and Putin don’t get together and help these poor souls out? It’s been a ‘hard year’… Don’t let the rich drown themselves in vodka! Give them a helping hand.

Obama to bankers, ‘I’m saving you from the pitchforks!’

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pitchforks at the gateWell there you have it from the horse’s mouth, Obama is not trying to save you, me, and all the other poverty stricken louts! He’s trying to save the bankers from us coming at them with pitchforks! He’s willing to give them trillions of $$$, too, to help them out. Money that the louts will eventually be paying off for the bankers. See Inside the Obama-Bank CEO Meeting

Obama laughed along with the rest of the CEOs, before listening to Lewis get to his point: he wants to pay back Troubled Asset Relief Program funds.

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Obama said.

Protecting thieves is a criminal act, Mr. President. Helping drive the get away car is, too.

But in this case, it is the President of the US and US bank officials driving the car! This is the greatest bank robbery in history
and the liberal Democrats are letting them get away with it, too. They just don’t seem to have the smarts to figure out what’s going on? And they’re too busy pointing fingers at others as they’re led by their noses!

“Saddam and the Third Reich”… the REAL Connection.

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Not the hype they’re promoting on the Hysteria International Channel, in an attempt to justify the violent conquest of Iraq to seize the assets of the country and turn them over to Exxon Mobil and other Corporate Partners of the CheneyBush Company.

Nope, the most solid connection is, once again, the Bush Family.

Their banking enterprises provided money laundering for both the Third Reich and for Saddam Hussein.

Since the Military Propaganda Committee are apparently going to try to drown us out, on this soon to be seventh year of the Invasion and Occupation OOOPSIE I was supposed to say “Liberation” , right?

I’ll point out once again because the Right Wing are kind of Stupid and forget easily, and I’ll type it Really Slowly because they can’t read very fast,…

The stated reasons for invading Iraq were straight up unadulterated Lies.

The Koalition of the Killing were NOT liberating Iraq, NOT even looking for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, NOT fighting for freedom in any sense of the word.

But maybe the Uniform-Heads can repeat those lies often enough that at least they, themselves, will believe it.

Or maybe they understand that their stated reasons are Bullshit and just don’t give a damn.

In which case they and everybody who still supports the War are guilty of Murder.

Murder of Iraqi Civilians and American Soldiers and Koalition of the Killing Soldiers as well.

They have blood on their greedy claws and if they’re still proud of it, they should stop calling themselves Americans.

But they won’t and we all know it.

They’ll insist that everybody who doesn’t agree with their Conquest is somehow Anti-American.

I’d like to give them some credit, any credit I could think of, maybe that they’re drugged or brainwashed, but no, that wouldn’t be true.

They know they’re committing Evil and continue to do it, and rejoice in doing it.

They know they’re lying but continue to lie.

They know they’re baby-killing murdering coward scum, and that it violates every law of God and man, but they’ll continue doing it.

Happy Anniversary.

You have the blood of over 4700 Americans on your nasty little hands, and a literally countless number of Iraqi civilians.

Gandhi possessions safe from defilement

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gandhi possessionsThe iconic personal possessions of Mahatma Gandhi were auctioned this week, and will remain in India. Gandhi’s poverty may have been largely symbolic, but his bowl and sandals remain unimpeachable representations of his ideals.
If there’s an upside to the banking collapse, it’s that some Wall Street or London financier was not able to purchase Mohandas’ bowl for the sole purpose of taking a shit in it.

Mark 6TH YEAR of Iraq Occupation with profiteers Boeing, Lockheed, GD and KBR

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answer-march-on-pentagon
A.N.S.W.E.R.’s March 21 MARCH ON THE PENTAGON to mark the sixth year of the War in Iraq will be directed not only at the US Department of Defense, but at the war profiteers for whom 2007 was a record year, among them Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and KBR. In Colorado Springs the merchants of death can be visited on one corner.

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On March 21, 2009,
March on the Pentagon and the Corporate War Profiteers

Department of the Defense HeadquartersThe March on the Pentagon on Saturday, March 21 is shaping up to be a dramatic and highly significant demonstration. Many thousands of people are coming to Washington, D.C. to make their voices heard.

March 21 will culminate in a dramatic direct action where hundreds of coffins—representing the multinational victims of militarism, Empire and corporate greed—will be carried and delivered to the headquarters of the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death.

From the Pentagon, we will march to the nearby giant corporate offices of Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin Corporation, General Dynamics and KBR (the former subsidiary of Halliburton).

The march will start close to the State Department in Washington, D.C. (assemble at 12 noon at 23rd St. and Constitution Ave. NW).

Please make an urgently needed donation today by clicking this link to donate online through our secure server, where you can also find information on how to donate by check.

These are the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death. They are the vultures who profit off the death and suffering of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, and off of the thousands of U.S. soldiers and marines who have died or been wounded in these wars of aggression. They are anti-worker and anti-union.

The march will be led by a large contingent of veterans and family members of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and from earlier conflicts.

Militarism and Corporate Capitalism
We will march on their slick-and-shiny corporate offices that are located less than a mile from the Pentagon. Their location in the very shadow of the Pentagon speaks volumes about the intimate connection between militarism and corporate capitalism.

When the Pentagon brass retire, they rotate out of their Pentagon offices and directly into the Corporate boardrooms and office suites of the Death Merchants. It is a very cozy and very profitable relationship for the elites—in and out of uniform. They make the profits, others do the bleeding.

Last year was a great year for the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death. Profits soared even as the rest of the economy neared collapse. The CEOs of the four corporations that we will be visiting on March 21 received more than $319 million in compensation in 2007 alone (and remember, that’s just for four individuals). “We the People” paid the bill for the high tech weapons that were used against occupied people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. The Corporate Executives laughed all the way to the bank while grieving parents and children buried their loved ones from Baghdad to Kabul to Gaza to Detroit.

A quick examination shows that the CEOs of the Military-Industrial Complex contributed to both the Democratic and Republican Party candidates in almost equal amounts. They favor a system that ensures that politicians will come and go every four years but the military machine—that fusion of industry, banks and the Pentagon brass—will remain as is.

We Need Jobs & Schools – Not War!
The same banks that are being bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars even while they foreclose families who can’t pay their mortgage debts are double-dipping from the national treasury by making huge profits in their investments in Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and KBR.

War is just good business for these corporate executives. Every F-16 bomber, attack helicopter, cruise missile and Drone bomber is a source of profit. If the wars stopped they would be out of business.

