Obama Watch

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

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

[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

[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

[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 »

posted by richzubaty on Jan 17

[The Rude Guy Podcast #65 January 17, 2010]

[FDR: "I welcome their hatred" speech.]

Rich Zubaty here. Welcoming you to the Reality Cult. The show that’s about reality…not fantasy. Not Rush Limbaugh talking points, not the Democratic Party platform, not Barack Obama’s to-do list, not fantasy. Reality.

This just in. Natives of the South Pacific island of Vanuatu recently held a, quote “conciliation ceremony”, with the great great grandson of the British missionary, the Reverend John Williams, whom the islanders ATE when he came ashore in 1839. They claim their forefathers had eaten him to, quote, “absorb the power of their enemy”. Nonetheless, 160 years later they still feel “guilt” over killing and eating the famous Christian missionary, and therefore presented great great grandson, Charles Milner-Williams with…a SEVEN YEAR OLD GIRL…I shit you not… a SEVEN YEAR OLD GIRL, who will NOT be eaten. But whose education will be paid for by the British aristocratic family. Win win for the natives. First they eat the great great grandfather, then get his family to pay for their daughter’s private education in the best English schools.

See what I mean about reality.

[bird]

I’ve actually begun to think that one big reason President Obama is in no hurry to end the wars, is because he’s afraid to throw a couple million more people out of their jobs, making guns and bombs, in this rotten economy – as if they couldn’t be reassigned to repairing falling bridges and crumbling schools. But staying the maddening course, set by George W Bush, is the safe way to handle it. And that’s the way our pragmatic president does things. The safe way. The easy way. The convenient way. The way that makes the fewest waves and fewest enemies. The CONSERVATIVE way. We now have a populist leader who has convinced us that War is Peace, Conformity is Creativity and No Change is Change. Someday soon, in order to avoid mass insanity, we’re gonna have to go back to using the dictionary definitions of things, not just whatever sounds good in a sound bite.

It’s gotten to the point where I cannot stand the sound of Barack Obama’s voice. As soon as I hear it I change the channel, just like I did with George W Bush. It just plain annoys me listening to him serving up vinegar and calling it champagne. It makes me angry.

My shrink tells me that I’m angry because I am fearful. That anger is always caused by fear. Oh really? That’s like telling me that pigs can’t fly because they don’t have wings. There’s a whole lot more to the story. Pigs can’t fly because they don’t have hollow bones and streamlined bodies and proper wing muscles. Like so many things in clinical psychology, what my shrink tells me is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.

I’m angry because Barack Obama lied. To me and to the nation. And in lying to us he fucked up an enormous opportunity for change. Fucked up a historical swing of the pendulum from conservatism back to liberalism. No, fuck liberalism. Way past liberalism…to Progressivism. Maybe even socialism. Once again, the Democrats came out in full blown support of bullshit social issues – electing a black man or a white woman for president – and tiptoed away from supporting no bullshit economic issues – like halting the thirty-year destruction of the middle class by banks and insurance companies. And today. One year after the economic collapse directly caused by Wall Street greed, the capitalist pigs are openly saying: boy oh boy, if we didn’t start a stampede to socialism after that fuck up, it’s NEVER gonna happen. And they’re greedier and more brazen than ever. Because Barack Obama dithered and compromised and sermonized from the sidelines, instead of jumping into the game and grabbing the ball, and making the moves he told us he’d make, to straighten out the economy and the wars and insurance company parasites…which means, he lied.

Never have I seen a human being talk so much, and do so little. If you think that this guy is smart, then I’ve got a flying pig to sell you. Read the rest of this entry »

posted by richzubaty on Dec 19

[The Rude Guy Podcast #64 December 19, 2009]

Rich Zubaty, The Rude Guy here. I had to laugh when Barack Obama gave himself a “solid B plus” for his first year in office. In my last podcast I gave him a solid D plus. Obama’s cautious plodding conservative do-nothing style, makes it look like the white guys who have been running the place for the past two hundred years, were a bunch of gung ho activists, doing a whale of a job. I’m a WHITE guy and I don’t even believe that. For progressive activists like me, the bad news is: Barack Obama is a bigger threat to us than George W. Bush ever was. If George Bush had got up before the Nobel Prize Committee and told us: “make no mistake about it, evil exists,” we would have hooted and cat-called, and shouted, “Yeah right George, and you’re it. The evil is you.” If Bush had sent another 50,000 troops into Afghanistan and told us “don’t worry, they’re gonna start coming home in a year and a half,” this is, right after the midterm elections, there would have been protests from coast to coast, and in dozens of European cities. But when Obama says it there’s one single protest demonstration in Bozeman Montana. Good for you Bozeman. If Bush had told us he was gonna fix the demolished economy, and then did everything he could to help Wall Street and nothing to help main street, for ONE SOLID YEAR, leftists would be having “die-ins” on Wall Street, and on the runways of major airports, to shut them down and get the government’s attention, like Thailand did last year.

