Category Archives: Class War
Uncle Tom’s Pizza Cabin
Cain wants to hire you for minimum wage with no benefits to deliver pizzas for him…you have to have your own vehicle though, and buy your own gas. If you get robbed/shot Cain will send his best wishes to your family and send someone to retreive your blood-stained uniform to be washed and re-used. Good luck kids!…actually many of the folks delivering pizzas these days are in their 40’s/50’s.
I have now found out what it takes to be hired as a minimum wage ($6.67 per hour in Florida) delivery driver at a Pizza Hut take out, delivery, and carry-out restaurant here in St. Pete. This is one of the smaller restaurants, and it does not even have “dine-in” facilities.
It takes the typical paperwork of filling out a job application, plus the paperwork of confirming one is either a U.S. citizen or qualified to work in the U.S.
But it also takes filling out an 80-question questionnaire.
Additionally, once one is hired, one is shown approximately 2 hours straight of corporate promotional videos on the Pizza Hut restaurants.
If one’s hiring manager is preoccupied with a manager of his own having come from outside the immediate chain to oversee him and ask him questions that day, one will have no training that day.
If one’s hiring manager tells one he will telephone you the next day to confirm he will be in the next day to give one training, and he does not give you that phone call, he simply does not give you that phone call. Then if you show up, and he is not there, he simply is not there.
If he fobs off the training that second day on a subordinate with a thousand different tasks that subordinate is performing, and if you show and the subordinate on whom the training’s fobbed off is put into the situation wherein the thousand different tasks interfere with his being able to adequately train you, you don’t get training and it’s preferred you leave before the end of your shift, so the company will save money on the paltry $6.67 per hour they are paying you; if you leave before the end of your shift that day, you simply don’t get paid.
Additionally, you are to wear black pants. And you are to purchase them yourself. The organization does not purchase them. You do. I purchased two pair, and they cost me $40.00 for the two at a Target.
Additionally, you must wear a certain kind of shoe, and you must purchase them. The organization does not purchase them. You do. I was told they could cost me up to $40.00, and the money would come out of my paycheck.
This is on a paycheck of minimum wage of $6.67 per hour.
Part of your responsibility — and you are told this in the promotional videos — is to “hustle.” They tell you, “hustle” from the restaurant to your car, and “hustle” from your car to the home of the customer who is receiving the delivery.
They also tell you to be careful of crime, because delivery drivers get victimized by criminals. But they also tell you, no firearms are allowed in the restaurant. I had a concealed firearms carrying license, and I did not reveal that to my hiring manager. While I was fully within my legal rights to carry my concealed firearm, since I had a Florida concealed firearms carrying license, the restaurant tells employees in a restaurant that handles cash, and employees who handle cash when they deliver to customers, no firearms. This is sort of like telling a seal to swim glibly and gayly and utterly without a care within an ocean full of great white sharks.
The interesting thing was, when I came for my first day on the job, I was sent to the back of the Pizza Hut restaurant. The hiring manager was there for that day, and he set me up in front of the video player, and had the 5 videos I was to sit and watch for the next several hours in front of me. He informed me that there was originally supposed to have been an orientation of 5 people, not 1 person, but I was the only one who, in his words, “worked out.”
The day previous to that day, I had met him at another restaurant where he was working to answer to his telephone call and he had said on that earlier occasion that I’d so far been the only one who had worked out.
Additionally, they give you a motor vehicle check, if you’re to be a delivery driver. And before hiring you, they check into your driving background. They did that with me, and again, apparently, I was the only one who checked out okay.
Their turnover rate is evidently so high that this sort of thing is conventional and typical with them.
After being there 2 days with no training, spending 40 bucks on two pairs of pants out of my own money, realizing I’d have to spend 40 more on shoes, realizing my car insurance was entirely my responsibility and if any accident I had happened, I could not only lose my job, but end up without car insurance, having had the hiring manager’s time primarily preoccupied the first day on the job by his manager from the outside coming in to check up on him, and then having had the hiring manager promise to call me the second day and confirm and show up the second day to train me, and then not do that, and showing up myself the second day and having the training responsibilities fobbed off by the hiring manager, who managed 82 stores total (this being only one of his stores), on some hapless and luckless subordinate, and being asked an 80-question questionnaire as a precondition to being employed at the sum of money of $6.67 per hour for a job which was apparently not even going to be full-time, I decided this would not work out.
I went to the restaurant the third day, turned in my new “uniform” in the shape of my shirt given me the previous day and my cap given me the previous day, and said, “I’m outta here, I quit.”
