Haughty Obama Hits Russia With More Sanctions

Late Wednesday the pathetic Obama administration fired yet another salvo at the Russian bear showing that they are as determined as ever to provoke a new cold war or maybe even a hot one with a nuclear armed power. Despite warnings from American business groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers that the months running dick-measuring contest between El Presidente and Russian leader Vladimir Putin would be harmful to American business the sanctions were leveled anyway. It is obvious that Obama has a huge inferiority complex and his thin-skinned temperament along with a monumental incompetence that is a now apparent to all but the Kool Aid drinking armies of O-Bots and he is now taking a run at the worst president in US history.

The old war criminal and neocon talking point spewing zombie Dick Cheney has remarked in his latest freakish tirade that Obama was "the worst president of my lifetime" although only because he has not militarily occupied the entire Middle East. But when you strip the statement of the reason behind it crazy Dick Cheney is right but it is not for the lack of warmongering but rather for doubling down on Bush-Cheney policies like mass surveillance and covering up torture as well as his regime's unprecedented free pass to the looters on Wall Street to loot the country with impunity while doing zilch to help the average American. Hell, at least George W. Bush sent everyone $600 which immediately went back into the economy instead of being hoarded by banksters who shower themselves with bonuses for their ongoing rape of the US taxpayer.

Obama's economic dream team has successfully crushed the middle class into pulp on the verge of eradication and still the money-changers are calling the shots while not one prominent banker responsible for the 2008 economic implosion has gone to prison, Forget that ridiculous and ballyhooed $7 billion settlement with Citigroup over the role of organization in the mortgage securities scam, that is horseshit - Citi's stock actually went up that day and the people who lost their homes as a result of fraud will get chump change out of it all. The perps all walked - walked away that is with nothing but a mere slap on the back of the wrist by the crooked Eric Holder's Justice Department. At least the protectors of predatory finance capitalism are still facing some opposition even if it is only symbolic and in the end matters nothing. Democratic party Senator Elizabeth Warren humiliated the stammering mummified creature who is Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, Obama's latest identity-based appointment. The blog Liberty Blitzkrieg has a great post with a video of the grilling here where Yellen obfuscates in order to avoid having to answer questions on why the too big to fail banks are bigger in 2014 then they were when Lehman Brothers went under.

But back to the sanctions. Having to this point failed to bait Putin into sending the Russian military into Ukraine to stop the US backed ethnic cleansing and murder of anti-Kiev, anti-fascist, anti-austerity rebels where he can then be fully demonized by a corrupt western media machine the Obama regime is fuming. How long can the false narrative be maintained and the truth that America has been funding (although likely indirectly) vicious neo-Nazi militias and murdering mercenaries to put down resistance to their illicit coup d'etat back in February. The fighting against the death squads and military from the US-EU-NATO Axis of Aggression backed Kiev junta continues largely because the eastern Ukranians know that they are inevitably doomed under a pro-Nazi regime led by Porky Poroshenko and his Hitlerian threats of vengeance -“for every life of our servicemen, the rebels will pay with tens and hundreds of their own” and are fighting for their lives. It has all of course been blamed on Putin by a corrupt media propaganda machine - one of the best essays on this sinister disinformation machine comes from a blog by a writer named Vera Graziadei who describes herself as a 'British Ukranian Russian actress and writer' and does a masterful job in flaying the lie machine - the piece is entitled "The Cunning Demons of Russian Propaganda, Or What The BBC Forgot To Warn Us About" and is a must read.

It is the entirely false narrative that allows for Obama and his loathsome regime to unnecessarily push the world closer to the brink out of petulance and dear leader's narcissism. Being punked by Putin over his offer of asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and then watching the Russian leader act like an adult by pissing on the parade of their imminent attack on Syria over a bogus sarin gas incident last summer has been a burr up Obama's ass ever since. The new round of sanctions ups the ante in that - according to The Guardian -  includes: "two major energy firms, a pair of powerful financial institutions, eight weapons firms and four individuals". Of note is the timing of the announcement - right after the BRICS summit where the developing economic powers continue to work to wrest themselves free from the tractor beam of the US centered financial Death Star.

