The Revolving Door Spins Again as Eric Holder Returns to Gig at White Shoe Law Firm

Former Attorney General Eric Holder wasn’t out of work for very long. He has now - like so many others who have undermined American democracy in the imperial Washington sewer - passed back through that gold-plated revolving door between government and the private sector. Mr. Holder, who turned over his duties of giving away get out of jail free cards to Wall Street looters to Loretta Lynch in May, has returned to the same white shoe law firm where he worked prior to heading up the Justice Department as the nation's top law enforcement official.

As reported by the website The Intercept in the story “Eric Holder Returns As Hero to Law Firm That Lobbies for Big Banks”:

After failing to criminally prosecute any of the financial firms responsible for the market collapse in 2008, former Attorney General Eric Holder is returning to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients.

The move completes one of the more troubling trips through the revolving door for a cabinet secretary. Holder worked at Covington from 2001 right up to being sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. And Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.

The Covington & Burling client list has included four of the largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Lobbying records show that Wells Fargo is still a client of Covington. Covington recently represented Citigroup over a civil lawsuit relating to the bank’s role in Libor manipulation.

Covington was also deeply involved with a company known as MERS, which was later responsible for falsifying mortgage documents on an industrial scale. “Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and several other large banks,” according to an investigation by Reuters.

The Department of Justice under Holder not only failed to pursue criminal prosecutions of the banks responsible for the mortage meltdown, but in fact de-prioritized investigations of mortgage fraud, making it the “lowest-ranked criminal threat,” according to an inspector general report.

The Obama regime has had several of the figures who bailed out the banksters at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer quit their public gigs only to cash in big after a brief period by taking jobs in the same industry - an enormous betrayal of the American people. There was former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who scored two jobs with firms that benefitted from his management of the printing presses. 

Helicopter Ben nailed down gigs with bond firm Pimco as well as hedge fund Citadel and his Quantitative Easing programs have inflated the largest stock market bubble in history - one that is inevitably going to burst but probably not until Obama has joined Holder on the golf course. Then there is former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitnher who ended up at private equity firm Warburg Pincus and departed Press Secretary Robert Gibbs who scored a position with McDonalds along with many others of a lesser profile.

The conflict of interest is stunning but predictable for a rat and longtime fixer like Holder. It would have been nice had he at least waited for a few months but the stench of impropriety is so thick in the D.C. air that it isn't even noticed anymore. This is a very serious breach of the public trust for Holder who was in the position to act on behalf of all Americans who got ripped off by these big banks but unethical Eric had all of their backs. With the news that he is officially back on their team now it is pretty evident why there were no meaningful prosecutions of the Wall Street racketeers.

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.

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.

Escape Velocity: DJIA 16,000 +

It is a glorious feeling of American euphoria today on Wall Street and in the luxurious confines of the looter class. Pigs are flying as the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared above 16,000 today for the first time in the history of the index. Not that this is really any sort of a true economic barometer of our days prior to collapse but it is what the shills, presstites and state-corporate media are given to push as an indication of a vibrant and resurgent American economy. Pumping 85 billion a month into the now bigger than ever banks thanks to the squadrons of helicopters on constant altert courtesy of Chairman Ben Bernanke and his onerous Federal Reserve, an institution that exists only to ensure that the high-rollers will never have to eat their speculative losses. The cooked to a fine fricassee markets have been in hyperdrive since last week’s command performance by Bernanke successor Janet Yellen who promises to keep the punchbowl filled with booze and the easy money that provides the heroin fix to the junkie banks flowing into the grand New York City gambling houses.

Things are so good that even Turbotax Tim Geitner just landed a new gig over at Warburg Pincus, yet another of those parasitic private equity houses that specialize in vulture capitalism or more appropriately sucking the blood out of the busted out average American and then picking the last morsels of flesh from their bones. The ongoing economic gaming of the system now enters the next stage and Yellen’s coming escalation of the QEuphoria is going to make Bernanke look like Paul Volcker by the time she is done feeding the pigs and inflating the Fed’s balance sheet to astronomical proportions. With the sweet, sweet spike now intravenously and permanently inserted into the arm of the zombie banks the final crushing of the remnants of our once vibrant middle class, at one time the envy of the world is about to be snuffed out for good. While I was driving home this evening I noticed that gas prices have jumped 26 cents a gallon overnight so the speculative feeding frenzy is already on and there is nothing like four dollar per gallon plus right in time for the holiday season to stomp the jackboot of the corrupt bankster state down on the windpipe of a reeling country.

Barack Obama now will also go down in history as the president who finally destroyed American capitalism, not that his immediate predecessors don’t have their own fingerprints on the murder weapon. Whether it be Bush’s maxing the national credit card with costly and unnecessary wars or Slick Willie’s collusion with slimeballs like Robert Rubin to eliminate the Glass-Steagall act and tear down the firewall between actual honest commercial banking and immoral degenerate gambling it is a joint effort. Hell, even the sainted Reagan bears more than his share of the blame for the orgy of deregulation that was just bound to be hijacked by greedy, well-funded special interests who while preaching “free markets” were ensuring that the rules would be rigged so that the only thing “free” would be the boatloads of illicit money that the pigs would eventually extract by permanently fixing the markets. 