“Change we can believe in” huh? The Politics of Hope always was bullshit. Obama’s self-centered ambition, repackaged as a populist dream. “Change we can believe in” was a slogan invented by David Axelrod, chief strategist and media advisor for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The job of media advisers is to come up with snappy slogans. Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who makes $1.5 million dollars a year as a political media consultant, had already worked for—Mayor Richard M. Daley, senatorial candidate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, and Tom Vilsack — and had run John Edwards failed 2004 presidential campaign. Indeed, Axelrod had a long time friendship with Hillary, through her work for an epilepsy foundation, co-founded by Axelrod’s mother and wife, but…friendships be damned. This was politics. If opinion polls had said that “a peanut butter sandwich on every plate” or a “wrecked car for every homeless person to sleep in” were the winningest campaign slogans, then instead of “change you can believe in” we would have been hearing about peanut butter and junk cars for two years. That’s how deep “change” went with these guys.

Yes, folks, unlike any other candidate in history, Barack Obama ran for president for two years. He never did shit as an Illinois Senator. Didn’t even oppose the war that he had so heartily opposed to get onto the national stage. Where I live shi-shi Obama house parties for the wine and cheese liberals, started in 2006. There were even bogus anti-Kucinich emails, accusing Dennis of being a racist, flooding our inboxes, because they knew Dennis Kucinich had won the 2004 Democratic primary against John Kerry, in this county.

As I’ve said before, I voted for Obama. I was proud of America for electing a brown-skinned president. The entire world was ready to march to his drum, and bring about systemic change, particularly Europe. Even some African and Muslim countries. And now I am appalled, at what a do-nothing conservative sell-out he really is. He’s taking the generals advice, instead of the grunt’s advice, to fight an international terrorist organization that operates under fifty different names, in fifty different countries…by putting 100,000 troops into Afghanistan.

His economic advisers are all understudies and former employees of Bob Rubin, the free trade pirate himself, who wrecked the entire economy by abolishing the Glass-Steagall act as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, then went over to the freshly deregulated Citigroup to make 120 million dollars before his deregulatory schemes poisoned the entire world economy. Wonder why there are no serious attempts to reinstate Glass-Steagall right now, the firewall between commercial and investment banks? Bob Rubin, the guy who smashed that firewall, is still behind the curtain, pulling the levers to run the U.S. economy.

As Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone said: it would have cost us 1.4 trillion dollars to bail out every subprime mortgage in America, but instead taxpayers ended up paying FOURTEEN trillion dollars to pay off all the bad BETS, on the subprime mortgages, placed by Wall Street banks. And President Obama wants to give us $70 billion to stimulate jobs. Whoopee do. The man lives in a shoe. And the shoe is owned by the big banks.

And that’s what this show is gonna be about. The big banks that own the American economy, and thereby own the American government, including its water boy in chief, Barack Hussein Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

posted by richzubaty on Nov 26

[The Rude Guy Podcast #63 November ??, 2009]

This is Rich Zubaty, The Rude Guy. Back with another guerilla attack on wealth, hypocrisy and the American Way.

Freedom isn’t free. But if you think our soldiers in Afghanistan are protecting our freedom you’ve got your head up your anus. The Afghanis aren’t trying to take away our freedom. The Republicans and Democrats are.

Lone wolves like Ron Paul and Alan Grayson occasionally join together to fight for things like, auditing the Federal Reserve, an institution that played a great part in causing the Great Depression of 1929 AND our current economic depression. The FED is a private club of a dozen or so private banks that can print and loan money at will, with no oversight, and which has NEVER BEEN audited. Preposterous.

By and large both Republicans and Democrats are complicit in letting the well-oiled machinery of the corporate state set the course of monetary policy.