The hiring manager was there and he ran after me to stop me, and I yelled back, “You want reliability from your employees, but you’re supposed to be reliable yourself and you weren’t reliable and didn’t show up to train me. I quit.”
I said that loudly as I got into my car and drove away.
Hence ended my 2 shifts, one 4 hours, and one 3.5 hours, with Pizza Hut.
I am 60 years old, and, frankly, I simply could not take it
My point is, I have had my share of tough jobs. But this 2 days at Pizza Hut and the literally evil and horrendous way in which workers were demeaned into being considered nothing but cogs in the machinery of production of profits for the looters, thievers, pillagers, exploiters, and swine at the top of the establishment, and their well-paid agents in the management in the middle, was simply too much for me at 60 to take.
So I simply quit. I could not take it. And this may be my last experiment in trying to get work, because my money’s running out, and if I cannot find work soon, I will be homeless. I will not be homeless, and have already made “alternative plans” to the possibility of homelessness, which some already know of. After watching the City of St. Petersburg City Council and Mayor pass ordinances effectively criminalizing homelessness here in the City of St. Petersburg, I have decided, that if it’s a choice of homelessness or death, I will take death.
Lynch Mob Rule
Despite the trotting out of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords last Monday night in what has to be the most cynical and shameless bit of political theater since George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier, the great debt ceiling crisis was the nadir of the ongoing decline of the Der Homeland. Mrs. Giffords, who was nearly murdered by a deranged little freak at a public appearance in rootin’ tootin’ Tuscon has been reinvented as some sort of icon of hope in the era of Obama’s chump change. The shooting, of which Giffords was only one of victims (the dead included a federal judge and a nine year old girl) grabbed headlines in that the act of wanton murder went down in a Congressional district that Sarah ‘lock and load’ Palin’s PAC just happened to have featured a gun site over in an recent solicitation for money. While Jared Loughner could never definitely be tied to the violent haters that comprise the teabaggers and fascist Republican base (and likely never will be due to his insanity) it was treated by many as a wake up call to the potential for mayhem spurred on by the general climate of anger, hatred and toxicity in American politics.
So it was Gabby Giffords who would provide the necessary human interest cover story for the grand scale, red white and blue, dipped in Tabasco ass-fucking delivered to America by the terrorist Republican party. A terrorist Republican party that has benefited enormously by the cover provided by their repackaged and rebranded Tea Party base, a mass of embittered pasty white folks who have meshed well with the standard collection of American Taliban religious crazies and have been able to wrap their radicalism in a Gadsden flag as some bizarre symbol of revolution against tyranny. A terrorist Republican base that is largely funded by plutocratic, anti-American tax chiselers like the Koch Brothers with their immense activist networks. A terrorist Republican party that is promoted by veteran Republican operative Roger Ailes and and the FOX news propaganda machine as well as tens of thousands of radio stations run by Christian fanatics to reach the haters. A terrorist Republican party that has been fed even more money by the vile pig Karl Rove who was able to escape prison thanks largely to the actions of the nebulous Patrick Fitzgerald to build a super money laundering machine. A terrorist Republican party that effectively has hijacked the entire fucking judicial system but especially the thoroughly polluted Supreme Court courtesy of the RATS (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas) who forever punched the ticket of American fascism with their landmark Citizen’s United ruling enabling corporations to openly buy elections. A terrorist Republican party that in true fashion, our feckless quisling leader Barack Obama never fails to surrender to.
One can nearly forgive the terrorist Republican party for their blistering hatred of the American public, that is after all what they are all about and despite the cheesecloth thin facade provided by their Tea Party they wear their fascism on their sleeves. What is unforgivable is the ongoing selling out of the country by the detestable rat that is Obama, a man who is rapidly carving out a niche for himself as the worst president in American history. Were Obama to have held office during the critical years of World War II we would all be speaking German today. Other than being a cheese eating surrender monkey the terrorist Republican party have hit the mother load with Obama because their neo-Confederate, racist teabagger shock troops will never relent while there is a Negro in the White House. Obama can capitulate on every demand, accommodate every desire to bust the backs of the middle class by destroying the social safety net and in will NEVER be enough. The bigots will still hate him, they will hate him with a burning white hot incandescence because that is in their blood. The would only be happy were the infidel Obama to be lynched at the fifty-yard line in Lucas Oil Stadium, on national television during the halftime show of Super Bowl XLVI accompanied by a Lee Greenwood-Toby Keith duet.
