Julian Assange and some real revolutionaries.

However, sometimes important things come up and I will write them down and post them here, just like a regular blog.

I can already tell it’s gonna be much messier and less refined that a spoken podcast. Sorry. It’s all I have time for.

…………

I just learned the frightening truth about our pathetic slick-ass conman sell-out president. According to economist Michael Hudson, as soon as Obama gets re-elected he is going to dismantle Social Security. Only a Democrat can do that. Republicans would be crucified if they tried it, just like George W Bush was. But, just as he believed the generals about the wars – not the diplomats, not the Vietnam vets, not even the soldiers fighting it – but the generals who get promotions ONLY when there are wars – so, when it comes to the economy, he believes the old school, trickle-down, Milton Friedman, neoliberal, free market economists. After 40 years of constant failure starting with Richard Nixon these trickle down guys are still doing things the Chicago School way, and Obama, who knows nothing of economics, is just following along. What a jackass. Who ever said this guy was smart?

Here is a president who has taken a stand on gay marriage, but refused to take a stand on the health insurance public option. Indeed, he stonewalled it to death, having made a backroom deal with the insurance companies. Here is a president who just said: “corporations are not people”, but he does not have the balls to make Eric Holder and his Justice Department prosecute the fraudsters on Wall Street: Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Corzine. These guys have stolen billions of dollars from the economy via lying and fraud and they are still walking around like princes.

“Corporations are not people.” I love it. Except that’s a Supreme Court issue and as president he will never have to deal with it directly. The same way gay marriage is a state issue and he will never have to deal with it directly. But on the things he DOES have to deal with what do we get? Knee-jerk conservatism, trickle down economics and kissing the ass of Wall Street.

It’s the same old Clintonista Liberal crap of being progressive on social issues, like gay marriage and women’s rights, but remaining shamefully conservative on economic issues. Like free trade, and hands off Wall Street.

Obama does not have the balls to stop the Afghan War. After ten years fighting over there he just had to fly into Kabul at night so Air Force One wouldn’t be shot down. And he wants us to think he has it almost wrapped up over there? What a transparent liar. What a gullible fool. Romney is a criminal and everyone who worked for Bain Capital should be put in jail, but at least he gave Massachusetts universal health care. Obama couldn’t even pull that off. 10 million Americans will still go without healthcare because Obama wanted a mandate and not guaranteed health care for all. More on that coming up.

Obama has no progressive action credential whatsoever – just talk talk talk talk talk. He doesn’t have a goddam thing to offer the Left but gay marriage. ABC news announced he favors gay marriage, because his daughters Sasha and Malia, who haven’t even hit puberty yet, convinced him gay marriage is cool.

So when he got into office he was taking advice from Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, and now he’s taking advice from Sasha and Malia.

………..

As I’ve said in earlier podcasts, marriage is a religious institution. Government should have NO say in it. It is a violation of the separation of church and state for government to meddle with marriage and every one of the founding fathers would be appalled to see that marriage has been absorbed into government. Get married in church get divorced in church. But no, government couldn’t leave it alone. Government invented no fault divorce and overnight created a 65% divorce rate. And now with gay marriage they are making a mockery of thousands of years of religious tradition. There may be some 2000-year-old religion that allows gay marriage, but I don’t know of it. So first the government usurps marriage from the church, then creates no fault divorce, and now it says gays can get married. What the fuck is this? If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck it’s really just a turtle with feathers.

I’ll never get married again. However, I could be induced to join a civil union. Sign a clear legal statement about shared property and legal obligations to one another. That isn’t only “good enough”. It’s the very greatest extent that government should be invited into “marriage”: establishing the economic agreements. If some renegade church wants to marry gay people good for them. That’s their business. Get married in church and get a legal civil union and you’re all set.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about Barack Obama being a political whore. Saying whatever sounds good to the Left to get our support after 3 and a half years of ignoring us. Shitting on us. Never again, for me. Voting for Barack Obama is a moral hazard. I won’t do it.

I don’t want to watch men kissing on TV so Obama can get reelected and take apart Social Security. It makes my skin crawl.

………..

According to Peter Schweizer in his book “Throw Them All Out”, for every one dollar raised for Obama, by Obama’s Finance Committee Members for the 2008 campaign…for every one dollar…they or their companies got $25,000 dollars back. One to 25,000. Have you ever heard of such odds? No wonder these guys bet on politicians, it’s light-years better than the craps tables. All you gotta do is win once and vavoom! A thousand dollars runs into 25 million!

So if you want to keep Social Security intact, vote for Romney. Tell Obama to go pick cotton and find out what it really means to be part of the working class.

Let that fascist Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital cronies take over. Then the Leftist talking heads will start criticizing the president again and the Leftist activists will take the streets and we will have civic involvement again. And we’ll halt the dismantling of Social Security. No more of the knee-jerk liberals refusing to criticize a brown-skinned guy who’s trying to wreck Social Security and virtually the entire legacy of FDR.

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I just read a very difficult book, Confidence Men by Ron Suskind, former national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal…which corroborates, in fine detail, what I have been saying for years about Barrack Obama. He has no management experience and no idea what a president does or how he does it… Still!

Just before Obama’s first state of the union speech I was talking to a longtime Hispanic friend of mine – and fellow Obama supporter – and I told him this: “If you ever tell anybody I said this I will deny it. But…the White House is now being run by four Jews and a nigger, and I don’t think any of them know what the fuck they’re doing.” Obama’s cabinet appointments were atrocious. Larry Summers, Clintonista blowhard who gave us unregulated derivatives and can never admit to being wrong about anything. His fellow traveller Robert Rubin who gave us the “business Democrats” under Clinton, and deregulated Glass-Steagall so he could become chairman of Citigroup and walk away with $100 million dollars as he ran the company onto the rocks of securitized mortgages. David Axelrod, newspaper reporter turned campaign adviser who thinks Obama is the Black Jesus. And Rahm Emanuel, vicious cynical Chicagoland deal-cutter who torpedoed the public option and fucked up health care.

I don’t hate these guys because they’re Jewish. I’m half Jewish. My kids are Jewish. I hate them because they are arrogant assholes playing on the world’s biggest political stage and fucking with things they don’t understand and don’t care about. These guys are mechanics, not automobile designers. They do not have my interests (or yours) at heart.

I don’t distrust Obama because he is black. I distrust him because he has a track record of stupidity, foot dragging, indecisiveness, and no experience whatsoever as a manager. He’s only ever managed two things in his life, the United States Presidency and his daughter’s basketball team. In that order.

According to Suskind, Obama’s staff manipulated him by way of what could be called “re-litigation”. In other words, every time Obama wanted to do something they didn’t like they would pile on with a bunch of questions and warnings and offer to do more research. So the implementation of the decision would be stalled until it died. Slow-walking is what Washington calls it. Stonewalling is what I call it.

Obama wanted to break up Citibank to send a message to the “too big to fail” banks. His staff slow-walked it until he dropped it – as he is prone to do. Summers claiming they were “protecting Obama from himself.” He wanted a securities transaction tax, which I have advocated many times on this podcast. They slow-walked it and killed it. And the same with the Wars and Health Care and everything else. We elected a guy to be president, and his staff of Washington insiders and Clintonista hacks ran the place.

And let’s get this straight. This is Obama’s fault. He hired these guys. He doesn’t know jack shit about war, Wall Street, health care, economics, global warming, green energy, or just about any other topic you can mention, apart from Constitutional Civil Rights cases. We don’t need a Civil Rights expert as president who spends his time in office figuring out how to circumvent our civil rights laws to help CEOs and generals. Bush waterboarded innocents. Obama is murdering them with drones! We need someone who can liberate us from useless wars and Wall Street theft. And this is not the guy. Three and a half years later he’s still not the guy. He’s about to destroy Social Security.

Obama’s technique, as revealed by Suskind, is to give a big “important” speech, then retreat back into the woodwork, and play golf and give speeches on other topics, while the real worker bees in Congress produce specific legislation…at which point he will reappear in a big flourish to sign it and take credit for it. He gives speeches! That’s it! And he thinks that’s leadership.

What is he supposed to do? The same things Lyndon Johnson did to browbeat the Congress into passing the very Civil Rights legislation that paved the way for Barrack Obama to become president.

Lyndon Johnson kicked the balls of congressmen who opposed him – like Obama should have done with Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln when it came to passing a public option. Johnson threatened opponents with political annihilation: cutting off their funding, shaming and embarrassing them publicly, marginalizing them, ostracizing them, refusing to move any of their bills, freezing them out of government.

And what did Obama do? He wanted to be their friend. What a feminized girly boy. He called a summit on the economy and invited all the Wall Street bigwigs. They were shuddering in their Armani suits as they walked into the room. Obama takes the podium. They expect him to talk about starting derivatives trading exchanges or a financial services tax, instead he says: “How can I help you.” How can I help you? This is what you say to a student who has done poorly on an exam. Not to the motherfuckers who just destroyed the world economy. How can I help you? He’s a fucking idiot!

…………

Confidence Men by Ron Suskind is a hard book to read because journalists don’t know how to write. They just string together articles they wrote earlier, repeating the same shit over and over again, bracketed by anecdotes and hearsay they got from interviewing some drunk assholes who used to work in the White House. It’s a 500-page book that a good writer could put into 50 pages. But to do that you have to go out on a limb and conceptualize bold thoughts. Not just report data. If Ron Suskind can’t find some professor who used to work with Obama to say that he “runs his cabinet like he used to run his graduate student seminars” it won’t show up in the book.

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The problem is, no so-called Liberal will say anything unkind about bona fide assholes who happen to be blacks or Jews, and sometimes, goddamit, it has to be done. George Bush’s crew were demented bastards, but they got the job done. They made up wars out of thin air and invaded other countries. Obama’s assholes can’t break up a bank, much less a country. When Enron blew up George Bush completely disowned Ken Lay, one of his biggest contributors. Left him on the beach to die. In my mind, probably even had him assassinated to cover up his own dealings with him. He had to. The guy was paying him money in order to use him, to create legislation, specifically designed to make Enron less transparent, and the whole thing stunk to high heaven. So Bush threw him under the bus. But what does Obama say? To the same category of assholes? “How can I help you?” Jesus Fuck!