Putin denounced the latest round of sanctions and warned that they were not in the long term interests of the US corporations operating in Russia - the US Chamber of Commerce gets this too although not Obama - and excerpting from a piece at libertarian financial blog Zero Hedge entitled "Putin Responds: "US Sanctions Will Boomerang And Cause Very Serious Damage":

It took just a little over an hour for Vladimir Putin to respond to the latest, most provocative and toughest round of US sanctions yet. The response, appropriately enough, came just after the BRICS summit in Brazil, where the world's developing countries yesterday announced the formation of both a BRIC bank and a $100 billion currency reserve to provide a liquidity alternative to the insolvent developed world's central banks. Here Vladimir Putin was asked to comment on the new package of sanctions against Russia announced just minutes earlier by Obama.

Putin's response: "We aren’t the ones introducing sanctions, you should ask them."

"Sanctions have a boomerang effect and without any doubt they will push U.S.-Russian relations into a dead end, and cause very serious damage, and it undermines the long term security interests of the US State and its people." he said to reporters while elaborating that said he needed to see the details of the sanctions to understand their full scope Reuters added.

And as was largely expected, Putin's next jab was right where it hurt: energy.

"This means that U.S. companies willing to work in Russia will lose their competitiveness next to other global energy companies."

Putin said the sanctions will hurt Exxon Mobil Corp which has been given the opportunity to operate in Russia. "So, do they not want it to work there? They are causing damage to their major energy companies," he said.

While we don't know for sure, we are confident that following the press conference Putin sat down with the rest of the BRICS, which command a population of just over 3 billion not to mention the world's fastest growing economies, and realized that for all the posturing, it is really a game of reserve fiat vs energy, with the US controlling the former, while the BRICS, and especially Russia, dominating the latter. And as long as the BRICS don't have their own monetary system, they will be reliant on the every swift (pun intended) whim of Janet "price-to-equity ratio" Yellen and her central planning kind.

We are just as confident that he and his peers are currently contemplating how to no longer be bound by the former ever again.

The sanctions are of course idiotic and self-defeating and it really is only a matter of time until the corrupt US based rigged casino is faced with alternatives where the deck isn't stacked - the only ones who don't realize this are idiots, narcissists and those who are drunk off the bitches brew of highly distilled American exceptionalism.

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Time to Punch Obama’s Ticket to Palookaville

Barrack Obama is now on the ropes, the false prophet of hope’s luck is now gone and it’s not coming back. The rats as in Democrats are sprinting for the lifeboats as the feckless aspirants to career lobbying jobs seek to cover their own asses in distancing themselves from the cascading fiascos of the Obama administration, the latest being the implosion of Obamacare. It was really a rotten program to begin with and it is a delightful bit of schadenfreude to see the Teflon coated snake oil salesman finally brought low and hoisted upon his own petard. The wretched political creature that is Obama wanted to have everything both ways, playing the end against the middle and cutting deals with the same Wall Street criminals who wrecked the economy and the rapacious insurance parasites with his corporate health care scam. Now after the implosion of what has to be the most half-assed website of all time the emperor of flimflammery has been shorn of everything but the skimpiest of fig-leafs and that is rapidly slipping as well.  How in the hell does something that has been so heavily promoted, faced so much opposition and is so important to El Presidente collapse like a shit souffle the minute it is rolled out?  Hell even some of the bloggers out there sitting around in their underwear in the basement would have been more competent than the buffoons hired by the White House – a firm named CGI Federal has been reported to have a history of problems. It should surprise nobody if they ended up as campaign contributors. Were Barry in office during World War II we would all be speaking German today. 

Seeing Obama this week during his forlorn Q & A session where he repeatedly apologizedfor "fumbling" the rollout was to see a man finally broken, largely thanks to his incompetent sycophantic advisers and his narcissism. It brought back  memories of George W. Bush’s magnum opus of political imagery when he appeared in Jackson Square in the Katrina devastated New Orleans French Quarter. The Bush spin machine trucked in floodlights to illuminate the scene for the bumbling Dubya’s televised address (not meant for the locals who had no power) after his administration, to borrow one of Barry’s numerous silly-assed sports metaphors ‘dropped the ball’.  There was a time in this country, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks when George W. Bush was invincible, he stood in the bubble of the World Trade Center with his megaphone and spewed jingoism wrapped nationalist tripe while the stench of rotting flesh still hung in the air of lower Manhattan. Bush was even then at the behest of Cheney and Rummy lying the country into two economically ruinous wars but he had the most ass-kicking club in the bag and unprincipled scum the likes of Karl Rove never ceased to use it as a bludgeon. I recall when there were billboards throughout the city that I live in promoting Bush, flags flew everywhere and SUVs roared down the roads with yellow ribbon magnets – it was like the freaking Weimar Republic. If there was ever a time in my life where I feared that the U.S. could actually topple into total dictatorship it was in 2002 and 2003. Then just when he was at the height of his power and in the early months of a second term  Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Big Easy and Bush’s credibility was destroyed forever.

