Wikileaks Vietnamistan

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[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.

Within hours of the release of these documents the White House, Fox News, and the major media were all telling us nothing new was revealed. Nothing new? Really?

What about the fact that the same type of shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles, that we gave to the Afghans, to shoot down Russian helicopters, are now being used by the Afghans against us, to shoot down our own helicopters. Doesn’t that seem a little fucked up to anybody in the media? In nine years I’ve never heard that reported in the news. We were told that our helicopters were occasionally being brought down by lucky shots from grenade launchers or small arms fire. Not Stinger missiles. You lying assholes. And useless news organizations.

Or how about the fact that a group of Polish soldiers made a mortar attack on a wedding party, in revenge, for an attack made against them, earlier in the week. This is going to win the hearts and minds of Afghanis? Attacking wedding parties?

Then there was the incident in Kunduz province in 2005 involving German troops, which almost brought down the German government, when it was thoroughly investigated by German news media…Two NATO gasoline tank trucks were stolen by somebody, but they got stuck in the mud. The local Afghanis descended on the trucks with cans and bottles to get free gas. German NATO soldiers called in a U.S. air strike and, according to the Der Spiegel report, 142 local villagers were blown to hamburger, and flame-broiled in exploding gas. The German Defense minister tried to cover up that slaughter, was outed, and resigned over the fiasco.

However…in the good old USSA…and this is a hell of a however. This is the kind of however that you cannot refute within hours of receiving the Wikileaks report. HOWEVER…the U.S. field report leaked by Wikileaks claimed that 56 Taliban were killed in that air strike. In reality 142 villagers were murdered, but our official U.S. Army field report claimed 56 Taliban were killed. Fuck those lying assholes. That’s a war crime, and it should be investigated as such.

You know what this means? It means that all of our field reports from Vietnamistan are suspect. Every single one of them is a potential lie. No one can go through all seventy thousand of them in a few hours and pronounce them all to be old news.

You know what else it means. It means that all the information Barrack Obama used to make his heady policy decisions about the war, was based on lies. Lies cooked up in the field. Lies cooked up by guys trying to make themselves look good and get their asses promoted the fuck out of there.

I went through all this bullshit before, with Vietnam. Back then it was called “Body Counts”. After fighting that war for 7 years, if you added up all the reports of all the enemies killed in action, you ended up with a total bodycount that was more than the entire population of North Vietnam. Men, women and children. It was all lies and bullshit. And because Barack Obama is ignorant. And because he is naive. And because he has spent more time playing golf in the first year and a half of his presidency, than George W Bush spent playing golf in his entire presidency, Obama’s Vietnamistan War policy doesn’t add up. It’s a mess. He doesn’t do his homework. He plays golf, watches TV sports, and takes weekend trips instead. He doesn’t question authority. Relying on the military to tell us whether there should be more war, is like asking a class of second graders if there should be free candy at lunchtime.

Within hours of the Wikileaks release, Obama went on TV and made the outrageous statement that, quote “These documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.” Unquote. If that’s true, I want him impeached. If he knew all this and still went ahead with tripling the troops, I want him impeached. He’s incompetent or morally crippled…or both. This is the guy who got elected on the slogan: I don’t wanna just end these wars. I want to end the mindset that got us into war. Then end it asshole.

But I don’t think he knew what was really going on, on the ground. I think he’s too dumb. I think he just took the word of the generals. He has no business being commander in chief of the deadliest army the world has ever known. He is turning us into an international clown act. The deadliest army in history, from the most powerful nation in history, cannot defeat some bearded guys with rifles and pickup trucks… We’re a globalized laughing stock. Huge armies cannot win guerilla wars. So add this to your mindset: Go the fuck home.

But what did we hear next from the White House? Are they going to start an immediate investigation into the lying army field reports? Are they going to investigate the circumstances in which 20,000 Afghan men, women and children, were murdered by our storm troopers? Murdered in their houses, while they slept, during night raids by our anti-terrorist assassination, task forces? Fuck no. They’re going to start an immediate investigation to find the leaker. They’re not going to launch an investigation into the lies, so baldly revealed in the leaked documents, and upon which this foolish war is based. They are going to run like attacks dogs to find the leaker. Fuck this administration. Fuck Barack Obama. I’ve had it. The man has his head up his ass. He should be impeached. He is NOT going to change. The lightbulb is NOT going to suddenly go on inside his head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he’s listening to other people who do not know what they’re doing. This is not the best and the brightest? This is the dumbest and numbest, the chicken hawks and sell-outs. Night-stalking Zombies of Ambition.

We need a strong candidate to run against Obama in the 2012 Democratic primary. I have never voted Republican in my life and I’m not going to start now. I voted for Nader in the past, and have never for one second regretted it. Nader is the only other hero I’ve had in my lifetime who should have been president. Who was really really qualified to be president. In 2000 I was supposed to vote for Gore and Lieberman. Joe Lieberman! Are you out of your minds? Two arch conservative military/corporate Democrats? Fuck that. We need someone to run against Obama. In the primary. A leftist to pull him to the left. Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich come immediately to mind. And Ralph Nader of course. Maybe Alan Grayson? Somebody has to do it.

Here is what former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman has to say about Obama’s Bungled War Strategies. Quote.
President Obama does not have the experience to manage the daunting challenge (of war). He had scant background in foreign policy, military policy and defense expenditures. Nor did he have much knowledge about the major players in these fields.
As a result of these shortcomings, the President assembled a national security team, for most of the wrong reasons. He made his two major national security appointments for domestic political reasons. Sez me: He played politics with war!

Hillary Clinton was made Secretary of State to build bridges to her wing of the Democratic Party, following a nasty political campaign, and to head off any Clinton reprisals. George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, was retained, as a sop to “bipartisanship”, and to conservative Republicans.

The Gates appointment was particularly damaging because it demonstrated deference to the Pentagon’s power structure, instead of the civilians in the Defense Department and State Department.

Gates and another Bush favorite, General David Petraeus, have emerged as the leading voices on national security policy. Their strength is magnified by the weakness and disunity of other senior officials, on Obama’s national security team.

For instance, Official Washington and the corporate media have hailed Obama’s choice of Petraeus, to replace General Stanley McChrystal, as commander in charge of the Afghan War. Yet, this move also has increased the power of the Pentagon to override any deadline for troop withdrawal, from the nation’s longest war.
Neither Petraeus, nor his bosses (Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen), have accepted Obama’s notion of a deadline, to begin significant withdrawals of U.S. troops next summer…Now, given the messy circumstances of McChrystal’s firing, Petraeus is virtually untouchable.

Sez me: And let’s not forget, in Afghanistan there are also approximately 104,000 U.S.-paid private military contractors. They are providing armed security, intelligence analysis, program management, engineering, and technical support for program offices; and data and analysis on which government officials base their decisions on awarding further contracts. These are sensitive jobs that are supposed to be done by government employees. Not mercenary contractors, working for profit with no effective oversight. I want THEIR logs leaked to Wikileaks too.

Sez Goodman: The new emphasis on counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and so-called “stability operations,” will actually create opportunities for new military deployments overseas, in other countries. There is no end in sight to this spending, unless Obama finds a new toughness to freeze the defense budget and stop force expansion.

But instead of the needed firmness, President Obama has contributed to the militarization of overall national security policy, by appointing general officers to key positions, that should have been in the hands of civilians. These appointments include the national security adviser; the intelligence tsar; ambassadors to such key states as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia; and a mediator for Sudan. They all should have been civilians, not generals.

Meanwhile, there has been no attempt to reverse the militarization of the intelligence community, which includes the Pentagon’s near total control, over the intelligence budget and personnel.