I can’t vote for this guy again. I live in the state where he was born and he is gonna take it like a hurricane so my vote here doesn’t count anyway. If I lived in Florida or Virginia or New Mexico I suppose I would be conflicted about the whole thing. I don’t want to lose my foodstamps and my housing and have to live in my car again.

But dammit, these guys squandered the biggest political opportunity I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. They squandered the years and years of volunteer work I did to discredit George Bush and the Republicans, and call for something new. There was, for once, a real chance for real change. And they kicked it around so long Ted Kennedy died and the arrogant feminists of Massachusetts lost his seat to Republican Scott Brown and the filibuster-proof Senate evaporated and the Democratic Senate and House super majority couldn’t pass a bill to wipe its own ass. What total fuck ups.

I hate Larry Summers. Everything Larry Summers did as Obama’s economic adviser was designed to put his fat ass into Ben Bernake’s chair as Fed chairman. He didn’t lift a finger to clean up the destruction he caused by deregulating Glass-Steagall and refusing to regulate derivatives. Thank God Obama was not stupid enough to appoint Summers to the Fed when Bernake’s term ran up. But too bad he was so afraid to hurt Larry’s feelings that instead of appointing someone like Joseph Stiglitz to the Fed, he made another non-decision, and reappointed Bernake…and we are left wallowing in the same old zero interest rate speculators paradise…instead of building back up a real economy, built on savings that are fairly rewarded by higher interest rates.

What a fucking mess. If a small time asshole like me understands this why don’t the writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post?

The only time to fix something is when it’s broken. But oh no, Obama, like he listened to the generals about Afghanistan, listened to the generals of Wall Street, who told him they were too fragile to be messed with right now. “Let’s reform when we get back to being stable again.” As they raked in record profits and paid themselves record bonuses and continued to create instability…because traders profit from instability. In unstable markets people trade a lot and pay a lot of commissions. When markets are stable they hold onto their investments and read about them on the financial pages.

…………

And Occupy Wall Street? What the fuck happened to them? They left Zucotti Park with half a million dollars? They’re masturbating on local issues and have veered from their international lunge at the throat of financial services fraud. Maybe I should run away to some other country again. I just don’t know where to run any more.

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And now, the woman who invented derivatives, Blythe Masters, head of currencies and commodities at JP Morgan, has decided that when we want to invest in soybeans and corn we should just call our bank, not the commodity exchanges. In other words, banks intend to start speculating in commodities. They are going to run the price of food through the roof and starve people all over the world. What a heartless brainless soulless bitch. Hasn’t she done enough damage? Hasn’t she starved enough babies and killed enough people with imploding derivatives? Now food? Where is the government that is going to stop these bastards? These people make me miss the USSR.

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OK here’s where I’m supposed to insert an audio clip with Max Keiser with Michael Hudson about what free markets are supposed to mean. [Max Keiser Show 259]

http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-259-max-keiser/

[Also Keiser 285 on oil and gas markets]

http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-285-max-keiser/

Both of these shows are worth watching. Max Keiser on RT TV.

……….

OK, here is a good interview transcript from Michael Hudson. I chopped it up, so you just have to pick the peaches from it.

http://truth-out.org/video/item/9047-what-americans-can-learn-from-eurocrisis

Transcript
Paul Jay, in Washington, Senior Editor: The Real News Network.

Guest:
Michael Hudson is a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

Hudson:The banks really have no power at all except the power to bribe, and in Europe—in South America, the power to assassinate, which they do quite frequently. All they can do is bribe. Remember, we had the same argument over here about three years ago, when Sheila Bair wanted to take over Citibank, and she said, look, we can foreclose on Citibank, we can close down all these big banks on Wall Street anytime. They’re insolvent. We can pay all the depositors. There’s no problem at all. (The big banks are acting) like the sheriff in Blazing Saddles saying, I’m going to shoot myself in the head if you don’t do what I want. If the government were to take over the banks, they can pay all the depositors. The only people who would lose would be the very wealthy, who have more money in the banks than they’ve got insured. Sheila Bair said the bank bondholders would suffer, the counterparties would suffer. The banks have no power at all. The problem is the corruption of the politicians, who are just demagogues pretending to oppose the banks while actually being in their pocket. The banks don’t have any power. They don’t have any economic power, except their power to bribe politicians…

Jay: Now, that would be a start for really changing the course of things, because if it hadn’t been for the public bailout, most of the banks wouldn’t be around anyway.

Hudson:That’s right. The government became the major shareholder of the insolvent banks here, like Citibank and Bank of America. The same thing in Europe. If European banks caused the crisis, the governments can simply say, okay, we’re taking over the banks. Now we own them. Now that we own the banks, we’re going to write down the mortgages to the price that people can pay. We’re not going to pay other rich people. But financial reform and tax reform have to go together. And they’d say, we’re actually going to roll back all the tax cuts for the 1 percent, and we’re going to the begin taxing real estate again, we’re going to tax monopolies, we’re going to reintroduce progressive taxation just like we had for 30 years ago. If capitalism worked 30 years ago with higher taxation, with strong labor power, with a good property tax, and with affordable houses, it can work again. All of the bailouts are unnecessary, except if the banks and their politicians can convince people that there is no alternative. So that’s really the banks’ argument.

Jay: And why did capitalism change to this extent over the last 30 years? Isn’t it because the finance sector has become that much more powerful, that much more dominant in the economy, somewhat as it was in 1932-33 when it was very dominant?

Hudson:The change over the last 30 years has been a drive by the finance sector to become steadily more dominant. So the finance sector has started a lot of think tanks, they’ve funded research institutes, and they’ve bought control of the public media, so that they’ve been able to convince people that there really isn’t an alternative to bailouts and austerity. They only talk about whether there is to be more austerity, or chaos. But, of course, the alternative to austerity isn’t chaos; its economic democracy, it’s progressive taxation, it’s taxing the rich, it’s writing down the debts. There are many alternatives. And what they’ve done is make sure that none of these alternatives get discussed in the public press or in the media. That’s why we’re on The Real News Network talking about it, not in The New York Times or the Fox media.

………….

Hudson: 1,000 years ago, it took a military army to come in and conquer a country and grab the land and charge the people rent…to take control of the monopolies and charge people huge markups from the monopolies, and to essentially shift the taxes off the wealthy, onto the population that was conquered. Now, in today’s world, they can’t afford an army anymore. The Vietnam War showed that no country can afford a military occupation anymore. So finance today is the means of conquering a country and getting what in the past took an army. Financial conquest is how you shift the taxes onto the population to pay the financial sector, how you load a population down with debt and make a population pay interest and amortization and penalties on debt service, you make a population pay for schooling instead of getting it free or a low price as used to be the case, you make a population take on a lifetime of debt in order to get a home that used to be affordable, you make the governments go into debt for the banks, so that in Europe governments don’t have a central bank to monetize their own deficits, but actually have to borrow money from banks. You essentially empty out an economy, and you take its economic surplus financially without an army, just by trying to promote what really is junk economics and junk politics…it’s the economics of Rubinomics in America under Clinton and Rubenomics in America under George Bush, and now with a vengeance under Obama—.

[God Damn Robert Rubin!]

………….

Hudson: I think the people who vote for Romney are the same people who voted in Europe to, essentially, throw the rascals out. When people are unhappy with an economic situation, they simply vote for the other party, whoever it is, and it’s a flip-flop back and forth. The Wall Street people – the backers of the Republicans are the same people who backed Obama – the Wall Street people very much want Obama to come in for a second term and then really move to dismantle Social Security.

Only a Democratic president can swing a Democratic Congress or Senate over to the right wing. Like Clinton with NAFTA and Welfare Reform and reducing the deficit. So the Republicans need to go so far to the right that Obama, who in the past would have been looked upon at as a right-winger or Republican…Obama can be made to look reasonable. And if you can push the crazies, as the Republicans are doing, then Obama seems less bad than the alternative. (But the reality is that if a Republican gets in, Social Security has no chance of being dismantled.)

……..

Hudson: Obama versus Romney. Isn’t that a crazy choice…to have to choose between these two, between an absolute terrible alternative and just a bad alternative? Where is the Left in America? Where is the Left in Europe? Where is what used to be the Left? I don’t see it anymore anywhere.

………

Hudson:I think you need a third party or you need to break away from the Democratic Party with people like Dennis Kucinich or the more progressive people. You need what was called 50 years ago “realignment”. And that realignment that people saw as necessary, even back then, was hasn’t occurred, and it hasn’t occurred in Europe either. That’s why everybody is so frustrated. In France and Greece and everywhere else in Europe, they’re equally frustrated. There doesn’t seem to be any alternative. And that’s exactly what Mrs. Thatcher liked to say, there is no alternative. And it’s just amazing when there really are SO MANY ALTERNATIVES that people can be convinced that there aren’t, and become so dispirited they just give up. So the fact is that most Americans are going to vote with their backsides. They’re just not going to vote this November.

……….

When Adam Smith wrote about free markets he meant markets that would be free of government interference, free of interference by monopolies, free of all gaming and cheating. But a hundred years ago “free market” started to mean the freedom for corporations and governments and banks to interfere freely in the market. (Do whatever the hell they wanted.) It was a 180-degree flip onto the head of Smith’s original meaning.

………….

Thank you Micheal Hudson. The guy is brilliant and he can be found on the web: Democracy Now, Max Keiser, the Real News Network.

………

Here are some more bullets and quotes:

Karl Marx: There’s nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals.

[That is how trickle-up economics works.]

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Michael Hudson/Max Keiser Show 279 15:50

Normally when we think of budget deficits we are talking about governments going into debt to purchase goods and services and labor.