Second terms are historically brutal for U.S. presidents. Nixon was ousted from the White House over Watergate, Bill Clinton was undone by a wandering trouser snake and a bold-faced finger-wagging lie to the American people and Ronald Reagan had Iran-Contra. Maybe Obama can redeem himself by sweeping into the mess hall at Bagram Air Base come Thanksgiving Day with a plastic turkey or have his NSA liars foil some mysterious terror plot but the ship has sailed and along with it goes Barry's credibility.  Maybe we can now finally be spared the horseshit about his "Grand Bargain" where he will gut Social Security for a few measly tax cuts to the rich. The knives are out in force for Obama and they should be. Let the Republicans flay him alive, he is already the lamest of ducks and Hillary Rodham Clinton is probably picking out the color scheme for the White House décor. He was always a phony and now is appropriately destined to become something akin one of his own sports metaphors – a political football and both the jackasses and the elephants will in the terms of one lawman named Buford T. Justice ‘barbecue his ass in molasses’.  The defection of 39 House Democrats last week is only the first trickle of the inevitable dam burst as the party officially pivots from Barry to Mrs. Clinton.

I always got a kick out of the liberals who I knew and their absurd idea that Obama was some sort of chess master, a political Jedi or to throw in another sports metaphor that Barry is so fond of - like Michael Jordan just studying the defense of the Detroit Pistons Bad Boys before he would explode in a whirling dervish of sheer will, breaking down the opposition and winning the champion ship. Bullshit. As Jordan once famously remarked at the height of his endorsement game when confronted about Nike’s use of sweatshop labor and suggestions that he should use his celebrity to take a stand against such practices the superstar refused to take a stand. When Jordan’s endorsement of notorious South Carolina racist Jesse Helms’ black opponent he huffed “Republicans buy shoes too”. Obama is more like His Airness in another way, he is just another amoral selfish prick milking the system for all that it is worth. The man has always been an incompetent and like his predecessor has always had apologists whose knee-jerk political loyalty or susceptibility to a cult of personality are immune to reality. There should really be some sort of minimal form of competency testing done before allowing Americans to vote especially with the evidence of the past decade of the dismal quality and non-existent morality of our elected "leaders'. As the great  libertarian writer H.L. Mencken once put it  "There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal." The entire system is a con and expecting it to produce anything other than the likes of Obama and Bush is foolish.

So as the band plays on and the ship continues to sink, the politicians seek to save their own lousy skins while the rest of us are trapped in steerage already up to our necks in water. 

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.

QE-UPHORIA

In a move that has been reported as shocking on a level right up there with Breaking Bad's classic just aired episode Ozymandias our esteemed top central bank racketeer eschewed the long predicted "tapering" of his Quantitative Easing lunacy. In a last shot to the gut of the American economic diaspora living in tent cities from sea to shining sea Helicopter Ben Bernanke made damned sure that his precious subsidizing of the same gamblers, con artists and ivory tower dwelling grifters who destroyed the economy in 2008 would have a very Merry Christmas again this holiday season. While the usual idiots in the state-corporate media gasped it was sure as hell not a surprise to me, nor to anyone else who has been onto this ongoing hustle for years.  Chairman Ben has presided over an unprecedented transfer of wealth upwards to the looter class that he and his private Federal Reserve have always served the interests of. In pre-collapse America the usurious bastards hold all of the cards and will not be satisfied until they own absolutely everything. It is the logical extension of the “ownership society” in that at the end of the day the banksters and their Washington embedded lackeys own all of our asses.

The ongoing Quantitative Easing under Bernanke is only allowing for the continuation of the ongoing thievery until he has safely left office and handed the keys to the printing presses over to Janet Yellen or some other establishment stooge - maybe Turbotax Timmy Geithner can be brought back for an encore performance. Rest assured that Chairman Ben will be have left the Marriner S. Eccles building and will be sequestered in some gated enclave of an elitist pig pen protected by the best mercenaries that money can buy when the shit does finally hit the fan and the economy implodes for good.  Ben knows very well that he is a “made man” and has nothing to fear while  once the streets erupt with violence when the monetary system has been rendered worthless and it will take the equivalent of the proverbial wheelbarrow full of Riechmarks to buy a bag of Doritos.

