Sign Of The Times: Guns Sell Like Hotcakes on Black Friday

Call it a sign of these troublesome times in America but early Thanksgiving weekend retail reports reflect that one particular item more than others was selling like hotcakes. Despite overall lower in-store sales on the day of the animals aka Black Friday firearms were literally flying off the shelves.

According to the website for financial network CNBC in story entitled “The right to bear arms--on Black Friday! Gun sales surge on retail holiday”:

Apparel and electronics are far from being the only things consumers seek out on Black Friday—many really like firearm deals as well.

Second amendment enthusiasts sent gun sales surging on Friday, according to a report from CNN.com. The federal government was on track to process more than 144,000 background checks for the purposes of gun ownership, a new record and the equivalent of 3 investigations per second, the report added.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesman told the news organization that approximately 600 FBI and contract call center employees sift through thousands of requests within a 3 day span. Traditionally, Black Friday is a peak day for volume, but Friday likely topped last year's requests of 144,758.

You have to admit that in the waning days of the sick and twisted era of Obama and the now fully weaponized fascist apparatus of the federal government that stocking up on guns is a hell of a lot more practical than $3.99 Blu Rays or other crap. The exposure of a growing racial schism in America as made evident by the events in Ferguson and fears of social chaos probably played a hand as well as the mainstream media has milked it for maximum effect.

These are grim days in a once great country and when the shit finally hits the fan – and it will – those who are armed will certainly have the best chances of protecting themselves and their families. It doesn’t have to be racial violence either although the Obama administration certainly did their damned level best to stir the pot for the sake of harvesting votes for the 2014 mid-term elections. The Democrats got mowed down anyway and we are all now left with the permanent damage of trafficking in race-baiting for cheap politics. Obama has become even more Nixonian than Tricky Dick himself with bullshit like that. Playing the race card is the bread and butter of the GOP but it is a grave misconception that the Democrats are above dabbling in the politics of animosity - they are just more subtle. 

The economic collapse that has been put off by Federal Reserve and U.S. Government meddling in the markets to inflate the biggest stock bubble in history is also coming. It is only a matter of time until the mother of all economic implosions hits like a category five hurricane, sending the rigged markets into a death spiral and triggering bank runs. That it has not already happened is a testament to the trickery of the scum who run the system but it is unsustainable and any “black swan” type of event could be the trigger. The absolute last place that you will want to be is out on the streets looking for food on the day that the ATM's stop spitting out money. The slothful, TV addicted, willfully ignorant American masses of 2014 aren't known for preparedness and I would venture to say that the vast majority has no more than a day or two of food in their homes. It will be like a real life zombie apocalypse movie when they figure out that they can't eat their iPads.

Whether the record Black Friday gun sales is a positive or a negative all depends on one’s own perspective but the figures illustrate the growing undercurrent of unease here in Obamastan.

Phony Democrats Exploit Minimum Wage Hike for Cheap Political Gain

The Democrats and particularly President Barack Obama have been politicking over raising the minimum wage in a transparent attempt to attract low-income voters. While it is understood that it is difficult to exist on the meager sum provided by jobs such as Wal-Mart greeters and Whopper floppers, the opposite side of the argument is that government forced wage hikes will only result in higher prices that will be passed on to the customers. Not to appear insensitive but if working at one of America's fast food chains or an emporium of made in China products does not provide a sufficient income then find another job or join the military. Not that there are many decent jobs anymore in America since the day that rapacious corporate bosses discovered offshoring which has been like crack cocaine to them ever since. The U.S. manufacturing base has been sent packing and the only businesses that truly thrive in the USA! USA! USA! are in financial chicanery, surveillance and the police state. 

Having found a winning issue look for more Democrat demagoguery over the minimum wage. It is a nice mix along with their bogus identity politics issues, the sudden interest in domestic violence now that two big name NFL players have been outed as wife and child beaters. There have already been strikes by fast food workers in several U.S. cities to demand higher wages but it is just more of the same false hope and chump change that Obama has been peddling to the suckers since he slithered into office on a carpet of lies. It isn't like the Democrats have actually done one damned thing to address the major problems of offshoring jobs and allowing Wall Street banksters to loot with impunity and as the late George Carlin so eloquently put it in his classic rant "The American Dream":

The table is tilted folks.  The game is rigged.  And nobody seems to notice.  Nobody seems to care.  Good, honest, hard working people. Blue collar, white collar, doesn't matter what color shirt you have on.  Good honest hard working people continue... these are people of modest means... continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them.  They don't give a fuck about you.  They don't give a fuck about you.  They don't care about you.  At all.  At all.  At all.  And nobody seems to notice.  And nobody seems to care

Now the backlash is beginning as it inevitably would. Fast food and chain restaurants are beginning the process of going to automated systems which will eventually render the concept of a $15 per hour burger flipper obsolete and silly. Per a story that appeared in the Washington Post entitled "McDonald’s fresh hope to turn around slumping sales: Ordering burgers from a machine":

Battling the worst sales slump in a decade and competition from build-your-own upstarts like Chipotle and Smashburger, McDonald’s is expanding a test concept built around ordering via tablet. Just tap on a screen and watch as your burger’s toppings (and calories) pile on, then wait for an employee to bring it over. No human interaction necessary.

McDonald’s move towards dehumanization, launched as a pilot last winter and expanded across San Diego last week, is part of a larger trend of chain eateries turning tablets into your full-time restaurant buddy: equal parts menu, server and paycheck. Applebee’s, Panera Bread and even airport bars have installed tablets to allow diners to order food or booze without a wait.

Chili’s became the U.S. king of human-less ordering this summer when it installed more than 45,000 tabletop tablets nationwide. Marketing executives said the tablets can speed up service and operate like table-side billboards, encouraging impulse orders of appetizers and desserts. A spokesperson for Ziosk, which made the tablets, said guests who used them spent more money, finished quicker and paid better tips.  (The future, as one professor predicts: “Robot baristas, robot Realtors and robot sales agents.”)

