[The Rude Guy Podcast #82 August 11, 2011]
[NOTE: most of this podcast was extracted from pre-recorded video clips that I did not transcribe. Every man needs a maid (secretary). So there is no bona fide text version of this podcast, apart from my introductory comments.]
Rich Zubaty here with this month’s Good news: The global insurrection against corporate capitalism is coming to America.
A group called occupywallstreet.com is planning to invade Wall Street on September 17, and NOT LEAVE. Here’s their mission statement:
On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices, following the lead of our Egyptian brothers and sisters in Tahrir Square.
The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America. It’s time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY!
Bravo people! Bravo! occupywallstreet.com
The only problem I see with this plan is that a few months takes us into Mid-December, and not many people are going to be camping out in New York City in December. Certainly not a thin-skinned gray-haired Hawaiian like me. But God almighty it’s about time for this. Fight like Egyptians on Wall Street.
I really really really want to make it to this event. I want it to succeed and I really really really want us to do it again, LARGE, next summer. And the same for the Tahrir Square in Washington DC event commencing Oct 6, on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, that I told you about last month: Remember? october2011.org.
I really want to be at both of these events, but I don’t think I’m gonna to make it. The plane ticket is close to a thousand bucks. But the main problem is that I’ll have no place to stay, and I can’t stay in a tent in the cold. At my age I just can’t do it. I already have wretched neck problems from misaligned vertebrae, caused by sleeping in my truck for two years, and camping out would put me in instant debilitating pain.
That’s why I am going to ask you, dear listeners, if any of you can go to either or both of these events and be our eyes and ears. Be a reporter on special assignment for The Rude Guy Podcast. I’ll kick in some gas and food money for anyone who can go, and provide us some first hand audio or video or written reporting.
Or maybe some of you out there know people in the New York/Washington area who I could stay with for the duration of these events. I would love to be at both of them 24/7, but I know that’s not gonna happen. I’m gonna get cold and hungry and tired. So I’m gonna come and go from the event. Anyway, we know that’s what worked in Tahrir Square. People came and left according to jobs and family obligations, but at any one time, thousands of people were always there.
So if any of you can go on special assignment for The Rude Guy, please let me know. And if any of you know someone who might put me up for what I hope will be a two to three month siege of the east coast financial terrorists in Washington and New York, please let me know. But at the very least check out these websites: occupywallstreet.com and october2011.org And forward the links to your friends.
Ralph Nader says this country is like a dry prairie that hasn’t seen rain in three years…and some spark is gonna ignite it, and the whole thing is gonna blaze, but we just don’t know what that spark will be yet. Time for one of Thomas Jefferson’s long overdue “little revolutions”. According to Jefferson, we should be more afraid of banks than of standing armies.
The Vietnam War would still be going on right now, sapping the economy, like Korea is, if hundreds of thousands of young Americans hadn’t hit the streets, and hundreds of thousands of draft age guys hadn’t refused to be drafted. I was one of them. I dodged the FBI for a year and then went to live in France. Refuseniks is what we called ourselves. We refused to cooperate with an insane government, run by corporations, making war for profit…, and we refuse the same thing now. Refusniks…You too can Refuse to cooperate with an insane government run by Wall Street…Erect tents, kitchens and barricades, and stop the fucking bastards. Thomas Jefferson said this needs to be done every ten years or so and we haven’t done it since the sixties!
The mainstream media is going to ignore these protests. They’re hoping some tiger mom will blow up a preschool that wouldn’t accept her gifted child, so we’ll all follow the gory details of that monstrosity for a couple weeks, and ignore this massive public insurrection against Wall Street crime.
But The Rude Guy is leaping into the breach. Any video or audio or written reports from these events will be distributed internationally by me, and they’ll be picked up by the handful of international news organizations who keep an ear to my podcasts. So go out and get us some news you east coasters. It’s a good way to feel good about yourself. A good way to contribute something to the solution.
RT TV, Russian Television, emailed, and asked to interview me on Skype about the Occupy Wall Street September protest. It may or may not happen due to logistics, but the fact that they are interested in reporting this while we are still in the planning stage is good news. This event is organizing itself. History is calling.
We need to terrify and embarrass the shit out of Obama before the coming elections. The Chicago police riots of 68 booted out the decrepit corrupt corporate war-mongering Democrats that year, and it can happen again. If Republicans win in 2012, we get the Leftist loyal opposition, back out on the streets, where they have been AWOL, absent without leave, for three years.