But since 2008 the budget deficits we have run up don’t purchase anything! They are just bailing out the mistakes of the big banks. They are NOT going into the economy in any way.

…………

Max Keiser Show 282

Only 16% of Wall Street trades are done by real people over real things. The other 84% are done by computerized front running and other means of extracting wealth.

The difference between freedom and liberty: Liberty is buying twenty spec houses on credit and driving up the price of real estate. Freedom is the freedom to afford to buy one house on the wages you earn.

………

Max Keiser 262

The central banks keep printing millions of dollars, inflating our money, to keep interest rates at zero to help speculators. Which hurts savers and hurts people buying clothes and food. Our money has become just tokens in a global game called “Realityville”, that has no accountability whatsoever.

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Max Keiser Show 281: 19:40 to the end. Great stuff.

David Graeber: Debt the First 500 years

They could have printed the money and given it to the mortgage holders. But no, they printed the money and gave it to the banks.

They could print a trillion dollars and pay off the student loans, but no they want everybody to be in debt.

There are 11 Occupy Farms in New York State.

………..

A study with Capuchin monkeys taught them to use money. It wasn’t long before the females were trading sex for money that they could then use to buy grapes and jello. The oldest profession indeed!

………..

something I posted online:

Being the son of a Chicago truck driver, and routinely slapped down as a “dumb Polack” when I was a kid, I wonder today how is it that blacks and Hispanics and women all have their “identity” groups, but there are none for poor white guys. None. We’re not part of the 1%. In most cases we are the ones who gave up our jobs for the blacks and women and Hispanics – we were not the white-man overlords filling their affirmative action quotas. The only reason that Occupy is working today is because – despite the ravings of sexist bigots like Roseanne Barr – the white guys are back. The POOR white guys are back. We haven’t been dumped off into the ether over some self-righteous notion of identity politics. In so far as Leftist politics was about class struggle we were always interested and involved. But when feminists started talking about how they too should become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies we spit and walked away. When women and Mexican and blacks took our jobs for no other reason than that they were women and Mexicans and blacks what did you think was gonna happen? There’s an ugly truth here, and that ugly truth is that these identity political movements eroded and derailed the very clear class wars in America. They were a disaster, and poor white guys paid heavily for their politically correct arrogance. I’ve been fired, or not hired, from many a job in Chicagoland because I was not a Mexican. Been turned down for many a “grant” because I wasn’t black. What Occupy has done is push the reset button so that we are focused on class war again. That is very very precious. Let us not blow it. Let us not cleave to the bigots like Roseanne Barr, because if they split us away from the rest of you we will ALL lose. Let’s all point our arrows in the same direction for once. At Wall Street Banks and corrupt politics. Not at each other.

…………

Wanna become a Hedge Fund? Sheila Bair tells us how.

Fix income inequality with $10 million loans for everyone!

By Sheila Bair, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Published: April 13 Washington Post Opinions

Are you concerned about growing income inequality in America? Are you resentful of all that wealth concentrated in the 1 percent? I’ve got the perfect solution, a modest proposal that involves just a small adjustment in the Federal Reserve’s easy monetary policy. Best of all, it will mean that none of us have to work for a living anymore.

For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them.

Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)

Think of what we can do with all that money. We can pay off our underwater mortgages and replenish our retirement accounts without spending one day schlepping into the office. With a few quick keystrokes, we’ll be golden for the next 10 years.

Of course, we will have to persuade Congress to pass a law authorizing all this Fed lending, but that shouldn’t be hard. Congress is really good at spending money, so long as lawmakers don’t have to come up with a way to pay for it. Just look at the way the Democrats agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts if the Republicans agreed to cut Social Security taxes and extend unemployment benefits. Who says bipartisanship is dead?

And while that deal blew bigger holes in the deficit, my proposal won’t cost taxpayers anything because the Fed is just going to print the money. All we need is about $1,200 trillion, or $10 million for 120 million households. We will all cross our hearts and promise to pay the money back in full after 10 years so the Fed won’t lose any dough. It can hold our Portuguese debt as collateral just to make sure.

Because we will be making money in basically the same way as hedge fund managers, we should have to pay only 15 percent in taxes, just like they do. And since we will be earning money through investments, not work, we won’t have to pay Social Security taxes or Medicare premiums. That means no more money will go into these programs, but so what? No one will need them anymore, with all the cash we’ll be raking in thanks to our cheap loans from the Fed.

Come to think of it, by getting rid of work, we can eliminate a lot of government programs. For instance, who needs unemployment benefits and job retraining when everyone has joined the investor class? And forget the trade deficit. Heck, we want those foreign workers to keep providing us with goods and services.

We can stop worrying about education, too. Who needs to understand the value of pi or the history of civilization when all you have to do to make a living is order up a few trades? Let the kids stay home with us. They can play video games while we pop bonbons and watch the soaps and talk shows. The liberals will love this plan because it reduces income inequality; the conservatives will love it because it promotes family time.

I’m really excited! This is the best American financial innovation since liar loans and pick-a-payment mortgages. I can’t wait to get my super PAC started to help candidates who support this important cause. I think I will call my proposal the “Get Rid of Employment and Education Directive.”

Some may worry about inflation and long-term stability under my proposal. I say they lack faith in our country. So what if it cost 50 billion marks to mail a letter when the German central bank tried printing money to pay idle workers in 1923?

That couldn’t happen here. This is America. Why should hedge funds and big financial institutions get all the goodies?

Look out 1 percent, here we come.

outlook@washpost.com

Sheila Bair is a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a regular contributor to Fortune Magazine.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

The American Spring

or RIGHT CLICK HERE (Apple command/click) then click “Save Target As” to DOWNLOAD the podcast to your computer or playback device

Or CLICK HERE to read the TEXT version of The Rude Guy Podcast #88

There has been a call for a General Strike On May 1 of students and workers. Read this from OWS NYC. And Occupy May Day General Strike. I’ve been waiting 60 years for this.

Also a coalition of leftist organizations are training 100,000 direct action demonstrators, in 15 different cities across the USA, for the upcoming summer fun. For info: the99spring.com

It’s officially official. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis has just pulled the pants off how the military and Obama have been lying to us about “progress in Afghanistan”. Read about it in the New York Times here and Rolling Stone here. He names names and kicks ass. It’s Vietnam all over again, just like I said ten years ago! Same fear-mongering, same soldiers dying for nothing, same lies and same sleazy cover-ups.

Occupy Wall Street — the Oil Painting — by Rich Zubaty — 40″ x 50″

I just stumbled on this. Wow! Matt Taibbi says what we all know but have trouble articulating. We want to change the WHOLE FUCKING THING.

They printed my Jail the Bankers comment in the New York Times. OWS is given credit for prodding Obama to investigate and prosecute Wall Street crime.

The year in protest on video from Democracy Now! Staggering to see them lined up one after the other from Tunisia to Wall Street.

A REALLY thorough and fascinating article by an Occupier about the future of Occupy.

Wow! mainstream media — CBS — is finally coming out BOLDLY on our side with an Occupy summary by Tom Englehardt. I just pinched myself. Yeah, I’m awake.

Here’s a recent comment of mine in the New York Times about how Occupy has succeeded. Occupy Rocks!

Here we go again! I love these people. New York Occupiers are re-occupying Manhattan.

Wow! In Frankfurt Germany the police allow the occupiers to OCCUPY IN PEACE!

Rahm “the fascist” Emanuel wants to raise the fines on protesters coming to the G8 and NATO summits next May in Chicago.

The New York Times reports on the quiet but surprising growth of Worker Owned Businesses — a glimpse into the post-corporate personhood world.

Nomi Prins, brilliant and delectable author of “It Takes a Pillage”, explains exactly how Wall Street fraud works, and how Wall Street executives lie to Congress, and the rest of us, during their Congressional testimony.

Wall Street Steals from All of Us
by: Robert Reich

For years Wall Street has speculated like mad in futures markets – food, oil, other commodities – causing prices to fluctuate wildly. The Street makes bundles from these gyrations, but they have raised costs for consumers.

In other words, a small portion of what you and I pay for food and energy has been going into the pockets of Wall Street. It’s just another hidden redistribution from the middle class and poor to the rich. (This is how they “paid back” TARP. Stealing from our other pockets.)…

Here is a VERY thorough call for a National General Assembly including 23 very specific demands. And if all that fails a detailed program for starting a THIRD political party.

Here are some FAQs on the Saving American Democracy Amendment to BAN CORPORATE PERSONHOOD introduced by Congressman Ted Deutch (FL-19) and Senator Bernard Sanders (VT)

And here’s where YOU can sign up to show your support for the Saving American Democracy Amendment to BAN CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

Washington DC Protesters shut down K Street!

“Hank Paulson’s head should be bouncing down the Capitol steps.” Here is Max Keiser nailing Hank Paulson to the barn door and peeling off his skin, revealing exactly where and how Paulson committed the criminal fraud that allowed his Goldman Sachs cronies to snatch billions, while leaving us taxpayers holding the bailout bag for the losses. Why won’t Obama and Eric Holder prosecute these financial terrorists! Says Max, “Let’s put Hank Paulson through what they put Gaddafi through during the last minutes of his life. Gaddafi, who was actually a victim of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.”

Wow! Los Angeles becomes the first major city to pass a motion to end corporate personhood. Occupy LA rocks.

Here’s where you can and should sign the petition against corporate personhood. God…I’ve been advocating for this for ten years.

Wow! Total West Coast Port Shutdown December 12. Hallelujah!

Richard Wolff, author of “Capitalism Hits the Fan”, talks about taxing the rich, taxing securities transactions, stopping the Fed from loaning money to Europe for their next round of bailouts, and the great advantages of employee owned businesses.

Here is Dennis Kucinch’s Bill to End the Federal Reserve by making it part of the Treasury Department.

