Crisis Interruptus

Hooray! The government is open again, the debt ceiling has been raised, thousands of federal employees just got a free two week paid vacation on the taxpayer dime and as Obama came right out and said it today - people are fed up with Washington. Of course Barry conveniently omits the inconvenient truth that HE is a part of Washington and the travesty of his administration along with a corrupt and incompetent congress that has an approval rating somewhere in between used car salesmen and child molesters. In the first business day after the national hysteria of the entire shameless sham Republican spinmeisters were busily polishing the turd of their surrender and El Presidente was engaged in a victory lap not much attention was paid to the agreement only being temporary. Get ready for a do-over of this entire ridiculous farce come February, the lazy, on the payroll ever feckless corporate state media have inherited the gift that keeps on giving. It is like the demon love child of O.J. and Jodi Arias and the remnants of Thanksgiving dinners will hardly be digested before the next wave of wall to wall coverage of the next debt crisis roars into America’s living rooms like a tsunami of digital manure all in high definition on that wonderful 52 inch television that you can get a deal on at Wal-Mart come Black Friday - that is if you don’t get trampled to death on the way to the electronics department.

Now that this spectacle has reached halftime and Team Jackass and Team Elephant are headed for the locker rooms to make their adjustments it would be wise to consider just how much this latest example of ugly Americanism plays in the civilized world. We could barely transition our exceptional asses from the botched war on Syria and the plague of NSA spying and industrial espionage to this idiotic debacle before the globalized masses in the technological era began to whisper - and rather loudly - that the Imperialists have no clothes. The Chinese who incidentally happen to hold one hell of a lot of American paper and are integral in keeping the entire Ponzi scheme of mutated American capitalism going are making noises about the future being a “de-Americanized world” and the International Monetary Fund is also dropping hints that it is about time for the children on Uncle Sam’s plantation to grow up and get their shit together. In today’s “new normal” of the globalized business world we have already taken plenty of hits over the inability for businesses and world consumers to utilize American based cloud computing without being spied on by a pack of voyeurs led by a Nazi with a Star Trek fetish. The future costs of lost business due to Obama’s NSA has yet to be calculated but by the time that all is said and done it will likely result in billions of dollars of lost income for U.S. tech companies. Throw in an unstable government led by a gaggle of clowns along with a neo-confederacy of dunces and it isn’t looking good. Hell, if you were an entrepreneur would you invest in this festering hellhole of dumbness, greed, hellfire missiles and public apathy? I thought so.

Nothing will be learned from any of this, not that anything could be by a pathetic nation of sheep who wear their willful ignorance on their sleeves as though it were a badge of honor were capable of it. The system will continue to list along with Captain Barry at the helm towing a barge filled to the brim with some of the biggest turds in American political history. A ship of fools headed right towards the proverbial iceberg with the boilers stoked to ramming speed. This is not going to end well and the collapse can has only been kicked down the road for a few more months. Crazy Ted from Texas via Canada and his dominionist minions are just dying for another bite at the apple come early 2014. His band of jihadists had their mad little insular worlds destroyed when the deal was done and the “Muslim’s” Soviet style death panels were still in business. Some, like the crazed stenographer whose ugly public meltdown is going viral on the internet today. Dianne Reidy, obviously an acolyte of the type of fascist style religion practiced by the Zamboni cowboy’s snake-handling father was escorted from the chamber in the aftermath of last night’s vote. Reidy ranted about the lie of the separation of church and state as well as raging against Freemasons - “He will not be mocked, he will not be mocked, He will not be mocked” wailed Reidy. “The greatest deception here, is that this is not one nation under God. It never was. Had it been...it would not have been...No. it would not have been...the Constitution would hot have been written by Free Masons...and go against God. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve two masters. Praise be to got, Lord Jesus Christ”. It reportedly was an unsettling event and she was spoke of by those who worked with her as “respectable and dependable, and this is very surprising to anybody who works with her” according to a CNN report. The disturbed woman was turned over to the police and appropriately transported to a local hospital for evaluation - hopefully followed by a Thorazine shot and an extended stay in a rubber room.