We were told that if we hadn’t bailed out the banks, we would be having a depression, not a mere recession. In a depression small businesses cannot borrow money to operate – farmers can’t buy farm machinery and seed, plumbers can’t buy pipe, everybody gets laid off. And what’s happening right now? Wall Street is fat city, and small businesses cannot borrow money to operate.

This is the Obama, Geithner, Summers recovery. These guys don’t have a fucking clue what normal people need to live. They don’t understand that when Wall Street is doing great, the rest of the economy suffers. They cannot imagine a future in which Wall Street is doing shitty and the rest of the economy is doing great, precisely BECAUSE Wall Street is doing shitty, and not being allowed to rob us blind. The stunning success of the Chinese economy over the past decade was certainly not due to banking. They didn’t HAVE any private banking.

[bird]

The good thing about Obama being AWOL in China during the healthcare debate, was that it made Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid look REALLY good. Like they’ve got the Congress working again. Like they can run the country just fine without him. If that was Obama’s plan – it was masterful. Americans need to believe that the Congress can actually pass bills about something more
than starting wars and cutting taxes.

I voted for Barack Obama. I wanted him to succeed. Now I’m not so sure. I thought Obama had the same values I do…now I’m not so sure. During the financial meltdown, a month before he got elected, I remember him saying: We Americans don’t have to apologize to anybody for our way of life. Unquote. That’s just about the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard a politician say. We have military bases in 130 countries and we spend as much as the entire rest of the world put together does, on soldiers and weapons and killing. We support tyrants and beat people up, all over the planet, so we can steal their wealth and exploit their cheap labor. And we have nothing to apologize for?

Without meaningful debate, Congress and Obama just gave the U.S. military and intelligence services as much money to operate for one year, as it would cost us for TEN years of healthcare coverage for everybody. Ten years. And that healthcare bill has been bogged down for months, getting more compromised and watered down with each passing week. Thank God Harry Reid finally moved the ball in the Senate.

Listen to what Beijing cab driver Li Chun Hwa, told a reporter from Aljazeera. Li was one of millions of Chinese who invested his life savings into stocks, buying into the western-styled WISDOM of fast returns on the market floors of capitalism.

Those floors collapsed this past year as speculative investments by US banks and financial institutions drove the world into financial crisis.

Says cabdriver Li, “The age of America as the world’s superpower has come and will soon pass…America has been too busy extending itself, spending money on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Now it’s broke, and it’s policies have lost friends around the world…what it says and does holds less meaning now.” Unquote.

Do you hear that Barack? We’re at a point in history where even cabdrivers in China understand, we have to apologize to just about the entire planet for our arrogant, militarist, greedy capitalist way of life. And not just apologize, but start behaving very differently.

Barack Obama presented himself as an agent of change, and one year later I…don’t…see it. Two weeks after he was elected he smugly told us: don’t worry about who I appoint to my cabinet. I am the change. That’s my job. The change comes from me…Then he appointed investment banker Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff. And he brought Larry Summers and Tim Geithner on board to FIX the financial mess THEY had created under Clinton and Bush. And one year later what’s happening? Wall Street is wallowing in money, paying out billions in bonuses to their employees. Worse, the big financial institutions that took our stimulus money are using our own fucking money, millions of dollars, to bribe congressmen NOT to pass legislation that would regulate them. In effect we are paying the New York banks and brokers to create another financial mess down the road, so we can bail them out again. This I call communism. Corporate communism. Corporatism. We have no control over these assholes. They OWN our government. Capitalist Communism. No matter who we elect, they still run the show. Even the biggest old fool of them all, Alan Greenspan, finally got religion. He recently said, quote: if it’s too big to fail it’s too big. It should be broken apart into smaller pieces… This is not a disaster. Look at Standard Oil. We broke it apart at the beginning of the last century and then its parts became more valuable than the whole. Unquote.

This is the same antitrust dispute we’ve been having in this country for a hundred years, since before Teddy Roosevelt was president. If it’s too big to fail it’s too big. So why not bring Leftists with a vision, like Nobel prize winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, into the Obama administration, to take on the task of cutting corporations down to a reasonable size? Why try to get bankers to regulate themselves? Why try to get congressmen, who have their hands in the pockets of the bankers, to regulate their patrons. Time for Obama to put other players in the game. Yeah, it’s as simple as basketball. You can’t have a five foot hotdog guarding a seven foot gorilla.