The State Department should be the major counter to the Defense Department, but Foggy Bottom has not had a strong leader since James Baker was the steward for foreign policy, two decades ago. The department has been in decline ever since, particularly during the last five years under Condoleeza Rice and now Hillary Clinton.
Rice had contempt for the Foreign Service; Clinton talks a much better game, but has surrounded herself with congressional and personal aides, who have little knowledge of foreign policy, and little political clout in this administration. Sez me: Basically Hillary’s still running for president surrounded by her old henhouse feminist cronies.

The intelligence community is in particular turmoil, and no longer serves as a check and balance to the Pentagon….This situation opens the door, to a return to politicized intelligence, as analysts grow fearful of contradicting the claims made by senior officials. Instead of intelligence analysis informing policy, the danger is that policymakers will stake out positions, and then expect the intelligence analysts to fall into line supporting them. Remember Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?

Inside the CIA, the appointment of a weak CIA director, Leon Panetta, has left in place many of the operational ideologues, who were responsible for secret prisons, abusive interrogations, torture and renditions. Obama has contributed to a continuation of the old ways.

President Obama will lack a handle on this deteriorating national security situation, until he realizes that Afghanistan is not central to the terrorism threat against the United States, and that the stability of Pakistan is far more important to U.S. security in South and Southwest Asia. Sez me: And that by driving the Afghani Taliban into Pakistan we are destabilizing Pakistan! Fucking morons. When we leave Afghanistan the Taliban go home and the threat to Pakistan virtually evaporates.

Sending more troops and resources into Afghanistan does not begin to address the threat of international terrorism, and no amount of economic assistance to Pakistan will buy support from Islamabad. Unquote.

So sez: Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, who spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is titled: Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

I quoted from his article entitled: Obama’s Bungled Military Strategies, Part III; published online at Truthout.Org, on Thursday July 8, 2010

A listener just emailed me a picture of a new bumper sticker that kind of sums up everything I’ve just said. It says: McBama…. McBama…same crap, different pile

[bird]

And then there’s Iraq. Which I now call Koree-istan. Korea in the Middle East. We’ve been in Korea for 60 years, and so will we be in Iraq. I’m thrilled Obama is drawing down our troops there. We are only leaving 50,000 American fighting men and women behind. 13,000 more than we’ve kept in Korea. But in Iraq there are also about 114,000 Department of Defense private contractors. And… Hillary Clinton wants 7000 more armed private security contractors to guard our NEW U.S. embassy in Baghdad. 7000. Worldwide we only employ 4000 armed security contractors, to guard every other embassy we have, in almost every other country on earth. But we will have nearly twice that many in Iraq alone. Why? Oil. Why? Because we built an embassy in Iraq as big as 80 football fields. A city within a city. Keeping in mind, that according to international convention, a foreign embassy is regarded as the sacred native soil of that country. It’s a safe zone. A city of refuge. Some CIA mad man assassin spy, crawls through the gates of the U.S. embassy, and suddenly he’s on U. S. soil, and the Iraqi government cannot touch him.

How about if the Iraqis built an embassy in Manhattan that was as big as 80 football fields and employed 7000 machine-gun toting al Qaeda desert fighters to guard it. Would that be OK?

We are leaving behind a destroyed country. Though we’re not actually leaving it at all. The Iraqis say that life was better under Saddam. Keeping in mind, under Saddam you got your tongue cut out for saying something bad about the government…and still the Iraqi people say life was better then. Oil production is less now than it was under Saddam, which means there’s no money. Electricity production, which used to be almost constant under Saddam, is now sporadic and unpredictable. People are afraid to go out of their houses looking for clean water and cooking kerosene. Civil War is all around them, to say nothing of the chance of getting blown to catfood by American Apache helicopters. Iraq is no more stable today than it was the day Obama took office, but he and his political iguanas played this timetable out, to be able to pull a political rabbit out of his hat, just in time for the midterm elections. It stinks to high heaven. Playing politics with war.

Barack Obama is a brown-skinned guy who sold his soul to military/corporate power, decades ago. He became their well-paid lackey and their silver-tongued spokesman. And because of his crass sell-out, he became our president. Julian Assange is a white-skinned, white-haired guy, who invented something out of nothing, in the backyard of his mind. A website devoted to whistle blowers all over the world. A place where the people of the world, who have become disgusted by the gap, between what the organization they work for says it does, and what it REALLY does…he created a place where these people can come anonymously, to post their rage and guilt and disgust. So Assange has jammed his fist up the ass of the military/corporate establishment, and military/corporate sell-out Obama is hunting him down for doing it.

Who’s the real hero here?

Sez Julian Assange: courage begets MORE revelations. Courage begets MORE courage. What a guy! His courage, and his web site, are leading the peace makers forward.

Some say that Julian Assange should get the Nobel Peace Prize! Now wouldn’t that be justice, since Obama got it last time around, then reinvaded Afghanistan!

But the real heroes are the military leakers who are leaking documents so fast, Wikileaks can’t even keep up with them – they have a six month backlog of leaks from the soldiers, who are brave enough to risk their freedom, telling the truth about a war they didn’t sign on for, and cannot in good conscience, condone. According to one soldier from Fort Hood, Texas, on a recent World Can’t Wait webcast, the Wikileaks collateral murder Apache helicopter video is making other active duty soldiers think: “hmm, maybe I should leak that video I’ve got?”.

And the grunts rah rah high school version of history is being thrown over the side too. According to this soldier “No War but the Class War” is a poster that has resonated with soldiers at Fort Hood. It’s a wider geopolitical perspective, a grander world view, that they are hungry for. Just like the Russian White soldiers, who quit and joined the Reds, in 1917. They don’t want to enlarge their officer’s portfolios. They don’t want to die for capitalist greed. “No War but the Class War”. That’s what they’ll fight for.

www.underthehoodcafe.org is where you soon should be able to find links to Fort Hood soldiers, who are planning direct action to oppose an upcoming scheduled deployment to Iraq. www.underthehoodcafe.org from Fort Hood Texas.

And also, there you can learn something about the history of soldiers actively sabotaging war, going back to Vietnam. Here’s an excerpt:

As early as mid-1969 an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cavalry Division, flatly refused – on CBS TV – refused to advance down a dangerous booby-trapped trail…my own recollection is that, two different combat companies, one after the other, flat-out refused deployment into Cambodia. Just simply refused. Shortly after that, President Nixon announced the new policy of “Vietnamization” – basically turning everything over to South Vietnam – and direct American combat operations came to an end, within a year. That’s how a war ends. When soldiers refuse to fight. When soldiers derail the mad engine of war.

And that’s who should get the Nobel peace prize. The soldiers leaking to Wikileaks. Wars will only stop when the soldiers stop fighting them. That’s REAL bravery. As one of the Fort Hood activists said: Instead of making truth a casualty of war…it’s time to make war a casualty of truth.

[hawk]

OK, time for another fan email from my very interesting and informative listeners. This one from a young Vietnamese man born in Australia, after his parents fled Vietnam in the wake of the U.S. collapse.

Hi Rich, Just a quick intro, my name is Anthony Vu, I’m 27 and live in Australia and work as a paraplanner in a bank. That’s right a bank… yes I absolutely hate working for a bank. I hate what they represent. According to my superiors, I apparently lack passion. But then again, how the hell do you become passionate with work, when your work is about ripping off mums and dads. I initially wanted to be a financial planner, as I thought it was a role where you can help people with their lives. How gullible I was. Then I realized it was really about making people buy financial products, they don’t really need. I personally couldn’t do that, and rip people off in front of their face. Instead I have to be a chicken shit, and seep as low as helping financial planners rip people off, while I hide in the back office.