Which brings us to a serious problem, at least in libertarian terms in that a good amount of the so-called tea party is filled with people just as batshit crazy as Reidy and hellbent at using the full power of the big government police-surveillance state to deprive their many enemies the most basic of their rights. This was the problem with the tea party after the original libertarian movement was hijacked by political operatives, filled with the re-branded dregs of the worst elements of the Republican base - especially the religious zealots and purged of the earnest libertarians who tended to support Ron Paul. These are very dangerous people and use the very guarantee of freedom of religion as a shield from behind which they work feverishly to ensure that theirs will be the ONLY religion tolerated. The state-corporate media in all of its wretched incompetence, corruption and false equivalencies has never dared to examine those that are the most intolerant of all and occupy a good amount of the seats in the House of Representatives. When it is reported that a meeting of House Republicans opened a meeting over the debt ceiling crisis with a full throated singing of “Amazing Grace” it would seem that such a thing would be at least mildly troubling to those who value freedom and liberty. There is nothing more oppressive and potentially murderous than a religious fanatic who believes that God is on their side, the piles of bodies of those who fell victim to such folks through history could probably reach the foot of the very throne of God were they piled up.  The American religious right has always been very dangerous to any concept of freedom that others who are more rational might have. So far the luck of this on the brink of tyranny society has lasted solely because they have never had an intelligent, articulate and charismatic leader - in Ted Cruz they finally have their Führer. I have to hand it to Ayn Rand who generates mixed feelings among libertarians but at least she was an atheist who refused to allow those in the religion business who were the equivalent of her fictional anti-capitalist/freedom villains any credibility in her circles.

Not that Americans bother with actually reading - a not insignificant contributor to our current plight - but if they were interested in trying it I would suggest that William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich be a mandatory addition to Christmas lists throughout the land.

Despite “Shutdown” Pentagon Recalls Workers

As the phony government shutdown enters week two it becomes increasingly obvious that it is just another of the big lies of our corrupt big government.  The announcement that between 300,000 to 400,000 civilian employees of the war machine would be coming back to work on Monday after a nice week of vacation is confirmation of the systemic rot. This thing has always been a farce, another ginned up fake crisis that gives the professional shills in the state-corporate media fodder while the empire teeters on the brink of collapse. The absurd pissing match over passing a budget attached to the revocation of Obamacare - the law that corporations are salivating over as they now have the ability to screw employees and their dependents with impunity as they jettison health insurance costs is just for show. The real business of the United States in 2013 is more than ever war, this was evident when Barry signed the Pay Our Military Act into law last week ensuring that the imperial stormtroopers will be at the ready for whatever war (Syria, Iran) is next on the agenda and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was never going to give up the hundreds of thousands of parasites that provide support at the Pentagon. As Randolph Bourne once famously remarked, "war is the health of the state" and there has never in history been one as dependent on the global killing machine as the American Empire.  The reverence for our blessed troops in this country is quite possibly the most telling example of just how fascist that this place has become. In a nice touch and just because it plays well the the rubes and easily manipulated base the House has passed a bill to bring back military chaplains because, god just loves war. Hallelujah.

The partial government closures will also not save money either despite how the wailing about spending cuts, in the true bipartisanship that always is possible when it comes to cover your own ass time congress is currently working on making sure that all of those on their vacations will be able to retroactively collect their back pay.  It was just way too obvious of a scam considering congress wasn't being made to cough up one thin dime of their taxpayer supported lives of living large and having all of their benefits paid for while the general population is thrown to the wolves.  Speaker John Boehner, one of the most disingenuous and shameless of politicians that I have ever seen, one whose ability to break into well-timed crying jags whenever on camera during his pre-speaker days  delivered the sound bite that "this isn't  some damn game" on Friday as the spinning continued.  Boehner of course is lying, his fake outrage is just a part of the scrum between the jackasses and elephants and the trophy is winning the media advantage going into the 2014 mid-term elections where all of the victorious assclowns will be able to hold onto their positions of privilege, power and a life of stealing money from hard working Americans.  It is all a game and one that honest, decent people trying to make a living are losing because of the entitled servants of the elite within the beltway and the insatiably bloodthirsty war machine that President Eisenhower warned of over a half-century ago:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

We all can see today how that turned out - "alert and knowledgeable citizenry"? That's just not the way we roll here in the Homeland.

