[The Rude Guy Podcast #88 the American Spring March 15, 2012]
Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy here. Happy to announce that we have arrived at the American Spring.
The National Occupation of Washington, DC begins March 30. The link to find out more is:
nowdc.org nowdc.org
Also…On May 1 there has been a call for a General Strike of students and workers. For info go to Facebook and search: Occupy May Day General Strike : Occupy May Day General Strike and Read this from OWS NYC.
Also a coalition of leftist organizations are training 100,000 direct action demonstrators, in 15 different cities across the USA, for the upcoming summer fun. For info:
the99spring.com the99spring.com
I have a valued listener who makes regular donations to this show. He lost his professional job and has been working as a security guard, and I really respect him for making donations to The Rude Guy on a security guard’s take-home pay. But…I was dismayed to hear that he, a part-African American, supports Ron Paul. At least when he’s not supporting Rocky Anderson. I’m surprised that anybody who listens to this show would support Ron Paul.
Yeah, I love Ron Paul’s anti-war, anti-Federal Reserve positions. But his deregulate-everything mentality, and cut corporate taxes to 5%, is not going to give us national health care, and is not going to rein in the big banks that have cooked up $700 trillion dollars in derivatives, that are about to blow up. I don’t think Ron Paul knows what the fuck a derivative is. I think he’s a doddering old fool offering up simplistic solutions that are being swallowed whole by hurt, gullible people, looking for easy answers. And the people listening to this show are NOT supposed to be gullible! And are NOT supposed to be settling for easy answers. Or why the fuck am I doing this!
I WOULD be a Libertarian myself if they had some program for regulating corporations…especially the banks. How could I expect anti-government crusader Ron Paul to rein in the banks that are robbing us blind? What’s he gonna do it with? Noble intentions? That’s a job for federal cops.
Yes, ending the Fed would be a tremendous thing to do. I’m all for it. We would have to start a National Bank of the United States to begin “printing” our money again, without creating debt that sticks us with interest payments (just like Abe Lincoln did to win the Civil War when European Banks wouldn’t lend us any money.)
And while we’re at it. Let’s make sure we understand how the bank bailout has screwed all of us. The Fed prints money wildly so the bank speculators can stay in business gaming the price of food and oil…and buying U.S. government bonds so the Federal Government can spend money like water on war and bogus Homeland Security contractors. That’s why Washington won’t bust Wall Street fraud. Because Wall Street buys their fucking bonds! But… at the same time…our wages do not go up at anywhere near the same rate as the inflation these guys are creating by printing so much money. We are all being screwed, so that Wall Street can keep buying government bonds, with money they conjure up on computer keyboards. It’s an abomination against poor and working people, because government auditors do not even take food, oil and housing, into account, in their so-called inflation index.
Comes now Bernie Sanders:
Senator Bernie Sanders and 69 other members of Congress say federal regulators should curb the speculation in crude oil markets which has artificially pushed up gasoline prices to nearly $4 a gallon. The lawmakers – 23 senators and 47 members of the House – said Monday, in a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that the regulators must stop Wall Street futures traders from dominating the oil market. The commission has flouted a provision in the 2010 Wall Street reform law that required regulators to put tough new trading limits in place by Jan. 17, 2011. quote: “We are disappointed that, more than a year later, the commission has not fulfilled this important regulatory duty…It is one of your primary duties – indeed, perhaps your most important duty – to ensure that the prices Americans pay for gasoline and heating oil are fair, and that the markets … operate free from fraud, abuse, and manipulation,” the lawmakers wrote.
They stressed that gasoline pump prices are up, despite high supplies and low demand. According to the Energy Information Administration, the supply of oil and gasoline is greater today, than it was three years ago, when the national average price for a gallon of gasoline was just $1.90. Today, the national average is more than $3.70 a gallon at a time when the demand for oil in the U.S. is at its lowest level, since April of 1997.
There is a growing consensus that speculators are to blame. Exxon Mobil, the Saudi Arabian government, the American Trucking Association, Delta Airlines, the Petroleum Marketers Association of America, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, all say excessive oil speculation significantly increases oil and gasoline prices. Citing a recent report from the investment bank Goldman Sachs, a Feb. 27, 2012, article in Forbes said, excessive oil speculation adds $.56 to the price of a gallon of gas.
Quote “As the cost for American people to fill their gas tanks continues to skyrocket, the CFTC continues to drag its feet, on imposing strict speculation limits, to eliminate, prevent, or diminish excessive oil speculation,” the members of Congress told the commissioners.
“We urge you to take immediate action to impose strong and meaningful position limits, and to utilize all authorities available to you to make sure that the price of oil and gasoline, reflects the fundamentals of supply and demand.”
In a surprising development ABC News is all over the story too. Hail Occupy Wall Street. The news media is getting its balls back.
On Feb 23, 2012 ABC New’s Mark Greenblatt Reports:
Every time you fill up your car with gas, your dollar ends up in the hands of a wide range of interests from around the world. Some of your money goes to oil companies, some goes to refineries, and some to the gas stations you stop at. What may surprise you, however, is what one of Wall Street’s top regulators has to say about who else you’re paying: speculators on Wall Street.
Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates commodity futures and option trading in the United States, said it’s time to look at home — in addition to overseas — when searching for the reasons why gas prices are on the rise.
By Chilton’s calculation, if you drive a car like a Honda Civic, you’re paying $7.30 more than you should, every time you fill up — to Wall Street speculators. If your car is a Ford Explorer, you’re paying an extra $10.41. For a Ford F150, owners pay an additional $14.56 per fill up -or more than $750 a year. Are you getting this? That’s $750 a year that goes from some Nebraska farmer or rancher, to Goldman Sachs! For nothing! For gaming the price of oil.
Bernie Sanders says that he wants to limit the amount of oil an investment company like Goldman Sachs can buy. Some call that socialism. I say good! And so would Benjamin Franklin.
In the last podcast I talked about how Ben Franklin expounded the “labor theory of value” – that labor IS capital – which he wrote about, 130 years before Karl Marx.
Ben Franklin was a socialist. Continue reading →