…Anyways I thought I should email you just so that you can keep going with your podcasts. And just to let you know I do listen. I have also bought and read your book “What men know that women don’t”. I have never been able to read a book from cover to cover, but your book was the first for me. You are very articulate and I hope when I reach your age I will be just as wise as you. (bless you Anthony. I hope you’re a lot wiser, than me by then.) The things in your book were exactly the same things I’ve seen with my own eyes, I was just never able to express those things the way you do. I’ve even made my girlfriend read the book, even though she has said she threw it against the wall a few times. Ha ha ha ha (yeah she couldn’t Finish it). Your books and your podcasts are a real good wake up call for anyone listening. The only sad thing about your work is, the things you preach will never be used in higher levels of government, due to the greed of all those feminised people. I’m sure you know this, but my point is that you should continue on, and leave as much of a legacy as possible. (Wow. Leave as much of a legacy as possible. Tall order, Anthony.) The best you can do to help change this world is to do the best you can do. Keep podcasting. Keep writing those books. Just keep on doing it as I’m sure people do listen…Your work is greatly appreciated. Yours sincerely Anthony

………..from his next email

Funny enough, I heard your pod cast first, before I bought the book. (Great news. That’s WHY I make the podcast.) I was looking for something interesting to listen to on the way to work, and there is literally nothing out there. A lot of jibberish out there is being communicated, plenty of waste. I was literally going through every pod cast out there about anything, and just randomly happened to stumble upon yours. Thank God.

….skipping ahead

Yeah I really hate American-led wars. (this from a kid whose parents escaped Vietnam by the skin of their chinny chin chins, on a small leaky boat) It is soo fucked up, especially from an Australian viewpoint. We have a large contingent of Aussie troops there, fighting an unwinable war. And only recently has the government told us they will be staying there…and not only that, we will be committing more troops there. Why? Because Australia is a USA lap dog. Why are we still a country so reliant on the US? The saddest part is that there was little objection from people here, and it had so little coverage in the media, which I’m guessing is due to the low Aussie kill count.

No clue why I’m telling you this, I’m just pissed off with alot of things in the world.

Anyways, as promised, I donated some coin your way, to keep the podcast going. I personally hope you never stop, as every podcast you do provides me with more education than any other school could.

Anthony Vu

God Bless you. Guys like you keep me going.

If you like this show, email me. So I hear about it. So I muster the good cheer to keep on going. therudeguy@hotmail.com …and maybe I’ll even read some of your thoughts on the air…

and visit my website too: happyfool.ORG

Blessings to one and all,

BP and the CIA

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Or CLICK HERE to read the TEXT version of The Rude Guy Podcast #69

[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?

Does Obama still believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy too? This man has no fucking idea how the world works. No idea who he is supposed to be listening TO, and fighting FOR. No fundamental hard-won philosophy of life, or of economics, or of government. Nothing. Just touchy feely platitudes. He has a childlike naive belief in establishment organizations. That’s the pattern. If it’s a giant organization he, believes them. If it’s just us common folk, he FEELS our pain. But if it’s oil company representatives or Wall Street, he BELIEVES them. How the fuck are we gonna get change out of a president. who relies on advice from establishment con men and thieves who starve children to death so they can buy bigger boats?

As former General, and then President, Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “God help this country when someone sits at this desk who doesn’t understand the military as well as I do.”

Eisenhower was talking about generals, but he was ALSO talking about corporations, and he was ALSO talking about Congress. He was talking about how these three groups gang up on the American people to steal their money.

In 1953 president Eisenhower addressed the Academy of Newspaper Editors on the state of the military buildup.

Said Ike, the war hero, who had commanded the D-Day invasion of Normandy: quote. “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities, it is two electric power plants each serving a town of 60,000 population, it is some 50 miles of concrete highway, it is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. (Here, by the way, is Eisenhower, talking about the government building hospitals instead of building bombers. You know what we call that? Socialized medicine. Government-built hospitals. Socialism. By a Republican no less. And now we’ve elected a BUSINESS Democrat who thinks government hospitals are only for veterans of foreign wars, and not for veterans of the domestic wars of rich against poor.)

Anyway…Continues Eisenhower “We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found, on the road the world has been taking.

(But [clipped]) this is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” unquote

Barack Obama is a bullshit jive-talker from the South Side of Chicago. I grew up around hustlers like him. He has no business in the Oval Office.

I want Bernie Sanders, I want Ralph Nader I want Dennis Kucinich. I want someone with experience and ideas and vision. And the courage to carry them out.

Not somebody who has no conviction about anything, no experience commanding anything, and no living understanding of history, whatsoever. After surviving George W Bush we deserve something better than a guy who gave himself a B plus for doing nothing besides giving speeches his entire first year in office while the country fell apart around us.

[bird]

OK, here’s something of interest. The real story of how BP, British Petroleum, has fucked up this country, OUR country, over the past sixty years. And it reveals Dwight Eisenhower’s blind spot too.

From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain’s standard of living was supported by cheap oil from Iran. British cars, trucks, and buses ran on really cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by cheap oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with cheap Iranian oil. This British Petroleum Company was the most lucrative British enterprise anywhere on the planet, because the Brits only paid the Iranians, 16% of the market price of a barrel of oil, and would not even let the Iranians see their books, to see how much oil they extracted.

In 1951 the new Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh tried to negotiate higher royalty payments out of BP, but when the Brits wouldn’t deal, he nationalized the oil fields and promised that, henceforth, oil profits would be used to develop Iran, not enrich Britain.

BP went crying to the British Government, which immediately went crying to President Eisenhower.

Eisenhower, encouraged by his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a lifelong defender of transnational corporate power, agreed to send the Central Intelligence Agency in to depose Mossadegh. The operation took less than a month in the summer of 1953. It was the first time the CIA had ever overthrown a democratically elected government. And it wouldn’t be the last.

The newly elevated Shah, an aristocratic despot, savaged the population with a murderous police force, and let BP do whatever it wanted. BP made hundreds of billions of dollars off the deal.

But our preposterous interference in a democratic country showed the world that the USA does not hesitate to overthrow democracies, like Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, on and on. So the Muslim world turned away from democracy, and toward Islamic Fundamentalism, as a governing system. Much less chance of the Americans screwing with that. And as we all know, Islamic Fundamentalism has become a plague on the entire planet.

So thank BP for the Ayatollah Khomeini, who kicked out the Shah, and took our U.S. embassy workers prisoner, creating the Iranian hostage crisis, that brought down the Jimmy Carter presidency, and put Ronald Reagan in the White House, kicking off 30 years of conservative hell in America. All our lives have been impoverished by living in a deregulated corporate nightmare for the past thirty years, where the corporations got richer, by stealing from the workers.

Yes, thank BP, for the greedy scheming that condemned me, and you, to have to live in an insanely right wing nation, from Ronald Reagan, right on through to today, with casino banking on Wall Street and a volcano of oil erupting in the Gulf of Mexico. And all because we helped BP steal hundreds of billion of dollars of oil from Iran by throwing out their democratically elected leader.

And now, laughably, the British government is whining to us about their poor old pensioners who have their money tied up in BP. Here’s what I have to say about that. Fuck them! Fuck the Brits, and fuck their pensioners. Stop being greedy. Stop investing in criminal companies because they give you big dividends, because they are robbing the rest of the planet blind. It’s your own fucking fault you greedy old farts.

Fuck British colonial capitalism. It is now, and always has been, a scourge on the earth. The Brits are the sleaziest, most corrupt businessmen on the planet. There are 50 oil refineries in the USA. BP owns two of them. And yet those two have racked up 97% of all the safety violations, in the entire industry. BP doesn’t give a shit about people. Not even its own workers.

And listen to this. Last year more than 137 billion barrels of oil were traded on the American commodities markets alone. And yet the world consumes barely 30 billion barrels of oil annually! What the fuck is that about? What it’s about is, the big banks and oil companies are screwing us again, by fiddling with the price of oil, like they fiddled with the price of food, so they can make profits betting on whether it will go up or down. Based upon their own insider manipulations of the oil supply.

