posted by richzubaty on Jul 8
CLICK HERE to listen to The Rude Guy Podcast #69
or RIGHT CLICK HERE (Apple command/click) then click “Save Target As” to DOWNLOAD the podcast to your computer or playback device
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posted by richzubaty on Jul 8
The Rude Guy Podcast #69 July 8, 2010
[BP and the CIA, The Cost of War, and Grow Your Own]
Rich Zubaty here. Cranking out another podcast for no reason other than I’m turning 62 and have no good idea what else I’m supposed to be doing with my life.
Old age sucks. My memory is going the way of the giant bluefin tuna, I have bone spurs in my neck so I can’t lift heavy suitcases, if I get five hours a day where my attention span is greater than that of a hummingbird I feel like throwing a party. I can’t sensibly go on one of my famous invigorating, therapeutic, traveling expeditions, to Brazil, or Bali, or somewhere, to clear the cobwebs out of my brain, unless I somehow recruit a younger stronger traveling companion.
On top of that, Kathleen Parker from the Washington Post just seemingly ripped off one of my podcasts, and gave me no credit whatsoever. On June 30, 2010, she came out with an opinion piece called: Obama: our first female president. In October 2009 I made a podcast called: Barack Obama: our first female president. How about that? She even segued into it like I did by saying…if Bill Clinton was our first black president, then Barack Obama is our first female president. Then she echoed me again, this time from last month’s Podcast 68, noting Obama’s cautious feminine, management style…in the face of the gulf oil gusher, that cried out for decisive leadership…saying, as I had said…what was he doing delivering jokes to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, when he should have been on Air Force One flying to the Louisiana coast. Three coincidences in a row? It looked like flat out plagarism to me.
So I emailed her and the Washington Post Ombudsman. She said she’d never heard of me, and that anyway she doesn’t write the titles to her pieces, someone else does. After a few more emails back and forth I concluded that she did not go to my podcast, listen to it or read it, and rip it off. I am not accusing her of that. However I still believe some combination of summer interns at the paper, clever quipping at Washington cocktail parties, by trendy eavesdroppers, and maybe even some precipitation from the…Overmind, [RG voice: the Overmind] conspired to materialize my ideas in her head. That’s kind of how memes work, spreading like a virus from mind to mind. And it happens to me a lot. Which is why I do not think it is entirely accidental. For instance, I do a podcast bit about how being born a poor white guy in America does not confer any great advantage, and three weeks later presidential candidate Obama is saying that being born a poor white guy in America is like arriving here as an immigrant. Someone out there is listening. And repackaging my stuff.
Years ago Bill Maher lifted material right out of What Men Know That Women Don’t, but in that instance I had sent him the book, so I know it got across his drawbridge. Yes, I’m delighted they steal my stuff, I just wish they would mention my name and send a few dozen more people to my podcast and web site. But I’m sure they learned years ago, from their media attorneys, never to admit to anyone that they stole your idea, because that admission might mean they legally owe you something. Said Lionel Trilling: “Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.” By and large mainstream media types are thieves. That’s how they got there and that’s how they stay there. What could it hurt to say: here’s an idea I got from Joe Blow, or Rich Zubaty.
[donkey]
And then, of course, as you know, I’m demoralized by the job Barack Obama is NOT doing, running our government. We voted for Martin Luther King Junior and got Redd Foxx. He fired McChrystal but didn’t fire the war. The only word for that is…stupid. He got handed an opportunity to pull out and blame it on the generals, but instead he’s doubling down. On track to spend more money on war than any president since World War Two.
The man is too gullible to be president. He BELIEVES in things, that are not worthy of being believed.
His first mistake was believing Tom Dashle – that he was the perfect Washington insider to spearhead healthcare reform. But Senator Daschle had neglected to pay his taxes on a free limousine service that had been provided to him for years, by a billionaire patron, so the Republicans ate him alive, and fucked health care reform right out of the gate.
Second Obama mistake was believing that the health insurance companies really wanted healthcare reform. Is he soft in the head, or what? Then he believed the generals who told him they could wrap up this Afghan war lickety split, if Obama would just give them more troops so they could have a surge, like in Iraq. Problem is, our surge in Iraq had nothing to do with decreasing the violence. The Shiites beat the crap out of the Sunnis and the Sunnis made peace with them. At the same time, we gave up our insane plan to have our oil corporations run the Iraq oil industry by finally resurrecting the Iraqi government Oil Ministry. The surge won’t work in Afghanistan because it didn’t work in Iraq. It’s irrelevant. It’s stupid. It just makes them hate us more.
