posted by richzubaty on Aug 11
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posted by richzubaty on Aug 11
The Rude Guy Podcast #70 August 11, 2010
[Wikileaks Vietnamistan]
Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy, having a great day, because I finally have some new heroes to admire. They’re not giants like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr, but, in a depressing era of posers and frauds, they are true heroes. To me a hero has to be both smart and brave. Smart without brave and you get Barack Obama, or Dick Cheney. Brave without smart and you get just about every U.S. soldier who is on the ground in Afghanistan. If you’re so smart, what’re ya doin’ there soldier? Quit before you die. We need you back home… But my new heroes are both smart and brave. And one of them IS a soldier.
My new heroes are Julian Assange, who founded Wikileaks. And Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked, to Wikileaks, the video of the Apache helicopter cannon fire murder, by high tech video game, of two Reuters reporters and 18 innocent bystanders. Plus severely wounding two young kids.
Private First Class Bradley Manning, a 22 year old intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, has been moved from a military jail in Kuwait, to the Marine Corps Base Brig, in Quantico, Virginia. Here’s what I got off his web site:
www.bradleymanning.Org
Manning remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation into the charges lodged against him on July 5. Manning was transferred because of the potential for lengthy continued pretrial confinement, given the complexity of the charges, and the ongoing investigation… And so forth.
Bradley Manning is facing decades in prison for doing the right goddam thing, and even me, with my ridiculous financial situation, sent his legal defense fund ten bucks off a credit card. It made me feel good to do that. Much better than buying a pizza. I recommend it to everybody.
www.bradleymanning.Org
And then there’s Julian Assange…who’s a hunted man! Living underground…somewhere. Nobody knows where. If the U.S. government could figure out some way to destroy him, and his organization, without creating an international outcry, they would do it in a second. Which is why it’s important that his name is known, and his work is known. As Abbie Hoffman said during the anti-Vietnam police riots, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, more or less: “as long as the cameras are on you, you’re OK. It’s the people who are off camera who the cops’ll beat up. But when the cameras get turned off…look out.”
This guy Assange is brave. Really really brave. Even Seymour Hersh, the New York Times reporter who broke the My Lai massacre story, told Assange, quote, “watch…your…back”. Assange is finally getting some safe harbor in Iceland and Sweden, but he has been living on the run, on the constant move, for a year or more. “Watch your back bro.”
Last week he released 76,000 documents which are mostly U.S. military field reports from Afghanistan. What I now call: Vietnamistan. Vietnamistan. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Jul 8
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posted by richzubaty on Jul 8
The Rude Guy Podcast #69 July 8, 2010
[BP and the CIA, The Cost of War, and Grow Your Own]
Rich Zubaty here. Cranking out another podcast for no reason other than I’m turning 62 and have no good idea what else I’m supposed to be doing with my life.
Old age sucks. My memory is going the way of the giant bluefin tuna, I have bone spurs in my neck so I can’t lift heavy suitcases, if I get five hours a day where my attention span is greater than that of a hummingbird I feel like throwing a party. I can’t sensibly go on one of my famous invigorating, therapeutic, traveling expeditions, to Brazil, or Bali, or somewhere, to clear the cobwebs out of my brain, unless I somehow recruit a younger stronger traveling companion.
On top of that, Kathleen Parker from the Washington Post just seemingly ripped off one of my podcasts, and gave me no credit whatsoever. On June 30, 2010, she came out with an opinion piece called: Obama: our first female president. In October 2009 I made a podcast called: Barack Obama: our first female president. How about that? She even segued into it like I did by saying…if Bill Clinton was our first black president, then Barack Obama is our first female president. Then she echoed me again, this time from last month’s Podcast 68, noting Obama’s cautious feminine, management style…in the face of the gulf oil gusher, that cried out for decisive leadership…saying, as I had said…what was he doing delivering jokes to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, when he should have been on Air Force One flying to the Louisiana coast. Three coincidences in a row? It looked like flat out plagarism to me.