While the WAPO story specifically speaks of customers being able to place their own orders (no more getting the wrong food at the drive-thru) a more seismic shift is coming. Michael Krieger of the Liberty Blitzkrieg blog recently wrote of the next iteration of the dehumanizing of fast food jobs. The piece which is entitled “360 Burgers per Hour” – Meet the Burger Flipping Robot that Could Change Fast Food Forever":

The main reason is that if employers are forced to pay these employee more, the employers in this industry are likely to move as quickly as possibly to fast-food preparing robots. This isn’t just some pie in the sky fantasy either, there’s a company called Momentum Machines that has already assembled a product that can make a burger in 10 seconds, or 360 burgers per hour.

Equally important, the entire argument of raising the minimum wage cannot be had without discussing the impact of technology. As I and many others have highlighted over the past several years, one of the most troubled segments of the U.S. economy consists of fast food workers. They simply cannot survive on the wages being paid to them by employers and need food stamps, disability and second jobs merely to make ends meet. In theory, raising the minimum wage will help these folks the most, but will it really? I think not.

As the saying goes, "be careful of what you ask for, you just may get it" and Democrat's sudden concern for a working class that they shanked in the back decades ago is nothing more than political pandering. Big businesses are rapidly adapting to implement new technology in order to eliminate the positions altogether. There are self-service checkout stands appearing in stores across the nation now. My local Wal-Mart neighborhood grocery store has them and they are great. It saves time and the upside to having to bag your own groceries is that no dumb ass is putting the potatoes in the same bag with the bread. The Wal-Mart greeters will likely be the next to be jettisoned, they are annoying and only are really needed on Black Friday to hold back the amped-up mobs of shoppers looking to score the door buster items.

Once again another great Obama idea goes up like a flaming bag of dog shit and the ones who get screwed in the end are the suckers who bought into it. But there will be plenty of jobs soon enough with the brilliant idea of funneling more arms to the Syrian rebels which will quickly end up in the hands of ISIS. The future of America is war and as such there is no greater big government employment program than bringing back the draft to provide those displaced fast food workers with new gigs.

JACKPOT! Speculators Win Big as Iraq Shuts Down Refinery

Nothing can collapse the economic house of cards that is the phony Obama recovery faster than a massive spike in prices - oil and food or simply just oil as the black gold drives damned near everything and keeping the hoax of the "recovery" alive is getting tougher by the day for the big boys and their footstool at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. With the brutal wave of violence raging through Iraq, still a mystery as to the exact cause but the US warmongers supplying arms to religious zealots including admitted cannibals is a probable factor the early winners are already in and they are the oil future speculators and other commodity traders who just had a collective orgasm over the splendid news that Iraq has just shut down production at the country's largest oil refinery.

According to a story at Reuters, "Iraq's biggest oil refinery shut down, foreign staff evacuated":

Iraq's biggest oil refinery, Baiji, has been shut down and its foreign staff evacuated, refinery officials said on Tuesday, adding that local staff remain in place and the military is still in control of the facility.

Militants from al Qaeda splinter group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized Iraq's second-biggest city of Mosul last week and other Sunni armed groups have advanced into the town of Baiji and surrounded its refinery.The refinery shut down overnight, the sources said.

Baiji is one of three oil refineries in Iraq and only processes oil from the north. The other two are located in Baghdad and the south and are firmly under government control and operational.

“Due to the recent attacks of militants by mortars, the refinery administration decided to evacuate foreign workers for their safety and also to completely shut down production units to avoid extensive damage that could result," a chief engineer at the refinery said on condition of anonymity.

Potential "extensive damage" to the refinery itself maybe but certainly not to the high-rolling swine in the oil cartels whose profits are about to erupt like a geyser of money stolen from the schmucks who are doomed to lives of quiet desperation because in America they have no political clout. Nor will there be "extensive damage" to the summer parties of the con artists and government subsidized thieves while they frolic drunk, naked and flying higher off if their own arrogance than the pure cocaine that they will be inhaling by the mini-dune. The posh enclaves of the looter class at The Hampton's and Martha's Vineyard will resemble something out of The Wolf of Wall Street if not the sheer excesses of Roman orgies that are still notorious for their gross excesses centuries later. This is time to celebrate the coming tidal wave of money that will be lifting the yachts of the many at the expense of the few who are already suffering under the crushing burden of stagnant incomes and rising food prices - stick around, it's only going to get worse.

While Obama has once again lied to Americans in sending troops back into Iraq - there will be more following the token initial insertion of special operations personnel - the conflagration has all of the signs of further escalation especially since the US installed Iraqi leader of a failed country with an army of falafel eating surrender monkeys paid for by the US taxpayer accusing the Saudis of genocide.Not that our "partners of peace", those degenerate, terrorist funding perverts in the House of Saud would ever do such a thing, after all - it isn't like fifteen of the nineteen September 11, 2001 hijackers didn't hail from The Kingdom. The Libertarian financial blog Zero Hedge nails in in their typical fashion sans the sugar-coating in the piece entitled "This Is Not Going As Planned: Iraq Prime Minister Defies US, Accuses Saudi Arabia Of "Genocide""- from which I excerpt:

Shortly after the US revealed that, in addition to aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships it was also sending a few hundred "special forces" on the ground in Iraq, contrary to what Obama had stated previously, Washington made quite clear it wants Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to embrace Sunni politicians as a condition of U.S. support to fight a lightning advance by forces from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Then something unexpected happened: Iraq's Shi'ite rulers defied Western calls on Tuesday to reach out to Sunnis to defuse the uprising in the north of the country, declaring a boycott of Iraq's main Sunni political bloc and accusing Sunni power Saudi Arabia of promoting "genocide."

In fact, as Reuters reported moments ago, the Shi'ite prime minister has moved in the opposite direction of Obama's demands, announcing a crackdown on politicians and officers he considers "traitors" and lashing out at neighbouring Sunni countries for stoking militancy.

Not only did Iraq defy the US, but it also called out America's BFF (or at least formerly so until the arrival of Iran, which the US is aggressively, and inexplicably, rushing to make its new key partner in the region) for being the real aggressor behind the scenes? How dare Maliki point out the truth - doesn't he know that those US troops in Iraq can just as easily be used to depose the current regime as "fight" the Al Qaeda Jihadists the US itself armed in the first place?