The people of this country are fed up with the status quo. They want decent-paying jobs, and affordable health care and housing for all. Students want to study rather than be driven out by soaring tuition rates. People want a complete—not partial—withdrawal of ALL troops from Iraq. They want the war in Afghanistan to end rather than escalate. They are increasingly opposed to sending $2.6 billion each year to Israel.

People are coming to Washington, D.C. on March 21 from college campuses, high schools, and cities and towns throughout the United States.

It is time for real change. Unless the movement for change stays in the streets, the powerful corporate and banking interests will certainly dominate the politics of this country. That is unacceptable. That is a path toward endless war and occupation abroad, and a massive transfer of wealth to the already rich at home.

All out for March 21! Jobs Not War! Schools Not War! Occupation is a Crime!

From pentagonmarch.org:

Meet the Corporate War Profiteers and Merchants of Death

James Mcnerney Jr BoeingW. James McNerney Jr.
CEO of Boeing.

2007 Total Compensation: $19 million. Value of Boeing Stock Owned: $25.7 million

Facts about Boeing:
Boeing currently produces numerous jets and bombers, including the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber and the F/A-22 Raptor, as well as multiple surface-to-air missiles and various bombs. Boeing also produces the bolt-on JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) that turns gravity bombs into “smart” munitions.

Boeing supplies Israel with various weapon systems, including the F-15 Eagle fighter jet and A-64 Apache attack helicopter, as well as numerous types of bombs and missiles. It was these weapons that helped to kill 1,017 Palestinians killed in the Israeli invasion of Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.

In 2008, Boeing made $2,225,947 in campaign contributions. 58 percent of these contributions were to Democrats, and 42 percent were to Republicans. In 2008, they spent $16,610,000 on lobbying.

Despite massive profits, Boeing opposed raises for plant employees, and attempted to outsource union jobs so that the company could be “more flexible.”

Robert Stevens Lockheed MartinRobert J. Stevens
CEO of Lockheed Martin

2007 Total Compensation: $37 million. Value of Lockheed Martin Stock Owned: $33.8 million

Facts about Lockheed Martin:
Lockheed Martin currently produces the F-117 Stealth Fighter that was used in the brutal “Shock and Awe” bombings of Iraq, as well as the F/A-22 Raptor fighter jet. They also produces various missile systems, including the Hellfire and Javelin, and various nuclear weapon designs. Lockheed supplies fighter jets and other weapon systems to Israel.

Lockheed’s 2008 first-quarter revenue was $9.98 billion–an increase of $700 million from the year prior. By 2015, the F-35 program alone could represent more than $16 billion in annual revenue for the company.

Lockheed’s former vice-president, Bruce Jackson, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

In 2005, Lockheed received $65 million every single day of the year from the U.S. government. That year, Lockheed garnered $228 in federal tax money from every household in the United States.

In 2008, Lockheed made $2.6 million in political contributions—49 percent to the Democrats and 51 percent to the Republicans.

In 2004, Lockheed spent nearly $10 million on more than 100 lobbyists. From 2001-2005, only Philip Morris and GE spent more money lobbying Congress. By 2008, that number was $15.8 million.

Nicholas Chabraja General DynamicsNicholas D. Chabraja
CEO of General Dynamics

2007 Total Compensation: $60 million. Value of GD Stock Owned: $154.2 million

Facts about General Dynamics:
General Dynamics currently produces dozens of weapon systems, which include the Stryker Armored Combat Vehicle and the M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank series, as well as other highly devastating artillery systems and the Trident Nuclear Submarine.

General Dynamics has supplied Israel with various weapon systems, including the F-16 Falcon fighter jet.

In 2008, General Dynamics made $1,682,595 in campaign contributions—58 percent to the Democrats and 42 percent to the Republicans.

Also in 2008, General Dynamics spent $8,562,439 lobbying for government contracts.

Fueled by sales of business jets and military-combat equipment, General Dynamics reported a 32 percent jump in first-quarter profits for 2008, to $573 million. The backlog of work not completed far outpaced revenues, growing by 14 percent to nearly $50 billion.

Analysts think General Dynamics and Mr. Chabraja will do even better next year, noting the “upside potential” of the combat-systems group, which is benefiting from the U.S. Army’s restocking of equipment lost, damaged or worn by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to a $12 billion backlog of orders for corporate jets.

William Utt KBRWilliam P. Utt
CEO of Kellogg Brown & Root.

2007 Total Compensation: $3.29 million. Value of KBR Stock Owned: $6.5 million

Facts about KBR:
There are roughly 14,000 KBR employees inside of Iraq that provide logistical support to the U.S. military. KBR has made billions off of “reconstruction” contracts within Iraq.

KBR is the largest non-union construction company in the United States. It has won many contracts with the U.S. government, including $100 million to build a U.S. embassy in Afghanistan, as well as $216 million for the construction of several base camps and training foreign troops from the Republic of Georgia.

Despite at least a dozen former employees alleging they had been raped by co-workers in Iraq and other employees saying co-workers regularly stole gold, artwork, and weapons, KBR remains in the Pentagon’s good graces. In mid-April, it received a 10-year, $150 billion contract to support the military overseas.

CEO William Utt called 2008 an “outstanding year,” saying KBR posted record profitability.

Despite many scandals and controversies, KBR reported that its first quarter net profits for 2008 more than tripled, from $28 million the previous year to $98 million.

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ANSWER Coalition Responds to President Obama’s Iraq Speech of Friday, February 27

With his speech today, President Obama has essentially agreed to continue the criminal occupation of Iraq indefinitely. He announced that there will be an occupation force of 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for at least three more years. President Obama used carefully chosen words to avoid a firm commitment to remove the 50,000 occupation troops, even after 2011.

The war in Iraq was illegal. It was aggression. It was based on lies and false rationales. President Obama’s speech today made Bush’s invasion sound like a liberating act and congratulated the troops for “getting the job done.” More than a million Iraqis died and a cruel civil war was set into motion because of the foreign invasion. President Obama did not once criticize the invasion itself.

He has also requested an increase in war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, and plans to double the number of U.S. troops sent to fight in Afghanistan.

President Obama has asked Congress to provide more than $200 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over the next two years, in addition to increasing the Pentagon budget by four percent.

Based on President Obama’s new budget, the Pentagon would rank as the world’s 17th largest economy—if it were a country. This new budget increases war spending. Total spending in 2010 would roughly equate to an average of $21,000 a second.

This is not the end of the occupation of Iraq, but rather the continuation of the occupation.

There is only one reason that tens of thousands of troops will remain in Iraq: It is because this is a colonial-type occupation of a strategically important and oil-rich country located in the Middle East where two-thirds of the world’s oil reserve can be found.

