Rich Zubaty, back again, after finishing up my Occupy Wall Street oil painting, which you can see online at my blog: The Rude Guy dot com. It’s pretty good. It’s from the night Troy Davis got murdered by the state executioners in Georgia, and Occupy Wall Street spread its wings and began to fly – in the face of the cops.
God bless the Occupy Movement. They’re having a rough winter. I wish I could grab ‘em all and lift them into April.
[hawk?]
A good old Libertarian friend just wrote me this:
Can we at least agree that Ron Paul vs. Dennis Kucinich would be an infinitely better presidential contest than say, Mitt Romney Vs. Obama/Clinton?
I wrote back:
Actually let’s just have Jesus and Mohammed duke it out.
Politics is not pie in the sky bro.
I want Romney to win and I’ll tell you why.
Romney and Obama are identical. Absolutely identical.
If Obama wins, the right will accuse him of being a socialist and yank him farther to the right. If Romney wins, the left will label him a corporatist and drag him further to the left. So we will get a more leftist government by electing an ideological right-winger. Insane but true.
This is where Leftists always fail. Elect a so-called leftist and he swims to the right. Politics is the exact opposite of what it seems. The opposite of what it claims, ideologically, to be. Free marketeer George Bush didn’t hesitate to bail out the big banks. Big time Socialism. Bill Clinton, the friend of unions, didn’t hesitate to pass NAFTA. Big time Corporatism.
I don’t like Ron Paul. He wants to take away my HUD housing. Fuck him. I’m sick of living in my car while banks get bailed out.
I do not want the U.S. deficits to be balanced on my back, one…more…time. My college education got fucked when I refused to be drafted into an insane war in Southeast Asia, and fled to France. When I got back from that mess I had to give up my jobs to women, blacks and Mexicans. Because I didn’t satisfy affirmative action quotas. I suffered through 30 years of conservative ideological hell, where big corporations thrived and controversial book-writers like me had to self-publish and paint houses to survive. I’ve made my contribution. I’ve earned the right to my little shit pile and I don’t want Ron Paul to take it away for his ideological crap reasons. Fuck Ron Paul.
Politics is the opposite of what it seems.
And Happy New Year.
PS. And don’t fall for Romney’s bullshit either. He says that corporations are people because the money corporations make goes to people. Flat out bullshit. The money corporations make goes to “investors”. Not working people. And the investors turn right around and invest their corporate profits in real estate, driving up the price of housing for working people. They invest in commodities. Driving up the price of oil and food for working people. Ohhh, but they invest in jobs all right. In China! Romney is just as big an asshole as Obama. They’re interchangeable. His only use to us is that – if he wins the presidency – he will drive the Democratic Party far far back to the Left. Obama is politically to the right of Ronald Reagan, for fuck sakes.
[bird]
I just taped a phone interview on Hawaii Public Radio about Occupy Hawaii. They didn’t air one tenth of it. So I want to read my show notes here. I presented that show just like I do a podcast, and it blew the reporter out of the water. She kept telling me to be nice. Use honey not vinegar. I told her to tell that to the Rolling Stones and Malcolm X. And anyone else who ever made a difference.
Here’s what I said to her during the sound test.
Let’s do an exiting program for a change. Huh? Funny, energetic provocative. Not a typical public radio show starting off with “when did you first get interested in politics? Music? Portuguese food? Women?” Or whatever.
I have three things I wanna talk about:
ONE…Stock traders destroy 8 times more wealth than they create
TWO…What are Derivatives and why do they matter?
THREE…Media…crimes of omission
So now the recorder is rolling, she asks me when I first became interested in the Occupy Movement. Doofus. I completely ignored her, and went right to point one:
1)…The reason for the whole Occupy Movement, is revealed in this one fact:
According to former Wall Street banker Max Keiser, of the Keiser Report, for every $5 million dollars of wealth a typical investment bankers creates, he or SHE, DESTROYS $42 million dollars of wealth. Destroys 42 million dollars of wealth, in the form of bailouts, tax loopholes, speculating in commodities – driving up the prices of oil and food and housing…and everything else! That means for every one dollar of wealth bankers create, they destroy 8 dollars. 8 times more!