Leon Hess, founder of Hess Oil, told a Senate Committee twenty years ago, “I’m an old man, but I’d bet my life that if the Commodities Market (today’s Nymex) was not in operation, there would be ample oil and reasonable prices all over the world without this volatility”. Unquote.

What does that mean? Today it means that in a world wide recession, demand for oil is down, and oil should be trading for $25 a barrel, not 75. The reason it’s trading for 75 is that big banks like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and J.P. Morgan, are filling up oil tankers and hiring them to sit offshore. Restricting the supply. Propping up the price of oil…And then some day, they will buy short futures contracts on oil, then they will empty their tankers, and flood the market, driving down the price of oil, and make huge profits on their shorted futures contracts. Capitalism is insane! It’s putting the cat, inside the canary cage. And calling it FREEDOM. The cat has a right to roam freely. How dare you keep it out of that canary cage? You socialist bastards.

[bird]

It’s time to end the Religion of Growth! The religion of growth.

Anyone who’s been listening to me for awhile knows I think our fundamental problem is, that we live in a neurotic capitalist society that is predicated upon constant growth, rather than in a sustainable democratic socialist society, that is predicated upon constant renewal. In a capitalist society rich people, who have much more money than they need, must be wooed…enticed to invest their money, so that the wheels of commerce can roll. What bullshit. People who already have too much money, have to be offered opportunities to make yet more of it, for anything to work.

A new survey of the countries with the quote “happiest people” showed the democratic socialist countries of northern Europe leading the list. These are all countries with health care for everybody, food and housing for the unemployed, government, not corporate, financing of elections and no wars.

In an ideal democratic socialist society, like they have on Star Trek Next Generation, money doesn’t matter. Indeed, on that show, money doesn’t even exist. If the people need a community garden, more than they need yet another 7/11 dispensing cigarettes and corn syrup soda, then by god, that’s what that empty lot at the end of your block gets used for. The metric is not how much money it can return to rich people investors; the metric is how much does it improve the quality of life of people who live on that block. Sustainability. Renewal.

I love gardening. I got good at organic gardening thirty years ago when I was growing pot. These days I could pump out some juicy tomatoes and lettuce and squash and green beans, and even some mint and oregano and fresh basil yum yum, if I could only find a place to grow the stuff. But I can’t. Everything is OWNED by some asshole. And there’s no room for me. Our local government pays for airports and boat ramps. In case you own an airplane or a boat. But doesn’t buy empty lots for growing food. This is anti-social behavior. Government captured by business. Neglecting the basic bonds between people, and the way we have functioned for ten thousand years, in order to stimulate the bonehead capitalist economy. Fuck the capitalist economy. My tomatoes taste better than theirs have for the past fifty years, ever since they started designing tomatoes they could pick green and ship on trucks from California to Chicago. So the economy could GROW, and rich people could make money, and the rest of us would all get cardboard food.

Cardboard food is not the inevitable consequence of living in a developed economy. Germany and France both have great food. In Germany, when you ride on the train, you see that people do not have lawns in their front and back yards. They have spectacular gardens, with corn and tomatoes and melons and bobbing bright yellow sunflowers. That’s what I call civilization. Where people really enjoy the hell out of growing their own food.

I saw community gardens in downtown Helena Montana. The State capitol of Montana. State building one block that way. Community garden one block this way. You wanna grow something you sign up and get assigned a little plot, and you take care of it.

I’m not gonna give you my “socialism is good” rant again. But if you like libraries and firemen and roads to drive on, then you already like socialism…so let’s figure it out, and get good at it and have more of it, like Star Trek. Community gardens are a no brainier. All you need is some seeds, and an empty lot where you have permission to plant them.

[bird]

OK…It’s summer and probably no one is listening, so I’m gonna indulge myself by reading some fan letters, emails from some of the folks who have read my books. The people who DO give me credit for what I do. These people keep my motor runnin’. Like this:

Hello Rich…I recently purchased your book What Men Know That Women Don’t. This book has literally been like a bomb going off in my head. I am grateful to you for having poured your energy and experience into this book. I am only sad that I did not know this earlier in life (I am 36) — yet I am now able to correct much badness that I have unknowingly created. I am blessed to have read your book and to be able to apply the principles in raising my 6-year old boy and 4-year old daughter, and with my wife. I have since turned on several guys to your website and book. Shoot – it’s as if we have all been walking around brainwashed for our entire lives, blind, and now suddenly we see it. Fucking unbelievable. May the Universe bless you. You are doing Great Work.

And in a follow-up email he writes:

I will be getting your other books shortly…I found the book, What Men Know That Women Don’t, on amazon.com. I found out about your work from a website called theabsolute.net that referenced your books and ideas. Please keep up the work — your book has prompted my own investigation into my, “mindscape”, as you call it… I am finally starting to see.

Since reading your book I have started fishing again — something I quit doing when I was 12 years old, and fell into the rat race. And I take my son and daughter with me. And I take days off work to do this….

I can see the effects on my children and wife when I am around, spending time, being a father and husband. We have less money because of it, but they are ok with that. They want my presence and love, rather than me showing up burnt out from working an 18-hour day, and showing up the next day to do it all over again. Your book has re-enforced my own gut instincts, that had been all but chewed up by the various memes of our culture. Somewhere along my descent into the abyss of the modern mindscape, fishing became something that was a, “waste of time”. What a trick! I’m taking my son and his buddy from school, fishing this weekend. Off the pier, nothing fancy or expensive, but spiritually priceless.

please feel free to use my statements…
may the universe bless you bro!

From: Vivek Sharma, Los Angeles, California “unquote”

What can I say mister Vivek Sharma. This brings tears to my eyes. Here’s a dad who read my book and started taking his kids fishing. Because, as he puts it, it’s spiritually priceless. It doesn’t get any better than this for a writer like me.

And then there’s this, from a Nepalese woman living in Australia, who saw my What Men Know That Women Don’t video, on Youtube.

Quote: the world wouldn’t be the same without guys, especially the ones that work in building/slash/construction/slash/engineering, and doing the really tough outdoorsy jobs, that require a lot of strength, and spatial intelligence. Women couldn’t and wouldn’t do the kinds of jobs that you’re capable of, and enjoy doing. We’re built by nature for having babies, nurturing/caretaking and light jobs. You guys deserve far more respect than you’re currently getting! Unquote.

She went on to say that UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, which she had experienced back in Nepal and India, was a blatantly sexist, anti-male organization. Personally I don’t know anything about that, but why am I not surprised? I can tell you this much, this woman is one of the few women in Australia who is not a rabid feminist. I told you in my last podcast that Ozzie and Kiwi feminists recently deleted my wikipedia page. Just made Rich Zubaty disappear – poof — on wikipedia, because I am not quote “notable”. Fuck wikipedia.

But we’re not done with this week’s fan mail yet. Listen to this, from:

Jeff Duke, 25, a janitor in Waterloo Iowa

Hey, Mr. Zubaty, I really enjoy your podcasts. I have been listening for the past year and a half now, while finding your humor and ideas original, as well as entertaining. I loved your autobiography, which I downloaded from your web site, and I also bought What Men Know That Women Don’t. It was a splendidly fine read; insightful, concise and compelling. I think every man should read it. Unquote.

Thank you, mister Jeff Duke, from Waterloo Iowa. I think every man should read it too. And let me take a moment to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to know that blue collar guys, like you, and like me, are listening to this podcast. I can picture the young Mr. Duke, at work, plugging the iPod into his ear, and sweeping the gym floor, late at night after the big game. Listening to Rich Zubaty rant about capitalism and socialism, instead of listening to Rush Limbaugh rant about capitalism and socialism. Before, on AM radio, they could only get Rush. Now they can get guys like me. Guys who know how to work with their hands, as well as work their mouths. I used to have electricians, and automobile assembly plant workers and other tradesmen listening to this show. And I hope some of them still are.