Apparently not, and instead of seeking a broad coalition with Sunnis as the US ordered, the latest target of his government's fury was Saudi Arabia, the main Sunni power in the Gulf, which funds Sunni militants in neighbouring Syria but denies it is behind ISIL.

"We hold them responsible for supporting these groups financially and morally, and for the outcome of that - which includes crimes that may qualify as genocide: the spilling of Iraqi blood, the destruction of Iraqi state institutions and historic and religious sites," the Iraqi government said of Riyadh in a statement.

 As Reuters notes, Maliki has blamed Saudi Arabia for supporting militants in the past, but the severe language was unprecedented.

AND

But where it would get most messy - literally - is if as the previously reported shuttering of Iraq's largest refinery leads to electricity blackouts for Baghdad. Because nothing gets people in a murderous rage quite as 115 degrees and no air conditioning.

The criminal elite and the political class that has now fully unchained itself from any accountability to the American people, while they ride high today, arrogantly fucking over 99+ percent to fund their bacchanals had best pay heed to that which is being whispered on the warm summer winds that for now only serve to gently rock the yachts at Cape Cod and other privileged locales. With their decadent lifestyles fully dependent on manipulation and stealing from others soon the "murderous rage" from the smoldering oppressed may be a hell of a lot closer than Baghdad.

Obama Doubles Down on Iraq War Catastrophe

When you find yourself in a hole the smart idea is to stop digging, that is unless it is a grave. With the situation in Iraq deteriorating by the minute, thanks to the neocon ideologues who goaded George W. Bush into attacking and invading the country in 2003 the now fully blossomed leader of the imperial war machine is prepared to once again sink more American blood and treasure into the Mesopotamian meat-grinder rather than stand up on his hind legs to the keening squealing of the war pigs. The grand "Shock and Awe" adventure of using the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as an excuse to settle a family score with Saddam Hussein is now as critics once warned becoming the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history and Obama is ready to begin the air strikes against the militant Islamic uprising that is raging through the war-ravaged country and heading directly towards the Green Zone.  I hope that the profiteers who fleeced the American taxpayer to construct that grand palace of a US embassy included helicopter decks because the way that this is going conjures up images of the fall of Saigon.

The American elite are so drunk on their own propaganda, their crusading arrogance and a pathological hubris driven by the obscene concept of American exceptionalism that has within it sown the seeds or our own destruction that any acknowledgement to the lessons of history are not only ignored but spat upon by the best and the brightest whose only real talent is the spectacular fuck-up.  The worst thing that has ever happened to the American people and this country's image as well as whatever moral high ground was once occupied was the fall of the Soviet Union - a triumphal moment that was proclaimed to be "the end of history" by the think tank dwelling masters of the universe who were the brat pack of the post World War II era. But Barack Obama firmly within that camp for the huge self-inflicted wound that he is about to deliver to America in committing the beleaguered  US military to more violence in Iraq - in addition to his NATO gamesmanship that is getting ever closer to igniting a war with Russia that cold being an end to the empire if not the planet itself.

This is a man who is a fool and one who has shanked the country in the back in paying far too much attention to his legacy, the grand taxpayer funded presidential library that will be erected in his honor one day in the Windy City like the idols and Sphinxes of the Egyptian Pharoahs to consider the ramifications of the renewed involvement in Iraq. The decision has already been made according to some ominous accounts, I excerpt the following from The Guardian "Obama pledges US support to Iraq as Isis militants approach Baghdad":

President Barack Obama pledged the US would help the Iraqi government push back an Islamic insurgency threatening to overwhelm Baghdad on Thursday, saying he had “not ruled anything out”.

Amid mounting pressure in Washington for a robust response to the rapid advances made by forces of the Islamic State and the Levant (Isis), the White House is understood to be examining a number of options including air support for Baghdad.

But he also said the advance of the Islamists should act as a "wake-up call" to the Shia-dominated government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has been accused of running a partisan government that has alienated the Sunni minority.

In brief comments to reporters after a meeting with Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, Obama said he was watching the situation in Iraq with concern and wants to ensure that jihadists do not get a foothold.The crisis escalated rapidly on Thursday as Iraqi Kurdish forces took control of key military installations in the major oil city of Kirkuk and the Sunni jihadi group Isis revealed its intention to move on Baghdad and cities in the southern Shia heartland.

Obama admitted that the scale of the insurgency in recent days demonstrated the need for more help. “I don’t rule out anything because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foot hold in either Iraq or Syria, for that matter.” The president said his national security advisers were “looking at all the options”.

Obama is too self-absorbed, too much of a power crazed, insulated narcissist to bother to consider that actions have consequences - bombing the shit out of the ISIS militants - who Obama himself bears a good deal of the blame for in arming vicious jihadists to topple the Assad regime in Syria - just may be the triggering event of the collapse of the entire rotten fucking house of cards. Particularly the economy because the oil speculators are already masturbating themselves raw over the payoff that will allow them to stick it to Americans at the pump with impunity. A gas price spike that drives pump costs to around 6 bucks a gallon would be catastrophic and could finally be the spark that ignites the smoldering but yet to ignite protests against the Empire at home. The defeat of the corrupt Republican House Majority leader Eric Cantor on Tuesday by an unknown who railed against Wall Street should be taken as what it is - a sign that judgement day is coming for the corrupt oligarchy that has subverted American democracy to lavish riches upon politically connected crooks, big banking houses and military arms hucksters.

The anger is building in what remains of this once great country and the pitchforks and torches outnumber the militarized police forces of the state - and many of them may join the party instead of defend the indefensible on the day when the shit finally hits the fan.

Obama is sitting on a powder keg and playing with matches and is flying so high off of his own perceived historical greatness that the he will be the one who is most surprised when it detonates.

Sanction This Obama! Russia Signs Gas Deal With China

The damage inflicted upon the USA, USA, USA both economically and in terms of credibility thanks to the Obama all star foreign policy team of unrivaled buffoons will truly not be understood until well into the future as the rubble from the collapse is sifted through by historians but the most important point is that it was all so unnecessary. Not that a happy ending to the neocon instigated overthrow of a democratically elected leader and the installation of a puppet regime backed by fascists and neo-Nazis could be expected and heads are likely exploding throughout Washington over the backfiring of their scheme.

