THAT'S RIGHT. Five US ex-presidents, so-called most powerful men in the world, who each did their most to expropriate the public wealth for the super rich, who denied you healthcare, job security, infrastructure, a clean environment, even peace, every last POTUS son of a bitch, now think the rescue of America's refinery capitol should be at your expense. Never mind that your taxes will already pay to rebuild Houston. These still-shilling salesmen-in-chief want whatever extra they can squeeze out of the American little person in the name of Christian Charity.
Tag: Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton’s Haitian ‘aid’ campaigning was all a big fraud
How many times did Bill Clinton pose himself as wanting to save the US made impoverished Haiti? I lost count. Well now a study shows it was all a big fraud, with most of the so called US aid to Haiti going to US companies, and only 1% of it to Haitians themselves! Yes, that's right. ...just 1%! And the study also found that the biggest recipient of U.S. aid after the earthquake was Chemonics International, a for-profit international development company based in Washington, D.C., that has more than 4,800 employees. These are US corporate creeps posing as international saviours alongside their co-partners, The Pentagon. See Study Finds Haiti Aid Largely Went to US Groups
Mimi Wesson has um big penis envy
DENVER- And it's a strange lot of penises she covets: there's Bob Guccione, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton and... Ward Churchill. In a private email in the midst of the CU firestorm over Churchill's 9/11 essay, Wesson compared the "thoroughly unpleasant" Churchill to a pornographer, wife-batterer-killer, pedophile and cheat --as attorney David Lane reminded us in his closing arguments today. But it wasn't the email that tipped me off, nor her fiction-writer persona promotional photo on the motorcycle. It was something which Marianne "My friends call me Mimi" did on her first day of testimony, early in the trial. When she left the witness stand, Wesson did not return to her seat, nor to the chairs located by the defense table for CU-aligned witnesses. During her break, Churchill-slayer Mimi Wesson chose the chair directly behind Ward Churchill. Did anyone else remark on this? Even though Wesson stubbornly tried to project an adult impartiality about the case, as would befit the chairperson of a committee deciding another faculty member's fate, off the stand Wesson couldn't resist the urge which it appears drove her to solicit the committee chair position in the first place: to face "male celebrity wrongdoers" and take them down. In the courtroom Wesson denied agreeing to the committee appointment only with the proviso that she be in charge, but her earlier videotaped deposition recorded otherwise. By her own account, Wesson had asked to be chairperson of the board selected to investigate Churchill. When Wesson blamed a possible stenographer's error for the inconsistency, Attorney Lane pointed out that the courtroom had just heard her deposition with its own ears. As a pup fiction writer, and a frequent law commentator on mainstream news programs, it's clear Wesson welcomes the public eye. During the "All Churchill, all the time" mayhem, maybe she saw an opportunity to pretend to have incited the Churchill lynch mob. I hope Wesson will be remembered for her testimony in this trial, in which the law professor demonstrated she was crafty enough to avoid admitting her prejudice, but couldn't distance herself from the incriminating grandstanding she'd already done. The "Wesson Committee" was shown in this trial to have been a hatchet team of academic hacks. Whose foray into Native America Ethnic Studies, purportedly to debunk Ward Churchill's scolarship, resembled a visit of Ugly Americans to an Indian reservation. With Mimi the Emasculator wanting both to drive and ride shotgun.
The Dubya archetype as maladroit foil
Some might argue that it began before George Dubya. Apparently the US public's distrust of politics is placated by believing its fate is in the hands of someone they could feel comfortable having a beer with. I'd say it began in earnest with the cardboard figurehead Ronald Reagan, and continued through the wimp and slick Wimpy. The perceived acuity of the US president has since been diminished ad absurdum to an incoherent, uneducated, illiterate inebriate. The ascension of Barack Obama marks a change meant to refresh voter confidence, but clearly our government's winning motif is taking a not so distant back seat. Americans need someone with whom to feel superior, if not in the highest office, at least among his foils. We saw it in Obama's purported campaign opponents Wrong-way McCain and the sans pareil Sarah the Plain. With Republicans willing to plumb heretofore unfathomable shallows to foist its characters, there appears to be no end of candidates for rodeo clown. While I'm inclined to think these caricatures are fashioned by the media's framework, mano a mano performance like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal make me a believer in the solo tour de force majeure, excuse me, grand malheur. Could Jindal's rebuttal to President Obama's congressional address have been any weaker? It's hard for me to predict that SNL will give us anything other than the Palin treatment, lampooning Jindal's insipid pitch by reprising it verbatim. Now you've been to a doctor, you've watched your lawyer kick ass, you've taken the sage advice of accountants, you've been impressed by museum docents, grateful to police officers, seen miracles performed by plumbers. I've even found myself in the debt of cable installers, and more often then not, public clerks. Are we to then believe that Bobby Jindal and ilk are the best our public offices can offer?
Consumer confidence men
The 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.
Barack Obama sneaking in real close
LOOK AT THAT CHEEKY RASCAL! He's wearing Bush's tie, and Bush's lapel pin, and he's standing right in there between the blue-bloods; like he wants to be Bush 44 and not somebody who even knows those red-tied crackers! I've still got my fingers crossed that this is a ruse. The minute the inauguration's over, Obama will put his arms over the shoulders of both the Bushes and lead them straight up a scaffold.
BlowJob Bill, Super Hero!
These days, Slick Willie is out there pretending to be helping the poor. See Bill Clinton has 1,000 pledges to aid world's poor ...At least, former president Jimmy Carter went out and pretended to build houses, and Al Gore pretends to be now saving the planet's ecology. But Slick is out there working for the 'Goodwill' Corporate Monopoly getting big corporations to drop off their older clothes and furniture, all in the name of Hillary, one suspects! Slick Willie, Humanitarian! Next you know, he'll be turning up at shelters from domestic violence to help the women and kids! He's BlowJob Bill, Super Hero!
Billy Bob Clinton and the cane fields
Makes you sick... capitalism as a means toward social organizing and a just prosperity. Tell me after reading this you're still convinced that capitalist democracy is viable any longer... for us, the working poor, the working class, the middle classes? We've lost all our gains, if any were actually made, since the early 70s. All the surplus that is produced from our labor, whether service or manufacturing, has been stolen by the financial industries and corporate wall street barons. This is the National Dividend that Richard Cook talks about and urges we demand, to get back our gains from our productivity.
The Hunting of the President, in reruns
Oh, to have a president whose private life was such an embarrassment, compared to the profoundly, shamefully dark little Nero we have today. Hillary Clinton fails us in her own right, for being a criminal corporate shill, not for past indiscretions shown by her husband.