So thank you Jeff Duke. You and Vivek Sharma and the Nepalese woman from OZ, made my week. Think of it this way. I get three dollars per book sold. So, since the Nepalese woman only watched my youtube video, I made six bucks this week. But look at the honest to goodness satisfaction to be had from getting three emails like these, about my work. Do you think three people emailed Stephen Spielberg last week and told him; “Gee Whiz, your dinosaur movies really changed my life?” …I doubt it. There’s real art and there’s corporate art. And as stupid as my efforts are at times, at least they are, for real. They’re not sold out popular crap. They’re not about making money. Long live podcasting.

If you like this show, email me. So I know it. So I muster the good cheer to keep on going.

Blessings,

Obama’s Oil Spill

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[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, and I hope we field a serious Democratic primary challenger to him, because otherwise Mitt Romney and the Republicans are gonna be swept into office. When people ask me: if not Obama, then who? – the names Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich rollll off my tongue. And that’s the point. We have solid progressive worker-bees who have toiled in government for decades, and who know exactly how to take the people’s power back from the corporations…and instead we elected some brown skinned charlatan yodeling about change we can believe in. What bullshit.

Instead of accomplishing a great deal, and lasting for only one term, he is going to accomplish virtually nothing, and last for only one term. And you call that smart?

Obama’s political technique is to give a rousing speech against something, then vote for it. When Obama was a Senator, and John Roberts was nominated for the Supreme Court, Obama gave a passionate speech about how Roberts had always served big business and ignored the little people…and then, Obama voted to confirm him. What the fuck. What are we supposed to make of that?

“Watch what we do, not what we say,” is a famous Republican quip. If we use that yardstick, Barack Obama is a Republican.

Obama says he didn’t get elected to serve fat cat bankers, but when the financial reform debate was raging, the White House policy ninjas, maneuvering off camera, struck blows against breaking up Too Big To Fail Banks, and capping credit card interest rates, and auditing the Fed. What the fuck? What are we supposed to make of that? Obama talks about ending the war, and then sends in more troops. What the fuck. What are we supposed to make of that? Is he schizophrenic? Or just a slimy Chicago political chameleon? The banks and generals and oil companies and conservative Supreme Court nominees, don’t care what he says on TV. They care what he DOES. And he consistently DOES their bidding. While talking against it. He’s the worst possible nightmare of a Democratic president. A conservative sell-out who leftists won’t criticize because he has brown skin.

I was told the Obama presidency would be like an oil tanker. Turn the rudder left now, and one mile, (or one year), later, the ship would start to turn left.

Problem is, Obama never turned the fucking rudder. He took control of the ship and held steady as she goes. This man committed a crime against the American people. He promised to change course, and plowed straight ahead. Flat out lie.

New York Magazine said Summers, Geithner and Obama are technocrats, who do not think there is anything wrong with the economic system. It’s just an old house where they can clean out the basement and paint the bathrooms and put some flower pots on the front porch and – hey – good to go!

We have systemic problems in this country. A banking system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich. A military out of control. A service economy with nothing to serve.

We voters ordered up a whole new house. And these guys are giving us handyman repairs.

Here’s what Michael Brenner, from the Center for Transatlantic Relations, said in February 2010, in an article titled:

Obama versus Obama

The enigma that is Barack Obama grows day by day. Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. (I like that. Perpetual motion that never reaches a destination.) ‘Obscene’ Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute, into well earned rewards for a good guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis, means placing it the callous hands of Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley, of health care fame; the plotting of exit strategies from Afghanistan by 2011, becomes a, quote ‘long as we have to’, occupation. All these contrapuntal reversals, against a sound track of non-stop exhortation, and a restless shuttling, from one photo-op to another. Who is this guy, anyway?

A few elements of Obama’s personality are now evident: a strong narcissistic streak, an ingrained sense of superiority, a nimbleness – intellectual and political – enabled by the incredible lightness of his conviction, about anything, an audacious ambition, yet no gumption for a fight. Behind these traits, there is something even more basic discernible. Obama is two people, one superimposed on the other. The visible, surface man, is the epitome of an enlightened, Ivy League, socially responsible liberal. This is Obama the community organizer (albeit an exceptionally non-confrontational one), Obama the African American political activist, who attends Jeremiah Wright’s, cosmopolitan church, Obama the orator, who routinely hits the high ‘Cs’ of the call to conscience, Obama the optimist, who appeals to the better angels of our idealistic American selves. This is Obama, the African-American, who moved enough voters, to be elected President of the United States.

To this portrait, we must juxtapose the other Barack Obama – the Barack Obama who surfaced in the public arena, and quickly shed his ‘liberal’ skin a month before he got to the White House. This other personality, I contend, is the underlying one – truer to the man’s core nature. This is the Obama who, twice in his young career, sought out positions in big corporate law firms; this is the Obama who was raised by three Kansans, who instilled in him conservative heartland values; this is the Obama who relishes wealth and what it can buy; this is the Obama who feels more at ease playing golf with his Wall Street buddies,
than with anyone of the Move On America crowd; this is the Obama who chose as his trusted confidant, that unscrupulous, liberals-be-damned, fixer – Rahm Emanuel; this is the Obama who absorbed the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s America, he himself has said, stands as the model of inspirational leadership. Unquote.

This is the Obama who is still waiting for the U.S. economy to recover by itself. Who is still waiting around for greedhead bankers to start making loans to small businesses. This is the Obama who sat on his hands while oil squirted into the Gulf of Mexico, a mere few weeks after assuring us offshore drilling was perfectly safe. This guy, is the Commander In Chief of the U.S. military, who is SUPPOSED to know, that after Gulf War One, U.S. Navy vessels successfully pumped up most of the Kuwaiti oil Saddam had viciously dumped into the Persian Gulf. Why weren’t these same naval pumping operations deployed in the Gulf of Mexico? Our gulf! This is the technocrat, who knows nothing about technology.

How much longer will we gawk at this melting pumpkin of the Obama presidency, before we demand he toss Rahm and Summers and Geithner to the sharks, and bring on some worker-bees who are willing to take some risks on behalf of the American people, and not only on behalf of oil companies and derivatives traders.

[bird]

Some lesbian harpies deleted my wikipedia page. Lesbian harpies, plus some feminized manholes, probably mostly from Australia or New Zealand – though there were certainly a few North Americans in the mix. It was a one week battle. They were led by someone called FisherQueen, who had already deleted my page twice in 2007, but someone had reinstated it. Our side was led by Lewis Loizou from Luxembourg. There were guys coming to my defense from Asuncion Paraguay to Melbourne, Australia, and across Europe, the U.S. and Canada. Our opponents were credentialed wikipedia so-called editors. We were the global insurgents for men’s issues. Their utter contempt, for the rights of free speech, for people they disagree with, was…contemptuous. That’s why I think they were mostly Ozzies or Kiwis. Countries that do not have a Bill of Rights, and that attempt to limit the speech of others. The United Kingdom does not have guaranteed free speech. I remember once when I was in Scotland, a man got arrested for calling a police officer’s horse, queer.

Anyway, their argument was that I am not, quote, “notable”, but that was just a red herring. They had made up their minds to bump me off, and then started looking around for reasons why I did not meet their criteria. We countered that my books and podcasts made me notable. They moved the goalposts, and said we had to give them print media references. So we gave them dozens of mentions in everything from Transition men’s magazine, to articles I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times and San Francisco Chronicle… They moved the goalposts again, and said the print articles had to be about me, not about my books, and not by me. We gave them the Harvard Crimson and the Irish Times and the Spokane Spokesman. They made no response to that, except to close the online deletion discussion, and delete the page. Total tyrannical cowshit.