Obama’s speech was a major disappointment for anyone who was hoping that Obama would renounce the illegal occupation of Iraq. Today, the U.S. government spends $480 million per day to fund the occupation of Iraq. Even if 100,000 troops are drawn out by August 2010, that means the indefinite occupation of Iraq will cost more than $100 million each day. The continued occupation of Iraq for two years or three years or more makes a complete mockery out of the idea that the Iraqi people control their own destiny. It is a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and independence.

It is no wonder that John McCain came out to support President Obama’s announced plan on Iraq. McCain was an supporter of former President Bush’s and Vice President Cheney’s war and occupation in Iraq.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld—the architects of regime change in Iraq—never had the goal of indefinitely keeping 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. They wanted to subdue the Iraqi people and exercise control with a smaller force. The Iraqi armed resistance prolonged the stationing of 150,000 U.S. troops.

Bush’s goal was domination over Iraq and its oil supplies, and domination over the region. This continues to be the goal of the U.S. political and economic establishment, including that of the new administration.

President Obama decided not to challenge the fundamental strategic orientation. That explains why he kept the Bush team—Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Generals Petraeus and Odierno—on the job to oversee and manage the Iraq occupation. They will also manage the widening U.S. war in Afghanistan and the aerial assaults on Pakistan. There have been over 30 U.S. bombing attacks in Pakistan in the last two months.

We are marching on Saturday, March 21 because the people of this country are fed up with the status quo. They want decent-paying jobs, and affordable health care and housing for all. Students want to study rather than be driven out by soaring tuition rates. The majority of people want a complete—not partial—withdrawal of ALL troops from Iraq. They want the war in Afghanistan to end rather than escalate. They are increasingly opposed to sending $2.6 billion each year to Israel and want an end to the colonial occupation of Palestine.

Consumer confidence men

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Sam IsraelThe more I see pundits scoring Barack Obama’s performance based on Wall Street’s reaction, according to how much hope Obama is able to infuse into the public’s faltering confidence in the economy, I have to ponder the uncomfortable etymology of the term CON ARTIST. Con Man is short for Confidence Man, itself a now obscure euphemism for chiseler, defrauder, grifter, scammer, swindler, gouger, or fraud. But the term is still charmingly descriptive.

While even the disreputable economists now admit that Americans can expect much worse from our economy, Bill Clinton is publicly counseling President Obama to come across with more confidence about our nation’s financial prospects.

The ex-president formally known as Slick Willy is talking about your confidence to spend, without regard to whether you may lose your job, your home, your health, or your life savings.

It’s money that makes the world go round. They need everybody’s, including yours. All the better if you have to borrow it, because you really are of little use to a monetary system unless you take out a loan and pay interest.

Otherwise, with what is anybody going to laugh all the way to the bank?

The following are a few relevant dictionary definitions. Actually, I thought they were going to be more tangential:

consumer confidence
The degree of optimism that consumers are expressing for the state of the economy through their saving and spending activity.

con·fi·dence
Trust or faith in a person or thing.

confidence man
A swindler who exploits the confidence of his victim.

confidence game
A swindle in which the victim is defrauded after his or her confidence has been won.

confidence trick
A swindle in which you cheat at gambling or persuade a person to buy worthless property.

toxic asset
Not in the dictionary. Not even Orwell’s 1984. Could this be the balance sheet doppelganger to the “good-for-you liability?” Does it share the value of a “profit-net-loss” as n approaches zero? The meaning of toxic asset would be recognizably oxymoronic, if it weren’t for the fine suits worn by the FED’s confidence men. Literally, shouldn’t a carcinogenic nutrient translate, currency-exchange wise, into Funny Money?

Much as the banks want to disguise it, a Toxic asset sounds to me like Spilt Milk, an idiom for which we already know the recourse. A chorus of cries from Bernanke, Volcker, Paulson & Rubin would not then be able to convince us to put it back in the bottle and pay for it again.

Dave Schultheis of Colorado State Senate District 9- Lost in a Black Hole of Stupidity

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Joe McCarthyIn this day and age, science has finally located the Black Hole of Human Stupidity and it is centered on Colorado State Senator Dave Schultheis, elected representative of Colorado State Senate District 9. That’s quite a dishonor, but Dave fully deserves the distinction. I mean today, how many public officials have Joseph McCarthy listed as a great American patriotic hero on their website? That’s major league Black Hole of Stupidity if there ever was one and the people of State District 9 elected this twit! Let his love of American fascist Joe McCarthy be expressed in his own words.

Here he answers a man who wrote him opposed to his legislative support for mandatory recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance…

6. Your passing references to McCarthy are noted. I would encourage you to do some reading on Mr. McCarthy. The modern myth about him serves the political agenda of the anti-American crowd, but it does not serve history or the nation very well. McCarthy was a golden boy from Wisconsin, the youngest sitting judge ever appointed in that state, and the youngest man to be elected from that state to the U.S. Senate. He married a Washington beauty queen after moving to the capital. Because of his natural talent and intellectual and moral strength, he was on the fast track to high places. He sacrificed his personal ambitions in order to confront no-kidding Communists who had infiltrated the U.S. at high levels, and his efforts helped lead to the conviction of Alger Hiss and other documented Communist spies. Secret Soviet cables known as the Venona Project which were declassified in 1995 have removed any doubt about this. It may sound far-fetched, given all the modern nonsense you have heard about McCarthy, but his true legacy was not one of forcing patriotism on innocent little children, an association you seem to draw. It was one of courageous, though imperfect, defense of the world’s freest and best political institutions. Again, I commend him to your prudent investigation.

I hope this helps you understand my point of view, and that of others advocating both formal, public patriotism, and inner, personal patriotism. This country is great. This country is good. Loving it deeply enough to advocate public ceremonies which reflect that love is not dangerous, but healthy. Naturally, I would be happy to answer your open letter, should you care to send one, with one of my own.

Best regards to you, and thank you again for taking the time both to write and follow up.