So I emailed her and the Washington Post Ombudsman. She said she’d never heard of me, and that anyway she doesn’t write the titles to her pieces, someone else does. After a few more emails back and forth I concluded that she did not go to my podcast, listen to it or read it, and rip it off. I am not accusing her of that. However I still believe some combination of summer interns at the paper, clever quipping at Washington cocktail parties, by trendy eavesdroppers, and maybe even some precipitation from the…Overmind, [RG voice: the Overmind] conspired to materialize my ideas in her head. That’s kind of how memes work, spreading like a virus from mind to mind. And it happens to me a lot. Which is why I do not think it is entirely accidental. For instance, I do a podcast bit about how being born a poor white guy in America does not confer any great advantage, and three weeks later presidential candidate Obama is saying that being born a poor white guy in America is like arriving here as an immigrant. Someone out there is listening. And repackaging my stuff.
Years ago Bill Maher lifted material right out of What Men Know That Women Don’t, but in that instance I had sent him the book, so I know it got across his drawbridge. Yes, I’m delighted they steal my stuff, I just wish they would mention my name and send a few dozen more people to my podcast and web site. But I’m sure they learned years ago, from their media attorneys, never to admit to anyone that they stole your idea, because that admission might mean they legally owe you something. Said Lionel Trilling: “Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.” By and large mainstream media types are thieves. That’s how they got there and that’s how they stay there. What could it hurt to say: here’s an idea I got from Joe Blow, or Rich Zubaty.
[donkey]
And then, of course, as you know, I’m demoralized by the job Barack Obama is NOT doing, running our government. We voted for Martin Luther King Junior and got Redd Foxx. He fired McChrystal but didn’t fire the war. The only word for that is…stupid. He got handed an opportunity to pull out and blame it on the generals, but instead he’s doubling down. On track to spend more money on war than any president since World War Two.
The man is too gullible to be president. He BELIEVES in things, that are not worthy of being believed.
His first mistake was believing Tom Dashle – that he was the perfect Washington insider to spearhead healthcare reform. But Senator Daschle had neglected to pay his taxes on a free limousine service that had been provided to him for years, by a billionaire patron, so the Republicans ate him alive, and fucked health care reform right out of the gate.
Second Obama mistake was believing that the health insurance companies really wanted healthcare reform. Is he soft in the head, or what? Then he believed the generals who told him they could wrap up this Afghan war lickety split, if Obama would just give them more troops so they could have a surge, like in Iraq. Problem is, our surge in Iraq had nothing to do with decreasing the violence. The Shiites beat the crap out of the Sunnis and the Sunnis made peace with them. At the same time, we gave up our insane plan to have our oil corporations run the Iraq oil industry by finally resurrecting the Iraqi government Oil Ministry. The surge won’t work in Afghanistan because it didn’t work in Iraq. It’s irrelevant. It’s stupid. It just makes them hate us more.
Next Obama made a total ass out of himself, telling us offshore drilling is safe, because he had believed in the oil industry’s reassuring propaganda, on oil-spill containment. From that he moved right along to believing Wall Street’s opinion that America needs mammoth, too-big-to-fail, banks, in order to compete globally, right…and that capping credit card interest rates would quote “hurt small business”, right…and that fantasy synthetic derivatives, like betting on movie box office receipts — that bleed capital out of the nuts and bolts REAL economy — will NOT be regulated as the Las Vegas style casino gambling they really are, but will get allll dressed up in the thin-lipped arrogance of Wall Street securities…right. And there’s no need to discuss putting a tax on all stock market transactions, like England has, to raise money to put our people back to work rebuilding bridges and roads. The people saved the markets, but we have no right to expect the markets to save the people. Right…So much for banking reform. Over and over again Obama’s employed the same guys who made the mess, to clean up the mess. You do that with plumbers and auto mechanics. Not with bankers and oil companies.