I recommend that people boycott wikipedia. It’s a useless publication with gross biases. It’s not some fabulous new open source for knowledge. It’s an online publication devoted to the tyranny of the majority. If I’m an approved minority, OK. But, if timid tenure-conscious academicians won’t write about me, because I question the moral superiority of women and the sanctity of feminism. Or if the corporate media won’t write about me, because I openly bash corporations. I can go beat off. According to wikipedia.

[donkey]

If you wanna see this show keep going, send money. Go to therudeguy.com or happyfool.orG and push the make a donation button. And enjoy all the other free stuff while you’re there. Especially the oil paintings. If I could sell one of those I could journey to the Chaco in Paraguay, and pick up the revolution where Che left off.

The future of America is in South America, where the workers are taking over the factories with NO ideology involved. How about that?

Hasta luego.

Conservative vs Liberal freedom

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[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. We got bamboozled into being forced to buy insurance with automobile insurance. If you wanna drive a car…in a huge country with very little public transportation… you have to buy auto insurance.

So why not…say the insurance companies…why not try it with health insurance too? Can’t hurt to try, can it? If you want to see a doctor, or even if you don’t, you have to buy health insurance. Fucking iguanas.

There is no freedom, liberal or conservative, to be found in the health insurance mandate. But all is not lost. Listen up…the reality is: there is no enforcement for this. It’s written right into the bill. If someone defaults on paying the tax they are assessed, for not buying health care, the penalty is: nothing. Nothing happens. They can’t be sued, their wages can’t be garnished. Nothing happens. It’s written right into the bill. The mandate was only ever there to pacify insurance company nazi’s like Karen Ignani and prod the sheeple to buy health insurance. Everyone knows it can’t be enforced.

And that’s good. Because frankly, this whole pathetic unworkable mess takes us one step closer to free national health care. Because, when it is proven that this fucked up compromise doesn’t work, because healthcare companies keep raising prices and gouging the government programs, created to subsidize those people, who simply cannot afford to pay for mandated health insurance…the government will plant its heels and howl at the moon and start building government hospitals stocked with government doctors. And little by little, maybe in a hundred years, we’ll have the kind of free, high-quality health care France and Canada enjoy today.

What world leaders we are…huh?

This democracy, our democracy, has gotten fucked up by our conflicting notions of freedom. But why has our democracy become a farce? Or was it always one?

I have never liked Friedrich Nietzsche, but sometimes you can learn a lot from people you don’t like. Historian Will Durant summarizes Nietzsche’s philosophy in his book, the Story of Philosophy. [p432]

Says Durant, according to Nietzsche: Democracy means the enthronement of liberty, the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence… Think George W Bush… It (democracy) means the impossibility of great men – for how could great men survive the indignities of an election? What chance would they have?… Think Ralph Nader…and Dennis Kucinich… Says Nietzsche Quote: “What is hated by the people, like a wolf by mere dogs, is the truly free spirit, the enemy of all chains, the one who does NOT adore or idolize, the one who is NOT ‘a regular party member’.” Unquote. Back to Durant: How can great men arise in such soil. And how can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown? Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical – not the superior man, but the majority man, becomes the ideal, and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes get watered down – the men become women and the women become men. Unquote. Back to me: The guy next door becomes the celebrity, becomes everyman, becomes no man.

The movies suck, the music sucks. The education sucks. The products suck. The services suck. The government sucks. Airhead celebrities make millions of dollars selling TV commercials, while philosophical visionaries eke out an existence on food stamps and Medicaid and living in their car – or simply die of the drugs and alcohol they consumed, to kill the pain of living in a mindless world of brainwashed automatons, best depicted by the last scene in the movie, Matrix…when Neo leaves the phone booth, and launches himself down a street of human cattle, oblivious to the fact that this frenzy of human activity is all an illusion, and they are really…just…batteries. Human batteries supplying the energy to power the hardware of robot civilization. [RG voice] Ha ha ha

This is freedom? And what about those tea baggers. What the fuck is their problem? Why do they hate Obama? Certainly not because he’s a socialist. Obama is a Rockefeller Republican. Liberal on social issues, conservative on war and capitalism. A smiley charming big-eared tool of big money and the military/industrial/congressional establishment. This guy is strictly middle of the road and a tremendous disappointment to leftists like me.

But…calling him a socialist sounds good. It’s a moth-eaten soundbite dredged up by that drug addled copy-cat Rush Limbaugh…because it worked for Reagan in his war against liberal freedoms and the legacy of FDR. Brain dead iguana. No American insurance company thinks Obama is a socialist – creating a multi-billion dollar giveaway to them. That’s not socialism. It’s crony capitalism that borders on fascism for fuck sakes. Keeping in mind that fascism is when corporations run the government. What do ya think we’ve got now? Corporate communism. Businessmen’s socialism, where corporations are bailed out and human beings are free to slip underwater and drown. The further the Democratic Party moves away from the vision of FDR, the less reason it has to exist. It’s an elephant in donkey skin.

But the teabagger movement has nothing to do with healthcare, and everything to do with this country changing from white skin to dark skin. 48% of the babies last year were born to blacks and Hispanics. In ten years the number of white babies born will be a minority for the first time since we started slaughtering the Indians. That’s what the tea party is really about. Loss of, “America for white people”.

Of course they’re scared. They’ve spat on colored people their entire lives, and they can see no reason why colored people won’t spit on them when the tables are reversed. This is a deep and even, for them, a rational, fear, that is not just going to go away.

Conservatism in America is sick and dying. Thank God. The teabagger inmates have taken over the asylum. But let’s be sure we do not get fooled by their rhetoric about FREEDOM, which is gonna really be heating up again this year.

The neocon zombies are popping out of their graves. Karl Rove just published a book full of lies, and Dick Cheney actually admitted to the press he ORDERED the torture in Pentagon prisons. They want to drive us away from Obama’s right-of-center policies, back to the far far far right again. And fuck the left. Fuck FDR and his second bill of rights that called for food and jobs and housing and education and healthcare and protection from corporate monopolies – like the banking and insurance industries – for everyone. The Second Bill of Rights. No. Fuck the pendulum of history and our Leftist voter-approved mandate for liberal freedoms. For real change….

We need to understand our enemy. It’s important to understand that the fundamental neocon idea, actually made lots of sense. Good sense. On paper.

That idea was this: instead of propping up dictators around the world…assholes like Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Somoza in Nicaragua…instead of supporting right wing dictators, we should overthrow them and launch democracies. Kick out the dictators and cultivate democracy around the globe. Sounds good huh? Sounds good, but…is it working in Afghanistan? Muslims don’t even WANT democracy. And for good reason. Rule by democracy means their countries will be controlled by powerful foreign corporations. Mostly by powerful foreign U.S. corporations. Once democracies are created in any country, they can be bought with oil money and weapons and gold. They can be controlled easier than any dictator. That’s why corporations swooned with joy at the neocon agenda.

That was our big post-war plan for Iraq if you remember. We HAD no plan. Corporations were going to run everything. That was the plan. Milton Friedman’s shock therapy. Free market everything. What a great thing democracy is – corporate wolves dressed in democracy’s clothing.

But fuck the rest of the world. Who cares what happens to them. Buncha geeks and ragheads. We need the oil right? Right? Well I’m here to tell ya the chickens always come home to roost. We were all betrayed by President Ronald Reagan. That man was a forked-tongued reptile. Iguana in chief. In order to bring democracy to the “world”, the Reagan administration strangled democracy at home. They lied and manipulated and made deals with Iranians and Israelis and Nicaraguan Contras, and kept all this information from the American people, who had, through Congress, banned military and financial support of the Contras.