Wall Street Toady Obama's Buddies Conjure Visions of Economic Doom

Of all things that Barack H. Obama has accomplished during his lamentable tenure in the White House he has consistently been able to contort himself into a foot stool for Wall Street. Obama more than anyone is responsible for this rank era of economic malaise, the failure of capitalism and the open season for the finance vampires to feed on the all of the lesser cattle roaming the perimeters of Uncle Sam’s plantation. It was Obama and his slimy consigliere Rahm Emanuel now the Mayor of Chicago who long ago cast their lot with the corrupt banksters. It was he who appointed Timothy Geithner, a reliable bagman for Wall Street as Treasury Secretary and enabled the Federal Reserve’s subsidizing of failed institutions that were able to purchase political clout and push this once great nation closer to the brink of insolvency - if it isn’t already there which is debatable. Despite his silly and focus group tested rhetoric about “hope” and “change” the flim-flam man in chief was only delivering “false hope” and “chump change” to 99  or so percent of American high rollers, while giving the looters and parasites free reign to pillage with aplomb and to give the rest of us the royal shaft.

If the so-called tea party has ever done anything right (and I have yet to see it) I would love to see it be them pushing the country into default and crashing forever the schemes of money changers the  like Lloyd Blankfein and his ilk. The unpunished culprits who destroyed the economy and have been coddled by Barry and the boys ever since and the ONLY thing that this type of scum understands is money. Let them lose it out the ass when their rigged markets come crashing down the day after the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Fuck them!

A parade of scum led by Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan arrived at the White House on Wednesday to present Barry with his marching orders.  Oh lord help us,  the sky is falling bleated the swine as the partial government shutdown went into day three. Despite the ongoing political circle jerk it was becoming incresingly possible that a small group of GOP lawmakers are not only going to keep on holding out but also will stick together to nix raising the limit on the national credit card - which should have been cut off long ago. The banksters seem to be getting restive at this point largely because much to their dismay they have run into a small block of resistance that is not susceptible to the standard high finance bribery and threats. From the beltway's ‘inside baseball’ report formally known as Politico there is this interesting bit entitled Government shutdown: Wall Street angry at tea party it has no influence over from which I excerpt:

Wall Street is clear about who’s to blame for the government shutdown and a looming debt default: tea party Republicans.

What’s less clear is what Wall Street can do about it.

The reality is that deep-pocketed financial services executives and their lobbyists have little leverage against tea party lawmakers who don’t much care for financiers or big banks and don’t rely heavily on the industry for campaign cash.

“Those are the ones who are most problematic for Boehner,” one D.C.-based lobbyist who represents financial services clients said of tea party lawmakers. “I don’t think there’s any way for Wall Street to punish the 25 to 50 hard core House Republicans. It’s not like [Reps. Steve] Stockman and Tim Huelskamp are doing a lot of Goldman Sachs events. I don’t think Justin Amash cares if Bank of America gives to him or not.”

The rise of tea party lawmakers’ influence is shift from years past when the Republican party was more business friendly and could be counted on by Wall Street to give great weight to its concerns.

For many members of Congress, wooing wealthy Wall Street donors and financial services PACs is a routine part of their reelection efforts and a source of frustration for industry critics who view this largesse as standing in the way of reforms. The reputation of the banking industry has taken a beating since the financial crisis, but it nevertheless remains a powerful lobbying force in Washington thanks in part to its generous political donations.

But the industry feels powerless when it comes to dealing with some members of the tea party, who are immune from one of Wall Street’s most potent tools: campaign donations.

“The extreme radicals are going to get reelected because they come from districts where they don’t need to raise that much money,” said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist of the Potomac Research Group. “This new tea party movement is not particularly pro-business. They certainly are not pro-Wall Street and pro-big banks. That is a new strain in the Republican party that worries many on Wall Street.”

It seems that some of the big boys in their Wall Street ivory towers, operating with total impunity to swindle the last fraction of a cent out of every living human being and who are above the law thanks to the protection racket that Obama heads may not get the equivalent of the bailout that saved them from their bad gambling bets in 2008.  Blankfein, who in any decent society would be rotting in one of the darkest dungeons in the land will find some way to once again fleece the taxpayers in order to fund his Goldman Sachs mega-casino but there may not be the accustomed political cover this time. He and his fellow financial jackals were able to successfully pull off a costly and brilliantly constructed propaganda campaign in the aftermath of the economic crash. This was fully aided and abetted by one Helicopter Ben Bernanke with his “Green Shoots” sloganeering which was enough for the sheep with their 401Ks to go back to their passive willful blindness and just tune out reality and tune in their televisions .  Then our prestigious head central banker fired up the printing presses at the Marriner S. Eccles Building for endless Quantitative Easing giveaways to take all of the worthless bad paper of the banksters onto the Fed’s bursting at the seams  balance sheet and provide them with even more money to gamble with while Americans lost their jobs, homes, insurance and their hope. It was the greatest crime in the history of the republic and nobody who was responsible ever went to prison let alone received so much as a slap on the wrist by Barry and the boys, only free food and drink on the taxpayer tab as they defiled the White House with their presence to one more time hold out their hats.