Obama, is still an enigma to a large degree. His presidency, an endless series of disasters that mount by the minute has in some sort of a sick way made me wistful for Bush and Cheney, at least then I knew who the fucking enemy was. Obama has been so consistently awful that he is either a complete ignoramus or he is in on the con. The fact that he packed his administration with Wall Street insiders and the worst type of recycled Clinton era scum would seem to indicate the latter but perhaps it is even worse. What if Obama reckons himself a transformational type of reformer who is going to co-opt the greatest hits of that old fraud Ronald Reagan and change the entire system into a magical post-partisan land of milk and honey? From Obama’s earliest days and his fawning admiration for the Doris Keans Goodwin book on the presidency of Abraham Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals he seemed to have this wild hair up his ass about ignoring reality and building a new bipartisan coalition in a land that is arguably more divided than what even Lincoln faced. The one great problem with this is that the fascist Republican hydra would sooner see Obama tarred and feathered and then dragged down Pennsylvania Avenue behind a team of Ford F-150s than make peace. That Obama was black only made the reactionary haters and tenth generation racists in the red states hate him even more. I recall that one of the lines of attack on Obama by the fascist right-wing was that he was a disciple of the late great radical Saul Alinsky but this is now as ludicrous as the other attack line that he is a socialist. Alinsky likely wouldn’t piss on Obama were he on fire today due to the Pope of Hope’s history of rolling over without a fight and then giving away more than the original demands to the GOP terrorists.
With this morning’s blessed (and cooked to a fine fricassee) stock markets being watched very closely by the Obama administration, the terrorist Republican party and the financial cartels that own BOTH of them to see how ‘investors’ react to Friday’s surprise Standard and Poor downgrade of the U.S. there is yet another sense of surrealism about. The fix is already in folks, Mr. Obama and his pet Wall Street racketeer insiders Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner will do whatever is necessary to keep the game going – get ready to become really familiar with the word austerity. The American economy will continue to crater – other than the rigged markets that have come to represent the financial health of the nation despite the inconvenient truth that they don’t have dick to do with the real economy. Since the Reagan reign of greed and illusion the swine and vermin on Wall Street have pulled off the big con of convincing the average American schmuck that they have a stake in the markets and the paper dealers have used millions upon millions in advertising and propaganda to get them into the pen for the shearing. The rolling out of 401k retirement plans and other investment vehicles have provided a very nice cover for corporate plunder, the dismantling and offshoring of the American manufacturing base and the ongoing war against labor that has led to the virtual extinction of the traditional company retirement and pension plans that built what was once the strongest middle class on the planet. You can bet that no matter what the opening bell of the DJIA (Dick Jammed In Ass) triggers that the hated big gubmint will be there to bail the bankster bloodsuckers and their stock churners out again. On the backs of already busted out and desperate Americans who are still oblivious to their plight and still for the most part believe in the legitimacy of their corrupted institutions.
The mockery of a “debate” on the debt problem, and it is one hell of a fucking problem is that it has zero basis in reality because it never, ever addresses the primary reason for America’s borrowing – to finance war and more war. This is where the terrorist Republican party and their mouth-breathing pasty white lynch mob will always be in the catbird seat. You see, the angry raised on John Wayne revisionist history dolts love war, especially when they don’t have to fight it and even more so when the war is being wage against the dirty brown skinned devil “a-rabs” or in a previous era “gooks”, they have an insatiable taste for human misery and a list of enemies that will ensure that there will never be a lack of those to wage war upon. The idiot masses are also being conned into buying the brilliant con job of destroying “entitlements” which is the word that has now come to describe Social Security and Medicare, programs that working Americans fucking PAID into for years and are now being cut to fund more war and money shuffling. The just plain mean nimcompoops who fly the Gadsden flag while manning the front lines for the terrorist Republican party are too buttfuck stupid to understand that while they are still waging cultural war against “welfare queens” and other Negroes sucking off of the big gubmint dole that the use of “entitlements’ to now include programs that they themselves benefit from that they have been given the knives to cut their own throats – and their gullibility ensures that they will do just that.