Pretty picture, huh? We’re going to bring democracy to the world, by hog-tying democracy at home. Our government is going to bring democracy to Nicaragua and Iraq and Afghanistan by…lying to us, keeping us ignorant and uniformed, and ignoring our will, the will of the American people…a solid majority of whom want nothing to do with these insane foreign wars for corporate profit.

That, in a nutshell, is where conservative freedom ALWAYS leads. To less freedom. Less democracy. Less honesty and openness. Less transparency in government. A nightmare where the end justifies the means and every path forward leads to more war.

The more free all people are, the more free corporate persons are, to buy and sell and steal and bribe and pollute and maim and kill. That’s not freedom. That’s not true Liberty. That’s the rule of the jungle.

Our country can NEVER be free until we get rid of corporate personhood…the never-approved-by-anyone, judicial minority opinion…losing opinion…that got quoted so many times it became a judicial precedent that corporations be legally regarded as persons. Persons who do not eat, sleep, die, pay a fair share of taxes or get drafted in time of war.

The freedom conservatives are talking about leads to slavery. Let us not be fooled. We want freedom of opportunity, not freedom from all restraint. Not just libertarian liberty. Not freedom from the knowledge of good and evil. Truth is Knowledge and Knowledge is power and power is freedom.

[bird]

Well, I chickened out on stopping paying my credit cards, as I agonized about on the last show. But I did get Citibank to give me zero percent interest for one year, which is more like it. Fuck Bank of America. They’re thieves. I hope they get broken up into a hundred pieces. Borrowing from the Fed for one quarter of one percent and renting that money out for 15 to 20 percent. That’s sixty to eighty TIMES more. 6000 to 8000% profit for those greedy bastards. So they borrow money from the Fed and screw us on credit cards…and speculate in oil futures, driving up the price so we, the ones who bailed them out, end up paying them once again at the pump. Heartless iguanas. But the GOOD news is, the State of Massachusetts is transferring $230 million dollars OUT of Bank of America because state law says credit card companies cannot charge more than 18% interest and Bank of America does not wish obey Massachusetts state law, only federal law, which has no cap. So screw them, Massachusetts is moving its money to other banks. Thank god people are getting this figured out. Money talks and bullshit can take a walk.

Ladies and gentlemen, our economic system does not work. It is nothing other than welfare for the financial services industry, and industry which does nothing for the economy. Absolutely nothing. The Financial services industry is libertarian unrestrained capitalism, that bets on silver to go down, and oil to go up, and produces not one toothpick of actual wealth for the economy. We need to get rid of Wall Street is what we need. There are other types of institutions – like state-owned and -operated banks — that are equally able to perform the basic banker’s job, of figuring out how to take people’s savings and invest them into meaningful, job-producing economic growth. Not just computerized second by second speculations on commodity price fluctuations.

[bird, or rooster or something]

If you wanna see this show keep going, send money. Lots and lots of money. Go to therudeguy.com or happyfool.org and push the donation button. And enjoy all the other free stuff there while you’re at it. Especially the oil paintings. If I could sell one of those I could buy a junk car to replace the limping, leaking, wheezing junk car I’m already driving.

Salut

Stop Paying Your Credit Cards

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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.

Here’s how we got here. The greedhead bankers made bets upon bets upon bets, and called it “insurance”. Derivatives, credit default swaps. And so forth. I call it sociopathic greed, and if any of the rest of us had done what they did, we’d be thrown in prison, and never get any credit again. But not them, not the government protected banks.

Basically, they bet on a horse to win. And then they took out an insurance policy against the horse, in case it didn’t win. And then they made various other bets about whether the horse would stumble, or the jockey would fall off, or it would only finish in third place. And then they bundled all these horseshit bets together with pretty wrapping paper, and sold them to Europeans and pension funds as Triple A mortgage-backed securities. The highest grade of investment. And then, because they knew they had sold everyone horseshit, they bet against their own horseshit. They took out insurance against their horseshit, based on the computer-generated guess, that the horseshit might start to stink, SOON…and then, they short-sold their horseshit on the securities markets, betting it would start to stink…based on the insider knowledge that it was horseshit to begin with, which only they knew, because they’re the ones who had wrapped the horseshit up in bright wrapping paper to begin with!

You know all that. You know it intuitively and that’s all I wanna say about it, because it’s what happened next, that fries my gonads.

Next, the horseshit soaked through the pretty wrapping paper and started plopping on people’s shoes, startling them into panic because of all the stink and mess. So, one month before a presidential election, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson went to George W Bush, and tried to arrange a taxpayer bailout for these vendors of horseshit. Amazingly and respectably, at first the congress said no. But a few days later, after lots of hinted-at forthcoming campaign donations to our representatives in congress, the congressional whores said yes.

So the big banks got their bailout…happy day. Except for one thing. The bailout came with strings attached, about how loose and fast the banks could operate in the future. So they immediately began thinking about ways to pay back the bailout money, so they could free themselves from the regulatory strings.

Anything to make a fast buck at this point. So they started speculating in petroleum and drove up the price of gas for everybody on the planet. Gas hit almost $6 a gallon where I live. Now it has settled down to a dollar seventy five MORE than it should be. And…to return to our main theme…the banks, in astonishing unison, also raised credit card fees and rates.

So here’s how this works. They made bad bets, that racked up huge debts, got bailed out from their bad debts by US taxpayers…but didn’t like the restrictions placed on them for taking the bailout money, and announced they would soon pay back the taxpayer money. How? By reaming taxpayers up the ass, shooting us like sheep in a pen. Strangling the very people who had paid the tax money to bail them out, with credit card interest rates, sixty times higher, than what it costs the banks to borrow that money. So…their big sophisticated financial plan is to suck the blood of the American people, to extract the money to pay back the bailout, given them by: the American people. And will we, the people, see any of that bailout money? Fuck no. Obama will blow it on nuclear power plants, or some such political rotten fish, to get more votes in Georgia, or somewhere else he’s losing ground.

Fuck these people. They should all be lined up against a wall and shot.

But…that’s only the current manifestation of the problem. Remember the Savings and Loan disaster? No, of course not, you forgot all about it. The banks stole 300 billion dollars from us back then, and we forgot about it. We forgot about it because we have been trained like monkeys, to accept the idea, that that’s what capitalism does. Once or twice a decade it raids the U. S. Treasury to cover bad bets. That’s just the nature of American-style corporate capitalism. Corporatism. Corporate communism. Government run for the benefit of Wall Street banksters. So we should just stop whining and get used to it – according to Wall Street.

Starting when the bombs went off in Afghanistan in 2001 I ran up $7000 dollars in credit card debt, traveling the length and breadth of North America, and twice around the globe, fighting against George W. Bush, and his insane wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I stayed with friends, and in backpacker hotels, and bought cheap plane tickets on dicey airlines, and cooked my own food, and got a long long way on 7 grand over three years. As you might know, I write books about men and war…and…increased book sales alone, jump-started by my many appearances at anti-war, and impeach Bush rallies, and at the Frankfurt book fair…increased book sales alone should have paid off ten times the amount of my credit card debt.

But they didn’t. Why?

Because I was frozen out of the book selling business by the big banks who finance the big publishing corporations, and big bookstores. Big banks are greed-monsters, who only invest in companies big enough to be listed on the stock exchange, and thereby create an environment in which small businessmen, don’t have a chance. Like today. Small businesses are going under because banks won’t lend them the money to operate.

Let me back up a little further and try to make this clearer.

I write books, and make associated videos, podcasts, articles and oil paintings. But no one would publish my books because they’re too controversial, so I self-published them. My book “What Men Know That Women Don’t”, completed in 1993, reissued in 2001, still pumps out a small monthly check from amazon.com. But amazon is the ONLY retailer that carries it. Despite 17 years of steady sales, no big publisher will republish it, which means no big distributor will distribute it. Which means no big bookstores will stock it. So people can’t see it, and pick it up, and browse through it…And buy it on impulse for their recently divorced brother.