There is just no way to look at America these days and now be astounded at the dismal quality of the US political class in that the savvy and demonized Vladimir Putin has just punked Obama and his minions yet again. First there was granting asylum to Edward Snowden, that blistering September 11, 2013 New York Times op ed in which Putin called out the ridiculous concept of American exceptionalism, the intervention to stop what was to be a massive attack on Syria (that one really pissed Obama off) and now the best of all in making the entire US establishment and their loyal winged monkeys in the state corporate media look like a pack of chumps by showing them exactly where they could stick their economic sanctions.

The 30 year, $400 billion deal illustrates how far that US Empire of war, greed and stupidity has fallen - picking up speed since 2001 - and the failure of Obama and Kerry's 'we'll huff and we'll puff and we'll blow your house down Mr. Putin' economic punishment over not falling in line with the US-EU-NATO Axis of Aggression and allowing for the absorption of Ukraine. Despite perhaps the greatest US media propaganda campaign in history (it put even the run up to the Iraq attack to shame) all that America is now left with now that the prestige and moral high ground have left the barn forever is a mammoth, money-sucking military machine, a rotten to the core political system, obsolete and crumbling infrastructure that is blown away by any advanced country, a workforce that cannot compete in a global world because the lack the necessary intellect and skills, an economy that only consists of pushing bad paper through above the law Wall Street casinos and a surveillance system that has no peer. Americans have a very bleak future indeed thanks to the series of failures by an arrogant, short-sighted political class and that doesn't take into account skyrocketing food and gas prices a good percentage of whom to blame for the coming food crisis can be laid at the foot of commodities speculators operating with impunity and big agribusiness that operates on a greed crazed, inefficient model that has driven locally produced food out of business. Dark days are coming and coming soon.

As far as the Russia-China gas deal, the virtual holy grail for the countries to which the future belongs I excerpt the following from The Guardian:

Russia and China have signed a 30-year, $400bn (£237bn) deal for Gazprom to deliver Russian gas to China in a deal that underscores Russia's shift towards Asia amid strained relations with the west.

The contract to provide 38bn cubic metres of gas each year was signed by the state-owned gas companies Gazprom and CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) in the presence of the countries' leaders, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, at the end of Putin's two-day visit to Beijing.

The Russian president – who has been pushing to close the deal after almost a decade of negotiations – called the agreement "the largest in the gas sphere during the era of the USSR and Russia".

But one British energy expert warned that the move could drive up prices for European gas consumers who are becoming increasingly dependent on Russia and now face competition for supplies.

Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University, warned that the Britain had the equivalent of only three years of North Sea gas left on the basis of current consumption and without the use of imports. "Russia's new pipeline to China will increase competition for natural gas from 2018 and will most likely increase the cost we pay for natural gas here in the EU. It will certainly increase the pressure on European countries to find alternative gas supplies," he said

I am sure that the people of Europe facing rising fuel costs due to the stupidity of their leaders and their failure to do anything but lick Uncle Sam's red, white and blue jackboots will be positively thrilled to shell out more money due to the blowback from the Ukraine disaster. At least Europe has a history of revolutions and a public that has managed to climb out of the mental morass of primitive religion that has exploded across The Homeland, it would do the peasants well to begin to ponder storming the castles and bring back the guillotine for their own rancid and corrupt political leaders.  It won't be long until there is a realization that the expansion of NATO and the botched coup in Kiev aren't the only things that the US establishment has lied about - that little miracle of abundant energy due to the "fracking" boom may not be all that it is cracked up to be.

More importantly though is how the US will react to this latest running drop kick in the balls from Putin. Do Obama, the buffoons at Foggy Bottom and the think tank dwelling ideologues finally back down or do they go down with all guns blazing in one final Wild Bunch style suicide charge and drag the rest of us down with them.

Welcome to Chumpland: Biden Pledges US Aid to Kiev Coup Regime

There is an old acronym that brings to mind the dismal state of affairs in America and that is BOHICA (Bend Over Here It Comes Again) and it is coming without a lubricant as smilin' Joe Biden - he of the donkey teeth - visited Kiev to shower the unelected coup regime with more US taxpayer dollars. Oh Joe, say it isn't so. Not that the majority of Americans bother reading anything that informs them of the true nature of the world, preferring to be spoonfed little sound bites of McNews from paid liars and government shills on television but if they were able to somehow bypass the propaganda I can't imagine that this would sit well. Having already been economically busted down thanks to Bill Clinton's finance industry "reforms" which really only served to rig the game for Wall Street predators, fleeced by George W. Bush for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and crushed by Barack Obama's ongoing subsidizing of Wall Street casinos with free house money now we will be sending money to neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

According to a story in The Guardian, the Vice President and possible 2016 Democratic party nominee if Queen Hillary the Inevitable changes her mind promised that:

Biden told Ukrainian members of parliament in Kiev, including presidential candidates, that the US stood with them against "humiliating threats". He added the US was ready to help Ukraine's economy but warned that Kiev must fight the "cancer" of endemic corruption.

As Biden met with the acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, in Ukraine's parliament building, US officials said the onus was firmly on Moscow to fulfil the accord meant to reduce tensions in the worst east-west confrontation since the cold war.

There are always ulterior motives behind US intentions as the government is rotten to the core with corruption and money has become the ultimate vote, even more so after the Supreme Court's recent ruling further rigging the game for the oligarchy and shutting out the peasants. There is a lot of big corporate money at stake in Ukraine and the country's geopolitical importance in pipelines and natural gas and the ability to use the US military to control the distribution routes so as to stick it to Russia weighs heavily. This isn't exactly top secret either political grandmaster Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote of the necessity to control Ukraine in his book "The Grand Chessboard" and ever since the old Soviet Union disintegrated, was looted by the IMF and US favored oligarchs the American political class and the Deep State that underlies it have been hellbent on humiliating and crushing Russia. There has been the ongoing absorbing into NATO (a Cold War relic that long ago should have been relegated to history along with the Berlin Wall) former pieces of the Soviet Empire and surrounding Russia with missile bases. It is easy to see why this does not sit well with Putin and the ability to goad the thin skinned Obama into an emotion based confrontation with the nuclear armed Russia does have official underlying policy reasons. That is not to say that it is right though nor very wise.