Next Obama made a total ass out of himself, telling us offshore drilling is safe, because he had believed in the oil industry’s reassuring propaganda, on oil-spill containment. From that he moved right along to believing Wall Street’s opinion that America needs mammoth, too-big-to-fail, banks, in order to compete globally, right…and that capping credit card interest rates would quote “hurt small business”, right…and that fantasy synthetic derivatives, like betting on movie box office receipts — that bleed capital out of the nuts and bolts REAL economy — will NOT be regulated as the Las Vegas style casino gambling they really are, but will get allll dressed up in the thin-lipped arrogance of Wall Street securities…right. And there’s no need to discuss putting a tax on all stock market transactions, like England has, to raise money to put our people back to work rebuilding bridges and roads. The people saved the markets, but we have no right to expect the markets to save the people. Right…So much for banking reform. Over and over again Obama’s employed the same guys who made the mess, to clean up the mess. You do that with plumbers and auto mechanics. Not with bankers and oil companies.
I just read a column in Huffington Post by John Hari, from the London Independent, who said, in 2006 speculators like Goldman Sachs saw the housing market start to collapse, so they pulled their money out of that and started speculating in the worldwide food market, driving up the price of wheat 80% and rice 320%. 200 million people starved, there were food riots in 30 countries and one government was violently overthrown. But bizarrely, more food had been produced that year than the year before, but the year before the real market had set the prices of food, and in 2006 the market speculators had set the prices. The greedheads and banksters took their hundreds of billions in profit out of the housing mess, and had nowhere to stick ‘em, so they stuck ‘em in food. And starved and murdered people worldwide. Barbarians in $2000 suits.
And these are the people Obama believes.
Does anyone see a pattern here? Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Jul 15
CLICK HERE to listen to The Rude Guy Podcast #59
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 #59
posted by richzubaty on Jul 15
[The Rude Guy Podcast #59 July 15, 2009]
This is Rich Zubaty, the Rude Guy. Its time for us to learn something about Afghanistan. I just saw the movie Kite Runner. Best movie I’ve seen in decades. But it made me remember, we have now had U.S. troops in Afghanistan for 8 years, twice as long as World War Two, and two years less than Vietnam So…I ordered a half dozen library books on Afghanistan and started reading. Which is what I do, and what this podcast is about. While you’re off doing your job, working to pay your rent, I’m living in my car so I don’t have to pay any rent, which gives me the time to go to the library, to learn about things, and then make podcasts about them, for you. Here’s what I found out.
Afghanistan. A country the size of Texas, is one and a half times the size of Iraq, with a million more people. Afghanistan is cut in half by the Hindu Kush mountains running east to west, with the capital city of Kabul, and the Bagram air base, plopped down on the main north/south pass through the mountains.
Estimated population: 32 million
Afghani soldiers: 140,000
U.S. and European “coalition” troops: 60,000
Total allied troops: 200,000
Taliban enemy combatants: 20,000
Stop right there.
20,000 Taliban… 200,000 well-equipped modern soldiers are fighting 20,000 guys with rifles and pickup trucks? For eight years? Twice as long as World War Two?…In a nation of 32 million people, which has supposedly been held hostage by these 20,000 extremists, for what? 15 years? That makes one Taliban for every one thousand six hundred Afghani people. In military circles it’s the rule of thumb, that it takes one soldier per forty people, to control a population. In other words, in Afghanistan, there are 40 TIMES more people, than the Taliban soldiers could effectively control. Yes, the Taliban used to run the country until we kicked them out. But the Taliban were never militarily in control. They led by religious example.
Sixty years ago Chairman Mao said: war is not a military act, war is a political action. Which means, if the people are not on your side, you can never ever win. No matter how much territory you take in the daylight, at night it reverts back to the enemy. If the people perceive you as invaders, you can never ever win. In this war, in Afghanistan, the Taliban are not the foreign invaders…WE are. We can never ever win.
