posted by richzubaty on Apr 16
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posted by richzubaty on Apr 16
[The Rude Guy Podcast #67 April 16, 2010]
[The Two Kinds of Freedom]
I’m Rich Zubaty The Rude Guy…We all love freedom right? We’re just a bunch of freedom lovin’ fools. But that’s how politicians fool us. Because there are two kinds of freedom.
Conservative freedom and Liberal freedom
Conservative freedom is the freedom of Thomas Jefferson. Often called Liberty. The – I’m a huge plantation owner with hundreds of slaves and I don’t want the government to fuck with me – kind of freedom. Fuck Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was the first neocon. An aristocrat in democrats clothing who thought voting was for rich people only, and who didn’t want any politically potent church wagging a finger at his slave holdings… A world built entirely on conservative freedoms would be a dangerous hell, where nobody would stop at red lights, and corporations would pollute every river, and fresh water fishing would be an extinct pastime, right up there with teepee building. Think Afghanistan, or Mexico. Liberty is basically anarchy, commerce without responsibility, rule of the jungle. Republicans are free market anarchists, blowing up everything in their way, to make millions.
Liberal Freedom is Equality of Opportunity. The Martin Luther King Jr kind of freedom, where a person will be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. It’s the opposite of… the don’t fuck with me because I’m rich, freedom. It’s the, don’t fuck with me because I’m poor freedom. It’s the freedom, the RIGHT, to equal treatment before the law in government, school, jobs, everything. It’s the authority to demand that:… I want my kids to have the same opportunities your kids have…kind of freedom.
I’m bored to death with health care talk and so are you. But stay with me here. Precisely because we were immersed in that insane debate for over a year, we’ve all absorbed some complex information, that will help us understand the two kinds of freedom. Conservative freedom and liberal freedom.
The Obama health care bill serves up BOTH kinds of freedom, and even demonstrates absolutely clearly why they cannot coexist. So let’s have a look at what we got with Obamacare. Which is really just Richard Nixon’s health care proposal 40 years late.
The main thing I love about the new healthcare bill is that it reverses the demented Ronald Reagan philosophy, that government is always wrong. Always the enemy and always the problem. That the worst thing you can ever hear is a knock at your door, with a guy standing there saying: we’re from the government and we’re here to help. That’s what we’re supposed to be afraid of? Fuck Ronald Reagan. GE TV puppet.
The liberal freedom Obamacare provides is the freedom for everybody to have health care. Not to be free FROM having health care, but to actually have it. Everyone is good enough and equal enough and qualified enough to get health care. And if you don’t have enough money then we’ll figure out some way to help you.
The conservative freedom Obamacare offers, is the freedom from government competition for insurance companies, hospitals and drug companies. Freedom from competition is the exact opposite of capitalism, but never mind. This is the healthcare industry we’re talking about. It OWNS the Congress and the courts and the president.
So, under Obamacare, the Insurance companies will not have to compete against a public option. Despite the fact that we are always being told how efficient corporations are, and how inefficient the government is, in back room deals Obama torpedoed the public option, that vile form of government INTERFERENCE — that could cut our national healthcare costs by one third or more. So, we will all pay one third more for healthcare, to preserve a fundamental conservative freedom. The freedom to make money from sick people. That makes about as much sense as closing down all interstate highways and forcing us all to drive on corporate-owned toll roads. Thank you Ronald Reagan you cockroach in the cupboards of history.
Also…drug companies will not have to compete against foreign drug imports. Our sold-out government actually PREVENTS imports, as if importing a drug is a risky behavior, but importing uninspected beef and pork from Costa Rica and Brazil is not.
Also…rest assured, there are no brand new public hospitals on the architects drawing tables. When I grew up all hospitals were in some sense public. Supported by local government. Ever since Nixon gave us private HMOs, as a substitute for his original comprehensive health care proposal, hospitals have been for-profit businesses, not, not-for-profit, public facilities.
This is why health industry stocks shot up the day after Obamacare was passed. It’s a multi-billion dollar corporate welfare giveway to the healthcare industry.