The short term goal I suspect is to steal the European natural gas market away from Russia with the "fracking" boom here in The Homeland and the miracle of shale oil making the US a player in global energy markets. The push for the Keystone XL pipeline continues but has been bumped until after the mid-term elections by the calculating political animal Obama and his swinish cadre of Democrats. Republicans on the other hand trumpet the miracle of jobs created by the completion of the pipeline and further domestic exploration, you know "drill baby drill!" but what nobody is saying is that little to none of what is extracted is going to be used for domestic consumption or to bring down prices once again approaching $4.00 a gallon plus despite government lies to the contrary. What IS going to happen with the increased supply is that the product will be exported - further raising prices in our star spangled lemming colony and with higher gas prices come higher food prices. Don't worry though, the government very conveniently omits food and energy costs from core inflation figures so everything is just fine.

You have to wonder at what point do Americans finally do what so many others are doing across the planet and rebel against the system. There was at least some of it during the days of the Occupy Movement but it was ruthlessly and quickly destroyed by the power of the state and the current protector of the elite Obama. With the political system no longer functional and becoming more so by the day with democracy being subverted by big money when will Americans finally get it that they no longer live in the country that they have been indoctrinated to believe that they do. The Chinese have a rather innovative idea on how to deal with corruption and politicians that can't be beaten at the ballot box - they just beat the hell out of them in the streets. Not that I am encouraging violence or anything but one of the greatest problems that exists today is that the government doesn't fear the people. The below excerpt from the popular website Infowars with the caveat that I do not consider it to be a very reliable source (too much Kochtopus and CNP propaganda) but it does have the best presentation on riots in China where corrupt officials had the living hell beaten out of them, the link is here:

 “Kill them! Kill them!” chanted mob

 Irate Chinese citizens savagely beat five government bureaucrats during an incident that escalated into a 1,000 strong riot on Saturday in another telltale sign of the Communist country’s increasing social tensions.

 The disturbance began after members of the Chengguan municipal police, China’s widely loathed bureaucrats who enforce government regulations against street vendors, began harassing and beating a woman in the Cangnan County of Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province.

When a bystander, 36 year-old Mr. Huang, came to the woman’s aid by filming the confrontation, he was reportedly attacked by cops with a hammer and began to vomit blood before dying on the way to hospital.

 After word spread on social media about what had just happened, a huge mob of citizens arrived to surround the Chengguan officers, who attempted to hide in their van. “Kill them, kill them!” chanted the mob as the officers were savagely beaten with bats, bricks and stones, leaving them bloodied and unconscious.

 “Angry onlookers deflated the van’s tires, while others smashed windows and doors with bricks, rocks, and wooden sticks. The men were dragged out of the van and beaten senseless by the mob,” reports Epoch Times.

This along with a piece from the financial blog Zero Hedge where a cop is beaten to death  shows what could make the rulers in Beijing very restive and at some point the corrupt government in Washington needs to rediscover a healthy fear of it's subjects. 

Are Corporate Mercenaries Assisting Neo-Nazis in Ukraine?

With the coup installed government in Kiev about to engage in some very serious skull cracking in order to put down a mounting rebellion in Eastern Ukraine cities there have been some accounts that hired guns from corporate mercenary firms are augmenting the local paramilitary police forces.  With the pushback against the US backed “Yats” regime and it’s neo-Nazi shock troops it is imperative that a real version of the Euromaiden “revolution” not be allowed to take root to oust the stooges of the corporate global finance mafia.  Foretelling what will likely be a massive orgy of state sanctioned violence against Ukranians who reject the coming forced austerity and repression are statements made by the Interior Minister of the occupying government Arsen Avakov that there would be a resolution within 48 hours either by negotiation or through the use of force. Translation: unleash the goon squads for the "anti-terrorist" action.

The corporate and high finance vultures that would reap a windfall off of the toppling of the elected president Viktor Yanukovych are furious over the loss of an estimated $10 billion in natural resource loot from Crimea and are not about to let any more money slip through their bloody claws. The US establishment as well as the EU and the Cold War relic that is NATO, an organization that should have been relegated to the scrap heap of history have too much invested in this already disastrous situation to do anything but double down. It is only standard operating procedure for paid mercenaries to be used and the denials, such as that from the US firm Greystone do not pass the smell test.  This is the way that we roll in America, the taxpayer funded killing sprees of the notorious Blackwater in Iraq are the template, it is just one more way to circumvent the system in order to spread “democracy” at the point of a gun.

In a brief video posted on You Tube that allegedly shows a man in paramilitary police gear being captured after an austerity government push in Kharkov on Thursday the man in black states that “I’m a US citizen” as though it is a magic talisman. It is about 40-45 seconds into what appears to be a video that was taken with a cellphone or similar device in what appears to be an underground setting. While information on the video is sparse and yet to be authenticated could be proof that western backed corporate mercenaries are indeed operating in coordination with the "Yats" regime in putting down dissent. Hey, it is not like big corporations or the US State Department aren't known for using those "security contractors" and it would be foolish to believe that with all that the lunatic push to topple Putin through Ukraine that it would be beyond possibility.  The video, if it is authentic and backed by additional pictures, videos and accounts could be the proverbial smoking gun that the poisonous US establishment and their Deep State propagandists within the media are once again and predictably lying but anything even remotely resembling the truth long ago left the building in The Homeland.  

The video snippet of the alleged mercenary (no word as to his fate was posted to my knowledge)  is an example of the ability for the oppressed to communicate in the interconnected global world.  When the wave of brutal  beat downs of those who do not support the illegitimate government in Kiev there will be more video coming, that much is inevitable. The neocon establishment continues to fight the last war and in their pure, unbridled arrogance believe that the ability to use social media and the internet to expose human rights abuses does not threaten their longterm goal of planetary conquest and neoliberal pillaging - it won’t.  The technologies and platforms such as You Tube and Twitter simply did not exist at the level of sophistication that they do now and the news about marauding, murdering US mercenaries - primarily Blackwater - in Iraq got out anyway.