Economist Michael Hudson calls Obama’s debt ceiling capitulation a “Nixon goes to China” moment… in reverse. There is NO WAY a Republican president could’ve gotten away with putting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and school loans on the chopping block, at the same time this country is being eaten alive by runaway military spending. Republican president and former General Dwight D. Eisenhower was far to the left of Barack Obama on the importance of building schools, not bombs. Only a Democrat, a fool of a Democrat, could sell us out this tragically. Every Democrat in Congress would have opposed this debt ceiling deal if a Republican was president. It could not have passed with McCain as president. Obama is worse than McCain, and that’s pitiful. We are being sold into slavery to Wall Street by a black guy. A dumb black guy. A Wall Street black guy. A black guy who couldn’t negotiate a school lunch program. I didn’t march with Martin Luther King junior in Cicero so that our first black president could bail out Wall Street and put Social Security on the chopping block.
Even long time black activist Harry Bellefonte has lost his patience with Obama. He says that Obama’s phrase “Yes we can” was very very clever. He never said exactly what it was that “yes” we could do. He goaded us into drawing pictures inside our heads about what that would look like, and then when he got elected he immediately started saying “I never actually said that”. Right. He only said that old people depend on Social Security and Medicare to survive. Not that he would never cut them. What a snake.
Fuck Obama. If I was black I would be appalled that he was the first black president. He’s poisoned the political waters for them. There won’t be another black president for generations after this disastrous performance.
Here’s what economist Michael Hudson reports: “When I was in Norway this summer one of the Norwegian politicians sat next to me at a dinner and said, “You know, there’s one good thing that President Obama has done, that we never anticipated in Europe. He’s shown the Europeans that we can never depend upon America again. There’s no president, no matter how good he sounds, no matter what he promises…that we’ll ever believe again. Mr. Obama has cured us. He has turned out to be our nightmare. Our problem is what to do about the American people who don’t realize this nightmare that they’ve created, this smooth-talking American Tony Blair in the White House.” Unquote.
Obama’s incompetence has turned America into shit in the eyes of the world! We have lost ALL credibility under his leadership. He’s not a psychopath like George Bush. He’s just a cipher. Nobody home. Nothing there. A silver-tongued airhead.
[cow; elephants???]
OK…Before I launch into the show, here are a few quick, but significant facts. I’m going to call this new show segment: the Rude Guy Reality Bullets. Here’s a reality bullet.
We live in a Soviet style Republic, where elections are rigged because information is manufactured and controlled. It has become impossible for democracy to function in America. We have become the United Soviet States of America. USSA.
Here’s another bullet…Wal-Mart is the biggest supporter of raising the minimum wage in the USA. Why? Their customers are minimum wage workers, and if those people get more money they’ll buy more stuff from Wal-Mart. Good for Wal-Mart.
Also…of us 300 million Americans, 2 million work for Wal-Mart. That means one out of every 150 Americans works for Wal-Mart. Astounding.
Also…There is NO proof that giving money to the rich creates jobs… and overwhelming proof that giving money to the poor does create jobs. When poor people have money they spend it, and create demand for goods and services, so workers get hired. When rich people get money they invest it – in China! What the fuck? How stupid can Americans, all the way up to and including Barack Obama…be?
Another bullet…There is no Nobel Prize for Economics. The Economics prize is only a prize handed out by the Swedish Central Bank in quote “honor of Alfred Nobel”. The Nobel family has even threatened to sue the bank for exploiting the family name, because the bankers give the prize mostly to free market economists, of whom Alfred Nobel would never have approved. Just more smoke and mirrors from the ratholes of academia. Thoughtful people like me respectfully contemplated the babble of assholes like Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, assuming he was selected for that hallowed prize by some committee of economic geniuses, NOT by a huge fucking bank. It’s like calling Boy Scout badges Presidential badges of honor! A massive fucking deception.
Also…the internet guerillas called Anonymous just made Paypal lose 1 billion dollars in stock value, in retaliation for prosecuting some 15-year-old kids who participated in distributed denial of service attacks against Paypal, when Paypal unilaterally froze the payment of donations made to Julian Assange. I lost the 10 bucks I donated to Assange, and you know how broke I am.
According to the tweet from AnonymousIRC: On July 27 Paypal lost 3.08% of share value. About $1 Billion dollars. Because 35,000 Paypal accounts were abruptly closed. Sez AnonymousRC | Thanks, Mateys! | #(hashmark)OpPayPal #( hashmark)AntiSec
I didn’t close my account entirely since it’s the only way I have at the moment to receive book royalties and donations from you folks. But I did remove the small amount of money I had parked there from donations and book sales over the past couple months.