Dave Schultheis

See Rep. Schultheis Responds to Constituent on Pledge of Allegiance
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Want more words of wisdom from this homophobic and immigrant-phobic dingbat, Dave Schultheis? How about his website’s headliner quote against being tolerant? Here it is then…

“Tolerance is a virtue of a man without convictions.” — G. K. Chesterton, who strongly influenced C.S. Lewis

So who is this G.K. Chesterton whose quote Schultheis puts on his website? He became a major Catholic apologist right at the time that the Catholic Church was solidly fascist in its sentiments in countries like Spain and Italy. Here below is part of wikipedia’s description of Chesterton…

Accusations of anti-Semitism
Both Chesterton and Belloc have faced accusations of anti-Semitism during their lifetimes and subsequently.[17] Their criticisms of the “international Jewish banking families” are some of the most important reasons for these accusations. For example, Chesterton, Belloc, and Chesterton’s brother Cecil, were vehement critics of the Isaacs, who were involved in the Marconi scandal in the years before World War I.[18] George Orwell accused Chesterton of being guilty of “endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts.”[19]

In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a “Jewish Problem” in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.[20] He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause. In 1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that:

In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people.[21]

The Wiener Library (London’s archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: “he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on.”[22]

Chesterton condemned the Nuremberg Laws, and he died in 1936, as the Hitlerite antisemitic measures were temporarily decreased due to the Berlin Olympics, long before lethal persecution by the Nazis would start.

G. K. Chesterton From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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More? Here is State Senator Schultheis touting sales of a book that decries homosexuals as being just what? …’The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today’! See Intolerant Dave on Homosexuality

Hey, did you know that? They are the principal threat to religious freedom protected by none other than Dave Schultheis! (and CS daily, The Gazette! They share this nutty view that Christians are under major attack, too). Poor Christians…. Who can save them from the fags?

Yes, Dave Schultheis of Colorado State District 9 is lost in a Black Hole of Stupidity, but that’s North Colorado Springs for you! And Dave Schultheis is one of the few remaining living, openly McCarthyite fossils left in America! Incredible! And how he manages to fuse together MLK with Joseph McCarthy is an amazing feat! Only in Colorado do we have such genius! It’s an amazing place!

the short end of the stick

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hazelwood tally stick It was one of the greatest heists in history. The scene? London, 1660. The perpetrator? England’s King Charles the II. The loot? All the gold he could con out of the country’s goldsmiths, bankers and businessmen. The tool?
 
A tally stick.

Tally sticks were a brilliant invention, but they were also insidious as they formed the foundation for the fiat currency systems we still have today. One where the root of a currency’s value is in a promise from a faceless institution, and not in the actual value of an object.

Put into use about a thousand years ago, they were a common sense solution for a young gold-and-goods economy where gold was scarce. By the time of the heist they were used in everyday transactions.

Here is how it worked. When a loan was made, the debt was carved in a standard fashion on the surface of a small (preferably hazelwood) stick, and then the stick was split in half through the center of the carving. The longer end of the IOU was given to the purchaser, and its handle was called the “stock” — the root of the word’s use in today’s markets.

Even a mostly illiterate public could read the amount scratched into the wood, and the stick would only fit perfectly with its original other half. That way, when the debtor returned with the money (or goods) owed, the sticks would be matched and the debt would be “tallied.”

In that fundamental use, they worked perfectly. But of course, as is governments’ way, the King was tempted to stretch those bounds.

Charles II ruled at a time when royal power was still based on a divine mandate. His government and institutions — and indeed he himself — saw the king as the Chosen One, which was a real shame for him because it bound him to the laws of Christendom. And Christianity at the time still forbade lending or borrowing with usury (interest). When financing several failing wars against neighboring countries depleted royal coffers, Charles II needed some quick cash to continue living in kingly fashion.

King Charles II turned to the trusted tally and the keen idea of selling his (government) tallies (debt) at a discount. That way he could allow his lenders to profit without charging interest — the basis for government debt being sold at a discount today.

And the King could issue advance tallies for emergency spending, an idea that proved all too tempting. He sold the tallies collected by his Exchequer (tax collector), essentially trading future tax receipts to the country’s goldsmiths (bankers) for quick cash.

The tallies were receipts for taxes to be paid later in the year. This is a crucial part of the story: they weren’t trading on the value of the objects being traded, but on the cost of waiting for a return and the government’s ability to collect taxes and stay honest. If the government is not honest, this is an outright Ponzi scheme, one where new debt issue could theoretically pay for passing bills. For a while.

The King realized that he’d stumbled onto something big. He could wage all the war he wanted and pay his bills with the gold he got for hazelwood. The King spent and spent, and the goldsmiths’ vaults filled up with more and more sticks.

Goldsmiths were handing out certificates for fractional gold reserves and inflating the young economy in a con all their own. And since the King played along with their early building of a banking system, they played along with the sticks-for-gold investment strategy.

Over time, the market got wise to the game. Buyers started attaching larger and larger discounts to the King’s debt to offset the perceived risk in loaning money to the King. The discounts prompted the King to issue even more tallies, promising out more future tax revenues just to meet his short-term spending desires. But remember only the discount was changing here. So the mountain of taxes to be redeemed in order to pay off his debts grew in comparison, soon overwhelming the King’s income.

By the time the whole Ponzi scheme came to an end, the King’s sticks were trading at a 10% discount (to put that into perspective, short-term T-Bills are currently trading with discounts of one-tenth of one percent or less). The payments on his newer issues trading at that discount soon outmatched all the Kingdom’s tax revenues, effectively bankrupting his Exchequer and threatening to put the monarchy in the poorhouse.

So with the stroke of a pen, the King simply declared those debts illegal and ceased payment.

With that single stroke he stole most of England’s gold — having already spent it — and forced the young economy to fall flat on its face. The King’s various creditors ended up on “the short end of the stick” and all credit in the country evaporated very nearly overnight.

Pretty scary, huh? I’m glad such a thing could never happen today.

Obama delivers Bush 3rd inaugural address

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Ft Carson GWOT Fallen Soldiers MemorialWhat did Barack Obama say at this morning’s inauguration that Bush hasn’t said in shorter mouthfuls?

Obama brought up the Goddamn War On Terror, without labeling it “so-called,” and aimed at the usual suspect evildoers. And he’s embraced Neoliberal Globalization like it’s cod liver oil.

Not only that, apparently America is unrepentant. Also, bring it on.

“Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. …

“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

On the subject of our economy, Obama wants to sidestep the rampant corruption and lay the blame on the American people’s resistance to globalization:

“Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

Then he wants to pick fights with the Third World which dares criticize the legacy of colonialism and ongoing oppression of globalism. Pitting their meager voices against the resources of world banking:

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.

Elaborating on what help the West offers:

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow;

Can that be anything other than a plug for big agra, and the international privatization of water?

But mostly Barack Obama’s theme was Kennedy’s and Bush’s, ask not what your country can do for you, yada yada.

How dare he? Millions of us contribute our efforts, our dollars, which they are still soliciting, to put Obama in office, and he has the nerve, in his inaugural address to call upon the American people for sacrifice. It’s up to them, us, to bring change.