The Afghani people do not trust us any more than they trusted the Russians. They view us as blue-eyed, black-skinned foot soldiers of a bastard religion. Careless, ruthless imperialists, who want to use their country as a military camp, and air base, to control the oil and gas of the Central Asian Republics, just north of Afghanistan.
The main thing we’ve achieved in Afghanistan is to drive the Taliban across the border into Pakistan and cause the evacuation of over a million Pakistanis from the Swat Valley. Total military fuck up.
There is no military solution to the war in Afghanistan, because the war in Afghanistan is not a war. Like Vietnam, it’s a police action, fought house to house, through the kitchens and back yards of a hostile population.
Only the Afghani and Pakistani people can win this conflict. Our new commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, wisely said: we have to get the Afghani people on our side. Unquote. He’s right, but this is eight years later. What the hell have we been doing there for the last 8 years? Pissing off the locals, killing their moms and sisters in accidental air strikes, and creating yet more maddened Taliban recruits. It’s the same disastrous policy that made it impossible for us to win in Vietnam. The locals hate us.
We need to supply the Afghanis with whatever they need to fight the Taliban, help them rebuild schools and hospitals and irrigation systems, declare victory, and get the fuck out. Right now! The sooner the better.
But hey! Who cares about the Afghanis? Fuck them. The real question is. What’s happening to us? What’s this war doing to us?
We pay $775,000 dollars per year, to keep one US solider in Afghanistan. Three quarters of a million dollars, per soldier, per year.
Obama just shoved through a $105 billion dollar supplemental spending bill to pay for our two wars. We spend $185 Billion dollars a year on war.
Of that we lose 40 to 50% of our money to sleazy subcontractors. Middle men of middle men of middle men, who do nothing for the war except pass along contracts and profiteer from them.
The long term cost of the Afghan war has been estimated to be $3 trillion dollars, according to Linda J. Blimes, author of…. the Three Trillion Dollar War.
And here’s what really sucks…we’ve just been told that Obama’s health care plan will cost too much: one trillion dollars over ten years. That’s $100 billion dollars a year. But we’re paying $185 billion dollars a year for war in Asia.
In other words, we can either have health care for all Americans, or unwinnable and unending war in Asia.
It’s a no-brainer. Why are we even arguing about this? Stop the war now and give us health care. Period. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Feb 15
Rich Zubaty
The good news is:
1) Obama signed an executive order to close down Guantanamo prison and stop the torture.
2) He has invited and received overtures from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran to get past decades of ill will and at least talk to one another.
3) He has decided to go slow on an anti-missile defense system in Poland which, means Russia will go slow at targeting nuclear missiles at Poland.
The bad news:
Obama doesn’t know how to play hardball politics and that is gonna bite his ass sooner rather than later. The Republicans all say what a nice guy he is, but not one Republican congressman voted for the stimulus package.
There are two good ways to get their attention:
1) Threaten to yank Bush’s rich people’s tax cuts NOW, not wait for them to expire, unless the Republicans decide to meet him in the middle somewhere.
2) Threaten to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld for high crimes and misdemeanors while in office, unless Republicans decide to meet him in the middle somewhere.
This country has drifted so far to the right we don’t even know where the middle really is any more. Time to push back the goal posts.
Capitalists want the corporations to run everything. Communists want the government to run everything. Socialists, like me, want the government to run big enterprises and individuals to run small ones – like Europe, which has TWICE AS MANY self-employed people as the good old “free market” USA. Twice as many self-employed workers, as a percentage of population.
The middle is socialism, not Obamaism. We should be rattling our sabers to nationalize Exxon Mobile, not bail out Wall Street.
Time to play hardball. The Republicans didn’t vote for Obama for a good reason. They don’t like his programs. They have to be kicked in the butt to get behind his agenda. As Rush Limbaugh said, he wants Obama to fail. Because if he succeeds it means that everything Limbaugh and Reagan and all the right wing geeks have been saying for 30 years proves out as ideological bullshit. Free market my ass. You can’t give Wall Street a trillion dollar bailout and pretend that this is a free market. It’s Corporate Communism, where corporations run the government.
Time to play hardball with them like they’ve been doing for 30 years with us. Kick the right wing bastards in the ass and hold ‘em down.