On page 15 it states: (1) the authority to create money within the United States shall hereafter reside exclusively with the Federal Government. Bingo! This guy is my political hero. This is what Occupy is all about for me. Occupying our currency.

Page 28: ‘‘(i) money creation is solely a function of the United States Government; and ‘‘(ii) fractional reserve lending is ended.

This ends the Reign of the Bankers. From the Bank of England, who we booted out in the Revolution, to Goldman Sachs and their criminal accomplices today.

Good Forbes report on the capital gains rip-off and why we should raise the capital gains tax. It’s amazing to see Forbes Magazine — the magazine of Big Money — write about this. People we DO make a difference. The top 1/10 of 1% make half of all capital gains.

“Capital gains are the key ingredient of income disparity in the US– and the force behind the winner takes all mantra of our economic system. If you want to even out earning power in the U.S, you have to raise the 15% capital gains tax.

Income and wealth disparities become even more absurd if we look at the top 0.1% of the nation’s earners– rather than the more common 1%. The top 0.1%– about 315,000 individuals out of 315 million– are making about half of all capital gains on the sale of shares or property after 1 year; and these capital gains make up 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400.”

Does America need Wall Street? The answer, according to The Washington Post, America’s number two establishment newspaper is — NO! Amazing. What an impact we’ve had! Click here to read on!

Join together in Washington, D.C., for an Occupied American Spring.

“We the People” are calling Occupations from across the country to join together for an American Spring in Washington, D.C. The National Occupation of Washington, DC (NOW DC) will begin March 30 to demonstrate against the corruption and abject failure of both parties in conducting our domestic and foreign policies; the Supreme Court for allowing the Constitution to be perverted; and the dysfunction of corporate controlled government, as well as to show our commitment to creating a new world where the people, not the 1 percent, rule. People in the United States now see that they do have power, that united and acting in solidarity they can change the direction of the country. Bring your tents and your skills, your vision and your heart, and join us in supporting the National Occupation of Washington.

The “Occupy” anthem by Makana. Due to become a classic.

The Washington Post finally starts reporting how speculation drives up the price of food and oil. This, people, is what “Occupy” has accomplished. We have started a conversation that has given mainstream media a “news hook”, an opening, to stop harping about deficits and start discussing how Wall Street is ruining our lives. In less than two months we have changed the national conversation. Let’s keep it changed. Let’s keep agitating.

General Strike called for Oakland!

Oakland Police shoot Scott Olsen

Welcome to the 60s…in 2011! Watch video of Oakland police shooting flash bang grenades and teargas at Occupy Oakland protesters.

REALLY good CNN article on the evolving impact of #occupywallstreet

Good photos from “Occupy” protests: Month 2 via @cbsnews

Occupy Wall Street beat back an attempt by Mayor Bloomberg to evict them from Liberty Square and Friday they are going to have a “Family Sleep Out” so the world can see families with children having fun and learning about their economic future in a world dominated by big banks and corporations. Those images should scare the shit out of the fascists.
Join together in Washington, D.C., for an Occupied American Spring.

People of the world, rise up on October 15th!

Washington activists shut down Senate Office Building

Washington activists negotiate with cops and gain FOUR MORE MONTHS STAY in Freedom Plaza!

Chris Hedges: These bankers have no idea what they are up against.

Occupy Wall street is spreading like amoebas sub-dividing:

Posted Oct. 8, 2011, 1:30 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

#ows is growing. We will be in a thousand cities in this country by the end of the month – hundreds of cities in other countries. We will see General Assemblies on six continents.

Liberty Square has grown exponentially over the last three weeks. It is time to form a second General Assembly in Manhattan. We expect more to follow.

We are growing. Block by block – city by city. We will see change in this country, in this world. It will happen sooner than you can imagine.

…………..

Oct 8: Washington Protesters pepper-sprayed at the National Air and Space Museum at an exhibit glorifying unmanned Predator assassination drones.

Oct 5: More police beatings and macing at Occupy Wall Street. Bastards.

Occupy Washington begins October 6. Info and updates: october2011.org here: The Rude Guy Twitter: @OccupyWashingtn (no “o”) @StopTheMach2011

Watch: Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Kucinich & Chomsky: “End The Left-Right Delusion, Corporatism Is The TRUE Enemy”

New York Police arrest over 700 on the Brooklyn Bridge and the New York Times lies to protect them. Proof that the New York Times lies

Here is a list of Occupations Worldwide! Occupations

Here is a Wikipedia page on Occupy Wall Street that is very thorough and seems to be frequently updated: Occupy Wall Street Wikipedia

Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy here. Happy to announce that we have arrived at the American Spring.

The National Occupation of Washington, DC begins March 30. The link to find out more is:

nowdc.org nowdc.org

Also…On May 1 there has been a call for a General Strike of students and workers. For info go to Facebook and search: Occupy May Day General Strike : Occupy May Day General Strike and Read this from OWS NYC.

Also a coalition of leftist organizations are training 100,000 direct action demonstrators, in 15 different cities across the USA, for the upcoming summer fun. For info:

the99spring.com the99spring.com

I have a valued listener who makes regular donations to this show. He lost his professional job and has been working as a security guard, and I really respect him for making donations to The Rude Guy on a security guard’s take-home pay. But…I was dismayed to hear that he, a part-African American, supports Ron Paul. At least when he’s not supporting Rocky Anderson. I’m surprised that anybody who listens to this show would support Ron Paul.

Yeah, I love Ron Paul’s anti-war, anti-Federal Reserve positions. But his deregulate-everything mentality, and cut corporate taxes to 5%, is not going to give us national health care, and is not going to rein in the big banks that have cooked up $700 trillion dollars in derivatives, that are about to blow up. I don’t think Ron Paul knows what the fuck a derivative is. I think he’s a doddering old fool offering up simplistic solutions that are being swallowed whole by hurt, gullible people, looking for easy answers. And the people listening to this show are NOT supposed to be gullible! And are NOT supposed to be settling for easy answers. Or why the fuck am I doing this!

I WOULD be a Libertarian myself if they had some program for regulating corporations…especially the banks. How could I expect anti-government crusader Ron Paul to rein in the banks that are robbing us blind? What’s he gonna do it with? Noble intentions? That’s a job for federal cops.

Yes, ending the Fed would be a tremendous thing to do. I’m all for it. We would have to start a National Bank of the United States to begin “printing” our money again, without creating debt that sticks us with interest payments (just like Abe Lincoln did to win the Civil War when European Banks wouldn’t lend us any money.)

And while we’re at it. Let’s make sure we understand how the bank bailout has screwed all of us. The Fed prints money wildly so the bank speculators can stay in business gaming the price of food and oil…and buying U.S. government bonds so the Federal Government can spend money like water on war and bogus Homeland Security contractors. That’s why Washington won’t bust Wall Street fraud. Because Wall Street buys their fucking bonds! But… at the same time…our wages do not go up at anywhere near the same rate as the inflation these guys are creating by printing so much money. We are all being screwed, so that Wall Street can keep buying government bonds, with money they conjure up on computer keyboards. It’s an abomination against poor and working people, because government auditors do not even take food, oil and housing, into account, in their so-called inflation index.

Comes now Bernie Sanders:

Senator Bernie Sanders and 69 other members of Congress say federal regulators should curb the speculation in crude oil markets which has artificially pushed up gasoline prices to nearly $4 a gallon. The lawmakers – 23 senators and 47 members of the House – said Monday, in a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that the regulators must stop Wall Street futures traders from dominating the oil market. The commission has flouted a provision in the 2010 Wall Street reform law that required regulators to put tough new trading limits in place by Jan. 17, 2011. quote: “We are disappointed that, more than a year later, the commission has not fulfilled this important regulatory duty…It is one of your primary duties – indeed, perhaps your most important duty – to ensure that the prices Americans pay for gasoline and heating oil are fair, and that the markets … operate free from fraud, abuse, and manipulation,” the lawmakers wrote.

They stressed that gasoline pump prices are up, despite high supplies and low demand. According to the Energy Information Administration, the supply of oil and gasoline is greater today, than it was three years ago, when the national average price for a gallon of gasoline was just $1.90. Today, the national average is more than $3.70 a gallon at a time when the demand for oil in the U.S. is at its lowest level, since April of 1997.

There is a growing consensus that speculators are to blame. Exxon Mobil, the Saudi Arabian government, the American Trucking Association, Delta Airlines, the Petroleum Marketers Association of America, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, all say excessive oil speculation significantly increases oil and gasoline prices. Citing a recent report from the investment bank Goldman Sachs, a Feb. 27, 2012, article in Forbes said, excessive oil speculation adds $.56 to the price of a gallon of gas.

Quote “As the cost for American people to fill their gas tanks continues to skyrocket, the CFTC continues to drag its feet, on imposing strict speculation limits, to eliminate, prevent, or diminish excessive oil speculation,” the members of Congress told the commissioners.

“We urge you to take immediate action to impose strong and meaningful position limits, and to utilize all authorities available to you to make sure that the price of oil and gasoline, reflects the fundamentals of supply and demand.”

In a surprising development ABC News is all over the story too. Hail Occupy Wall Street. The news media is getting its balls back.

On Feb 23, 2012 ABC New’s Mark Greenblatt Reports:
Every time you fill up your car with gas, your dollar ends up in the hands of a wide range of interests from around the world. Some of your money goes to oil companies, some goes to refineries, and some to the gas stations you stop at. What may surprise you, however, is what one of Wall Street’s top regulators has to say about who else you’re paying: speculators on Wall Street.

Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates commodity futures and option trading in the United States, said it’s time to look at home — in addition to overseas — when searching for the reasons why gas prices are on the rise.

By Chilton’s calculation, if you drive a car like a Honda Civic, you’re paying $7.30 more than you should, every time you fill up — to Wall Street speculators. If your car is a Ford Explorer, you’re paying an extra $10.41. For a Ford F150, owners pay an additional $14.56 per fill up -or more than $750 a year. Are you getting this? That’s $750 a year that goes from some Nebraska farmer or rancher, to Goldman Sachs! For nothing! For gaming the price of oil.