He’s got a paycheck now, his friends and colleagues have jobs, it’s time for them to snap to. They’ve been sent to Washington, not to tell us they’re going to be stymied, that they’ve got to compromise with the corporate right, but to say Yes We Can. And they better Goddamn do it. There is no consensus to reach on health care, or the environment, or war. Compromise with immorality is like cheating a little, or stealing a little.

What I wanted to hear from Obama, is “yes I can, yes I will, thank you America, now I’m going to deliver for you.”

Barack gives Bank of America ‘overdraft protection’ as he bankrupts the US public

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Barack LincolnThe Republicans gave the banks hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars, but that was not enough. Barack, instead of spending money to help house the homeless, institute universal medical coverage, or better Social Security for the elderly and incapacitated, thinks Bank of America’s corporate owners need yet more of your tax monies! What a wild CHANGE in thinking here! He brings us visions of Barack Lincoln, freeing the corporate class from all responsibilities! Poor slaves.

I got ‘overdraft protection’ from Bank of America, and I went over about $2 on a Safeway debit card purchase with them. They charged me over $100 before I even knew about it. I had told them I didn’t want their ‘protection’, but they had given me it anyway. So I closed out with them, Bank of America not even having any local banks in the area. Now they call me twice a day with a recorded message and have screwed with my credit rating. That’s my overdraft protection’ plan from them…. phone harassment.

If somebody came and knocked repeatedly twice a day unsolicited on my front door, the police would go get them for this abuse. But Bank of America can bombard me with computerized phone calls 14 times a week, and nobody calls that a crime, except for me. The bastards. Why doesn’t Barack Obama give me ‘overdraft protection’ from the Bank of America criminals?

Bank of America though has been given much better and real overdraft protection by their cronies, Barack and Dubya, the DP and RP. Little accounting error? Then Dubya and Barack are stumbling all over themselves to rush multiple tens of billions to Bank of America to fix their small little banking ‘error’!

They could actually nationalize the damn Bank of America and that would be fine by me. Hey, why doesn’t our government do just exactly that? Nationalizing is what they do with many small folk who go to jail if they do not pay off money they steal from others through their ‘bad investments’. Heck, the cops never even give small crooks the option to return that money, it’s simply you have been ‘nationalized’ and now you spend the next 20 years with us! Where’s the respect for small time crooks who are merely emulating the Bank Of America Big Boys with their financial thefts? The ‘law’ is rather strange in America… Rob little and you are a Bad Boy. Rob BIG, and the government starts throwing other people’s money at you!

Bank of America bail-out agreed I didn’t agree, did you agree? You did if you voted for Barack Obama, Mr. and Mrs. DP ‘Liberal’. You’re always being led around on upper class leash by hooks in your noses, it rather does seem… Dupes.

Who has the famous al-Zaidi Bush shoes

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Everyone’s clamoring for the shoe heard around the world. The several
Muntadhar al-Zaidimanufacturers who claim to have cobbled the offending black oxfords are deluged in orders. A Saudi man has offered ten million dollars for Muntadhar al-Zaidi’s original pair. But the NYT reports: “Explosives tests by investigators destroyed the offending footwear.” Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

I don’t believe that shit for a minute. If airport security can verify footwear inertness in a few seconds…

Not that a pair of worn leather shoes matters a whit. But there is more than shoe fetish at foot here. And I find something about the fate of this pair of shoes that’s awfully unlike a Skull and Bones man.

Idolatry
The Saudi who offered the king’s ransom for the “Medal of Freedom” shoes, may have been enraptured by idolatry, but he knows the magical allure which those shoes will always possess. How can any of us deny the mystical energy we attribute to baseballs marked by having been hit to home runs? All Americans take, or aspire to take, a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian to see the actual, for real, objects of their common heritage.

Museums of art and natural history, glean an idolatry all their own, but historical collections like the Smithsonian and the British Imperial War Museum, peddle in pure talisman mysticism.

The crown jewels come to mind, or any ordinary person’s diamond. Stones, crystals, runes, coins, fetishes, heirlooms, antiques, personal designer accessories, safety blankets. We swim in stuff which have meaning greater than their utility. Even poor Diogenes had his lantern.

Who are we kidding that mere objects don’t have enormous power over us? I myself keep everything. I frequently feel I’m drowning in remembrances and chanced-upon objects for which I aspire sentiment. Would that I could focus on strength-building empowering articles.

I’m reminded of last year’s sale of a copy of the Magna Carta, was it, to a modern Wall Street robber baron. I was not alone to surmise that he paid 21 million for the now-transgressed compact, probably to wipe his ass with it. As the great white hunters paid their safari guides in hope of being the last to personally vanquish whatever late species was next to be rendered extinct.

The al-Zaidi Shoes
This famous pair of shoes were thrown by Muntadhar al-Zaidi at President Bush, al-Zaidi being the first man to dare show defiance to the US Nero. Although, certain intellectuals do come to mind, for having voiced their discontent with his policies. I remember too, a certain brave Indonesian witch doctor who cast a magic curse on the universally despised Bush. Ki Gendeng Pamungkas placed a jinx to shorten Bush’s stay in Indonesia, it wasn’t a fatal voodoo spell, for that would have been just as illegal as making threats is in the US. I will always believe there must have been countless more who’ve cursed Bush to his face, if prudently under their breath.

But journalist al-Zaidi did the one act above all others. He showed open, physical defiance. At the bottom line, against an imperial oligarchy which dominates the world by military force, it’s the only defiance that really matters. And George Bush knows it.

Once subdued, was it necessary to bludgeon al-Zaidi? He had disarmed himself, and was now completely out of ammo. Was the rough apprehension in any manner appropriate? Everyone in the room had already been checked by security. What was the purpose of beating al-Zaidi in the next room? Or of the torture later?

Regicide
Would-be assassins of kings, in the times of kings, were drawn and quartered, made to suffer excruciating deaths, but their body parts desecrated as well. It wasn’t to insure their mortality.

From a historical perspective, I believe al-Zaidi’s projectile footwear represent an enormously momentous act, even more by being common objects. We all have shoes. And see, shoes have provide a ready aeronautic diversion from the path most taken. A significant number of common citizens can get close enough to our leader to lambast him with their shoes.

Do we approve of him or not? Does he listen to our protestations, or does he laugh them off as our America-given freedoms to disagree?

Is it a mere disagreement we have with Bush over his regime’s genocide, high crimes and theft from the American People?

I’m convinced that al-Zaidi’s shoes had to be drawn and quartered, lest they inspire further acts of bravery from the ranks of Bush’s subjects.