And then there’s Robert Gates. Read the rest of this entry »

posted by richzubaty on Oct 12

[The Rude Guy Podcast #62 October 13, 2009]

Barack Obama: Our First Female President

Rich Zubaty here, The Rude Guy once more. I voted for Barack Obama and I want him to succeed. But I don’t think he has a chance in hell of success unless he starts doing things much much differently. I’m glad he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe now he’ll start making some peace. So far he’s listened to the military assholes and sent more troops to Afghanistan and got more Americans killed there, than in any other year of this eight year war…and now, and only now, are he and Rahm Emmanuel reading books about Vietnam, trying to get up to speed on the American style of losing wars. This is not what you call smart. It’s what you call plodding, and overly dependent on advisors, and behind the eight ball. The Left was telling him a year ago to get out of Afghanistan because that war is unwinnable. Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires. The war’s just a running toilet of cost/plus dollars for our fucking defense contractors. Obama’s got blood on his hands now, and it’s time to change course. We should do exactly what Russia did. Pack everything up and leave. And that’s it. Hail to the Chief for getting the Nobel Peace prize. Now let’s have some peace! Henry Kissinger got it too. And all he did is prolong the war in Vietnam and give the go ahead for death squads in Argentina and to overthrow the government in Chile. Some peacenik Henry.

But there is some good news: President Obama is NOT going to put antimissile missiles in Eastern Europe. I’m thrilled. I really am. It’s the first thing he’s done right. 70% of the Czech people didn’t want the missiles. Russia viewed that Bush era plan, as belligerent saber rattling in their back yard, as if they suddenly decided to put missiles in Cuba – again. And…our antimissile missile system doesn’t even work. The technology is not there. I’m beginning to see what it takes for Barack Obama to make a decision. He needs a boulder on one side of the scale and a pebble on the other to decide anything. This man does not take chances. I’m sick of this already. He’s one of these guys who makes passionate arguments in favor of things everybody already agrees with. He’s against feeling bad and for feeling good and wants everybody to be happy. He’s all for puppies and sunshine and green energy. It’s feminized cowshit.

And therein lies the bad news. Barack Obama is our first female president. Our first female president. He governs just like a woman. That’s because he’s spent his whole life surrounded by women. Trying to please women. That’s his way. He was raised by a single mom. Truth of the matter is, if his dad had stuck around, Barack would probably be teaching computer science in Nairobi Kenya instead of being president of the United States. So he’s lucky his dad split.

When his mom died he was raised by his grandma. A bank vice president. His grandpa was a salesman. When he gave some drinking buddy a discount on furniture the guy helped get Barack into Punahou high school. Punahou is the most elite private high school west of Boston. Really. It’s where colonial captains of government and industry have been raised, together, in the same classrooms and on the same ball fields, for the past two hundred years. A bastion of conservativism. Just like Harvard, his other school.

Then Barack married a powerful lawyer and had two daughters. The man is surrounded by women. He knows how to “approach” women. How to appeal to women. He’s a woman’s man, not a man’s man. I would much rather have a beer with talk show host Ed Schultz than I would with Barack Obama. I’d rather talk about walleye fishing and bird hunting and unabashed leftist politics than about running some fucking community organization which, as far as I can tell, is the only thing Obama ever ran, before he became president of the biggest corporation in history.

Barack Obama is an attractive, charismatic, feminized man, who has no qualms about changing his mind. I voted for him, I own a piece of him and here are my questions for him. Are we getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo? Or not? Are we gonna have universal health care? Or not? Are we gonna investigate Bush era torture and assassination squads. Or not? Are we gonna end domestic spying? Or not. Are we gonna stop renditioning political enemies to be interrogated in other countries? Or not? Are we gonna regulate the piss out of Wall Street, or not?

George W Bush was an asshole from the get go. I was never fooled by him. But I feel more lied to by Barack Obama than any politician in my lifetime.

Obama holds his wet finger in the wind and says whatever he thinks people want to hear, this week. Clintonian opinion-poll politics. The worst. He’s a technocrat. Trying to patch up our country with a screwdriver, and some super glue, and a pretty speech.

Like a woman, his principal talent is talking. Not doing. Talking. Talking in that wonderful resonant seductive voice of his, while reading from a teleprompter.

Like a woman he wants to be all things to all people. He wants everybody to like him. He wants to throw his arms around the congressmen and women, and steer the government by consensus. Consensus is how women do things. That’s how you organize bake sales and pool parties. Not how you be president of the United States. The president walks point. He’s out in front. Not hanging back.