I just read a column in Huffington Post by John Hari, from the London Independent, who said, in 2006 speculators like Goldman Sachs saw the housing market start to collapse, so they pulled their money out of that and started speculating in the worldwide food market, driving up the price of wheat 80% and rice 320%. 200 million people starved, there were food riots in 30 countries and one government was violently overthrown. But bizarrely, more food had been produced that year than the year before, but the year before the real market had set the prices of food, and in 2006 the market speculators had set the prices. The greedheads and banksters took their hundreds of billions in profit out of the housing mess, and had nowhere to stick ‘em, so they stuck ‘em in food. And starved and murdered people worldwide. Barbarians in $2000 suits.
And these are the people Obama believes.
Does anyone see a pattern here? Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Jun 1
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posted by richzubaty on Jun 1
[The Rude Guy Podcast #68 June 1, 2010]
[Obama’s Oil Spill]
[clip of FDR speech: I welcome their hatred!]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president of presidents. A real man’s man. Even though he was crippled with polio and couldn’t walk.
This is Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy. I don’t know why I still make these shows, but a couple hundred people still download ‘em, so I guess that’s something. Though they never email, and never donate anything, so it’s hard to know why they download ‘em. Or if they even listen.
Once upon a time I thought that this show could exert some populist pressure to push President Obama further to the political left. But I’ve given up on that. He’s too ignorant. He’s too conservative. He’s too slow of a learner and I am tired of being caught up in his learning curve. He still thinks corporations are his friends, even as this BP disaster mires his presidency waste deep in petroleum muck. Even as the health care industry turned health care reform into a joke. Even as Wall Street turned banking reform into a joke. Even Donna Brazille, big black mama of the Democratic National Committee, said that the problem with the Obama administration is, that it’s not tough enough.
Anyone who read my book What Men Know That Women Don’t knows that this feminized, I’m OK you’re OK, touchy feely consensus management style is exactly what produces catastrophes like the gulf oil spill. The woman Obama appointed to head the Mineral Management Service that was supposed to be overseeing drilling regulation just resigned. But that’s not good enough. The buck doesn’t stop there. Obama is harping about “the cozy relationship” between petroleum companies and regulators when he should be ranting about fraud and bribes and corruption. But he won’t do that. Because he’s not tough enough. Becasue he doens’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Because he’s the first female president of the United States. And frankly, most women I’ve ever met would do a better, tougher job of running this country.
Moreover…Someone besides me finally said it. Barack Obama is, scary. Chris Mathews from Hardball said Obama’s reaction to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is, Quote “scary. He’s acting more like a Vatican observer than president of the United States.” Unquote. Then Dan Froomkin on Huffington Post echoed Mathews saying that Obama’s oil disaster behavior is scary.
The New York Times said it’s well past time for Obama to do something, even if it IS risky. But that’s his Achille’s heel. Isn’t it? He’s a school teacher. He’s a risk adverse president. Which is almost a contradiction in terms. Presidents have to be willing to take on risk. But here a momentous crisis explodes in his face, and Obama sits down on a rock to analyze it.
The man is pathetically incompetent, and he is NOT a fast learner. The BP oil spill IS going to be his Katrina. He’s making jokes at the Washington Press Club Dinner, and eating gourmet molé at a trendy Mexican state dinner, while the marine resources for the southern half of the country are being destroyed. When the globs of goop reach Long Island, his presidency will be over.
I just hope Borgs don’t arrive from another galaxy, far far away, while he’s still president, or he’ll start giving speeches about how, resistance is futile, and we’re all in this together, and how there are no American machines, and no American people, but just American machine-people.
I’m sure glad he wasn’t president when Joseph Stalin was around, or France would be speaking Russian. And I’m glad we had Franklin Delano Roosevelt and not Barack Obama to point the way after the great Depression, or the rural electric program and the union movement and the Federal Highway system would not have existed.