Is it time to throw our shoes? In this divide and conquer feudal age, by design an anti-social world which celebrates the individual lest a community spirit trounce the narcissism imperative to thwart organizing into collectives, a next shoe-thrower would be mocked for being a copy-cat. I can hope that we recognize the humility of extremely diminutive stature. We want to be voracious proponents of social justice, but have tragically impoverished resources, . The struggle against capitalist imperialism will require many foot soldiers. We can’t all be Che and al-Zaidi. We didn’t think to throw our shoes, we won’t be improvisers of the next gesture. For the better part of us, the most effective we can be is follow their lead.

Let’s imagine, for the populist courage they might ignite, that the al-Zaidi shoes were effaced from man’s heritage. Bush has done worse, he’s razed Iraq, cradle of civilization, the untold undiscovered archeological sites, the historic library, I can’t even go on, the losses were unthinkable.

Occult Talisman
Except, this is a man who like his father, and strangely like an odd many in his cabal, came out of the secret “Skull and Bones” club at Yale. The exclusive order was originated by a forefather, who amassed the Bush fortune with help from Hitler by the way, named for the club’s alleged possession of the remains of Sitting Bull. What, was Sitting Bull a famous Yalie? A forefather of modern empire building? Was he a banking/usury supremacist?

Sitting Bull was but one of the fiercest American indian leader to have defied the white man’s global conquest. Of course, it’s not uncommon for warring cannibals to feel that they gather strength from their opponents, even as they’ve defeated them.

The Bushes and their cadre of global elites are also members of Bohemian Grove. As occultist as blue-blood better-than-thous can get. I’ll not assert they celebrate witchcraft, but it’s more pagan than average churchgoers could comfortably countenance. Traditional religions hold it as false idolatry, academia dismisses it as mysticism.

Which brings me to the Lance of Longinus, allegedly the weapon which pierced Jesus’s side to deal the Coup de Grace. Though scholars have traced its existence to only 900 AD, the “Spear of Destiny” retains a tremendous occult allure, in particular the Nazi Third Reich. Other such talisman weapons have been sought by warrior leaders throughout history, as bestowing upon whoever possessed them, divine powers over challengers to their throne.

Let’s face it, since the success of the American industrial and banking driven democracy, in rising to dominate over all its WWII adversaries and allies, our elected leader has become absolute ruler of the known world. It wasn’t our intent, but it’s human nature.

Absolute Power Corrupts
We live again in a world of kings. Of moats, of food tasters, of royal jesters, of showing not just deference but fealty. We live in a world of a leisured class, where right to wealth and privilege is considered hereditary. A birthright to nobility is reinforced even by what we understand of genetics. Men are not created equal. Man at his highest is preordained. It’s no great leap to expect these men will search the firmament for signs to affirm that their supremacy is granted by divinity.

I expect earthly objects which defy a monarch’s impregnability have irresistible personal allure to kings for whom nothing remains but to divine their life’s purpose.

It’s not uncharted territory, there have been global empires before, except the world known to earlier supreme leaders had horizons closer in. Alexander ruled his whole known world. The Roman Emperors did, with the unconquered bits being just so much backwoods. Such leaders had no rivals in trade, power, or wealth. Charlemagne, Ghengis Khan, Shaka Zulu, ruled their entire known realms. While these leaders were empire builders, the related personages less lauded, were their progeny who succumbed to proving Lord Acton’s Dictum that “absolute power corrupts–” Each it seems resolved to challenge the last part “–absolutely.”

Now John Dalberg-Acton’s Essays on Freedom and Power is a scrap of paper I’d be surprised to find enshrined in a megalomaniac’s personal collection of power-emitting talisman keepsake chatchkes.

The American dyslexia for economics

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The interest rate for banks is down to zero. B of A and Citibank are still charging 39%. What again does economic news have to do with me?
 
The biggest news on the economy was BREAKING NEWS a week ago: the US economy is in a recession, and has been for over a year. Can news a year old still be news? What news exactly are we getting from the experts, economists and other mesmerists paraded on the television every evening?

We consult them on a minute by minute basis, actually, on 24/7 cable news stations, for every hint of a whiff of where the weather vane might indicate the US economy is blowing. If the stock market doesn’t hang on their every diagnosis, it reacts to what unelected, self-made officials say. Now we’re led to understand all that spinning can flip-flop for a year-old contradictory study.

And who’s going to let America know when we’ve hit a full-on depression? Will we be told it before the decade is enshrined post-facto in a Time-Life retrospective? Are those in charge so cynical that they count on the public knowing the truth in spite of their lies, because it’s we who endure the effects in real time anyway? The media can lie about unemployment figures too –what could it possibly matter to the unemployed?

It’s not only ADD. Americans understand why too-sobering statistics are kept from us, lest a post-mortem induce pre. We are the great engine of consumerism, running on pure flattery. I think it’s the same self-defeating fatalism which fuels the life insurance scam. We bet against ourselves. We buy self-help books. We are eternally sick.

But does the economy really work so? Would an autopsy be self-fulfilling? Can an economy go sour due to one bad-apple-attitude, or would it be because of the lost jobs?

I’m guessing this is where the University of Chicago meets Euripides, or if it prefers, palmistry. There’s a global comeuppance in your future, you small fraction of Earth’s population who have expended the lion’s share of its resources. That’s what will introduce the American quality of life to harsh earthbound reality.

Keeping American consumers in debt is less a magician’s act of driving the economy, than it is a swindler’s function of distracting the poor dupe until he’s lost his shirt.

But this swindler is not planning to catch the next bus out of town.

This banking scam isn’t over until the shirtless victim is thrown out the saloon door and into the street, where’s he’s got no redress but to face line after line of well armed riot police.

Brave New Chickens

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Not what you might think.

Actually it’s from a segment of “How It’s Made” on the Science Channel, coupled in with Aldous Huxley’s frequently banned book.

This one (I watched it today) was on Eggs.

And they proceeded to show what’s essentially a mechanized Egg Factory.

From time to time as I write this I’ll put in references to the book.

Civilization is sterilization, repeated 50,000 times between the ages of 5 and 6…

So they’ve got these hens, right, the basis of The Egg industry. A couple hundred thousand of them.

Raised in cages. Fed by a conveyor belt that delivers a mixture of feed that’s scientifically measured out for Maximum Egg Production.

Mesh floor so their droppings fall onto another conveyor belt.

All the cages identical, all the portions of the feed identical, the eggs as standardized as possible, the hens so identical they look like they’ve been cloned.

They lay their eggs, which roll out the cage onto yet another of those damned conveyor belts.