Obama’s feminized inclination to try and make everyone like him is self-defeating. When FDR revved up to pass Social Security he said, “The forces arrayed against me hate me, and I welcome their hatred!” I welcome their hatred! That’s leadership. That’s manliness. Here’s a cripple in a wheel chair with more balls than Barack Obama.

Obama was elected a year ago and what has he accomplished? Cash for Clunkers.

What a fucking clunker that was. Read the rest of this entry »

posted by richzubaty on Aug 15

[The Rude Guy Podcast #61 August 15, 2009]

Healthcare or die: people vs.corporations

This is Rich Zubaty and I cannot believe I’m going to talk about Health care reform again. But actually I’m not gonna waste any more hot air on health care, because this debate is no longer about health care. It’s about who controls America. The corporations, or the people.

The corporate ass-kissing Republicans are right. If they smoke Obama on health care, the rest of his administration will be a lame duck. Nothing of importance will happen. Yeah, we’ll get some goofy ass social legislation saying left-handed people should receive equal rights in the workplace, or some such drivel. But the corporate boot will be pressed down on our necks, unless we get public health care.

And if we don’t, I’m voting for Nancy Pelosi for President next time. She’s the only one showing any vision or leadership at this point. Obama has been fence sitting, triangulating, as usual. Saying he favors a public option but doing nothing to browbeat and shame the conservative democrats into getting behind it. He’s making intellectual arguments, not cracking his political whip. Eight years ago, when Congress was cutting taxes on the rich, while escalating spending for war, no one was worried about what John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich and the other progressives had to say about it. So now, when the shoe’s on the other foot, why should we give a fuck what the conservatives want? It makes no sense at all. It’s OUR turn.

With virtually all Americans wanting health care reform, and a full 72% wanting a public option, to compete with insurance companies, we should be charging ahead, and threatening any legislator who stands in the way of passing this bill, that they will be toast in the next election, if they don’t get in line right now. Exactly how the Republicans intimidated wishy washy Democrats into supporting the invasion of Iraq, is exactly how the Democrats should be intimidating the conservatives who’re threatening to torpedo genuine health care reform.

45 Senators are thwarting the will of over 200 million Americans, by blocking national public health care. I HATE the Senate. Two Senators from Wyoming have the same voting power as two Senators from New York. All some Delaware corporation has to do is pay off cheap Senators from rural states like Wyoming and Alabama and Idaho, and they can control the entire goddam country. How can we call this a democracy, or a republic, or anything besides a corporate dictatorship? Corporate feudalism.

Corrupt iguanas, like Senator Max Baucus, will stroke their chins on TV claiming this debate is all about principles, assuirng us he’s not swayed by the over one million dollars in donations, he’s gotten from insurance companies. But if that’s so, if he’s not swayed, if conservatives are not swayed by the medical industry money they get, then where is the legislator who is getting lots of insurance company money, and supporting the public option. Where? He doesn’t exist. She doesn’t exist. These guys are so full of shit it’s squirting out their ears. They’re bought and paid for. Like cheap whores.

Why are we leftists always playing defense, deflecting right wing talking points, even when we have an overwhelming mandate to steer government to the left? By the time we deflect one talking point, the right wing radio pin heads have already moved on to the next one. All they’re doing is shitting on our brains. It’s a cynical ploy. Just keep us busy answering their stupid talking points so the real issues don’t get talked about.

And where are the left wing talking points? Why aren’t we saying that any one who doesn’t support full medical coverage for all Americans is un-American, and unpatriotic and greedy and selfish and should be ashamed of themselves. And should move to Mexico and try living under the lawless, Libertarian, strong-man-takes-all, political wonderland, they’ve got down there. Why aren’t we announcing on TV that any legislator, who doesn’t support the public option, is a corporate lackey, a corporate water boy, a sell-out to Big Money, and should be sent back home to grow tomatoes by voters in the next election?

Why aren’t we saying we would rather have government standing between us and our doctor, than have some huge insurance company standing between us and our doctor? Who in his right mind could possibly trust for-profit insurance companies, more than they trust government?

One retiring Insurance company executive just got a compensation package worth $600 million dollars! $600 million dollars! That means that 60,000 people who paid his company for medical coverage, were each denied $10,000 worth of care, in order to pay this pig his retirement package. These paying customers did not get the tests and procedures they needed, so that this vulture could feather his nest with $600 million dollars. Read the rest of this entry »