Bernie Sanders says that he wants to limit the amount of oil an investment company like Goldman Sachs can buy. Some call that socialism. I say good! And so would Benjamin Franklin.

In the last podcast I talked about how Ben Franklin expounded the “labor theory of value” – that labor IS capital – which he wrote about, 130 years before Karl Marx.

Ben Franklin was a socialist. Quote “All property, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his match-coat, and other little acquisitions absolutely necessary, for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention.” Laws and customs made accumulation of property possible; the public therefore has the right to regulate the quantity and use of property. “All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual, and the propagation of the species, is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who therefore, by other laws, dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such, disposition….He who does not like civil society on these terms, let him go and live among savages.” Unquote. Benjamin Franklin.

Like I’ve said a hundred times: drop the Wall Street Bankers out of a plane over Papua New Guinea with a pocket knife and a book of matches, and let’s see how their derivative trading goes then. Fucking parasites. The time has come to use the public wealth, for the public. To make laws that “dispose” of wealth, in favor of the public welfare. Not the welfare of Wall Street fraudsters. Do you see now how fucked up the Ronald Reagan/Ron Paul Free Market philosophy is? These assholes rant and rave about the Constitution, but here is the Father of America, the First American, one of the guys who WROTE the Constitution, saying that public laws that allow the creation of wealth beyond that of basic necessities, can be altered at any time, to serve the public welfare. At any time the public welfare DEMANDS it. Fuck free market greed.

In every single period of human history there is one thing that stays the same. The rich people try to steal from the poor people, and the circumstances of the poor people get worse and worse, and then finally the poor people revolt, and kick the rich people out. It happened to the Mayan priests. It happened to the Czars of Russia. And it’s happening today with the Wall Street and City of London banks. And in every single period of history our job remains the same: to fight the rich fucking bastards. And in every day, in every way, they try to subvert us by saying: “hey, why fight us? You can become a rich fucking bastard too.” And most people fall for it, and become slaves of a system that is constantly robbing more and more of the wealth they produce. The idea that you can become a rich fucking bastard too, is exactly the con by which they divide and conquer us.

Says Max Keiser: The Wall Street terrorists don’t invent anything, they don’t make anything, they don’t create any value. They just steal our wealth. And how do they justify that? By saying, “Hey, why are you mad at us? We make money, and you can too. It’s legal. You can steal just like we do. You can come in with us. You can be our partner. Make money alongside us, the same way we do.”

It’s a lie. YOU are not that corrupt. YOU are not that greedy. YOU could never put on a tuxedo and swim in their slimy swamp. Starve babies, put millions out of work, destroy entire economies. Just to make money. You couldn’t do it.

[bird]

Here are some notes I made from listening to Max Keiser on the Keiser Report:

Says Max: What we have now is a “gaming currency”. Banks don’t have assets. We don’t have goods and services. The world economy is run on the equivalent of Facebook dollars, that governments keep issuing to keep the consumer economy going.

Says Max: Money is being printed to bail out the banks, but that’s also forcing oil prices higher, which is coming right back and causing the economy to shrink. So the bank bailout is a 360 degree trip to nowhere’s ville.

Says Max: Ken Livingston is running for mayor of London, on the platform of: Hang a Banker a Week (ha ha ha ha) Hang a Banker a Week – until the rest of them stop stealing.

Says Max: We live in a world where debt is booked as an asset. Debt created out of nothing! Some bank conjures up a loan on a keyboard, and then puts it down in its books as an asset. It’s not an asset. It’s a loan. It doesn’t exist until it’s paid back.

Says Max: JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are the buyer AND the seller. They manipulate the market because they are buying AND selling, at the same time. That buying and selling creates a fake price that’s used to engineer social change and political change. OK, let’s invade Iran. But first let’s manipulate the oil market, manipulate the stock market, manipulate the options market. Because…we can set the price on all these things, and nobody puts us in jail. Amazing!

Says Max: 300 Italian towns are losing 1 billion euros on derivatives sold to them by JP Morgan. Wall Street imperialism. Here’s how it works. First JP Morgan moves in with their advance team to destroy the economy using derivatives. Then the rating agencies will come in to downgrade the country’s sovereign debt. Then the hedge funds will come in with hundreds of billion of dollars in naked credit default swap sales. Then the IMF will come in and say, we’re gonna put in a technocrat to clean up this mess. Then all the assets of Italy will be transferred to these fricking criminals on Wall Street. It’s the same game plan, over and over and over again. Please, Mafia in Italy. Do what you do best! Take these suckers out! Unquote

Says Max: Here’s JP Morgan’s idea of capitalism: You take all the risk, we take all the profit…That’s not capitalism, that’s feudalism.

Says Max: JP Morgan is saying that we don’t have to pay out, on the insurance products that we invented, that exploded, because we sit on the oversight committee, that decides whether or not we have to pay out! That’s just an outright racket. This is a fundamental breakdown in democracy. And these protests are not going to stop.

[bird]

Here’s a few lines from Margin Call, the new movie about Wall Street meltdowns…a broker tells a new guy: “if all these people want to live like this in their fancy cars and big fucking houses that they can’t even pay for, then, you, are necessary. The only reason they get to keep living like kings is because we got our fingers on the scale, in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole fucking world gets real fucking fair, really fucking quickly, and nobody really wants that. They say they do, but they don’t. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent, pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well that’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow so fuck ‘em. Fuck normal people.”

[bird, hawk]

Hail Occupy Wall Street.

To paraphrase Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men on the Keiser Report show #257. “It’s so frustrating listening to people going into great detail, about far-fetched conspiracies, that cannot be proved, when we have, right in front of us, a real conspiracy, that can absolutely be proved, there’s tons of evidence, it’s everywhere, and that’s what we’ve got to be fighting.” The biggest conspiracy of all time: the Wall Street Bankers and their pet politicians and militarists and corporations – controlling every aspect of where we work, and what we hear and see and think and do. You don’t have to go looking under rocks or for secret societies, or secret landing strips for this one. It’s screaming in our faces!… “We’ve got to change the rules of the game that allow this conspiracy to exist. That may be why Occupy Wall Street has been so effective, and so frightening to so many of the 1%. Refusing to adopt a simple list of demands, and precise targets, has been probably the wisest thing that any movement could do. Just saying: there’s a serious problem here and we have to rewrite the rules that allow corporations to get away with murder, literally murder, and lesser crimes,” makes the 1% tremble in their castles. In other words, Occupiers of the American Spring, let us not wander off into the boundless wilderness of individual issues, important as they are. But let us stay dedicated to “changing the rules of the game, for how banks and corporations operate”. Occupy is not a way to gain sex appeal for your pet issue: war, foreclosures, GMOs. It’s much bigger than that. Attempts to co-opt and redirect Occupy into local pet issues will only dissipate and destroy it. Indeed, those undercover agents working for the FBI and Homeland Security, at this moment, are attempting to do exactly that. Drive us into the wilderness of individual issues, rather than attacking, directly and unreservedly, the entire paradigm of corporate feudalism. Don’t fall for it.

[bird]

from Al Jazeera by Paul Rosenberg, March 7, 2012

On February 28, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, announced her retirement from the US Senate, citing her frustration with…partisan gridlock.

But, says Rosenberg, it is wrong to propagate the historical delusion that bipartisan consensus is the key to solving the United States’ biggest problems. Nothing could be more wrongheaded. In fact, consensus has always been the enemy of progress, unless and until it is overthrown, and a new consensus is formed, on what were, previously, radical foundations. This is how the United States itself was established. It’s how slavery was ended. How women got the vote. How segregation was ended. How women and minorities got formal equality under law. How labour got the right to organise, and how the modern middle class was forged into being, in the furnace of class struggle. It was even, ultimately, how “big government” put a man on the moon.

As Dr Martin Luther King, Jr explained in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, so-called “untimely”, confrontation, was fundamentally necessary, in order to disrupt the superficial, temporary peace, of repression…in order that the deep and lasting peace of justice, could be established. King was writing about the process of mass non-violent civil disobedience, used to desegregate the South, but the same principle applies to the entire panorama of all profound political change, that advances human progress. And the U.S. is in crisis today precisely because it is entirely convinced, that those self-congratulatory, “voices of reason”, who opposed King, were the reasonable ones, the ones who understood political reality and knew how to get things done. Ridiculous.

Indeed, my former Open Left blogmate, Mike Lux, wrote a whole book – The Progressive Revolution – about how the United States’ history of political progress at the federal level, is packed into discrete episodes, of a few short years, of dramatically furious activity, sustained by strong ideological majorities. The Civil War Radical Republicans, the Great Depression New Deal Democrats, and the 1960s Great Society Democrats, are three of the best-known examples.

Behind the above-noted barrage of false claims about the importance of consensus, is an underlying center-right ideology…a structure of lies that serves to rationalise the existing order of American empire, and the dysfunctional dominance of the 1 per cent. Unquote

[bird]

OK…Time for a clip from the Keiser Report where Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert decry how there are no penalties for committing massive financial crimes.