There is at least an understanding of the potency of social network tools to some degree though, take for example the ZunZuneo aka Cuban Twitter scheme in which the Obama administration used relief agency USAID as a cover for fomenting an uprising in Cuba. While this is indicative of the same Cold War lunacy that is behind the Ukraine debacle and the ongoing pissing contest with Vladimir Putin’s Russia social networking technology is given the degree of importance that it deserves. The problem along with the ongoing blundering of an Obama foreign policy team that is a fucking embarassment to America to put it kindly is that the blinders of American exeptionalism and neocon ideology - that rather closely aligns with the visions of Hitler and Stalin - prevent the acknowledgment that the criminal deeds of the Deep State are more easily exposed than ever. This despite the full spectrum dominance that is evident in the extreme propaganda and dishonest coverage of the events in Ukraine. The anti-Austerity freedom fighters in Donetsk, Kharkov and other eastern cities, on the brink of a pitched battle with paramilitary police, mercenaries and thugs from Pravy Sektor and Svoboda will prove to be a serious, long term detriment to the plans of chopping up the country and selling it to corporate and financial parasites.

NATO is upping the rhetoric and wailing about massed Russian military forces on the border in the latest effort to create a Gleiwitz style pretense for a hot war and Obama and Kerry, both of whom are hellbent at avenging the Syria and Snowden humiliations are showing no signs of backing off.  Were the state-corporate media to bother with the truth it would be that this entire mess is the fault of those two thin-skinned narcissists and their foreign policy team’s billions of dollars in US taxpayer money spent on destabilizing the region.  In the coming sweep and destroy “anti-terrorist” campaign the hotheads and neo-Nazis had best exercise a caution that they have yet to display in that any murder that they perpetrate has the potential of becoming a viral internet video even as those in Eastern Ukraine will be presented with a martyr to further galvanize their opposition to the Washington-Brussels-Kiev Axis of Evil.

I wonder what the American taxpayer who has already been bled dry by government subsidized sprees of gambling by politically connected, unaccountable Wall Street casinos and corporate plunderers who enjoy total impuinty in the corrupt, star-spangled shithole that is The Homeland. There is also the trillons of dollars stolen away by a miltary/surveillance moster that has a vested interest in endless wars to justify their existence - it still smells like a rat that the Cold War II meme began at a very convenient time to prevent cuts in military spending. Billions of dollars pumped into Ukraine alone and Christ knows how many more billions elsewhere - Venezuela, Cuba etc. to destabilize democratically elected governments that do not heel to the whims of the rapacious global finance mafia. Not to mention the money spent to back blatantly in our face neo-Nazis, were the all encompassing bubble of official state-corporate lies and propaganda to ever burst - even temporarily even idiotic Americans have a breaking point.

That breaking point could come if there were a realizaiton that none of this even remotely benefits the average American but only the same global corporate hydra that serves the interest of a very small proportion of a corrupt elite and the institutions that they have erected to protect them. Americans should look at the situation unfolding in Ukraine and ask themselves a very serious question: how long will it be until the mercenaries and the fully militarized police right here in the US of A begin to conduct their own “anti-terrorist” operations because that is exactly the direction that we are heading.

Eat This! Americans Go Without as Billions Sent to Ukraine

If there was any remaining shadow of a doubt about where regular Americans stand in the sewer of corruption that is Obamaworld let it now be removed. While food stamp programs, long-term unemployment and veterans benefits are cut to the bone there is plenty of money to send to support Neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Both Barack Obama as well as the real enemies of the American people in the US Congress just stuck it to us all good and hard. In yet another of those truly amazing shows of bipartisanship that is always able to cut through the gridlock whenever it comes time to fuck over the citizens of this country in order to shower undeserving foreign governments with money stolen from the US taxpayer the Congress voted overwhelmingly today to send billions in aid to the illegitimate, coup d'etat installed puppet government in Kiev and its neo-Nazi component.

This big star-spangled bag of loot is only awaiting Barry's signature but that is of course a formality. Never has a US president been such a complete stooge of the global finance mafia nor has a sitting US Congress approached this level of wanton - in your face - corruption. Where Americans anything but the television lobotomized sheep that they are they would be the ones out in the streets where the would be quickly confronted with all of the force that the rogue government has to bear and the blood would be knee deep in the streets. The audacity of the government here daring to engage in demagoguery over an inside job of extremist instigation and questionable sniper fire in Kiev when the fully militarized police state would turn any similar mass protest into piles of bloody chunks of human hamburger.

But in Der Homeland it is always about contradictions and hypocrisy, look at polls that show an enormous level of disapproval with the way that Obama has handled the now fully Hitlerized Russian president Vladimir Putin. The squadrons of couch bound warriors want Putin's head on a fucking pike paraded through the streets, mummified and then used as the game ball during the next Super Bowl in Tempe, and of course the immediate nuclear attack that would turn Moscow into a the world's largest parking lot  However it never once occurs to the average American thumb-sucking dumbass that the money going to fund the endless wars of imperial aggression and prop up puppet governments that enforce crushing austerity measures sold as "democracy" that the money is being stolen from them to finance it all. Not that long ago I thought that the movie Idiocracy was a prediction of the future of this country but given the ability of boobus Americanus to be once again suckered into supporting the planetary looting spree and the likes of Obama and the bought and paid for Congress it is obvious that it is already here.

Adding insult to injury is the inconvenient truth that Americans are being squeezed by spiking inflation - not of course that which is revealed by official government statistics which are total horseshit as food and energy costs are conveniently omitted in the calculation. Food prices are already up 19 percent this year, the prices are going up and the packages are getting smaller by the month as our criminal political class continues to enrich themselves at the public trough and earn every dime that big energy cartels, agribusiness conglomerates, the military industrial complex, the surveillance industrial complex, Wall Street gamblers and the global high finance parasites are paying them.  The average American schmuck who is all for a war with a nuclear power like Russia can't be bothered with such vagaries though as their long and slow slide into slavery continues. 

Welcome to chumpland suckers!