The “Oracle of Omaha” himself Warren Buffet once referred to Wall Street derivatives as financial weapons of mass destruction, let’s see the well dug in tea party renegades be the ones who do the world a favor and set it off, bringing down all of their illicit bets upon their heads and their corrupt system of financial fraud along with it. Like one of those cleansing rains of biblical proportion. Granted, that it will be rough for awhile but perhaps it will allow for a reset of what were supposed to be the free markets of capitalism.  In the process of reconfiguring the system, restoring the rule of law along American credibility and free enterprise. There could be search parties sent forth to dig through the rubble and find the scoundrels responsible for the collapse. The lines to the guillotines could begin forming up at the ass end of that golden calf of a bull statute that sits at the foot of Wall Street.

Oh, and the service academy college football teams will play on Saturday - nice to see where our priorities lie.

The Shutdown Circus

The crisis du jour is of course the threat to shut down the government barring the passage of a continued funding resolution.  This is the new “fiscal cliff” and makes for a nice distraction in the corporate-state media but in reality is nothing more than . With yesterday’s GOP House vote to attach conditions that will effectively be the dagger in the heart for Obamacare, the grotesque excuse for healthcare/insurance reform that primarily benefits the parasitic insurance industry the countdown clock continued ticking. The coming media swarm will be similar to the Syrian dead children propaganda onslaught or any standard sort of a sordid sex scandal or missing white teenage girl story. But it won’t come to pass, at least in any meaningful form because the corrupt vermin in congress will be sure that any shut down doesn’t affect the crusading military or the fascist police state programs that are the real problems, not Barry’s half-assed corporate giveaway program. I am all for a government shutdown because it is way past time to reign in this out of control monster and end the war on civil liberties, nail shut the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington and send a good many career bureaucrats of our bloated government packing and force them to get real jobs rather than suckling at the taxpayer teat but this is phony baloney.

The ongoing Republican jihad against Obamacare simply is good politics for a base that has been fed shovels of bloody red meat straight out of the John Birch Society Blue Book ever since the run up to the 2010 mid-terms and next year is an election year.  The so-called tea party, originally a libertarian movement was hijacked by GOP high-rollers back in 2009, cleansed of the Ron Paul supporters in a purge similar to the night of the long knives and then used as an exoskeleton for a rebranded post-Bush GOP establishment. The political shock troops who were bussed into town hall meetings was comprised largely of the religious right party base, kooks, racists and bluehairs whose sheer gullibility was exploited by a cynical political party. This latest staged attack on Obamacare is just more rabble rousing because quite frankly the law is in the books and it is not going to be defunded or repealed after the penultimate corporate stooge, Chief Justice John Roberts provided the  big business seal of approval with last summer’s SCOTUS verdict to uphold the program. Greedy corporations are already drooling at the prospect of soon jettisoning dependents and employees from those costly employer subsidized insurance programs and into the feeding troughs of the insurance industry.  The GOP is just taking advantage of people whose support can only be ensured by continued lying and demagoguery. The term "socialism" which is most often used to mobilize the masses to agitate against Obamacare is ridiculous nonsense given that there seems to be no such objections to real socialist programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the military, the police and fire departments, those who build the roads and keep the water running etc. But it sells well with the rubes.

Republican senator Ted Cruz, a slicker than spit on a griddle McCarthyist type is the flavor of the day with the easily duped who are always looking for the man on the white horse.  The Harvard educated former Supreme Court clerk is a dyed in the wool elitist with an ambitious streak who has mined the cultural populism for all that it is worth. Cruz is a freshman senator from Texas whose remember the Alamo style of belligerent rhetoric has earned him a following while he engages in the sort of relentless self-promotion that means only one thing – that he has eyes on assuming the keys to the war machine from Barry in January 2017. His staged 21 hour pseudo filibuster last week where he railed against Obamacare was a publicity stunt but one that endeared him to the always scummy David Gregory to the degree that he was the guest of honor on Press the Meet this morning.  Cruz has that potential star power that the Sabbath morning mental masturbation fests just adore, he may even be able to dislodge McCain and Graham if he continues to parlay his shtick. But Cruz also represents something very special to that certain twenty percent or so of the populace who have an authoritarian bent. As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer:

No matter how vital we think the role of leadership in the rise of a mass movement, there is no doubt that the leader cannot create the conditions which make the rise of a movement possible. He cannot conjure a movement out of the void. There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before movement and leader can make their appearance.