Former Reagan budget director David Stockman caught hell from both sides of our false paradigm of a two-party system when he wrote the scathing piece “Sundown in America” in the New York Times. His book The Great Deformation is an extended version of the article that earned him the scorn of the presstitutes and the elitist defenders of a system gone to rot. The Bircher element of the far-right has always pushed the Obama as Marxist whopper when the man is actually by virtue of the system he presides over a fascist and Marx could have never dreamed of nuking capitalism the way that Barry and the boys have with their ongoing government subsidizing of the markets at taxpayer expense. To give Marx a bit of credit capitalism always has held within itself the seeds of its own eventual destruction in that everything becomes commoditized and all is for sale, including government officials, judges, statehouses, universities, the media etc. In the past most of the looting was done abroad as the imperialist policies of this country plundered with aplomb and the big money had the U.S. military on call. Former United States Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler nailed it when early in the last century he proclaimed:

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Now the chickens have come home to roost and with foreign lands plundered and occupied the strip mining of America itself began. I have always thought of the analogy of the old Stephen King short story “Survivor Type” as a wonderful metaphor for cancerous vulture capitalism of the type that now exists. In the tale a dude finds himself marooned on a barren Pacific island after a shipwreck. The character is a former surgeon who was involved in drug trafficking and had in his possession a huge cache of heroin (we keep coming back to this substance when discussing Wall Street banks for some reason) and no food. During the story he begins imbibing the drug and eventually has to start slicing off parts of his own body which he then eats in order to survive while he awaits rescue. This is what American capitalism is today, the politically connected corrupt classes have destroyed free enterprise and the spirit of being the best at what you do/produce. In short the pigs have broken the back of American entrepreneurial ladders into the upper class and turned the American dream into a nightmare.

Today’s 16,000 Dow record will be trumpeted by the house shills and the crooked court jesters like Mad Money Jim Cramer but it is all a lie, just like everything else in this debased land as it careens towards the inevitable final collapse. Not that I am any sort of a qualified financial consultant but it doesn’t take an Harvard doctorate in economics to see that the best investment for the near future is in canned goods.

I don't know just where I'm going…But I'm goin' to try for the kingdom if I can…Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man…When I put a spike into my vein…Then I tell you things aren't quite the same…When I'm rushing on my run…And I feel just like Jesus' son….And I guess I just don't know…And I guess that I just don't know

- “Heroin” by Lou Reed 1972-2013

Wall Street Rejoices as Bernanke’s Policies Will Live On

The confirmation hearings for Obama’s new Federal Reserve head Janet Yellen are an indication that more of the same failed policies will continue to subsidize the Wall Street casinos. With the 2014 mid-term elections looming and Obamacare looking every bit the disaster that could have been expected by letting the insurance companies basically write the law much credit to Senator Max Baucus, one of the most corrupt swine in the U.S. Congress. The website rollout was a clusterfuck of monumental proportions, people were jettisoned from the policies that the liar in chief told them they could keep and the brutal realization that greedy corporations were going to use the program to dump dependents from coverage hit Americans like another punch to the gut. This is a pummeling that they should be accustomed to under the rule of the penultimate footstool for Wall Street and bagman for corporate interests Obama and it is about to get worse. Today’s Yellen hearings sent the markets soaring in inverse proportion to Barry’s approval rating but while the speculators are approaching orgasm the vampires are taking flight to suck the last remaining drops of blood from the besieged middle class.

Wall Street gamblers are chortling with unabashed glee that Chairman Ben’s replacement is now on record as not only not going to put the helicopter fleet on stand down but is a damned certainty to continue to use QEternity to create digital money and funnel it into buying bad paper of the same banksters who destroyed the economy. This should surprise absolutely nobody who has been any paying attention to this ongoing scheme to artificially inflate the markets to enrich only the big boys and beggar the rest of us peasants. The perversion of capitalism will roll on under Calamity Janet as the bubble just gets bigger and bigger along with the catastrophic shock wave that will be released when it eventually explodes and there is no way that it will not do exactly that. They key is for the elitists to stockpile enough real assets, hire private security firms (mercenaries) to protect their compounds, fill up their wine cellars and get the hell out before it does. Let the little people deal with it when the ATMs no longer work and hordes of desperate people take it to the streets to engage in an existential struggle for food. The dollar will collapse along with the economic system and it will take a proverbial wheelbarrow full of Reichmarks to but a bag of freaking Doritos. For those who survive the scrum there will be plenty of food in the for profit prisons and relocation facilities that they will be sent to but Yellen and her ilk will be sitting pretty and watching the show.

Expect Yellen’s ticket to be punched in the true bipartisan manner that is always mustered from our rancidly corrupt politicians whenver it comes to time to protect the interests of the true owners of what George W. Bush once referred to as “the ownership society” - what it really means is that they own all of our asses. As the late George Carlin once nailed it, “it’s a big club and you aren’t in it”. There will be some Republican resistance although it will be portrayed by the state-corporate media as largely being confined to the noisy rabble that is the now discredited and co-opted tea party. At least when Ron Paul was still in congress we could count on the old man giving a good roasting to Bernanke when the former Time Person of the Year showed up to testify but Janet Yellen won’t get the same treatment. Any serious questioning is likely to be spun as a part of the Obama spinmeisters bumper sticker  war on women and she will get the free pass afforded to the moneychangers.