[Keiser clip]

Here’s some Good news for white men

From The Independent; February 28, 2012

New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America
New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian ancestors of the American Indians, set foot in the New World.
A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the U.S. east coast.
The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades – and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity’s migrations around the globe….What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style, stone knife, found in Virginia back in 1971, revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.
Another key argument is the complete absence of any human activity in northeast Siberia and Alaska, prior to around 15,500 years ago. If the Maryland, and other east coastal people, of 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, had come from Asia, not Europe, early material, dating from before 19,000 years ago, should have turned up in Siberia and Alaska, but none have been found.
Some genetic markers for Stone Age western Europeans, simply don’t exist in northeast Asia – but they do, among some north American Indian groups. Scientific tests on ancient DNA, extracted from 8000-year-old skeletons from Florida, have revealed a high level of a key, probably European-originating, genetic marker. There are also a tiny number of isolated Native American groups whose languages appear not to be related in any way, to Asian-originating American Indian peoples.
…the Solutrean (i.e. European originating) Native Americans, were either partly absorbed by the newcomers, or were substantially obliterated by them, either physically, or through competition for resources.
Great news. So white people didn’t murder the first nations? We WERE the first nations? Until we were raped and killed by the invaders who came across the Siberian land bridge?
They wiped us out before we came back 15,000 years later and herded them onto reservations? Hmmmmm. One less thing to feel guilty about…white men.
And then there’s the anomaly of the 14,000 year old, non-Clovis, that is, non-Asiatic, settlement in Chile. And even the fact that the species of pig, coconut and manioc plants in the South Pacific Islands, came from South America, not Asia. And that the Caribbean and Polynesian words for “man” are the same: Kane (Kah-nay). It’s pretty obvious that in the last 50,000 years, human beings bounced all over the planet, and archaeologists have been absolutely unscientific in their resistance to studying this fact.
[bird]
The Soviet Socialist Republic of Women, is a place where men never complain out loud about women, because they don’t want to reduce their chances of getting laid. Ugh. It is a flat, literal, materialistic world, where TV science becomes water cooler gossip, and the unknown unknowns don’t enter into anyone’s equations. It’s a competitive wasteland of earning degrees and certifications, and chasing after careers on the corporate ladder, whose job descriptions basically amount to: telling other people what to do or think or believe. Who would want to live like that? Only creatures who lack the fearlessness and imagination to live any other way. Women. And pussy-whipped men. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Women. Gives Socialism a bad name.

[bird]

[Kindle iBooks promo clip]

Financial Gangsters

or RIGHT CLICK HERE (Apple command/click) then click “Save Target As” to DOWNLOAD the podcast to your computer or playback device

Or CLICK HERE to read the TEXT version of The Rude Guy Podcast #87

[MLK clip]

My hero. Martin Luther King Junior…Rich Zubaty here. Here’s some good news.

The New York and Los Angeles City Councils have passed resolutions stating unequivocally that: corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Yahoo.

Also Missoula Montana, Boulder Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin all passed direct-ballot voter-initiatives by over 75% of the voters, that corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Hallelujah!

Also…State Representatives Mark Pocan and Chris Taylor of Madison Wisconsin introduced a resolution to pass an amendment to the United States Constitution that corporations are not people and money is not speech. If Congress fails to act, the resolution further calls for a National Constitutional Convention under Article V of the United States Constitution.

Also signature drives have commenced to get the…“corporations are not people, money is not speech”…resolution, on the ballots, in November, in Oregon, Illinois, California and Utah.

Thank you Occupy Wall Street. Let’s not stop now.

[RG voice ] Thank you Occupy Wall Street

[bird]

Here’s the inside dope on the mortgage mess, and the lawbreaking bankers who created it. I put it in story form so it’s easier to understand.

OK… Let’s say it’s 2001, you’ve got a steady job, you own a house, and want to build-on an addition for your teenage kids and your old mom. You go to a bank and ask to borrow $50,000.

The banker says, what the hell, you’ve got a good job. Why not borrow $250,000, put that together with the equity you already have in your house, and buy yourself a new house. Don’t worry. We can keep the monthly payments low. In six years you’ll have a balloon payment, but the price of your house will have risen so much by then, we can just refinance it to pay off the balloon.

“OK,” sez you. And you buy a new house.

The banker takes your mortgage and bundles it together with hundreds of other mortgages and sends them all offshore to a shell company – a dummy company – in the Cayman Islands, which is actually owned by Deutsche Bank. The dummy company turns the mortgages into securities – stocks – and then issues the stocks back to your bank.

What has your bank done?

Listen closely. Your bank is required by the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, to maintain a 9 to 1, debt to assets ratio. 9 to 1, debt to deposits. That means that for every 1 dollar it has on deposit, it can loan out nine. Not ten, not eleven, nine.

However, by shipping its loans offshore and securitizing them, and taking back stock on those securities, it now holds stock, which is an asset, not a loan. So it can turn around and issue hundreds more mortgages based upon the legal limit of the 9 – 1 debt to asset ratio. In other words it’s a flat out scam to get around SEC regulations, and the SEC has been asleep at the switch and probably being paid off to look the other way.

Banks like Wells Fargo, Citibank, Bank of America, and others, all did this, and ran up an actual debt to deposits ratio of something like 99 to 1. Not 9 to 1. 99 to 1. And that’s why, when the economy dipped into its second recession during the George W Bush presidency, the mortgage market flew apart so fast.

But the important part of the story is still coming. Back to you and your house.

When your balloon payment came due you refinanced, paid off the balloon, put some money into junior’s college fund, and now you owe $400,000 on your house. Then you lost your job. Fuck.

You went to the bank and asked to modify your loan, and while you were doing that, the entire economy crashed. Housing prices fell by 40%. You now owe $400,000 on a $250,000 house.

The bank said sure. You’ve been a good customer. We can modify the loan. Just fill out these papers and we’ll get back to you…You do…And they don’t. Finally you ask them about it. They say they must have lost your papers. Send them in again and they’ll get back to you. You do. They don’t.

After a couple knuckle-biting months you ask them about it yet again, and they tell you you have to miss two mortgage payments in order to qualify for the new federal program that facilitates mortgage modification…so do that and they’ll get back to you. You do…and they don’t.

After waiting and waiting to hear from them you get back to them and they tell you, you have missed the deadline for qualifying for a mortgage modification and they are foreclosing on your house. You panic and look for a rope to hang yourself in the garage.

Why won’t the banks help you out of the mortgage mess, that they created? For centuries banks have said: “We are not in the real estate business. We do not want to foreclose on anybody.” So why are they doing it now?

Because they have broken the law, and the pond scum at the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way while they did it. And the politicians took big contributions from them while they did it.

But now you know, what they really did. They lent out $99 for every dollar they kept in reserve, instead of the $9 they were legally allowed to loan out.

And if they just grab back the houses, all that crappy accounting fraud stays hidden. But if those loans actually see the light of day in a mortgage modification session, three things come out into the sunlight.

1) These banks are grossly overstating their assets. They are claiming on their balance sheets that they hold $400,000 mortgages on properties worth only $250,000

2) These loans have been sliced and diced and sold as securities, and it is not clear who really owns them any more. Did TARP funds already pay these off? They might have. Nobody knows. It’s like trying to recreate a pig out of pork sausage.

3) But the main thing is: the egregious fraud of illegally lending $99 dollars for every $1 comes out into the open, and in order to stay in business, in order not to be forced by SEC regulations to close their doors, in order for these fraudster bank CEOs NOT to go to jail, these criminal banks must magically come up with EIGHT TIMES more money, in deposits, than they already have. They need to show $9 for every $99 they lent out. Not $1 dollar. $9 dollars. And they can’t do it. They simply can’t do it.

So the only way to avoid total disaster for their greed and irresponsibility, is to steal your house out from under you. That’s what they call the free market. They steal, and you can’t stop them.

Bastards.

And Barack Obama had the gall to state that, quote: “a lot of the things those guys did were not actually against the law, but we made them against the law now.” What bullshit. What a red herring. A lot of the things those guys did were against the law THEN, and are against the law NOW, and goddam it, it’s time for the executive branch to do its job, put a boot up Eric Holder’s ass and execute the law. Prosecute these bastards who committed this fraud, fire the SEC guys who went along with it, embarrass the politicians who took money from these crooks, and get to the bottom of this mess. Because millions of homeowners are gonna get hurt unless Barack Obama DOES HIS JOB. The chief executive of the executive Branch is commanded by the Constitution to execute the law. And the law was 9 to 1 not 99 to 1.

Then…finally…after three years…Obama came out with an announcement in his 2012 State of the Union address regarding the mortgage mess.

Here’s a comment I had in the New York Times about Obama’s declaration to investigate and prosecute the mortgage fraudsters.

………………….

Said Obama in his Speech before Congress: “And tonight, I’m asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general, to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law…and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Said the New York Times: “On Tuesday night, (Obama) called — finally — for a full investigation of the lending abuses that inflated the bubble and led to the crash… Over the last year, Americans have become more aware of the deep inequities in the economy, and of the government’s responsibility to act. Mr. Obama deserves some of the credit for that, but it has a lot more to do with the unrelenting tough times, and the efforts of Occupy Wall Street and other protests. What Americans want now is strong political leadership.”

Said me: Thanks for giving credit where credit is due. Hail, Occupy Wall Street! Jail the Bankers!

But…Is this gonna be another political stickup, of Obama talking big, and then stonewalling the investigations of those who give loads of money to the Obama campaign? I suspect so. Which is why we of Occupy Wall Street have to attack harder than ever this year. I don’t wanna be fooled by Obama again. I smell blood. This year we have to keep up the pressure to Jail the Bankers. It’s the only way to stop them. Fines don’t work. Jail the Bankers. Here we go. Thank God. But mostly thank Occupy Wall Street

[bird]

OK, here’s a collection of notes I gleaned from Max Keiser on the Keiser Report.

One…When we have trillions of dollars in derivatives, a small percentage loss results in a debt that cannot be covered. So the banks, like MF Global and JP Morgan, HAVE to steal from their customer deposits.

If these bastards lose say, one tenth of one percent, on 700 trillion dollars!, that means they have to come up with 700 billion dollars to cover their asses. We have GOT to stop this derivatives market madness. And if we don’t, they will just steal all of our money.

And how can they say they can’t “find” the money? We can find an email sent five years ago with the word “pelican” in it, but MF Global and JP Morgan can’t find $1.2 billion dollars of missing customer money? Out right lies.

Two…We have a broken accounting system. We have $1.2 trillion dollars a year in military expenditures that are not accounted for in the cost of oil. The real cost of our gasoline is 10 dollars a gallon not 4 dollars a gallon.