I voted for this silver-tongued coward and I feel betrayed. He was an establishment whore from the moment he walked on the national stage, and started babbling about how there was only one America, and it was both black and white. No, there was only one Barack Obama, and he was both black and white.
A former poker player companion of his said, Obama is the worst kind of guy to play poker with. He antes up and takes his cards. If he doesn’t like them he drops out immediately. If he likes them he places bets, and everyone else drops out, and he wins a small pot. Boring. Like watching a turtle run a race.
He’s only had two visions in his life I can think of. One was to marry Michelle. And the other was to become president. But beyond that – nothing. No idea that corporations are too powerful and have to be cut down to size. No idea that we cannot control Asian oil and gas by occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, in obedience to long-disproved cold war geopolitical fantasies. The man got the Nobel Peace prize and sent more troops to Afghanistan the next fucking week. He has NO vision.
He is a tinkerer and a technocrat, jamming political alliances together like they were legos. Let’s see: take this funnel and stick it on the end of that hose, then electrify the hose and jam it up an elephant’s ass, and then, when I talk into the funnel my voice will come out of the mouth of the elephant sounding just like…Hamid Karzai…and the Taliban will be defeated. This is how he thinks! That an incremental patchwork of half-solutions is going to add up to an unprecedented policy victory. Well…it always worked for him before. When he was a school teacher. Duh.
The man never managed anything more complicated than a classroom full of greedy law students, and then he bullshit his way into becoming CEO of the largest corporation on earth. The U.S. Government. How did this happen? We were riding on a national tidal wave demanding something wildly different than we were getting from George W. Bush, and all we got is different skin color. We got a healthcare bill that helps big medical corporations, and a banking reform bill that helps big banks.
We voted for Martin Luther King Jr. and we got Redd Foxx, from Sanford and son.
Barack Obama is a one term president, Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Apr 16
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posted by richzubaty on Apr 16
[The Rude Guy Podcast #67 April 16, 2010]
[The Two Kinds of Freedom]
I’m Rich Zubaty The Rude Guy…We all love freedom right? We’re just a bunch of freedom lovin’ fools. But that’s how politicians fool us. Because there are two kinds of freedom.
Conservative freedom and Liberal freedom
Conservative freedom is the freedom of Thomas Jefferson. Often called Liberty. The – I’m a huge plantation owner with hundreds of slaves and I don’t want the government to fuck with me – kind of freedom. Fuck Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was the first neocon. An aristocrat in democrats clothing who thought voting was for rich people only, and who didn’t want any politically potent church wagging a finger at his slave holdings… A world built entirely on conservative freedoms would be a dangerous hell, where nobody would stop at red lights, and corporations would pollute every river, and fresh water fishing would be an extinct pastime, right up there with teepee building. Think Afghanistan, or Mexico. Liberty is basically anarchy, commerce without responsibility, rule of the jungle. Republicans are free market anarchists, blowing up everything in their way, to make millions.
Liberal Freedom is Equality of Opportunity. The Martin Luther King Jr kind of freedom, where a person will be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. It’s the opposite of… the don’t fuck with me because I’m rich, freedom. It’s the, don’t fuck with me because I’m poor freedom. It’s the freedom, the RIGHT, to equal treatment before the law in government, school, jobs, everything. It’s the authority to demand that:… I want my kids to have the same opportunities your kids have…kind of freedom.
I’m bored to death with health care talk and so are you. But stay with me here. Precisely because we were immersed in that insane debate for over a year, we’ve all absorbed some complex information, that will help us understand the two kinds of freedom. Conservative freedom and liberal freedom.
The Obama health care bill serves up BOTH kinds of freedom, and even demonstrates absolutely clearly why they cannot coexist. So let’s have a look at what we got with Obamacare. Which is really just Richard Nixon’s health care proposal 40 years late.
