Media Spins McJob Gains as Sunny Holiday News

Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis

-Chris Hedges

In a manner typical to highly paid liars the state-corporate media is today trumpeting the joyous news that U.S. private sector hiring rose in November at the “fastest clip in a year” according to payroll firm ADP. There hasn’t been this much job growth since… oh…. the last holiday shopping season. The hoopla and cheerleading is just more of the same reheated heavy petting of cooked to a fine fricasse economic figures to put a big smile on the face of Americans in time to go out and buy more foreign made crap to celebrate the birth of Jesus. However today’s euphoria will be January’s malaise as retailers and restaurants will begin cutting the McJobs once the last possible Christmas spending nickle has been extracted by the maxed out and largely screwed over and on the way to out American sheeple. This type of chicanery always brings to mind that nifty little trick years ago when the corrupt government was trying to get hamburger flipper gigs reclassified as manufacturing jobs to falsely portray economic figures.

The one great thing that the pocket media always can be relied on (other than lying about wars, NSA spying, exploiting dead children and shilling for a long rotten system) is selling hope and there is nothing like hope for the Christmas holidays. The old showman P.T. Barnum had it pegged that there was a sucker born every minute and the greedy bastards who run this place never fail to capitalize on the whimsical, childish and asinine thinking that large chunks of the public gobble up like precious biscuits of bullshit. The truth is that the economy is a disaster (unless you happen to own a hedge fund) that has never recovered from the 2007-2008  collapase and subsequent depression that was in typical cynical manner played down with the cute little focus group tested “Great Recession” tag. The entire “recovery” was a sham led by the thoroughly dishonest dishonest Obama administration, Wall Street inside man Timothy Geithner and millions of dollars of propaganda and public relations. I recall back in early 2009 when the homes of greedy AIG executives were being swarmed and hostile sentiment against the big banksters who wrecked the economy was threatening to lead to serious reform. HBO liberal comedian Bill Maher actually called for two random bankers to be hung from the big board on the NYSE with their balls in their mouth to send a message and then a magical wave of hope washed across the land like a blessed kiss from God himself that all would be well.

The schmucks were played again as none other than Helicopter Ben Bernanke showed up on 60 Minutes to speak glowingly of the “green shoots” of hope as the now obviously faked recovery were sprouting. Americans for the most park set down their pitchforks and torches and accepted their impoverishment at the hands of the same slimy bastards who were now pacifying them with that golden nostrum of good old American ‘can-do’ and that if they all just worked a bit harder that they too could one day become members of the exalted one percent. Then they went back to sleep allowing Bernanke’s Federal Reserve to carry out the greatest wealth transfer and heist in history, creating money from nothing and providing it as an endless supply of gambling chips to the Wall Street casinos all the while pumping tens of billions of dollars a month into the grand-daddy of all stock bubbles.

I have long believed that one could indirectly trace every rotten thing that has gone so horribly awry in America to the denial and delusion associated with the entire ‘think positively’ confidence game. It only encourages apathy, dreaming and submissiveness and it was the naïve belief in the absolute legitimacy in grand scale fraud that is mutated crony capitalism and has destroyed the economy so that the fattest of the pigs can continue to gorge themselves. The national dogma that what is good for Wall Street is good for America, that the bill would never come due on those evil little pieces of plastic credit cards that were maxed out to be just like the images on the television which in the end are alas nothing more than the images flickering off of the walls of Platos’ cave to pacify the slaves.

The fraudsters who run the banking system were all too happy to inflate the housing bubble that the devastated this country's economy with neutron bomb style efficiency, leading to financial death while leaving the actual structures intact for the banksters to sweep up for pennies on the dollar.  The never-ending ATM that was phony home equity fueled the mass illusions as long as the flim flam men could scheme to turn that imaginary mortgage equity into derivatives and bad paper that was ultimately worth as much as low grade toilet paper of the 100 grit quality. And it only continued because the jackasses in this country believed the charlatans like  Alan Greenspan, Bernanke and Mad Money Cramer. They bought into it, did not question it as they should have and in the end were impoverished by it. Oh, and they allowed themselves to be conned again into bailing out the same banks, the modern day Pharaohs who reside in the temples of avarice that are Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Damned fools, sheep and morons and we all have made to suffer because of the the pollyannas who skipped down the primrose path to perdition who fell for it all hook, line and sinker.