It’s a rigged game. It’s de facto market censorship. But fools like me have watched too many Hollywood movies, where the good guy ultimately wins, and we don’t know that we can never win against them…the big banks won’t give us small businessmen, fair business loans, so we take on the high-interest credit card debt they offer, printing books and promoting books in a publishing environment that’s already rigged to fail, by the very guys who issued us the high-interest credit cards in the first place. The big banks.

But, fuck me. Who cares. I borrowed $7000 dollars and paid back $9000, and I’m not paying any more. They got a three per cent annual return on money they can borrow at a quarter of a percent – which is twelve times more. Every dollar they paid in interest, I paid back with twelve. Much fucking better than they were gonna get from AIG, without the taxpayer bailout partly financed by ME and you. So I quit. I don’t want their credit. Fuck credit. Let ‘em grow cabbages. No more loan fees outta me.

We need to establish a Bank of the United States that prints its own money, cutting out the FED. We need a bank owned by ‘we the people’, that lends directly to small businesses, cutting out the big banks, which don’t loan money to small businesses anyway. I won’t see that in my lifetime. But I guess its time to kick the can down the road. Stick my neck out again and risk what? I don’t even know. I’ve tried negotiating with these assholes and they won’t even negotiate. Every business deal is negotiable. How come credit cards are different? These assholes get together at Swiss ski resorts, and illegally price fix higher interest rates and fees for American credit cards, and that’s supposed to be OK. Maybe if I stop paying then they’ll decide to negotiate. Or maybe not. I’ll find out. And let you know. But I’m not gonna be a hamster on a credit card treadmill any more. My fishing spots are gone. My heroes are gone. My bullshit meter has gone off the scale. I ain’t runnin’ any more.

[bird]

I’m going to quote again from Ellen Hodgson Brown, from an article on Truthout.org. Hodgson Brown wrote the book the Web of Debt, that I told you about in Podcast 64 titled: Nationalize the Fed.

Quote:
A publicly-owned bank has also been proposed on the federal level. Nationalizing the Federal Reserve (which is not actually federal but is owned by a consortium of private banks) Nationalizing the Federal Reserve, was advocated by 2008 presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat, and Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party candidate. In 2009, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz said, the government would have been better off funding a federally-owned bank, than doling out trillions of dollars to private investment banks and CEOs, who speculated their way into bankruptcy. Speaking at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on March 6, 2009, Stiglitz said: quote
“If we had used the $700 billion dollar TARP money instead, to create a new financial institution, a Bank of the United States, and allowed it leverage of 10 to 1…which is very modest compared to the 30 to 1 leverage that the banks were doing…10 to 1 would have generated $7 trillion dollars of new lending capacity, far in excess of what our country needs. So the issue here is not about lending. It’s really about saving the bankers. And what we confused was, saving the banks versus saving the bankers and their shareholders.” unquote
We COULD have saved the economy, by starting our OWN bank, and letting the speculators drown in their own horseshit. But they bamboozled congress into bailing them out. Telling us everything would fall apart if we didn’t do what they said. Instead of giving us a couple weeks to figure out there were a couple hundred OTHER ways to handle the problem. Ways that would have helped all of us. A sea change in the way banking is done in America. An incredible blown opportunity.

And…here’s some even better news. There is a growing prairie fire of support for state owned banks. I hope it sweeps the nation. The State of North Dakota started one in 1919, to protect its farmers and small businessmen from Wall Street…sound familiar?…and it’s been working out ever since. And…North Dakota is a Republican state…and the reason they love their SOCIALIST bank, is because it means LOWER taxes for everybody. The State lends money out of its general fund. And collects interest on those loans. And funds many of its government expenditures, roads, social services and more, from those loan profits. How simple can it get? No bankster middle men.

Florida, Illinois, Oregon, Massachusetts, Idaho and California, all have political candidates whose platforms contain this proposed solution to the credit crisis. State owned banks.
In Idaho, James Stivers, a Republican candidate for the Idaho Senate, has also proposed a state bank to fill state coffers and protect the local economy. Stivers declares: quote
“An important part of sovereignty is the monetary authority. Currently, banks are allowed to multiply, many times over, the state tax receipts, deposited, in their private institutions. This special privilege is partly responsible for the ‘sucking sound’ in our local economies, as regional banks send their assets to central banks, that are playing the derivatives markets of the world.
unquote
Stivers sees the bank as a way to facilitate small business startups, end the ability of private banks to cream profits from the public treasury, protect key budget items, and stave off excessive influence from the federal government…The current banking system, he says, causes inflation, one of the quote “greatest detriments to a living wage”:
Says Stivers:
“Inflation is the secret tax of the banking industry, in which lenders use the multiplier effect to the benefit of their cronies. This secret tax takes the form of a decline, in the value of the dollar, and results in higher prices. Wages never keep up with this process because its very purpose is to extract wealth from the wage earner, to support the privileged classes, who curry the favor of lenders. A state bank would restore this privilege to the people in a public trust, and would give us the opportunity to back our deposits with the wealth from our public lands.”
Unquote
This guy’s a Republican for fuck sakes. It’s amazing.
Also, writes Ellen Hodgson Brown:
Economist and author Farid Khavari, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Florida, proposes a state-owned bank that would lend directly to borrowers. The Bank of North Dakota usually uses a “lead lender” such as a bank, savings and loan company, or credit union, rather than doing commercial lending directly. Dr. Khavari maintains that the proposed Bank of the State of Florida would cut out the middlemen banks, and manage lending hands on. It could be launched at no cost to taxpayers, by using the state’s assets as the reserves for making loans, employing the same fractional reserve lending rules used by private banks today. In this way, he says, the bank could drive an “economic miracle” in Florida, instigating massive job creation, cutting costs in half or more, providing low-interest financing to homeowners and businesses, and improving teacher salaries, and care for veterans and the elderly, while at the same time reducing taxes. He explains: quote
“The economy is collapsing due to lack of demand. The economy needs money, but the banks are cutting credit, and then sucking all the cash out of the economy, by raising interest rates, to make sure no one has any cash left at the end of the month. [Khavari’s saying this, not me] The cost of interest is built into the cost of everything. People already work ten years of their lives just to pay interest in one form or another. The Bank of the State of Florida will end that for Floridians. And this model will work for every state….
“We can pay 6 percent interest on savings. Using the same fractional reserve rules as all banks, we can create $900 dollars of new money, through loans, for every $100 in deposits. We can loan that $900 in the form of 2 percent fixed rate 15-year mortgages, for example…and the state can earn $12 every year, for every $100 in deposits. That means Floridians can save tens of billions of dollars per year, while the state earns billions, by making the savings possible for them.
“State and local government budgets, will balance without higher taxes, when the Bank of the State of Florida, the BSF, cuts interest costs. [and listen to this ladies and gentlemen; quote] 6 percent BSF credit cards, will save people billions of dollars per month, money that stays in Florida instead of going to the big banks — and the state will make huge profits on that, too. Saving billions in interest costs will create millions of jobs without subsidies, just by keeping those billions circulating in Florida. Eventually the state will earn enough to reduce and eliminate state and local taxes, while every Floridian, has economic security, in a recession-proof Florida.” Unquote.
So…my ranting and raving has gotten us somewhere. Fuck big banks. Create state owned banks that give out home loans at 2% interest, and credit cards at 6%, or less! — to finance small business, cut taxes, and get our economy moving again. Time to give the finger to Wall Street.

[bird, or rooster or something]

If you wanna see this show keep going, donate money. Lots and lots of money. Go to therudeguy.com or happyfool.org and figure out how. And enjoy all the other free stuff there while you’re at it. Especially the oil paintings.