This is financial cancer. It is not job creation. It’s financial cancer. Eating the belly out of American workers. And it’s NEVER reported in mainstream media. And that includes NPR and public radio. This is a first. (But of course she didn’t put that part on the air.)
Sez me: And remember this: 200 years ago financial speculators were hung by the neck until dead. Now they’re invited to lunch at the White House. That’s how rotten, this has gotten. The Wall Street banks and the City of London banks and the Frankfurt Germany banks have been hollowing out our economies. Stealing with both hands. And when their financial schemes explode WE, the ones they stole from, have to bail them out. This is how revolutions are made. Historically, when the gap between rich and poor gets too great, revolutions explode on the scene. Welcome Occupy Wall Street. What took you so long? Were ya thrown off the track by Obamamania?
2)…Derivatives are bets on bets on bets. Banks won’t lend money to small businesses because they’re too busy borrowing money from the Fed at ¼ of 1% interest, and investing in derivatives. Bets on bets on bets. Someone bets the price of birdseed will go up. Someone else bets it will go down, but he hedges his bet by taking out an insurance policy that will pay off in case the price actually goes up. Someone else bundles these birdseed bets all together and names it, the Avian Futures Fund, a Triple A security…and peddles that fund to union pension funds in California and Germany. And then someone takes bets against that. And on and on and on it goes. And there is not one dollar of actual value in any of these things. These derivatives. No one even owns any birdseed. They’ve just made bets on the future price of birdseed. This is what we call the Financial Futures Market, as if it was some wonderful contribution to modern civilization, instead of a vampire squid sucking blood from our financial arteries.
Listen up…The entire U.S. economy is $13 trillion dollars a year. But… there are $700 trillion dollars of unregulated derivatives – 700 trillion dollars – fifty-three times more – of unregulated derivatives, floating around in the shadow economy. Waiting to blow up. And none of these derivatives have so much as $1 of actual physical value – they’re just bets on bets on bets. Avian Futures Fund my aching ass.
3)…Media Crimes of Omission You can bet Hawaii Public Radio did not report on this.
Mainstream media, including public radio, is guilty of crimes of omission. You don’t tell us what’s going on out there because you don’t KNOW what’s going on out there. And you don’t bother to find out. Here’s an example:
Every day I hear a report on NPR that says something like this: The stock market lost 200 points today on fears that European governments are NOT going to bail out the European banks… OK… Next day I hear: the stock market lost 200 points today because…even though European governments decided they ARE are going to bail out the European banks… some broker at Goldman Sachs says she doesn’t think that’ll be good enough.
Do the people on NPR who report this mindless babble know what’s going on here? No, they don’t. They’d rather interview mystery writers and talk to decrepit rock guitarists. I’ll tell you what’s going on here.
Stock and commodities traders only make money when there is volatility. So…they CREATE volatility. They create volatility by creating rumors. A nice steady rising stock market means nobody’s buying, and nobody’s selling. There are no price jumps, or drops, to take advantage of, to exploit…to front run with light-speed computers. There are no commissions to be made when things are calm.
Traders WANT volatility. Traders MAKE volatility. They make up rumors out of nothing…and cause the price of something they bought five seconds ago, to move 2 tenths of a point, so they can sell it, and make a few thousand bucks. Fine days work for these vampires. Go drink French Champagne at lunch you pricks.
And the reporters, who report on this, are too dumb to know what’s happening. The REASONS they are spoon-fed by the industry, for virtually all Stock market price spikes, or dives, are complete bullshit. The reasons for the price spikes and the dives, is that the TRADERS WANT THE PRICES TO MOVE! Nothing other than that. They want the prices to move so they can make fast bucks on trades and trading commissions.
You are gullible idiots, you media talking heads! Educate yourselves. Find out what you’re talking about. Media crimes of omission.