This element, which is anathema to a functional free society should be shunned and exiled to the fringes because they are as dangerous as hell. Cruz represents that most important thing that those with a predisposition to fascism have lacked – a Führer.  As thoroughly rotten as the regime of the narcissist Obama has been do you really want to see the now fully constructed and integrated police/surveillance state placed in the hands of a demagogic fanatic? It is imperative that those better elements of the so-called tea party join with libertarians and principled progressives (NOT liberals) and lead a movement to restore civil liberties, the rule of law and truly free market principles to this country before conditions allow a calculating lunatic to seize the reins of power. Perhaps a man like Rand Paul could be one to rally around, at least he seems to have a somewhat consistent set of principles and is not afraid to buck the system.
Even a former New York Times employed liberal is showing signs of warming to Paul. In his latest column for New York Magazine entitled “It’s Hard to Hate Rand Paul” Rich writes the following:

What separates Paul from many of his tea-party peers is his meticulous insistence on blaming Republicans and Democrats alike for the outrages he finds in every tentacle of the federal Leviathan. He also takes a moderate rhetorical tone, far removed from that of the other right-wing politicians, Fox News talking heads, and radio bloviators who share his views. “I believe no one has the right to pollute another person’s property, and if it occurs the polluter should be made to pay for cleanup and damages,” he writes in one typical passage. “I am not against all regulation. I am against overzealous regulation.” There’s no “Don’t Tread on Me” overkill in his public preachments. He harbors no impeachment fantasies and not so much as a scintilla of Obama hatred even as he leads the charge against what he sees as the oppressive government nightmare of Obamacare. This has been the case from the start. When Paul began running for the Senate, it was during the red-hot tea-party year of 2009, with its tsunami of raucous town-hall meetings and death threats to the president. Paul gladly accepted Palin’s endorsement, but never succumbed to those swamp fevers. Though the liberal editorial page of the Louisville Courier-Journal was dismissive of his views during his Senate race, it went out of its way to observe that the man himself was “neither an angry nor resentful person” and was instead “thoughtful and witty in an elfin sort of way.”

While Rich’s piece could be said to be the damnation of faint praise given some of the other statements on Paul in reference to a  number of things but that this could be written previously was not that long ago unthinkable and perhaps it offers signs of a breakthrough given the exposure of the NSA Stasi and the permanent warfare state. While I have never really thought that much of Senator Rand Paul, I did admire his father a great deal for his courageous stance during the darkest years of the Bush-Cheney regime - especially when he whipped out a reading list at one of those debates for the benefit of Rudy "Mr. 9/11" Giuliani. I must admit that I am slowly warming to Rand Paul because the next president of this country needs to reign in decades of abuses and begin holding criminals accountable for their actions. Given the rotten array of choices to succeed Obama – Hillary, that loudmouthed fat slob from New Jersey and the Texas Zamboni it would seem that Rand Paul is the cream of the crop. He needs no stronger endorsement than this comment from the virulent neocon propagandist William Kristol, a coward who never served in the military yet whose blood lust to feed American men and women into the meat grinder of combat knows no bounds sneered that Paul was the “spokesman for the Code Pink faction of the Republican Party.”

While Cruz and the House GOP continue to milk this ridiculous shutdown threat for all it’s worth, one yahoo – a back bencher who goes by the name of John Culberson and is of course from Texas invoked the holiest of post-democracy American folklore in exclaiming “I said, like 9/11, ‘Let’s roll!’.  That there are idiots like this guy who are equating their silly little political snit to the event that has justified the ongoing fascist crackdown on civil liberties, NSA mass surveillance and wars without end is a perfect example of the authoritarian element that I spoke of a couple of paragraphs ago. When the whole thing blows up soon and the shutdown is exposed as a confidence game Culberson and his ilk will only become more embittered and hell bent at doing whatever possible to escalate our collapse.

Christ knows that Obama isn’t doing a good enough job of destroying the country without the help of useful idiots.