Meanwhile Back in The Homeland

With the feverish 'all-in' push for the relaunching of the Cold War the NSA Stasi is probably delighted to be out of the spotlight for the time being at least. The waves of anti-Putin invective continue to roll out of the neocon dominated US propaganda machine over at the Washington Post, the latest war criminal on deck is former Bush administration National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  Like Dick Cheney and Colin Powell the lies of Ms. Rice were instrumental in making the case for the illegal and disastrous attack and invasion of Iraq, a country that did not remotely threaten the United States yet like the others she is afforded slavering treatment befitting a great and benevolent defender of human rights while outside of the bubble of The Homeland she would be just another accomplice to one of history's greatest crimes and should have had her day standing in the dock at the Hague. There were people who stood trial at Nuremberg and who were hanged for less than what Rice accomplished with her infamous "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" statement during an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Following up the recent WaPo oped of her war criminal predecessor Henry A. Kissinger the 'Altair Voyager' penned a piece entitled "Will America heed the wake-up call of Ukraine?" in which she leads off with a convenient yet un-provable anecdote that:

 “Meet Viktor Yanu­kovych, who is running for the presidency of Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin and I were standing in his office at the presidential dacha in late 2004 when Yanu­kovych suddenly appeared from a back room. Putin wanted me to get the point. He’s my man, Ukraine is ours — and don’t forget it.

And followed by this call to arms –

This time has to be different. Putin is playing for the long haul, cleverly exploiting every opening he sees. So must we, practicing strategic patience if he is to be stopped. Moscow is not immune from pressure. This is not 1968, and Russia is not the Soviet Union. The Russians need foreign investment; oligarchs like traveling to Paris and London, and there are plenty of ill-gotten gains stored in bank accounts abroad; the syndicate that runs Russia cannot tolerate lower oil prices; neither can the Kremlin’s budget, which sustains subsidies toward constituencies that support Putin. Soon, North America’s bounty of oil and gas will swamp Moscow’s capacity. Authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline and championing natural gas exports would signal that we intend to do precisely that. And Europe should finally diversify its energy supply and develop pipelines that do not run through Russia.

Perhaps Condi is telling the truth – something that she failed to do while the costly in terms of blood and treasure Iraq debacle could have been avoided but it has more than a slight whiff of the normal bullshit that the high criminals of the new Evil Empire regularly trot out without ever being called on them.  The key though is the playing of the Keystone XL pipeline card, as a former Chevron executive her obvious lack of credibility due to conflicts of interest should be pounced on by journalists and a media that honors their duties in the traditions of the First Amendment. We don’t have one here – at least anymore and after the embarrassment of the outing of the unconstitutional NSA surveillance colossus thanks to the leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden outgoing American Stasi Commandant General Keith Alexander hinted that there will soon be new measures (very likely of a Draconian nature)  implemented to deal with the reportage of the rogue NSA going forward. Oh, and Condi’s former employer Chevron who thought so much of her that they named a fucking oil tanker after her is in full party mode as the corporation just prolonged against an Ecuadoran judgment that got wiped out thanks to getting it thrown into the corrupt US judicial system which never had jurisdiction. It is exactly as journalist Greg Palast dubbed it - "the best democracy money can buy". 

And when it comes to buying "democracy" and according to The Guardian none other than "Yats" himself is going to be coming to America this week to visit the White House. He would be the pencil-necked little geek who was illegally installed as the Ukranian Prime Minister whose formal name is Arseny Yatseniuk. "Yats" is the term of endearment used by Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland during that intercepted phone call on an unsecured line (what a dumb bitch) as the US was lining up the coup d'etat that would oust democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych in favor of a rogue junta led by the former central banker who will be tasked with carving up Ukraine to be feasted upon by the global financial mafia.

"Yats" will undoubtedly be trotted out by Obama as the head of the 'freedom fighters' seeking to cast off the yoke of the evil bear as has been reincarnated by the spinners as Vladimir Putin's new Soviet Union - note how the same old shit is repackaged to suit the times - not that long ago it was the Islamic Caliphate. The neo-Nazis and fascists that "Yats" relies on as his enforcers are no different than those former 'freedom fighters' that were extolled by none other than the Gipper himself in the Latin American butchers known as the Contras as well as  the Islamist fanatic packed Mujahideen from which al Qaeda sprung forth. I can at some level understand Reagan's backing of murderous thugs given the decades long national trauma that was the Cold War but please explain to me why it is exactly that Obama and his neocons are using American taxpayer money to back a bunch of fucking neo-Nazis. There is no money for the extension of the benefits for the long-term unemployed in this country yet Barry and the boys are able to funnel billions to an illegally installed regime and neo-Nazis?

This is so wrong that there just are not sufficient words to describe it and while the state-corporate media has blasted out months of anti-Putin propaganda to back the filthy overthrow of the sitting government in Ukraine it is no excuse because the truth is out there if people would just get off of their lazy asses and bother to look for it.

 (Image: Dusseldorf Germany parade/US News)

Despite Excuses the Economy Still Sucks

The state-corporate media continues to generate spin and excuses for the ongoing dismal state of the U.S. economy which despite the big Wall Street bailout has yet to generate a real economic recovery for those outside of the elitist enclaves and the Lower Manhattan state-subsidized gambling casinos. It has now been nearly six years since the pigs choked on their own greed triggering the implosions of Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers and the subsequent drop in the stock markets that proved that modern finance capitalism as practiced in our rotting land of at one time plenty is a gigantic fraud. The moneychangers and their over leveraged scams including subprime loans, mortgage backed securities and derivatives that should be illegal went up like a flaming bag of dogshit and both the incumbent administration of George W. Bush and his eventual successor Barack Obama rushed to stamp it out. The banksters got burned by their own bad bets and it was the American taxpayer that got the shaft with the gargantuan bailout of the big con game under the threat of the imposition of martial law.

Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson went on bended knee to the Weasel Queen Nancy Pelosi who was at the time Democratic Speaker of the House to beg for the government to rescue him and all of his crooked buddies from the consequences of their scams. The initial House rejection of the $700 bailout plan sent the crack whore markets into full convulsions with a nearly 800 point drop in the DJIA and the American taxpayers have been on the hook ever since in providing the monthly heroin infusions to keep the junkie banks in business. The bailout has always been a con job and today despite the billions of dollars pumped into the big banking casinos the job market still sucks and not one lesson was learned other than that by the banksters that they will continue to be allowed to get away with the whole damned heist until the day that the arsonists finally succeed in burning the whole thing down. That day is coming too as the too big to fail banks are even bigger than before, getting back into the subprime and securitization business with a vengeance and all with the tacit approval of the Obama administration.