And ugly it will be, consider that a good many of the citizens of this giant lemming colony don't have more than a day or so of food on hand at any given time. When the ATMs are no longer functioning watch out because the absolute last place that you want to be would be anywhere the local supermarket which will be overrun with looters within a day or so. It will take complete martial law to prevent the total disintegration of society when Bernanke's financial WMD detonates but that after all is the inevitable endgame in a number of scenarios that would seal the fascist transformation of this once great country.

In the classic 1980's Bruce Willis movie Die Hard an international group of thugs invade and take over Nakatomi Plaza, holding hostages and all under the pretense of terrorism for political reasons. The real truth is that the terrorist ploy was designed to provide cover for a massive robbery and in the end all the hostages would be marched up to the roof of the building which mined with C4 explosives would be blown up, killing all of the hostages and allowing the perpetratorss to escape to their beaches of choice where they could bask in the sun collecting interest on their plundered loot.  It is a fitting metaphor for what Bernanke, Geither, Hank Paulson, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Vikram 'the bandit' Pandit and a cast of tens of dozens of other sordid miscreants are in the process of successfully pulling off in America.

It is all abetted by the gross incompetence of a certain Barry H. Obama over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who has not only the ticking down time bomb of the ruined American economy on his tab but also myriad other abortions including the NSA Stasi, another war that is currently in the gestation stage and of course Obamacare. His crowning achievement is a so-called health care ‘reform’ rip-off that will one day rank in the top ten in the bunco artists hall of fame. Not only does this law allow for the insurance parasites to feed off of millions of new customers who are forced by the police state to purchase the overpriced policies but it allows already bloated and greedy corporations to begin to kick family members off of insurance plans and into the arms of the bloodsuckers. Soon it will be all employees currently covered by employer provided insurance plans who will be sold down the river into bondage with the proverbial big government gun pointed at their heads and Obama will have his finger on the trigger. Welcome to modern day American, the land of ‘f**k you, I got mine”.

There is today much hullabaloo over the Republican led House bill to defund Obamacare as a condition to not shut down the government but don't pay attention it because it is total horseshit and only more political chicanery that provides cheap fodder for the talking heads and distracts from the real problems. Both parties are in on the con because the oligarchy owns both teams lock stock and barrel. Jimmy Carter had it right when he recently lamented the demise of a functioning democracy in America but he being shunned like a leper by the rulers can just be shushed like the drunken crazy old uncle who shows up once a year to ruin Thanksgiving and vomit into the sweet potato pie. Move along, nothing to see here.

But as to the travesty of the Federal Reserve’s continuation of bailing out the bankers and rigging the markets. Bernanke’s ‘unexpected’ move to continue full Q.E. had the pigs squealing with glee as they will continue to have their criminal schemes underwritten by the taxpayer and protected by the Obama administration. According to St. Louis Federal Reserve President Fred Bullard “While I expect to see inflation rise during the coming quarters, I want to see evidence of such an increase before endorsing less accommodative policy action by the FOMC”. This statement regarding inflation is as asinine as it is dishonest. One of the primary reasons that the criminals who run the big con are continually able to base their ongoing crack-ho economic policy of buying garbage mortgage backed securities it is due to this Hitlerian whopper. What is never mentioned is that core inflation rates conveniently omit food and energy prices, exactly the two areas where Americans are getting the screws put to them the hardest by the scum that runs the system. Just take a look at what you have been paying at the grocery store since this Q.E. game began, the prices are higher and the packages smaller and it is only going to get worse because this is the "new normal".

It is hard to hold the currently configured system in anything less than utter contempt - that is unless you are one of the TV addled, low-info drones who still believes what they tell you on cable news shows. As the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson once so brilliantly put it the rulers only stand for - ".. the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”  He was of course referring to his personal bête noire Richard M. Nixon but as we have seen with his paranoid streak, use of government agencies such as the IRS and DOJ to go after political foes and support of an all seeing surveillance state Barack Hussein Obama has left Tricky Dick in the dust.

And so it goes on, the tightening of the screws....