And then…there’s the GIANT disconnect. The reason this new healthcare bill will never work, is, of course, the mandate requiring all Americans to buy health insurance. Forcing Americans to buy anything IS against the constitution. I really hope this gets overturned in court or we will have all kinds of weird mandates coming down the road at us from this insane precedent. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Mar 3
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posted by richzubaty on Mar 3
[The Rude Guy Podcast #66 March 03, 2010]
Stop Paying Your Credit Cards
I’m Rich Zubaty. Welcome to the Truth Police. This is the place where we’re serious as hell about telling the truth. No posturing. No spin. No fantasies. Just truth. No matter WHO gets hurt. Any entertainment you get from this will be purely accidental.
Page one
The Democratic Party has been running the City of Chicago since before there was a Santa Claus…and that’s the problem with having Chicago Democrats run the White House. They’re accustomed to being the Ruling Party, and they don’t know any different. They are the party of labor and business, unions and corporations, waitresses, janitors, commodities brokers, carpenters, Sears and Boeing. It’s a party run like a third world dictatorship by way of bribes and payoffs and back room deals. I grew up there, and I know.
But that’s not how the rest of the country runs, and that’s not how the people in the rest of the country WANT it to run. We want two parties, with different ideas, that take a stand and fight it out. We try things for a little while the Republican way, then a little while the Democrat way, and which ever way is best prevails over time. Or that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But we don’t want one big party deciding everything. That’s Corporate Communism. Government and business in bed with each other. Also known as fascism.
Barack Obama is Bill Clinton with rockets in his pockets. I warned months ago that Obama was poised to take triangulation, what Clinton called The Third Way, to unimagined heights of selling out. Within nine months in office he drove my bullshit meter right off the scale. And now he’s just announced $8 billion dollars for clean energy – formerly known as nuclear power, the filthiest nastiest energy ever invented. Ugh.
The Republicans hate both Clinton and Obama, and for the same reason. These are the kind of Dems who conquer Republican turf. Republicans have sold their souls for a century to make the insurance companies THEIRS, to make Wall Street THEIRS, to make huge corporations THEIRS, and all of a sudden here’s this conniving squirt Rahm Emanuel, making back room deals. Sucking up to the big money. Doing the bidding of the very people the Dems were elected to oppose. They don’t know any better. They’re the Ruling Party in Chicago and they expect to operate that way in Washington.
Time for Rahm Emanuel to take a subway to hell.
[bird]
Here’s some breaking news: I finally found out why people have to die. I just figured it out. It’s for our own good. After 70 years of watching the good fishing places get poisoned and fished out. Of watching the pheasants disappear and the purple martins fail to come back in spring. Of watching god-like politicians replaced by technocratic cowards, and even god-like gangsters replaced by Wall Street quants – after 70 years of that, we’ve just had enough. It’s time to die. Our teen idols are gone…the Marlon Brandos and Jim Morrisons, replaced by grumpy, nihilist rappers, wearing gold chains, and airhead songstresses cloaked in dyed chicken feathers. Martin Luther King Junior replaced by Condoleeza Rice! Walter Cronkite replaced by Glen Beck for God sakes. Vine ripened tomatoes replaced by tasteless bio-engineered cardboard sludge-balls. It’s for our own good, death is. How many good things can you lose over 70 or 80 years before you become constantly depressed, and just live in the past anyway?
I’ve made the mistake of returning to the old fishing holes and the old girlfriends and the old politics, and I am instantly struck by how stupid I was, not to have let them live on as wonderful old memories, instead of revisiting them in all their degenerate horror. So don’t be sad about death. It really is for the best.
But before I die I figured out one good way to jam my boot up the ass of Wall Street. I’m going to stop paying my credit cards. Just flat out stop paying them. I’ve never missed a credit card payment in my life, but I’m gonna stop paying and stick Bank of America with $7000 dollars. Well…not really. I’ve been paying out a thousand dollars a year since 2001, and that makes $9000 dollars I’ve paid out, on $7000 dollars worth of credit. So that’s plenty. That’s enough. They made their money back on me. That’s how I see it. That’s not how they see it. But I don’t care anymore how they see it. What I have to say to them is: fuck you you greedy bastards, I’ve had enough.
And what pushed me over the brink of finally having had enough, is this: Bank of America can go to the Federal Reserve and borrow the $7000 I owe them, at one quarter of one percent interest. The FED makes this money up out of thin air, and lends it to Bank of America, at one QUARTER of one percent. Then they turn around and lend that to me at 14%. That’s 60 TIMES more. 6000% more. For every dollar they pay on interest for the funny money they borrowed from the Fed, they get 60 dollars back from me. And they don’t think they should be regulated?