Anonymous made their point. By threatening to hack Paypal and rob all their accounts, the rumors flew, people withdrew their money, and the stock price crashed. This is the weak underbelly of capitalism I’ve talked about before on this show. This is exactly how to GET them. Destroy their public image. Destroy their stock market valuation.
If Paypal is gonna operate as a proxy government enforcer, screwing people like Assange out of their lawfully acquired donations, then they are gonna get screwed back. It’s the only thing corporations understand. Losing money.
Long live Anonymous! Hear hear!
[bird]
OK… Last month we left off with a quote out of Chris Hedges’ book, Death of the Liberal Class:
Remember what it was ?…I do.
Said Hedges: Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to feed yourself by connecting a tube from your mouth to your anus.
I told you I was going to start this month’s show by finishing up my book report on Death of the Liberal Class…but I lied. Too much else is happening right now.
I’m going to play some online audio clips from other people. We need to get our thinking straight about WHY we need to Occupy Wall Street, and occupy Washington DC, in September and October. So here’s why.
First…Michael Hudson is gonna explain the rot of our financial system, and of the Obama administration. Here’s Michael Hudson.
[Michael Hudson audio clips]
Next…Ralph Nader tells us how big a coward, Barrack Obama is, for refusing to appoint Elizabeth Warren as the head of the new Consumer Protection agency she invented. Also Ralph tells us how easy it would be to eliminate the deficit by exerting the political will to cut corporate welfare, stop Pentagon waste, tax corporations, stop the Iraq and Afghan wars, and bring home the troops stuck in Europe and Asia since World War Two. Here’s my favorite American political animal: Ralph Nader.
[Ralph Nader audio clips]
Next…Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert, from the Keiser report on RT TV, warn us about the global financial terrorists we call bankers, and report on the global insurrection against them. They also deride the inflationary insanity of what the FED calls QE, quantitative easing, which quite simply is creating massive amounts of money out of thin air with computer keyboards, and thereby inflating – in other words, destroying – the value of our money. In effect, watering down workers wage even more!
But most important, they explain how the policy of the U.S. government is to keep the value of the dollar low against other currencies, in order to stimulate exports of U.S. goods and services. Seems to make sense, at first. Until you realize that the problem is that the price of oil is fixed in U.S. dollars…so when the value of the dollar goes down, the price of oil, necessarily, goes up! Because now it takes more dollars to buy the same amount of oil. But our wages are not going up! So lower dollar prices make higher oil prices. Yes, we export a few more American-made chochkies, but even though by devaluing the dollar our export numbers go up, our trade deficit also goes up, because two thirds of the U.S. trade deficit is caused by oil! QE. Quantitative easing, is economic insanity. Smoke and mirrors from the American political/economic fun house called the FED. I’ll let Max and Stacey explain it.
And as always, they revisit their running theme of how the Nazis couldn’t take over the Greeks in World War Two with tanks and dive bombers. But now, the German banks have done the job, with a financial helping hand from the neocon Jewish Bankers at Goldman Sachs. What a team: German and Jewish bankers. The entire globe is fucked.
Here’re Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert.
[Keiser Report clips]
Find all their programs at: rt.com/programs/keiser-(hyphen)report or just Google K-E-I-S-E-R report. K-E-I-S-E-R
Finally…Richard Wolff, author of “Capitalism Hits the Fan”, explains why we need a populist revolt against the banksters. Right now. If I was 25-years-old again wild horses couldn’t keep me from being on the streets of New York and Washington this fall. Richard Wolff.
[Richard Wolff clips]
[record: “skipping ahead” to jump over rough cuts]
[bird]
OK…No doubt some of you think this was a fake show since so much of it was pre-recorded clips. But it takes me one hour to record a typical show, and 15 to 20 hours to edit it, mix it, clean up glitches and fuckups, and remove things like the guttural spitfire mumbling of Amy Goodman and the brainless babbling of her sidekick Juan “Pancho” Gonzalez. So maybe it took me an hour less to make this show…19 hours instead of 20.
Nonetheless you’re off the hook because I am not going to try and shame you into sending me a podcast donation or buying a book. Happy Occupy Wall Street month. The good news is that Amazon.com sent me a $37 payment for Kindle book sales. And thanks to that, since – for the first time in 17 years, I have just gone two months without a payment from paper book sales – I’ve decided not to hang myself from a post office flag pole.
But please let me know if anyone out there is in a position to report on the upcoming populist demonstrations in New York and Washington D.C., this fall. This is HAPPENING people. Tahrir Square was not organized any better than we are. The occupation of the Madison, Wisconsin courthouse was not organized any better than we are. We just have to show up! History will do the rest.
Onward and upward!
[“no more bullshit…” Rude Guy voice]