The Christmas bonuses will be awarded to the looter capitalists on Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange crowd will break into a chorus of “Joy to the World” as the greedy pigs gorge themselves on champagne and caviar as the sweet, sweet spike of the next fix is jammed into the arm of the junkie markets. Crack ho economics again, the holiday season will be one that is very festive in the enclaves of The Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard and other posh retreats where the hedge fund hyenas are the dominant indigenous species. The rest of the schmucks can mournfully scrounge through the remnants of Chinese manufactured crap in the bargain bins come Black Friday.  In America the elite reign supreme, it is as though it were their divine right as codified and enforced by the power of the state. Decades of television and movies have fully indoctrinated the masses of asses into glorifying ghoulish fiend CEOs and full blown swine like Donald Trump are to be honored as though he were the Pope. While “class warfare” may be a dreaded and unspeakable term in the lexicon of the elite it is only because it is a war that they have not only won but crushed all in their path, a blitzkrieg of greed that has become a testament to American ingenuity when it comes to rigging the system, tilting the tables and fixing the game.

Howard W. Campbell Jr. from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American journalist Kin Hubbard “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying fom the cash register.

Seep will be sheep and along with lemmings they shall wander the land, an economic diaspora in a wasteland of their own choosing.  As their “owners” continue to gorge themselves the flock of the forlorn are incapbable of anything remotely resembling the sort of righteous indignation that could get them back into the game. Shorn of their money and their pride and brainwashed by reality television such as “who wants to be a millionaire” they engage in silly squabbles and accept their enslavement by the moneychangers. They have conditioned to worship mammon and call it God, a false religion that ensures that the fatted calves will continue to live large in their comfortably secluded strongholds secure in their knowledge that Obama, Helicopter Ben and Calamity Janet will deliver the goods.  The only thing missing from the legions of suckers who continue to put up with this bullshit is a candy coating and a stick shoved up their assholes.

You never know thought, that stick may end up being a spit when the food trucks stop rolling a few weeks after it all has collapsed.

The Least Surprising Rescue of Humanity EVER

To television addled American simpletons it was the stuff of James Bond and Jason Bourne cliffhangers. To those of us who understand the depth of the systemic rot it was must more of the same political theater. As the Armageddon clock ticked down, the state media shrilly warning of imminent disaster as the crisis du jour that was the raising of the debt ceiling (aka increasing the limit on the national credit card) approached the point of no return there was a breakthrough in negotiations to save the day. This afternoon the compatible scoundrels in the Senate negotiated the deal to end the phony calamity for a couple of more months (and then it all starts over much to the delight of the corporate-state media) and to wrap it all up in the fuzzy red and blue blanket of “bipartisanship” – oh it is so precious to live in a land where we can just all get along isn’t it? The looter class wins again as if there was any doubt and the Barack Obama administration, the criminal congress and the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington have hammered that home repeatedly, like the blow of the captive bolt pistol between the eyes of the first sheep down the steel chute.

There will be champagne corks popping from Wall Street to Martha’s Vineyard to The Hamptons or whatever tony digs are inhabited by our ruling elite. The rest of this is only a formality, the luminescent orange drunkard John Boehner has capitulated and the intransigent tea party factions in the House of Representatives, duped and sold out again by leadership can just go and suck their thumbs and cry softly into their pillows along with the Zamboni Cowboy Ted Cruz, The Club For Growth, Jim DeMint and the rest of the fascistic tax chiselers with their Nazi style loyalty pledges. I found it humorous that the dyspeptic old bastard John McCain even relished giving good old Teddy a swift kick in the balls when he gloated that “This has been one of the most shameful chapters I’ve seen here” – take it from McCain who is the President Pro Tempore of “shameful” political behavior. By the time that it is morning in America on Thursday the 17^th the bipartisan rulers will have once again succeed in yoking the slaves and delivering them to the man.

Thankfully this farce is over at least in terms of the media coverage, there is not much worse than having to endure the teleprompter reading big breasted bimbos with the thousand yard stares weighing in on economic issues. Nor anything more nauseating than the talking heads for either supposed side of this mockery of all that this once great country was supposed to stand for. Let them all go and find some corpse to hump for maximum ratings ala Nancy Grace or the next celebrity scandal, missing teenage blonde girl or intrepid and loyal pet saves owner tale. At least until the next round of the ‘debt crisis’ slated to kick off in early 2014 before the nation’s Christmas trees are taken down. As for the worthless and corrupt Congress, there is already much anticipation over the ever diligent Darrell Issa convening a tribunal over the closing of the World War Two Memorial which should be open before that oily gasbag, the richest man in the House of Representatives can call his first witness. As H.L. Mencken once famously remarked – “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage”, it may be time to buy futures in bananas.

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.

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....