posted by richzubaty on Aug 11
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posted by richzubaty on Aug 11
The Rude Guy Podcast #70 August 11, 2010
[Wikileaks Vietnamistan]
Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy, having a great day, because I finally have some new heroes to admire. They’re not giants like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr, but, in a depressing era of posers and frauds, they are true heroes. To me a hero has to be both smart and brave. Smart without brave and you get Barack Obama, or Dick Cheney. Brave without smart and you get just about every U.S. soldier who is on the ground in Afghanistan. If you’re so smart, what’re ya doin’ there soldier? Quit before you die. We need you back home… But my new heroes are both smart and brave. And one of them IS a soldier.
My new heroes are Julian Assange, who founded Wikileaks. And Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked, to Wikileaks, the video of the Apache helicopter cannon fire murder, by high tech video game, of two Reuters reporters and 18 innocent bystanders. Plus severely wounding two young kids.
Private First Class Bradley Manning, a 22 year old intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, has been moved from a military jail in Kuwait, to the Marine Corps Base Brig, in Quantico, Virginia. Here’s what I got off his web site:
www.bradleymanning.Org
Manning remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation into the charges lodged against him on July 5. Manning was transferred because of the potential for lengthy continued pretrial confinement, given the complexity of the charges, and the ongoing investigation… And so forth.
Bradley Manning is facing decades in prison for doing the right goddam thing, and even me, with my ridiculous financial situation, sent his legal defense fund ten bucks off a credit card. It made me feel good to do that. Much better than buying a pizza. I recommend it to everybody.
www.bradleymanning.Org
And then there’s Julian Assange…who’s a hunted man! Living underground…somewhere. Nobody knows where. If the U.S. government could figure out some way to destroy him, and his organization, without creating an international outcry, they would do it in a second. Which is why it’s important that his name is known, and his work is known. As Abbie Hoffman said during the anti-Vietnam police riots, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, more or less: “as long as the cameras are on you, you’re OK. It’s the people who are off camera who the cops’ll beat up. But when the cameras get turned off…look out.”
This guy Assange is brave. Really really brave. Even Seymour Hersh, the New York Times reporter who broke the My Lai massacre story, told Assange, quote, “watch…your…back”. Assange is finally getting some safe harbor in Iceland and Sweden, but he has been living on the run, on the constant move, for a year or more. “Watch your back bro.”
Last week he released 76,000 documents which are mostly U.S. military field reports from Afghanistan. What I now call: Vietnamistan. Vietnamistan. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Jul 8
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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 Jun 1
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posted by richzubaty on Jun 1
[The Rude Guy Podcast #68 June 1, 2010]
[Obama’s Oil Spill]
[clip of FDR speech: I welcome their hatred!]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The president of presidents. A real man’s man. Even though he was crippled with polio and couldn’t walk.
This is Rich Zubaty the Rude Guy. I don’t know why I still make these shows, but a couple hundred people still download ‘em, so I guess that’s something. Though they never email, and never donate anything, so it’s hard to know why they download ‘em. Or if they even listen.
Once upon a time I thought that this show could exert some populist pressure to push President Obama further to the political left. But I’ve given up on that. He’s too ignorant. He’s too conservative. He’s too slow of a learner and I am tired of being caught up in his learning curve. He still thinks corporations are his friends, even as this BP disaster mires his presidency waste deep in petroleum muck. Even as the health care industry turned health care reform into a joke. Even as Wall Street turned banking reform into a joke. Even Donna Brazille, big black mama of the Democratic National Committee, said that the problem with the Obama administration is, that it’s not tough enough.
Anyone who read my book What Men Know That Women Don’t knows that this feminized, I’m OK you’re OK, touchy feely consensus management style is exactly what produces catastrophes like the gulf oil spill. The woman Obama appointed to head the Mineral Management Service that was supposed to be overseeing drilling regulation just resigned. But that’s not good enough. The buck doesn’t stop there. Obama is harping about “the cozy relationship” between petroleum companies and regulators when he should be ranting about fraud and bribes and corruption. But he won’t do that. Because he’s not tough enough. Becasue he doens’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Because he’s the first female president of the United States. And frankly, most women I’ve ever met would do a better, tougher job of running this country.
Moreover…Someone besides me finally said it. Barack Obama is, scary. Chris Mathews from Hardball said Obama’s reaction to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is, Quote “scary. He’s acting more like a Vatican observer than president of the United States.” Unquote. Then Dan Froomkin on Huffington Post echoed Mathews saying that Obama’s oil disaster behavior is scary.