I agree, they should be lined up against a wall and shot! They should be doused with red paint and rolled through the streets. They should be put to work growing onions and cabbages in Alaska. They should be given brooms and forced to sweep up the slums. How would you like to be some unemployed janitor, looking down from the ninth floor of your tenement, watching a banker sweeping up the broken glass in the street. Wouldn’t that make your day? Wouldn’t that make you feel like America is working again? The entire economy would bounce back in a few weeks if people saw that happening. Bankers actually working. How unique. How special.
The key to this is, if we ALL stop paying, the bankers are really gonna freak out. If we won’t borrow money from them at 6000% profit, what’ll they do? Lower it to 5000%. 4000?
That’s how we stopped the Vietnam War. It’s not covered in the history books, but that’s how we stopped that war. When we ALL said we weren’t gonna fight, the soldiers, the draftees, the students, the workers…everyone…the war stopped. But I’m not waiting on anyone else. I’m just gonna stop right now. And urge you to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Jan 17
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posted by richzubaty on Jan 17
[The Rude Guy Podcast #65 January 17, 2010]
[FDR: "I welcome their hatred" speech.]
Rich Zubaty here. Welcoming you to the Reality Cult. The show that’s about reality…not fantasy. Not Rush Limbaugh talking points, not the Democratic Party platform, not Barack Obama’s to-do list, not fantasy. Reality.
This just in. Natives of the South Pacific island of Vanuatu recently held a, quote “conciliation ceremony”, with the great great grandson of the British missionary, the Reverend John Williams, whom the islanders ATE when he came ashore in 1839. They claim their forefathers had eaten him to, quote, “absorb the power of their enemy”. Nonetheless, 160 years later they still feel “guilt” over killing and eating the famous Christian missionary, and therefore presented great great grandson, Charles Milner-Williams with…a SEVEN YEAR OLD GIRL…I shit you not… a SEVEN YEAR OLD GIRL, who will NOT be eaten. But whose education will be paid for by the British aristocratic family. Win win for the natives. First they eat the great great grandfather, then get his family to pay for their daughter’s private education in the best English schools.
See what I mean about reality.
[bird]
I’ve actually begun to think that one big reason President Obama is in no hurry to end the wars, is because he’s afraid to throw a couple million more people out of their jobs, making guns and bombs, in this rotten economy – as if they couldn’t be reassigned to repairing falling bridges and crumbling schools. But staying the maddening course, set by George W Bush, is the safe way to handle it. And that’s the way our pragmatic president does things. The safe way. The easy way. The convenient way. The way that makes the fewest waves and fewest enemies. The CONSERVATIVE way. We now have a populist leader who has convinced us that War is Peace, Conformity is Creativity and No Change is Change. Someday soon, in order to avoid mass insanity, we’re gonna have to go back to using the dictionary definitions of things, not just whatever sounds good in a sound bite.
It’s gotten to the point where I cannot stand the sound of Barack Obama’s voice. As soon as I hear it I change the channel, just like I did with George W Bush. It just plain annoys me listening to him serving up vinegar and calling it champagne. It makes me angry.
My shrink tells me that I’m angry because I am fearful. That anger is always caused by fear. Oh really? That’s like telling me that pigs can’t fly because they don’t have wings. There’s a whole lot more to the story. Pigs can’t fly because they don’t have hollow bones and streamlined bodies and proper wing muscles. Like so many things in clinical psychology, what my shrink tells me is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.
I’m angry because Barack Obama lied. To me and to the nation. And in lying to us he fucked up an enormous opportunity for change. Fucked up a historical swing of the pendulum from conservatism back to liberalism. No, fuck liberalism. Way past liberalism…to Progressivism. Maybe even socialism. Once again, the Democrats came out in full blown support of bullshit social issues – electing a black man or a white woman for president – and tiptoed away from supporting no bullshit economic issues – like halting the thirty-year destruction of the middle class by banks and insurance companies. And today. One year after the economic collapse directly caused by Wall Street greed, the capitalist pigs are openly saying: boy oh boy, if we didn’t start a stampede to socialism after that fuck up, it’s NEVER gonna happen. And they’re greedier and more brazen than ever. Because Barack Obama dithered and compromised and sermonized from the sidelines, instead of jumping into the game and grabbing the ball, and making the moves he told us he’d make, to straighten out the economy and the wars and insurance company parasites…which means, he lied.