Three… I LOVE this one: Banking companies should be public utility companies, and must provide a public benefit! Fuckin’ A. Who the hell ever decided banks should be private. They should be public utilities like your electric company. Monitored and controlled to bring you the best power for the price, whether electrical power or financial power.

Sez Max: charter ten new plain vanilla banks that just do banking, and the economy will work again.

And how about oil companies? Same goes for them! They should be public utilities too.

Four…Max Keiser on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital: They used borrowed money and had no risk. Lose and they walk away from it. Win and they rake in huge profits. This is not capitalism. They had no risk! And what business were they in? The business of destroying companies. Buying up companies with borrowed money. Firing everybody they could. Selling everything that wasn’t nailed down. And then trying to resell the company by issuing stock, much of which they issued to themselves. No risk! Mitt Romney is just a financial thief who doesn’t drink coffee. unquote

Five: Raising interest rates would be the best thing that the Fed could do for the economy. It would drive out the speculators and bring into play the real entrepreneurs, who are actually doing something for the economy, not just sucking money out of it. People who save money would actually start getting decent interest rates, so private wealth, real wealth, would increase. And along with that, wages would increase. Right now speculators are borrowing money at one quarter of one percent, and speculating in oil and rice. That not only does nobody any good, but it just raises the price of oil and rice for everyone in the world! Low interest rates are a Central bankers scam to fuel speculators. Speculators can’t rake profits from money borrowed at a high interest rate. So they stop gambling and inflating our food and oil prices. Jesus fucking Christ!

OK…let’s listen to a Max Keiser clip on financial gangsters.

[Keiser clip on financial gangsters]

I just started reading the biography of Benjamin Franklin. What an amazing guy. History has portrayed him as a doddering old fool who wrote a corny almanac, and got lightning to smack a kite, but there’s a lot more to him than that. He was, as the book is titled, The First American. 25 years before the American Revolution, during the French and Indian War against the English colonies, he popularized the idea of uniting the English colonies for their protection, like the Iroquois nation had united the Iroquois tribes. It was a radical idea at the time. He published what is considered the first American political cartoon: a snake cut into eight parts, each part labeled as one of the then, eight colonies, captioned “Join, or Die.” In Europe he was the most admired American of his time, in great part due to his applied scientific experiments on everything from electricity and refrigeration to the invention of the Franklin Stove.

But here’s what I stumbled across. According to Franklin, gold and silver were nothing more than convenient measures of the amount of human labor that went into any commodity. Quote “The riches of a country are to be valued by the amount of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the amount of gold and silver they possess.”

Wall Street has completely forgotten this. They think that you make money – create value – by buying and selling electronic digits at computerized light speed. Greed-head economic rapists… But that’s not what caught my eye. Here is Benjamin Franklin, the First American, talking about the labor theory of value. Here is Ben Franklin saying that Labor is Wealth, Labor is Capital, 130 years before Karl Marx! 130 years before Karl Marx based his entire idea of socialism, of worker owned businesses, on the idea that Labor is Capital. You won’t ever see that in your high school history books. Thanks Ben. That’s the idea that made this country great…before it was even a country. Labor creates wealth. Not gold or silver. And certainly not printed paper or electronic digits. By the Fed issuing more of that crap, all they are doing is diluting the value of our labor. That’s why this country doesn’t work any more. The criminals are printing their own money. Legally!

I heard years ago that the sons and daughters of the mafia dons went to Harvard and Princeton and took jobs on Wall Street. Is it any wonder then, that Wall Street is suffused with a criminal mentality? Why sell dope and pussy when you can just sell stock certificates you print up in your basement?

[bird]

OK, here’s an email from George Pendleton in Pennsylvania:

Rich,

Just wanted to say great job on the last podcast! I especially liked the explicit proviso you gave about the left alienating white men.

I grew up in the Midwest and a lot of young boys like me learned, I think appropriately, to associate leftist politics with whiny little momma’s boys who would hoard their stuff, read and talk about star wars, and get super temperamental over the drop of a hat. They were the children of divorced parents often times, and I can understand, with such an overbearing presence from their mothers, why they developed the way they did. These kids would always side with the ever-prevalent female authority figures on everything, and later would become poster boys for the new left. They would spout off socialist concepts on a regular basis, but boys like me knew that as soon as any of us tried to cooperate with them, they would stab us in the back, like girls. They didn’t play fair. They are the intentional product of liberal/feminist women trying to remake men into good little robots who deny their sexual nature and do what they’re told.

Long story short, boys like me who grew up competing on teams learned to associate competition and free markets with good, and socialism and feminism as bad. I really didn’t think, until hearing you, that one could be a socialist and not go along with the new left and feminism. (thank you George, that’s my main thing. You can be a Leftist without falling for the self-serving sexism or the self-serving racism of identity politics. Indeed, identity politics is what destroyed the American Left. We’re ALL getting fucked. Not just the women or the blacks or the Mexicans.)

Continuing with George…: It is my opinion that the surge Ron Paul is having is due mostly to the media omission of masculine leftists. Guys in my age group seem to love him, and he does make some sense on certain issues. But this idea of cutting the corporate tax rate to between 5-15% is absolutely insane. My goal in life is to get my old friends, who still have respect for me, and how I conduct myself, to see that competition is good, so long as the actual stakes in it aren’t real. By real I mean that they don’t determine the livelihood of other human beings. [Sport is sport, not life.] Anyways, your podcasts certainly help in that process and I appreciate it!

Thanks George

And here’s a comment left on my What Men Know that Women Don’t youtube video page by dalriada842, after some vicious attacks made on me by wimpy ass feminized commenters.

Sez he:

When you’re right, you’re right. Remember what George Carlin had to say: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and remember that half the other people are stupider than that.” Be like Teflon to such morons!

[RG laugh]

[Kindle book commercial]

[Rude Guy voice we’ll be back; no more bullshit]

[The Rude Guy Podcast #87 Financial Gangsters February 15, 2012]

[MLK clip]

My hero. Martin Luther King Junior…Rich Zubaty here. Here’s some good news.

The New York and Los Angeles City Councils have passed resolutions stating unequivocally that: corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Yahoo.

Also Missoula Montana, Boulder Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin all passed direct-ballot voter-initiatives by over 75% of the voters, that corporations are not people, and money is not speech. Hallelujah!

Also…State Representatives Mark Pocan and Chris Taylor of Madison Wisconsin introduced a resolution to pass an amendment to the United States Constitution that corporations are not people and money is not speech. If Congress fails to act, the resolution further calls for a National Constitutional Convention under Article V of the United States Constitution.

Also signature drives have commenced to get the…“corporations are not people, money is not speech”…resolution, on the ballots, in November, in Oregon, Illinois, California and Utah.

Thank you Occupy Wall Street. Let’s not stop now.

[RG voice ] Thank you Occupy Wall Street

[bird]

Here’s the inside dope on the mortgage mess, and the lawbreaking bankers who created it. I put it in story form so it’s easier to understand.

OK… Let’s say it’s 2001, you’ve got a steady job, you own a house, and want to build-on an addition for your teenage kids and your old mom. You go to a bank and ask to borrow $50,000.

The banker says, what the hell, you’ve got a good job. Why not borrow $250,000, put that together with the equity you already have in your house, and buy yourself a new house. Don’t worry. We can keep the monthly payments low. In six years you’ll have a balloon payment, but the price of your house will have risen so much by then, we can just refinance it to pay off the balloon.

“OK,” sez you. And you buy a new house.

The banker takes your mortgage and bundles it together with hundreds of other mortgages and sends them all offshore to a shell company – a dummy company – in the Cayman Islands, which is actually owned by Deutsche Bank. The dummy company turns the mortgages into securities – stocks – and then issues the stocks back to your bank.

What has your bank done?

Listen closely. Your bank is required by the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, to maintain a 9 to 1, debt to assets ratio. 9 to 1, debt to deposits. That means that for every 1 dollar it has on deposit, it can loan out nine. Not ten, not eleven, nine.

However, by shipping its loans offshore and securitizing them, and taking back stock on those securities, it now holds stock, which is an asset, not a loan. So it can turn around and issue hundreds more mortgages based upon the legal limit of the 9 – 1 debt to asset ratio. In other words it’s a flat out scam to get around SEC regulations, and the SEC has been asleep at the switch and probably being paid off to look the other way.

Banks like Wells Fargo, Citibank, Bank of America, and others, all did this, and ran up an actual debt to deposits ratio of something like 99 to 1. Not 9 to 1. 99 to 1. And that’s why, when the economy dipped into its second recession during the George W Bush presidency, the mortgage market flew apart so fast.

But the important part of the story is still coming. Back to you and your house.

When your balloon payment came due you refinanced, paid off the balloon, put some money into junior’s college fund, and now you owe $400,000 on your house. Then you lost your job. Fuck.

You went to the bank and asked to modify your loan, and while you were doing that, the entire economy crashed. Housing prices fell by 40%. You now owe $400,000 on a $250,000 house.

The bank said sure. You’ve been a good customer. We can modify the loan. Just fill out these papers and we’ll get back to you…You do…And they don’t. Finally you ask them about it. They say they must have lost your papers. Send them in again and they’ll get back to you. You do. They don’t.

After a couple knuckle-biting months you ask them about it yet again, and they tell you you have to miss two mortgage payments in order to qualify for the new federal program that facilitates mortgage modification…so do that and they’ll get back to you. You do…and they don’t.

After waiting and waiting to hear from them you get back to them and they tell you, you have missed the deadline for qualifying for a mortgage modification and they are foreclosing on your house. You panic and look for a rope to hang yourself in the garage.

Why won’t the banks help you out of the mortgage mess, that they created? For centuries banks have said: “We are not in the real estate business. We do not want to foreclose on anybody.” So why are they doing it now?

Because they have broken the law, and the pond scum at the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way while they did it. And the politicians took big contributions from them while they did it.