In true capitalism poorly run businesses are allowed to fail, that is what the entire thing is about the theory is that the cream will rise to the top and those who build the proverbial better mousetrap will dominate the market based on their hard work and ideas. That is unfortunately not the system that we live in and those who are honest are placed at a competitive disadvantage by the racketeers who have parlayed their ill-gotten loot into insider access to the highest levels of government. This is fascism quite plain and simple and the state is in the business of picking winners with the reigning champs being the criminal class on Wall Street. Not only do we not have a system of true capitalism nor free markets but we also have one where crooks aren't prosecuted and thrown into prison - while the most obvious example of this would be the pathological liar that is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper you can just as easily swap him out with the heads of the big banks the point being that when you have enough swag to buy political juice, influence judges and have a crackerjack media propaganda machine to back it up you are above the law.

So here we sit in February of 2014, the Saturday after Valentine's Day and we still haven't been kissed after being fucked. While the stock markets continue to soar courtesy of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve's ongoing socializing of the losses while privatizing the gains the job market is dismal and the propaganda machine is starting to run out of reasons to point the finger at for the continued economic malaise to duck their own collective guilt for destroying the economy. The latest excuse being that it is the bad weather that is responsible for a lack of demand and not stagnant wages, a chronically piss poor job market, long term unemployed, inflation (the calculation of "core inflation" omits food and energy costs) and the need to keep shoveling money into rigged markets. This from CNBC, home of the deranged Jim "Mad Money" Cramer the top shill for the banksters and their schemes:

Severe winter weather this season may have cost the economy as much $50 billion and 76,000 jobs.

A CNBC Fed Survey of 19 Wall Street economists, strategists and fund managers puts the total weather impact at about a third of a percentage point on the $16 trillion US economy, or roughly $50 billion.

The big hit to the economy comes this quarter, where survey respondents estimated that bone-chilling cold and driving snow shaved about four-tenths of a point off total growth, including lost work hours and lost sales.

That is the excuse of the season, next up will be unseasonable heat, rain, drought, hurricanes, earthquakes etc etc. In an election year there is little taste for truth telling nor anything short of the standard cultural populist bullshit that so serves our owners and keeps their whores firmly in place running the government. As the late George Carlin so nailed it in his classic three minute diatribe The American Dream - "it's a big club and you ain't in it".

The peasants are however getting restless or at least are perceived to be by the filth that has bought the system, take for instance the poster boy for persecuted billionaires vulture capitalist Tom Perkins. The Silicon Valley billionaire, the latest of the high-rolling whiners doesn't bother to waste time with false pretenses anymore:  the rich deserve more votes according to this slimy bastard. Perkins is the same shameless chiseler who recently compared criticism of the fractional one percent of the uber rich to the Nazi persecution of Jews leading up to the Holocaust.  Not that it hasn’t already been made evident by the penultimate ugly American Donald Trump but money can buy everything but class.

Hell, I don’t like taxes either and I especially resent two things in particular concerning the money that gets taken from me by Uncle Sam and they are 1: Using my money to finance wars, murder of innocent foreigners and the surveillance state at home and 2: backstopping scum like Perkins by the government issuing what amounts to an insurance policy with billions pumped into the failing financial institutions that vampires like Perkins feed on. So fuck Tom Perkins. If anyone deserves to be nicked to pay a bit more it should by he and his elitist class, the way that I see it it’s the least that they can do to finance a U.S. military that opens new markets for their exploitation, keeps shipping lanes open and the financial embeds in D.C. that keep redistributing wealth in order to finance their ‘investor’ schemes. Every time that  I hear one of these ungrateful bastards engaged in their self-serving bemoaning of the same democratic system that made it possible for them to use their wealth to rig the game in their favor I long for the day when the guillotines will finally be rolled out. Meanwhile, despite the official story of the bad winter being a drag on growth the backstopped stock market only continues to thrive.

The barometer for the looter class, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a constantly changing basket of the biggest winner stocks) has cracked the 16,000 barrier and continues to rise. This is a distortion of the true economic state of the country yet the sheeple are constantly hammered by a corrupt media that has for decades pimped for Wall Street while failing to provide context of the lives that are ruined as a direct result of rampant speculation. The strip-mining of America includes homes lost to foreclosure, jobs lost to offshoring (crack cocaine to corporate America), predatory lending to the economically disadvantaged, soaring property and health insurance rates, spiking energy prices, food costs rising and packages shrinking and the systemic dismantling of the “American dream”.  Entrepreneurs must be forced to compete with mammoth corporations and the costs associated have broken the backs of the small businessperson upon which this once great county’s economic might was built.

Look at the just announced merger between Comcast and Time Warner – you can rest assured that this is going to just be another running kick in the crotch for Americans as they are faced with even less competition and will assuredly be gouged by this new monopoly.

True capitalism is dead in America. In closing I will reference a New York Times op ed that is runner up to the hated Russian leader Vladimir Putin's calling out the horseshit that is "American exceptionalism" that ran on September 11, 2013. Former Reagan administration official David Stockman was absolutely vilified by the state-corporate press and all of its Wall Street shills when he had the temerity to publish a piece in the New York Times entitled “Sundown in America” last year. I excerpt the following:

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

AND

THE state-wreck ahead is a far cry from the “Great Moderation” proclaimed in 2004 by Mr. Bernanke, who predicted that prosperity would be everlasting because the Fed had tamed the business cycle and, as late as March 2007, testified that the impact of the subprime meltdown “seems likely to be contained.” Instead of moderation, what’s at hand is a Great Deformation, arising from a rogue central bank that has abetted the Wall Street casino, crucified savers on a cross of zero interest rates and fueled a global commodity bubble that erodes Main Street living standards through rising food and energy prices — a form of inflation that the Fed fecklessly disregards in calculating inflation.

These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.

All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.

It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.

It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.

Such words of wisdom are mocked and scorned in our great star-spangled lemming colony - it is always easier to just blame it all on the weather, at least the rubes can understand it that way.