The main thing I love about the new healthcare bill is that it reverses the demented Ronald Reagan philosophy, that government is always wrong. Always the enemy and always the problem. That the worst thing you can ever hear is a knock at your door, with a guy standing there saying: we’re from the government and we’re here to help. That’s what we’re supposed to be afraid of? Fuck Ronald Reagan. GE TV puppet.
The liberal freedom Obamacare provides is the freedom for everybody to have health care. Not to be free FROM having health care, but to actually have it. Everyone is good enough and equal enough and qualified enough to get health care. And if you don’t have enough money then we’ll figure out some way to help you.
The conservative freedom Obamacare offers, is the freedom from government competition for insurance companies, hospitals and drug companies. Freedom from competition is the exact opposite of capitalism, but never mind. This is the healthcare industry we’re talking about. It OWNS the Congress and the courts and the president.
So, under Obamacare, the Insurance companies will not have to compete against a public option. Despite the fact that we are always being told how efficient corporations are, and how inefficient the government is, in back room deals Obama torpedoed the public option, that vile form of government INTERFERENCE — that could cut our national healthcare costs by one third or more. So, we will all pay one third more for healthcare, to preserve a fundamental conservative freedom. The freedom to make money from sick people. That makes about as much sense as closing down all interstate highways and forcing us all to drive on corporate-owned toll roads. Thank you Ronald Reagan you cockroach in the cupboards of history.
Also…drug companies will not have to compete against foreign drug imports. Our sold-out government actually PREVENTS imports, as if importing a drug is a risky behavior, but importing uninspected beef and pork from Costa Rica and Brazil is not.
Also…rest assured, there are no brand new public hospitals on the architects drawing tables. When I grew up all hospitals were in some sense public. Supported by local government. Ever since Nixon gave us private HMOs, as a substitute for his original comprehensive health care proposal, hospitals have been for-profit businesses, not, not-for-profit, public facilities.
This is why health industry stocks shot up the day after Obamacare was passed. It’s a multi-billion dollar corporate welfare giveway to the healthcare industry.
And then…there’s the GIANT disconnect. The reason this new healthcare bill will never work, is, of course, the mandate requiring all Americans to buy health insurance. Forcing Americans to buy anything IS against the constitution. I really hope this gets overturned in court or we will have all kinds of weird mandates coming down the road at us from this insane precedent. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Mar 3
CLICK HERE to listen to The Rude Guy Podcast #66
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posted by richzubaty on Mar 3
[The Rude Guy Podcast #66 March 03, 2010]
Stop Paying Your Credit Cards
I’m Rich Zubaty. Welcome to the Truth Police. This is the place where we’re serious as hell about telling the truth. No posturing. No spin. No fantasies. Just truth. No matter WHO gets hurt. Any entertainment you get from this will be purely accidental.
Page one
The Democratic Party has been running the City of Chicago since before there was a Santa Claus…and that’s the problem with having Chicago Democrats run the White House. They’re accustomed to being the Ruling Party, and they don’t know any different. They are the party of labor and business, unions and corporations, waitresses, janitors, commodities brokers, carpenters, Sears and Boeing. It’s a party run like a third world dictatorship by way of bribes and payoffs and back room deals. I grew up there, and I know.
But that’s not how the rest of the country runs, and that’s not how the people in the rest of the country WANT it to run. We want two parties, with different ideas, that take a stand and fight it out. We try things for a little while the Republican way, then a little while the Democrat way, and which ever way is best prevails over time. Or that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But we don’t want one big party deciding everything. That’s Corporate Communism. Government and business in bed with each other. Also known as fascism.
Barack Obama is Bill Clinton with rockets in his pockets. I warned months ago that Obama was poised to take triangulation, what Clinton called The Third Way, to unimagined heights of selling out. Within nine months in office he drove my bullshit meter right off the scale. And now he’s just announced $8 billion dollars for clean energy – formerly known as nuclear power, the filthiest nastiest energy ever invented. Ugh.