Never have I seen a human being talk so much, and do so little. If you think that this guy is smart, then I’ve got a flying pig to sell you. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Dec 19
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posted by richzubaty on Dec 19
[The Rude Guy Podcast #64 December 19, 2009]
Rich Zubaty, The Rude Guy here. I had to laugh when Barack Obama gave himself a “solid B plus” for his first year in office. In my last podcast I gave him a solid D plus. Obama’s cautious plodding conservative do-nothing style, makes it look like the white guys who have been running the place for the past two hundred years, were a bunch of gung ho activists, doing a whale of a job. I’m a WHITE guy and I don’t even believe that. For progressive activists like me, the bad news is: Barack Obama is a bigger threat to us than George W. Bush ever was. If George Bush had got up before the Nobel Prize Committee and told us: “make no mistake about it, evil exists,” we would have hooted and cat-called, and shouted, “Yeah right George, and you’re it. The evil is you.” If Bush had sent another 50,000 troops into Afghanistan and told us “don’t worry, they’re gonna start coming home in a year and a half,” this is, right after the midterm elections, there would have been protests from coast to coast, and in dozens of European cities. But when Obama says it there’s one single protest demonstration in Bozeman Montana. Good for you Bozeman. If Bush had told us he was gonna fix the demolished economy, and then did everything he could to help Wall Street and nothing to help main street, for ONE SOLID YEAR, leftists would be having “die-ins” on Wall Street, and on the runways of major airports, to shut them down and get the government’s attention, like Thailand did last year.
“Change we can believe in” huh? The Politics of Hope always was bullshit. Obama’s self-centered ambition, repackaged as a populist dream. “Change we can believe in” was a slogan invented by David Axelrod, chief strategist and media advisor for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The job of media advisers is to come up with snappy slogans. Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who makes $1.5 million dollars a year as a political media consultant, had already worked for—Mayor Richard M. Daley, senatorial candidate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, and Tom Vilsack — and had run John Edwards failed 2004 presidential campaign. Indeed, Axelrod had a long time friendship with Hillary, through her work for an epilepsy foundation, co-founded by Axelrod’s mother and wife, but…friendships be damned. This was politics. If opinion polls had said that “a peanut butter sandwich on every plate” or a “wrecked car for every homeless person to sleep in” were the winningest campaign slogans, then instead of “change you can believe in” we would have been hearing about peanut butter and junk cars for two years. That’s how deep “change” went with these guys.
Yes, folks, unlike any other candidate in history, Barack Obama ran for president for two years. He never did shit as an Illinois Senator. Didn’t even oppose the war that he had so heartily opposed to get onto the national stage. Where I live shi-shi Obama house parties for the wine and cheese liberals, started in 2006. There were even bogus anti-Kucinich emails, accusing Dennis of being a racist, flooding our inboxes, because they knew Dennis Kucinich had won the 2004 Democratic primary against John Kerry, in this county.
As I’ve said before, I voted for Obama. I was proud of America for electing a brown-skinned president. The entire world was ready to march to his drum, and bring about systemic change, particularly Europe. Even some African and Muslim countries. And now I am appalled, at what a do-nothing conservative sell-out he really is. He’s taking the generals advice, instead of the grunt’s advice, to fight an international terrorist organization that operates under fifty different names, in fifty different countries…by putting 100,000 troops into Afghanistan.
His economic advisers are all understudies and former employees of Bob Rubin, the free trade pirate himself, who wrecked the entire economy by abolishing the Glass-Steagall act as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, then went over to the freshly deregulated Citigroup to make 120 million dollars before his deregulatory schemes poisoned the entire world economy. Wonder why there are no serious attempts to reinstate Glass-Steagall right now, the firewall between commercial and investment banks? Bob Rubin, the guy who smashed that firewall, is still behind the curtain, pulling the levers to run the U.S. economy.
As Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone said: it would have cost us 1.4 trillion dollars to bail out every subprime mortgage in America, but instead taxpayers ended up paying FOURTEEN trillion dollars to pay off all the bad BETS, on the subprime mortgages, placed by Wall Street banks. And President Obama wants to give us $70 billion to stimulate jobs. Whoopee do. The man lives in a shoe. And the shoe is owned by the big banks.