I am reminded of my days as an outside vendor representative who would make regular visits to a certain high profile national chain of convenience stores. The managers of these stores suffered from some sort of shellshock, they were walking wounded, broken people hounded by micromanaging corporate types, tyrannical district managers who always popped in at unexpected times and harangued by customers. They were psychically damaged material doing a thankless job for a pack of corporate pricks. What I remember in particular was one frumpy manager (looked like a dumpster in pantsuit) who had been transformed as some are by taking Jesus into their hearts. 'Sally' had found her own winning lottery ticket in life because she had just been recruited into the notorious Amway Inc upon which the DeVos family (which includes Xe/Blackwater’s Erik Prince) built it’s massive fortune.  Sally backed me into a corner and explained that she would soon be wealthy beyond her wildest dreams, out from under the corporate slave masters who she baked bricks for and that her entire mindset was changed after attending some Amway (brainwashing) sessions. I recall that she invoked a popular science fiction series while trying to explain the difference as though there were two parallel universes and that she had been able to transcend them…..it was like stepping through The Stargate she told me - everything was right on the other side, it was filled with wonderful positive and successful people and she too was going to leave the drudgery behind and join them. You can sell anything in America but nothing sells like hope, it’s like vails of ‘holy’ water sold in a leper colony, there is a reason that that a snake oil salespeople like Dr. Phil and Obama Medal of Freedom honoree Oprah are so revered in this country.

A few years after my conversation with Sally over the Stargate, after I had moved on to other things I happened to stop by that very convenience store to buy a six pack of beer and lo and behold there she was, toiling away behind the counter looking as sad, beaten and frumpy as ever. She had a look on her face like she had a big stinky turd in the inner front pocket of her green smock. The Stargate ultimately led to yet another boulevard of broken dreams as it always does in the blessed domain of the sheeple.

But for today and the coming weeks it’s all good. The McJobs report is a signal of economic rejuvenation and traditional seasonal hope, the stockings may be full of holes but they will be hung from the chimney with care as they always are by a hope-filled exceptional people. It won’t be Saint Nick stopping by though, only the Goldman Sachs Grinches.

The Real War On Christmas

Christmas has been under assault for years here in America only not by those devilish forces that are so often conjured up by highly paid establishment talking heads seeking to mobilize their political bases by conjuring up as H.L. Mencken once put it "an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary". The terrible liberals were hellbent on 'taking the Christ out of Christmas' shrilly shrieked the attack dogs for the elite primarily from their Fox News studios. While the on the flip side an enormous amount time and money was wasted on some of those very liberals waging war against nativity scenes on government property. Much sound and fury expended over a stockingful of nothing that only served to poison what remains of the holiday spirit in this star spangled land of exceptionalism. What has always gone largely unsaid (most certainly by the millionaire talking heads whose jobs are to sow the seeds of disunity) is that the real war against Christmas has been waged by nothing more complicated than good old American greed and the need to exact maximum profit with no concern of the consequences.

Christmas in America is in and of itself the ultimate triumph of corporate propaganda as it is far more geared towards getting consumers out to the malls and big box stores to participate in the gross annual pagan festival of rampant consumerism that is the holiday shopping season than in celebrating any religious aspects. In America Jesus Christ was long ago banished to playing second banana to Santa Claus in a land where the ultimate holiday season currency is not frankincense and muir but Visa and Mastercard. Stress and spending overkill, maxing out the plastic and indulging the need for more bling bling and foreign made electronic gadgetry has become a seasonal ritual as the sheeple continue to contribute to their own demise, playing with their toys in steerage as the national ship of fools sets course towards the iceberg of collapse and increases speed. Big banks, already grossly subsidized by a clueless and corrupt central bank to the tune of 85 billion a month and likely more when Janet Yellen takes over the Fed are singing Joy to the World as they lavish themselves with holiday bonuses, the ill-gotten spoils from the crony capitalist winners of the class war. Christ has indeed been banished from Christmas but long before he was run out of the temple by the moneychangers. Perhaps this is a bit overly religious in nature and I am personally not a religious man but such analogies are needed for many to see the extent to which all that was once good about the holiday season has been squeezed out of it by the same greedy bastards who have strip-mined the national workforce with their plague of offshoring which is like crack cocaine to CEOs and their short term focus on profit above all.

I remember the days past when the holiday season truly was about family, togetherness, good tidings and the bonds that were once sacred in simpler times before all was hijacked by the pigs. Greed and systemic corruption have succeeded in tainting this as well, painfully made ever the more evident with spreading of the Black Friday virus into Thanksgiving Day itself like some particularly malignant form of herpes. It is a social ill though and as the simultaneously heartrending and gut wrenching reports from the front lines of retail store skirmishes continue to pour in, some sardonically amusing and others just plain tragic there is very little to be festive about as the darkest instincts of many Americans are laid bare for all to see in the age of the smartphone camera. It is the dark underbelly of the corruption of capitalism, a system that made this country great yet has been destroyed courtesy of the cheats, swindlers, liars and criminals who have rigged the game and now use the polluted government that has been purchased to ensure that it will always be that way until the day when it collapses under its own weight. Free enterprise has left the building, the same massive retailers who have this year defiled Thanksgiving with their disgusting "Door Buster" orgies of greed have broken the backs of the traditional small businessmen and women and turned the American Dream into a perverse feverish nightmare. Predictably it is all encouraged by a corrupt state-corporate media that hypes and contributes to the sense of frenzy by their seductive imagery as well as incessant advertising  just as it serves the establishment in selling ruinous and bankrupting wars.

None of it is going to end well nor should it given the relative ease that the forces of greed and corruption were able to successfully hijack this country used and the apathy and willful ignorance that allowed it to.