The Republicans hate both Clinton and Obama, and for the same reason. These are the kind of Dems who conquer Republican turf. Republicans have sold their souls for a century to make the insurance companies THEIRS, to make Wall Street THEIRS, to make huge corporations THEIRS, and all of a sudden here’s this conniving squirt Rahm Emanuel, making back room deals. Sucking up to the big money. Doing the bidding of the very people the Dems were elected to oppose. They don’t know any better. They’re the Ruling Party in Chicago and they expect to operate that way in Washington.
Time for Rahm Emanuel to take a subway to hell.
[bird]
Here’s some breaking news: I finally found out why people have to die. I just figured it out. It’s for our own good. After 70 years of watching the good fishing places get poisoned and fished out. Of watching the pheasants disappear and the purple martins fail to come back in spring. Of watching god-like politicians replaced by technocratic cowards, and even god-like gangsters replaced by Wall Street quants – after 70 years of that, we’ve just had enough. It’s time to die. Our teen idols are gone…the Marlon Brandos and Jim Morrisons, replaced by grumpy, nihilist rappers, wearing gold chains, and airhead songstresses cloaked in dyed chicken feathers. Martin Luther King Junior replaced by Condoleeza Rice! Walter Cronkite replaced by Glen Beck for God sakes. Vine ripened tomatoes replaced by tasteless bio-engineered cardboard sludge-balls. It’s for our own good, death is. How many good things can you lose over 70 or 80 years before you become constantly depressed, and just live in the past anyway?
I’ve made the mistake of returning to the old fishing holes and the old girlfriends and the old politics, and I am instantly struck by how stupid I was, not to have let them live on as wonderful old memories, instead of revisiting them in all their degenerate horror. So don’t be sad about death. It really is for the best.
But before I die I figured out one good way to jam my boot up the ass of Wall Street. I’m going to stop paying my credit cards. Just flat out stop paying them. I’ve never missed a credit card payment in my life, but I’m gonna stop paying and stick Bank of America with $7000 dollars. Well…not really. I’ve been paying out a thousand dollars a year since 2001, and that makes $9000 dollars I’ve paid out, on $7000 dollars worth of credit. So that’s plenty. That’s enough. They made their money back on me. That’s how I see it. That’s not how they see it. But I don’t care anymore how they see it. What I have to say to them is: fuck you you greedy bastards, I’ve had enough.
And what pushed me over the brink of finally having had enough, is this: Bank of America can go to the Federal Reserve and borrow the $7000 I owe them, at one quarter of one percent interest. The FED makes this money up out of thin air, and lends it to Bank of America, at one QUARTER of one percent. Then they turn around and lend that to me at 14%. That’s 60 TIMES more. 6000% more. For every dollar they pay on interest for the funny money they borrowed from the Fed, they get 60 dollars back from me. And they don’t think they should be regulated?
I agree, they should be lined up against a wall and shot! They should be doused with red paint and rolled through the streets. They should be put to work growing onions and cabbages in Alaska. They should be given brooms and forced to sweep up the slums. How would you like to be some unemployed janitor, looking down from the ninth floor of your tenement, watching a banker sweeping up the broken glass in the street. Wouldn’t that make your day? Wouldn’t that make you feel like America is working again? The entire economy would bounce back in a few weeks if people saw that happening. Bankers actually working. How unique. How special.
The key to this is, if we ALL stop paying, the bankers are really gonna freak out. If we won’t borrow money from them at 6000% profit, what’ll they do? Lower it to 5000%. 4000?
That’s how we stopped the Vietnam War. It’s not covered in the history books, but that’s how we stopped that war. When we ALL said we weren’t gonna fight, the soldiers, the draftees, the students, the workers…everyone…the war stopped. But I’m not waiting on anyone else. I’m just gonna stop right now. And urge you to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »
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