But now you know, what they really did. They lent out $99 for every dollar they kept in reserve, instead of the $9 they were legally allowed to loan out.

And if they just grab back the houses, all that crappy accounting fraud stays hidden. But if those loans actually see the light of day in a mortgage modification session, three things come out into the sunlight.

1) These banks are grossly overstating their assets. They are claiming on their balance sheets that they hold $400,000 mortgages on properties worth only $250,000

2) These loans have been sliced and diced and sold as securities, and it is not clear who really owns them any more. Did TARP funds already pay these off? They might have. Nobody knows. It’s like trying to recreate a pig out of pork sausage.

3) But the main thing is: the egregious fraud of illegally lending $99 dollars for every $1 comes out into the open, and in order to stay in business, in order not to be forced by SEC regulations to close their doors, in order for these fraudster bank CEOs NOT to go to jail, these criminal banks must magically come up with EIGHT TIMES more money, in deposits, than they already have. They need to show $9 for every $99 they lent out. Not $1 dollar. $9 dollars. And they can’t do it. They simply can’t do it.

So the only way to avoid total disaster for their greed and irresponsibility, is to steal your house out from under you. That’s what they call the free market. They steal, and you can’t stop them.

Bastards.

And Barack Obama had the gall to state that, quote: “a lot of the things those guys did were not actually against the law, but we made them against the law now.” What bullshit. What a red herring. A lot of the things those guys did were against the law THEN, and are against the law NOW, and goddam it, it’s time for the executive branch to do its job, put a boot up Eric Holder’s ass and execute the law. Prosecute these bastards who committed this fraud, fire the SEC guys who went along with it, embarrass the politicians who took money from these crooks, and get to the bottom of this mess. Because millions of homeowners are gonna get hurt unless Barack Obama DOES HIS JOB. The chief executive of the executive Branch is commanded by the Constitution to execute the law. And the law was 9 to 1 not 99 to 1.

Then…finally…after three years…Obama came out with an announcement in his 2012 State of the Union address regarding the mortgage mess.

Here’s a comment I had in the New York Times about Obama’s declaration to investigate and prosecute the mortgage fraudsters.

………………….

Said Obama in his Speech before Congress: “And tonight, I’m asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general, to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law…and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Said the New York Times: “On Tuesday night, (Obama) called — finally — for a full investigation of the lending abuses that inflated the bubble and led to the crash… Over the last year, Americans have become more aware of the deep inequities in the economy, and of the government’s responsibility to act. Mr. Obama deserves some of the credit for that, but it has a lot more to do with the unrelenting tough times, and the efforts of Occupy Wall Street and other protests. What Americans want now is strong political leadership.”

Said me: Thanks for giving credit where credit is due. Hail, Occupy Wall Street! Jail the Bankers!

But…Is this gonna be another political stickup, of Obama talking big, and then stonewalling the investigations of those who give loads of money to the Obama campaign? I suspect so. Which is why we of Occupy Wall Street have to attack harder than ever this year. I don’t wanna be fooled by Obama again. I smell blood. This year we have to keep up the pressure to Jail the Bankers. It’s the only way to stop them. Fines don’t work. Jail the Bankers. Here we go. Thank God. But mostly thank Occupy Wall Street

[bird]

OK, here’s a collection of notes I gleaned from Max Keiser on the Keiser Report.

One…When we have trillions of dollars in derivatives, a small percentage loss results in a debt that cannot be covered. So the banks, like MF Global and JP Morgan, HAVE to steal from their customer deposits.

If these bastards lose say, one tenth of one percent, on 700 trillion dollars!, that means they have to come up with 700 billion dollars to cover their asses. We have GOT to stop this derivatives market madness. And if we don’t, they will just steal all of our money.

And how can they say they can’t “find” the money? We can find an email sent five years ago with the word “pelican” in it, but MF Global and JP Morgan can’t find $1.2 billion dollars of missing customer money? Out right lies.

Two…We have a broken accounting system. We have $1.2 trillion dollars a year in military expenditures that are not accounted for in the cost of oil. The real cost of our gasoline is 10 dollars a gallon not 4 dollars a gallon.

Three… I LOVE this one: Banking companies should be public utility companies, and must provide a public benefit! Fuckin’ A. Who the hell ever decided banks should be private. They should be public utilities like your electric company. Monitored and controlled to bring you the best power for the price, whether electrical power or financial power.

Sez Max: charter ten new plain vanilla banks that just do banking, and the economy will work again.

And how about oil companies? Same goes for them! They should be public utilities too.

Four…Max Keiser on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital: They used borrowed money and had no risk. Lose and they walk away from it. Win and they rake in huge profits. This is not capitalism. They had no risk! And what business were they in? The business of destroying companies. Buying up companies with borrowed money. Firing everybody they could. Selling everything that wasn’t nailed down. And then trying to resell the company by issuing stock, much of which they issued to themselves. No risk! Mitt Romney is just a financial thief who doesn’t drink coffee. unquote

Five: Raising interest rates would be the best thing that the Fed could do for the economy. It would drive out the speculators and bring into play the real entrepreneurs, who are actually doing something for the economy, not just sucking money out of it. People who save money would actually start getting decent interest rates, so private wealth, real wealth, would increase. And along with that, wages would increase. Right now speculators are borrowing money at one quarter of one percent, and speculating in oil and rice. That not only does nobody any good, but it just raises the price of oil and rice for everyone in the world! Low interest rates are a Central bankers scam to fuel speculators. Speculators can’t rake profits from money borrowed at a high interest rate. So they stop gambling and inflating our food and oil prices. Jesus fucking Christ!

OK…let’s listen to a Max Keiser clip on financial gangsters.

[Keiser clip on financial gangsters]

I just started reading the biography of Benjamin Franklin. What an amazing guy. History has portrayed him as a doddering old fool who wrote a corny almanac, and got lightning to smack a kite, but there’s a lot more to him than that. He was, as the book is titled, The First American. 25 years before the American Revolution, during the French and Indian War against the English colonies, he popularized the idea of uniting the English colonies for their protection, like the Iroquois nation had united the Iroquois tribes. It was a radical idea at the time. He published what is considered the first American political cartoon: a snake cut into eight parts, each part labeled as one of the then, eight colonies, captioned “Join, or Die.” In Europe he was the most admired American of his time, in great part due to his applied scientific experiments on everything from electricity and refrigeration to the invention of the Franklin Stove.

But here’s what I stumbled across. According to Franklin, gold and silver were nothing more than convenient measures of the amount of human labor that went into any commodity. Quote “The riches of a country are to be valued by the amount of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the amount of gold and silver they possess.”

Wall Street has completely forgotten this. They think that you make money – create value – by buying and selling electronic digits at computerized light speed. Greed-head economic rapists… But that’s not what caught my eye. Here is Benjamin Franklin, the First American, talking about the labor theory of value. Here is Ben Franklin saying that Labor is Wealth, Labor is Capital, 130 years before Karl Marx! 130 years before Karl Marx based his entire idea of socialism, of worker owned businesses, on the idea that Labor is Capital. You won’t ever see that in your high school history books. Thanks Ben. That’s the idea that made this country great…before it was even a country. Labor creates wealth. Not gold or silver. And certainly not printed paper or electronic digits. By the Fed issuing more of that crap, all they are doing is diluting the value of our labor. That’s why this country doesn’t work any more. The criminals are printing their own money. Legally!

I heard years ago that the sons and daughters of the mafia dons went to Harvard and Princeton and took jobs on Wall Street. Is it any wonder then, that Wall Street is suffused with a criminal mentality? Why sell dope and pussy when you can just sell stock certificates you print up in your basement?

[bird]

OK, here’s an email from George Pendleton in Pennsylvania:

Rich,

Just wanted to say great job on the last podcast! I especially liked the explicit proviso you gave about the left alienating white men.

I grew up in the Midwest and a lot of young boys like me learned, I think appropriately, to associate leftist politics with whiny little momma’s boys who would hoard their stuff, read and talk about star wars, and get super temperamental over the drop of a hat. They were the children of divorced parents often times, and I can understand, with such an overbearing presence from their mothers, why they developed the way they did. These kids would always side with the ever-prevalent female authority figures on everything, and later would become poster boys for the new left. They would spout off socialist concepts on a regular basis, but boys like me knew that as soon as any of us tried to cooperate with them, they would stab us in the back, like girls. They didn’t play fair. They are the intentional product of liberal/feminist women trying to remake men into good little robots who deny their sexual nature and do what they’re told.

Long story short, boys like me who grew up competing on teams learned to associate competition and free markets with good, and socialism and feminism as bad. I really didn’t think, until hearing you, that one could be a socialist and not go along with the new left and feminism. (thank you George, that’s my main thing. You can be a Leftist without falling for the self-serving sexism or the self-serving racism of identity politics. Indeed, identity politics is what destroyed the American Left. We’re ALL getting fucked. Not just the women or the blacks or the Mexicans.)

Continuing with George…: It is my opinion that the surge Ron Paul is having is due mostly to the media omission of masculine leftists. Guys in my age group seem to love him, and he does make some sense on certain issues. But this idea of cutting the corporate tax rate to between 5-15% is absolutely insane. My goal in life is to get my old friends, who still have respect for me, and how I conduct myself, to see that competition is good, so long as the actual stakes in it aren’t real. By real I mean that they don’t determine the livelihood of other human beings. [Sport is sport, not life.] Anyways, your podcasts certainly help in that process and I appreciate it!

Thanks George

And here’s a comment left on my What Men Know that Women Don’t youtube video page by dalriada842, after some vicious attacks made on me by wimpy ass feminized commenters.

Sez he:

When you’re right, you’re right. Remember what George Carlin had to say: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and remember that half the other people are stupider than that.” Be like Teflon to such morons!

[RG laugh]

[Kindle book commercial]

[Rude Guy voice we’ll be back; no more bullshit]