[The Rude Guy Podcast #88 the American Spring March 15, 2012]
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]