The New York Times said it’s well past time for Obama to do something, even if it IS risky. But that’s his Achille’s heel. Isn’t it? He’s a school teacher. He’s a risk adverse president. Which is almost a contradiction in terms. Presidents have to be willing to take on risk. But here a momentous crisis explodes in his face, and Obama sits down on a rock to analyze it.
The man is pathetically incompetent, and he is NOT a fast learner. The BP oil spill IS going to be his Katrina. He’s making jokes at the Washington Press Club Dinner, and eating gourmet molé at a trendy Mexican state dinner, while the marine resources for the southern half of the country are being destroyed. When the globs of goop reach Long Island, his presidency will be over.
I just hope Borgs don’t arrive from another galaxy, far far away, while he’s still president, or he’ll start giving speeches about how, resistance is futile, and we’re all in this together, and how there are no American machines, and no American people, but just American machine-people.
I’m sure glad he wasn’t president when Joseph Stalin was around, or France would be speaking Russian. And I’m glad we had Franklin Delano Roosevelt and not Barack Obama to point the way after the great Depression, or the rural electric program and the union movement and the Federal Highway system would not have existed.
I voted for this silver-tongued coward and I feel betrayed. He was an establishment whore from the moment he walked on the national stage, and started babbling about how there was only one America, and it was both black and white. No, there was only one Barack Obama, and he was both black and white.
A former poker player companion of his said, Obama is the worst kind of guy to play poker with. He antes up and takes his cards. If he doesn’t like them he drops out immediately. If he likes them he places bets, and everyone else drops out, and he wins a small pot. Boring. Like watching a turtle run a race.
He’s only had two visions in his life I can think of. One was to marry Michelle. And the other was to become president. But beyond that – nothing. No idea that corporations are too powerful and have to be cut down to size. No idea that we cannot control Asian oil and gas by occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, in obedience to long-disproved cold war geopolitical fantasies. The man got the Nobel Peace prize and sent more troops to Afghanistan the next fucking week. He has NO vision.
He is a tinkerer and a technocrat, jamming political alliances together like they were legos. Let’s see: take this funnel and stick it on the end of that hose, then electrify the hose and jam it up an elephant’s ass, and then, when I talk into the funnel my voice will come out of the mouth of the elephant sounding just like…Hamid Karzai…and the Taliban will be defeated. This is how he thinks! That an incremental patchwork of half-solutions is going to add up to an unprecedented policy victory. Well…it always worked for him before. When he was a school teacher. Duh.
The man never managed anything more complicated than a classroom full of greedy law students, and then he bullshit his way into becoming CEO of the largest corporation on earth. The U.S. Government. How did this happen? We were riding on a national tidal wave demanding something wildly different than we were getting from George W. Bush, and all we got is different skin color. We got a healthcare bill that helps big medical corporations, and a banking reform bill that helps big banks.
We voted for Martin Luther King Jr. and we got Redd Foxx, from Sanford and son.
Barack Obama is a one term president, 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 Dec 2
Tom Hayden said its time to peel the Obama sticker off his car. And I know why. Barack Obama distorts the truth.
In response to those of us who oppose his Afghani military build up Obama said:
“They argue that [Afghanistan] cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.
“And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now – and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance – would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.”
So…Obama arrogantly puts us down by claiming we rely on, “A false reading of history”? What a stupid, off-the-wall statement. No one who lived through Vietnam has any kind of false idea what happened historically during the Vietnam War. The entire nation was lied to by the generals until Walter Cronkite came back with a true assessment of the situation. Which was, that we could not win that war.
So what would our “history” be false about? Current conditions on the ground in Afghanistan? That’s not history. That’s a dispute over facts. Do you believe the generals’ facts? Believe the guys who make war for a living? The guys who don’t get promoted unless there’s a war? Or do you believe the CIA guys and diplomats who have lived the politics of the situation?
No, this is not about history. This is about facts. And one major fact is that Al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan to plan attacks on the USA. 9/11 was planned in Hamburg Germany. Indeed, most 9/11 training took place in flight schools in the USA itself. If Osama bin Laden, our great friend and warrior against the Soviets, had asked for asylum in America, WE WOULD HAVE GIVEN IT TO HIM. He could have planned the whole thing from Lubbock Texas for fuck sakes. Read the rest of this entry »
posted by richzubaty on Nov 26
CLICK HERE to listen to The Rude Guy Podcast #63
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