And that’s what this show is gonna be about. The big banks that own the American economy, and thereby own the American government, including its water boy in chief, Barack Hussein Obama. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Jun 15
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posted by richzubaty on Jun 15
[The Rude Guy Podcast #57 June 15, 2009]
This is Rich Zubaty, The Rude Guy. The Paul Harvey of podcasting. Bringing you…the Rest of the Story.
I’m still living in my car, because rent is way too high. If I pay rent I don’t have money for anything else, and in fact, I go deeper into credit card debt each month. Rent is an abomination. Rent is the way that rich people and banks, oppress poor people. And rent, these days, includes mortgages, which are really just rent of money…So how did we get here?
Long ago, in Europe and Asia and America, some man looked out over a thousand acres and said, “This is all mine”. The Indians, the local nomads, were baffled. They fell over laughing. But before long this entrepreneur had hired them, or other latecomers like himself, to “work” this land. Plowing it and raising cattle on it. Making it productive. The entrepreneur himself worked long and hard too, but he was the “owner”. He paid the others subsistence wages, corn and cows, and kept the rest for himself. And thus his wealth increased, by the capital, produced from the labor, of the local people. Labor IS capital.
Several generations later, the sons and daughters of this entrepreneur, still “owned” the land. But they had been to Harvard and Princeton, and had better things to do than raise pigs and soybeans. So they… “rented out” the land. To whom? To the grandsons and granddaughters of the very locals who had built up the capital wealth of the farm, in the first place. Overnight, the owners began renting the work of the local great grandfathers, to the local great grandchildren. What a system. This is what Proudhon meant when he said, quote, “property is theft.”
But pretty soon the renters wondered why they couldn’t be owners too? And after awhile, the heirs of the owners decided they needed ALL the capital, all the wealth, held in the farm, for other projects they were launching. So they decided to, “sell” the farm. To whom? The heirs of the very locals who had built it up. Now they were selling the work of the great grandfathers, to the great grandchildren. But the problem was, the locals didn’t have money to buy the farm.
“No problem,” said the heirs of the owners. “We’ll lend you the money, from our bank.” So the heirs of the owners made up money out of thin air, which is what banks are licensed, by the government, to do. Then they “lent” this money to the heirs of the people who had built the farm… so now the great grandchildren could “buy” the work of their great grandparents. And all they had to do was pay a little “interest”, in order to buy their great grandparents work back from the heirs of the owners.
Every wonder why there was a French Revolution? Why king’s and noblemen’s heads rolled in the streets? Why capitalism is despised over most of the globe? This is why. Rents and landlords.
An average payment on this rent of imaginary money, now called a “mortgage”, would be 90% towards interest, and 10% towards principal. It would take the better part of your lifetime, to pay off your purchase of your grandfather’s work. Grandpa’s work was stolen to begin with, and you have to buy it again. Ever wonder how rich people can afford racehorses and yachts?
And it gets worse.
For who would set the price of the farm? The renter? The owner? No, no, no, no. The “market” sets the price. What market is that? The “market” that is made up of 90% imaginary money, lent by other banks to other locals, who want to buy farms too. This is what’s meant, by growth. Growth is actually inflated value. The only way the banks can get back their imaginary money in real money, is if the economy keeps growing. Keeps inflating the value of everything, so that if you own lots of things, you get richer just for waking up in the morning. And if you don’t own anything, you get poorer sipping every morning’s coffee. But Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Party, and bastard, sell-out, right wing Democrats like Max Baucus, tell us that’s how the market works, so who are you to complain? You can buy all the work of your grandfathers for nine times more than it’s worth, plus interest. (with gravitas) The “market” says so.
Fine. You buy the farm. You make the payments. You have some good years. You have some bad years. The Banks, who have already made piles of money from you, by financing your purchase of the work of your grandfathers, the banks, lend you more money for machinery and seeds. The good years come back, but meanwhile the banks have also financed huge agribusinesses, farming hundreds of thousands of acres, which produce so much, food they drive commodity prices into the toilet. You can’t compete. You go bankrupt.
And now the banks, owned by the sons and daughters of the original “owner” of the farm, have your land back again. And they’ll even hire you to come work on it, at a subsistence wage. Just like your great great great great grandfathers did. Read the rest of this entry »