[bird]
Economist Richard Wolff cobbled together a book called “Capitalism Hits the Fan”. His main idea is that in the 70’s, women and minorities fought for, and won, the right to go to work – at half the price white men were paid. Corporations soon discovered they could fire one white men, and hire two women or blacks, and get twice the production without raising wages. And then, over the next couple decades, automation and mechanization kicked in. Unions were destroyed, and outsourcing of jobs overseas was flaunted by Bill Clinton, and the rest of the Republicans, as being good for America.
But as Ralph Nader had predicted, by destroying the earning capacity of the American worker, the American worker no longer had any money to buy the stuff the corporations were making. So Wall Street came up with a solution right outta hell. The banks would lend working people the money they needed to buy the stuff they needed. This came to be called Consumer Credit. It was a throwback to the plantation system…and the women’s and civil rights advocates fell for it like ducks landing on decoys. They’d never fought to build the unions. They’d just landed on half-pay jobs because of skin color or a hole between their legs. And they needed money to buy housing, cars and food, in an economy where cheap credit was enticing investors to churn real estate, constantly buying and selling, driving prices up and up and up, way beyond their actual value.
The workers needed money to live…so they just borrowed it. And for decades that worked. The FED printed ever more watered-down currency causing the prices of everything to go up. And working people borrowed more and more. And then the whole fucking thing came un-sprung and houses crashed to one-half their inflated value, and people walked away from paying on underwater mortgages, that were calibrated at twice what their house was actually worth. And since no one was buying anything, workers started losing jobs, and our economy got flushed down the Financial Futures toilet.
But here’s the bad news. We are in a Depression. If we rated inflation the same way now, as we did in 1980 – adding in the cost of food, fuel and housing – like we did back then – our inflation rate would be 10% per year. Everything is going up 10% per year. But our wages are not rising. We are deadlocked in an economic depression, no matter how the government economic wonks, distort the metrics, to make it all seem better than it is. I mean, how can you NOT include the costs of food, gas, and rent in the inflation index. Who the fuck are you kidding?
The only way out of this mess is: a forced-march beyond capitalism. We need worker-owned businesses. NOT state owned businesses like Leninist/Stalinist Communism. NOT capitalist businesses that
move to China. Worker-owned businesses, real socialism, like Karl Marx advocated.
For starters, there is no way the workers will ship their own jobs overseas. No way they will pay fat cat capitalists big paychecks for going to four, Board of Directors meetings, a year. No way they will come to work drunk or forget to oil their machinery. Cause it’s THEIR machinery, and THEIR company. And they will pay themselves enough money to be able to buy the stuff they make, and buy other worker’s stuff too. And that will keep the economy going.
Worker-owned businesses. And here’s what people don’t know. In the USA there are currently more workers in worker-owned businesses, than in unions. MORE. It’s a quiet revolution.
This phenomenon was made possible by the invention of the employee stock ownership plan…a specific legal plan to help workers buy out owners. Let’s say the owner of a shoe factory did very well, sent his kids to Harvard and Yale, they became doctors and history professors, and want nothing to do with shoes. The owner, who wants to retire, is fond of the workers who built up his business, and wants to pass it on to them. So, through a bank, he sets up, an employee stock ownership plan. The bank buys out the owner using the factory as collateral. Then the workers pay parts of their paychecks to the bank until they pay off the mortgage the bank holds on the factory. And then! The factory becomes theirs!
[bird]
OK, I read a truly excellent Truthout article that you can link to from The Rude Guy blog. I regularly update the blog about the latest Occupy info. The article was called:
Populism Isn’t Dead, It’s Marching: What 19th Century Farmers Can Teach Occupiers About How to Keep Going…
Friday December 30, 2011 by: Ashley Sanders,
Here’s what I commented online: This is a really really really beautiful article. And I will post it on my blog and local Occupy Facebook page. I love everything about it. Except this:
We need, especially, to reach out to people of color, the poor, immigrants and women.
Sez me: Where are the white men? The working white men? The ones who fix your toilets and grow your food and keep your electricity flowing. You think THEY are not oppressed. They smell your poop and plow in 90-degree heat and go out in the middle of hurricanes to reconnect your power. Thank a white man the next time you flip a light switch or take a hot shower. If you think you’re going to have a populist revolution without the involvement of working white men, you are deluded. The REASON the anti-Vietnam movement worked was because the blue-collar white men got involved. The REASON Occupy has worked as well as it has, is because the white men got involved.