For the sake of literary diversity I’ll insert here, the hens looked like one huge Bokanovsky Group.

I’ll point out that one of the big commercial sponsors of the show is an Investment Banking group whose advertising- du-jour has thousands of Identical Looking factory workers (who aren’t the customers of the investment bank, no, we’re not THAT important to them) first at their identical, uniform “individual” workstations. Wearing of course uniforms. Sterile White Uniforms. Like the chickens, white. Sterile.

One wonders if they have a catheter arrangement where their droppings fall through the floor onto another conveyor belt…

Then that segues into the workers at the Cafeteria, at perfectly spaced, identical round white tables, (all of this As Seen From Above, so we’re literally “looking down on them”) eating identical meals, and I’d swear by the Lord God who made us all that they were eating in unison, coordinated just as surely as if they were marching.

Civilization is sterilization, repeated 50,000 times between the ages of 5 and 6.

The eggs are carried by the conveyor belts through various machines which measure them, by volume then by weight.

Machines that pick them up 5 dozen at a time and stack them quickly, efficiently, quietly, cleanly, then stacks them onto carts. Here one of the Human Intervention squads come in, identical looking workers wearing Sterile White Clothes pushing the carts onto conveyor belts which carry them into a refrigerated storage area.

Then they’re rolled, again by machines, this one triggered by a thermostat, and fed through some more sorting apparati.

A bright light is shone from behind them, and a computer reads the image to find each egg which is cracked, and mark it out for removal.

Another Worker Drone goes in with a scoop and efficiently as any machine, scoops the “tagged” eggs out.

Another computer imaging device spots which ones have traces of blood in the egg.

And the routine is once again repeated.

Then about 2 minutes more of the Glory Of The Machine being expounded…

Then the Narrator chirps much about how the chickens start laying eggs when they’re 7 weeks old, and have a productive cycle of about 52 months. Just under 4 and a half years.

Then they get a free, all expenses paid trip to the slaughterhouse.
The Narrator actually used that expression.

Which we’ve seen that mechanized, standardized operation as well…

From Hatch to Hatchet all Untouched by Human Hands.

Now, I’m sure some Industrial Apologist Type A-2 is going to give the same identical speech the Director of World Hatcheries gave to John the Savage in the book.

When John the Savage and Bernard Marx had, in a Rage Against the Machine action, interrupted the doping of a Bokanovsky Group, where they were being given their Soma rations, which triggered an Automated Security system where Soma in vaporized form was sprayed through vents in the walls and ceilings, and a Recorded Voice says “Friends, why are you being angry? Everybody belongs to everybody else, after all. ” and a couple of other Mass Calming subliminal messages they had repeated to them in their Hypnopædia sessions 100,000 times between the ages of 5 and 7…

Then Bernard and John the Savage and their friend are talking to the Director of World Hatcheries and it’s calmly explained to them, the DWH shows John the Savage copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and other Anti-social books, says the people were already so well conditioned that even if the books were given to them, they would simply dismiss it with one or more of the one-line platitudes they had been taught since childhood….

By the way, the “Hatcheries” means where Humans were grown in glass bottles until birth.

No mother, no father, just “Genetic Donors”.

The message? Conform or Else.

In the best of election outcomes…

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I’ve been fantasizing for decreasingly brief moments of late, about the outcome of this election. There’s still time to make a wish. Join me! It’s one thing to win the lotto, and another to have everyone win.

Let’s assume a Democratic landslide. It’s not improbable. In the wake of the Bush deluge, the economic and moral collapse of a once diffident cultural hegemony, in light of the investment bank highway robbery and the American legacy plunged into permanent war, couldn’t it be imagined that Americans might have wised up about Republicans? What are these Republicans after all but thieves? How can conservatism be taken to represent anything anymore but ignorant apologists for entrenched corruption?

I think it’s a lovely thought to imagine P.T. Barnum’s adage proving trump, that all Americans can’t stay fooled all the time. And so, what then? How to dispose of Republican stragglers intent on making a last stand with their authority?

We ride them out of town on a rail. Send them to Iraq with personal instructions to stand in for the boys coming home. Make them rebuild Iraq with their bare hands. Make them do, as we forced the Germans to do as we liberated Europe, to help clean the mass graves of the concentration camps. Grind their noses into their immoral mess. Hope they contract a conscience and die of it. That’s for starters.

The smug pencil pushers, GOP operatives who paid the lip service to tolerating torture, condoned what the other imbeciles about them didn’t realize was legislated against already in common law. My sympathies will run insufficient you dopey fiends.

Mine is a bloody fantasy. Blind complicity to mass murder, mass ignorance, mass apathy, amoral immorality, the norm slacker. No more.

It’s time for righteous indignation to stomp on the banal serial injustice minions. We don’t want them crowding our pursuit of happiness, constraining us with conservative red tape which is just administrativ-ese for chicken-shit cheese place-holding.

Republicans deserve foreshortened lives. Not the noose for most, of course, but a doctor’s prognosis that, by measure of how much life they’ve sucked out of other people, how much spirit they have wasted, how much suffering they have caused, how many rights they’ve denied, how much they’ve taken from others, that much should be debited from what they have been banking as their due for their patriotic allegiance.

An eye for an eye. A tooth for a denture denied to an uninsured American. That simple.

We used to damn just the Neocons, but they rode on the shoulders of the Republicans, among others. Isn’t it the hour of reckoning for the Red Blue Meanies?

Fantasy Option Two:
Speaking of Blue Meanies, What if the Republicans win next Tuesday? What then? Cancel the champagne, hold the tar and feathers.

If the Republicans and their anti-democry programs escape the tether of the public’s grasp, it’s curtains most certainly for the land of liberty. But as we fall into post-industrial decay, I wish this fate for the Dems. Every last ordinary registered Democrat must repudiate their pseudo-party. Make their representatives don the lapel pins of their masters. Democrat and Republican politicians are the same.

It pains me to imagine being told that the Republican machine wasn’t built in a day, that Democrats must knuckle down for the long haul to build a similar base. Quietly and patiently put their people into the right local offices, that they might too, someday, rig the election in the Democrats’ favor. But this begs a question the Dems will never resolve. Republicans from top to bottom are smug, selfish dogs. Unthinking brutes by definition. That’s what it takes to run a well-oiled graft machine. Look at your fellow Dems and tell me they will have the stamina and self-interest to work those lower echelons with dumb tenacity. Republicans have staffed the halls of bureaucracy because it suits their temperament. How is a do-gooder supposed to lie, cheat and steal, for a living, elbowing his fellow man?

Forget Joe the Plumber, the only person McCain represents is Jack the Lobbyist

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"I believe banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
– President Thomas Jefferson, 1802

Bigots for McCain!

RepubliKKKans caught hanging Obama in effigy on University of Kentucky campus.

Palin must be so proud. Two arrested in Republican plot to assassinate Obama.

Al Qaeda Endorses McCain!

I’m starting to feel a little sorry for the McCain campaign. He’s senile, and now she’s gone completely off the reservation.

EXPOSED: SARAH PALIN ADMITS SHE’S IS A COMMUNIST!

Sarah Palin: ready to become Dick Cheney on day 1. She rigged bidding on $40B pipeline so it would go to her cronies.

Poll: Obama has highest approval ratings of any candidate in 28 years. Palin has the lowest, ever.

Senior Republican figures predict historic landslide for Obama.

Former Bush speechwriter says McCain is taking the entire GOP down with him.

Break out the bubbly! Vile heterofascist Marilyn Musgrave’s campaign is tanking.

Bush appointed Fed Chair endorses Obama.

Unhinged Republicans now claiming Obama is a Devil worshiper!

Call me paranoid if you want, but I have a hard time believing that Cheney has any intention of leaving office on January 20th, exposing himself to criminal prosecution for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and treason against the US Constitution. And McCain is just waaayyy too confident, considering the polls. November 4 is when things start to get a little dicey in our “democracy.”

US blackmails Iraq, will shut down entire country if they won’t sign agreement letting us continue genocidal occupation for 3 more years.

wealthy cry socialist

(Excerpts from Oct 31 notes of Thomas MC.)

The Law of the Jungle

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THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE

Trade, within a society and between countries, is the exchange of goods and services produced by human beings. The owners of the means of production appropriate the profits. As a class, they are the leaders of the capitalist state and they boast of fostering development and social wellbeing through market. This they worship as an infallible God.

In every country there is competition between the strongest and the weakest; the ones with more physical energy and better fed, those who learned how to read and write, who attended school and have more experience accumulated; the ones with more extensive social relations and more resources, and those within society who fail to have these advantages.

Now, as far as the countries is concerned, there are differences between those with a better climate and more arable land, more water and more natural resources in the area where they are located, when there are no more territories to conquer; the ones mastering technology, having greater development and handling unlimited media resources and those who, on the contrary, do not enjoy any of these prerogatives. These are the sometimes enormous differences between the rich and the poor nations.

It’s the law of the jungle.

There are no differences between ethnic groups, however, when it comes to the mental faculties of the human being. This has been thoroughly proven by science. The present society is not the natural way in which human life evolved, but rather a creation of the mentally developed man without which his life would be inconceivable. Therefore, what is at stake is whether the human being will be able to survive the privilege of having a creative mind.

The developed capitalist system, epitomized by the country with a privileged nature where the European white man brought his ideas, dreams and ambitions, is today in a crisis. But, it is not the usual crisis happening once in a number of years; not even the traumatic crisis of the 1930s but the worst of all crises since the world started to pursue this growth and development model.

The current crisis of the developed capitalist system is taking place when the empire is about to change leadership in the elections to be held in twenty-five days; it was all that was left to see.

The candidate of the two main parties that will say the last word in these elections are trying to persuade the bewildered voters –many of whom have never cared to cast a vote— that as candidates to the presidency they can secure the wellbeing and consumerism of what they describe as a people of middle class only, even though they are not planning to introduce any real changes to what they consider the most perfect economic system the world has ever known. The same world that, in their respective minds, is less important than the happiness of over three hundred million people who account for less than five percent of the world population. The fate of the remaining ninety-five percent of human beings, peace and war, the fit or unfit-for-breathing air, will highly depend on the decisions of the administrative leader of the empire, whether or not that constitutional position has any power at a time of nuclear weapons and space shields moved by computers in circumstances where every second counts and when ethical principles keep loosing their value. Still, the more or less nefarious role of the President of that country cannot be overlooked.

Racism is deeply-rooted in the United States where the mind of millions of people can hardly reconcile with the notion that a black man, with his wife and children could live in the White House, which is precisely called White.

It’s a miracle that the Democratic candidate has not met the same destiny as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others who only a few decades ago dreamed of justice and equality. He is in the habit of looking at his adversary with serenity and of smiling at the dialectic predicament of an opponent gazing into space.

The Republican candidate, on the other hand, who likes to enhance his reputation as a belligerent man, was one of the worst students in his class at West Point. He has confessed that he did not know any Mathematics; it can thus be assumed that he knew less of the complicated economic science.

The truth is his adversary surpasses him in cleverness and composure.

Something McCain has aplenty is age, and his health condition is not safe.

I am bringing up these data to indicate that eventually –if anything went wrong with the candidate’s health, in case he is elected— the lady of the riffle, the inexperienced former governor of Alaska could become President of the United States. It can be noticed that she does not know a thing.

Meditating on the current US public debt –$10,266 trillions— that President Bush is laying on the shoulders of the new generations in that country, I took to calculating how long it would take a man to count the debt that he has doubled in eight years.

A man working eight hours a day, without missing a second, and counting one hundred one-dollar bills per minute, during 300 days in the year, would need 710 billion years to count that amount of money.

I could not find a more graphic way to describe the volume of money that is practically mentioned every day now.

In order to avoid a general state of panic, the US administration has declared that it will secure deposits that do not exceed 250 thousand dollars. It will be managing banks and such funds as Lenin would never have thought of counting with an abacus.

We might be wondering about the contribution of Bush’s administration to Socialism. But, let’s not entertain any illusions. Once the banking operations go back to normal, the imperialists will return the banks to the private business as some other countries in this hemisphere have already done. The peoples always foot the bill.

Capitalism tends to reproduce itself under any social system because it is based on selfishness and on man’s instincts.

The only choice left to human society is to overcome this contradiction; otherwise it would not be able to survive.

At this time, the ocean of money being poured into the world finances by the central banks of the developed capitalist countries is dealing a hard blow to the Stock Exchanges of the countries which resort to these institutions in an effort to beat their economic underdevelopment. Cuba has no Stock Exchange. We shall certainly find more rational and more socialist ways of financing our development.

The current crisis and the brutal measures of the US administration to save itself will bring more inflation, more devaluation of the national currencies, more painful losses in the markets, lower prices for basic export commodities and more unequal exchange. But, they will also bring to the peoples a better understanding of the truth, a greater conscience, more rebelliousness and more revolutions.

We shall see how the crisis develops and what happens in the United States in twenty-five days.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 11, 2008 6:15 p.m.