This is a huge blind spot in the Left. Do not alienate men. Do not alienate White Men. Do not listen to Roseanne Barr fulminating about the patriarchy. The guys who smell her poop and drill her oil are not patriarchs. Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are! You are playing into the insidious right-wing-funded agenda, that shattered and destroyed Leftist politics for 30 years. An agenda unwittingly promoted by political halfwits and man-haters like Roseanne Barr. Keep some white men in the game…some poor working white men. Stop demonizing them and shaming them and overlooking them. Keep some white men in the game…or…lose.
I say this same kind of thing at Occupy events. If you shame and demonize and marginalize white men, you will lose. Let’s include EVERYONE this time. Not just immigrants and people of color and women.
[bird]
OK, here’s a clip from Max Keiser about how bankers cost us 8 times more than they produce.
[clip]
Here’s another clip from Max Keiser: about commodities futures trading fraud.
[clip]
Another clip from Max Keiser about: computerized trading fraud.
[clip]
Here’s Max Keiser talking about fraud as the financial model of the U.S. and U.K.
[clip]
[bird]
OK, on a final note, here’s an email from a guy who just read my most popular book:
Dear Mr. Zubaty,
My name is Brett Toombs, and I just finished reading your book, What Men Know That Women Don’t.
Just to give you a little background about myself, I am another fool who believed the American lie. About 2 years ago my ex-wife told me on my birthday that she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. She left…and for the past 2 years I have been soul searching…trying to find out, what exactly does it mean to be a man in this world. I must admit…I’m still trying to figure that out…but your book has definitely made me feel better about myself, and given me a lot to think about. I’ll be 40 years old this month…and I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of my years, and in many ways I’m starting all over again.
Honestly, I don’t know if good men have much of a chance surviving in this feminist society controlled by women. But now I have a new way of thinking, and reacting to their irrational ways. I will never be hurt by them again. (ha ha ha ha good luck man)
So thank you for writing such a powerful, thought-provoking book, for men. It’s about time men stand up for themselves, including me. For years I have felt lost with no direction. Now I have a compass that is leading me in the right direction.
I will be ordering your book, The Corporate Cult, this month. I look forward to reading it.
Best wishes,
Brett Toombs
Thanks Brett. You said it all. What Men Know that Women Don’t, is now available on Kindle and iBooks for only $8.99. A big price drop from $24, plus shipping, on Amazon, for the paper edition. My three other books are available there too. For $2.99! $2.99! And the other good news is: you do not need to buy a Kindle reader to read them. You can download a free Kindle reader from Amazon and read on your computer. Just Google: free Kindle reader. It’s actually a very good reader. Clear sharp type. Plus it let’s you read black on white, or white on black, or in sepia tones, which I prefer, because they are very easy on the eyes.
The usual suspects…Robert, Keith, Jason, George, Roderick…all made end-of-the-year donations to The Rude Guy. Thanks men. Your support keeps me going. But…to others of you looking for a way to contribute…buy a book online. Check out my autobiography, Romance, living and loving in 25 countries, for $2.99. Or my zany futuristic science fantasy novel, about my two perennial issues: men and corporate colonialism, Your Brain is Not Your Own. It’s pretty fuckin’ funny too. $2.99. Or the Corporate Cult where, interspersed with travel adventures, I warned about a coming financial implosion in our hollowed out economy…10 years ago. Corporations are cults! $2.99
I just read a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. Fascinating book. Few people know that he was the defender of the French Revolution against the monarchies and aristocrats of Europe and Russia. They attacked first. The Bourbons and Hapsburgs and czars did not want Republican-style, government-of-the-people, taking root in Europe. So they attacked. Here’s an interesting quote from Napoleon – A revolution is an opinion, that has acquired, some bayonets.
Ha ha ha ha ha
[Rude Guy voice we’ll be back; no more bullshit]