The real problem in this country with money and debt is that the entire “debate” is dishonest, other than the failure to include the costs of waging endless and costly corporate wars the real menace of big gubmint run amok, the post 9/11 national security state is also never addressed. Teabaggers are perfectly down with a high-tech surveillance network unlike anything seen in human history, the state sanctioned molestation of children and bullying of old ladies wearing medical diapers by TSA Nazis and the militarizing of local police departments because after all, if you didn’t do anything wrong why should you be afraid? There also can’t be any form of higher taxation on the rich pigs and chiselers (or to crib from a well known amphetamine gobbling Russian emigre “looters” and “moochers”) who have benefited astronomically from the three decades running class war that kicked off when Dutch Reagan fired those goddamned air traffic controllers. There is a rapidly declining tax base due to rigged laws that allow those who least deserve tax amnesty to avoid paying their fair share, millions of unemployed who can’t participate in the consumer economy and the glue that holds the entire thing together is the big lie that anyone can become rich in America, thanks to our benevolent rich job creators – horseshit! Tax the fuckers until they grow hoarse from squealing and loose the RICO laws on pigs like Grover Fucking Norquist, Karl Rove and the treasonous Koch Brothers.
So as the band plays on and the continues to sink, the rails manned with angry white lumpen Republicans waving their Gadsden flags and cheering while the glorious winners of the looter capitalist class war commandeer the life boats. Never mind the rest of us who are trapped in steerage, already up to our fucking necks in water.
One Link Shorter: Joe Bageant 1946-2011
Barack promised change — and sure enough, things changed for the worse
-Joe Bageant
It was with immense sadness that I discovered that Joe Bageant had succumbed to cancer and departed this mortal coil the weekend prior to last. I was a huge fan of Joe’s, his writings, especially in recent years as the obvious decline and fall of America into fascist third world status accelerated were poetic, mournful, darkly funny and dead on. He will be missed, as Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “the tribe is smaller by one, the circle is one link shorter and the enemy jacks up the odds by just a little bit more”.
Money Doesn’t Talk, It Swears
– Janwillem van de Wetering
Money doesn’t talk, it swears
-Bob Dylan
As the cancer that is looter capitalism continues to devour America in order to perpetuate it’s necessity to show continuous growth as we now enter the final monopoly stages it would be wise to realize that none of this were to have happened had our society not glorified the rich, condemned the poor and become damned by greed and lack of compassion. The zero sum game that is big time American capitalism (which is not to be confused with free enterprise) the decades of pillage and conquer abroad not nearly enough to feed the insatiable rapacious monster which is fueled by pure greed has come home to roost. I am often reminded of that old Stephen King story Survivor Type where the dude is marooned on a barren and deserted island with nothing but a gargantuan amount of heroin and has to amputate parts of his body to eat in order to survive. This is the late stage of capitalism, the one that those foul devils Karl Marx and Vlad Lenin as well as every influential thinker with any common sense warned about. This is the continuation of the vaunted ownership society….they own your ass!
Forget the mass hallucination that was George W. Bush’s ownership society, the miraculous run up in home prices where the average shmoe could dream of becoming a real live real estate kingpin like the noxious Donald Trump by flipping houses just like the big boys. With the glorious magic of ever increasing property values Americans could just take out huge home equity lines of credit and live beyond their wildest means, filling their McMansions with shit that they couldn’t afford using money that they didn’t have, all of which debt was then being packaged off into derivitives, what the exalted high priest of the temple of American mammon Warren Buffett aka the Oracle of Omaha once himself called financial weapons of mass destruction. The big banks couldn’t lend money fast enough, with shoddier standards or any foresight of what might happen were the party to stop, largely because the loans were being pureed and repackaged into mortgage backed paper (more like toilet paper) that was immediately sold to investors while the con artists who created it were also using credit default swaps to bet against it. The pigs were gorging themselves in an unprecedented orgy of greed, corporations were getting fat while using the relatively new practice of offshoring to divest themselves of jobs for Americans in favor of lower paid workers in India and other locales and manufacturing was being systematically dismantled in favor of using plants in China. All of it was great until the waning days of the Bush administration when the shit hit the fan and the whole thing blew up.
While phony conservative pundits foist off the blame for the economic collapse on the usual bogeyman black people for taking out loans that they couldn’t afford to pay back, a fake narrative that the racist white trash teabaggers gobbled up like frosted bullshit biscuits it was just another big lie. It would be far more accurate to point the finger at the pasty white social climbers who turned into wheeler dealers as they churned housing, taking out risky loans (which the Wall Street temples of avarice pumped out with full knowledge of their toxicity) to plunk down on skyrocketing properties which they briefly held before selling to the next schmuck. It was only a matter of time until the music stopped and a good many of the greedy bitches and bastards were left without chairs, any sane person could see that it wasn’t real. Then there were the TV addled dopes, the Boobus Americanus who actually bought their dream homes, mini-mansions in exurbia with polished marble countertops, more rooms that they needed and had to be furnished by maxing out the plastic and the two and three car garages in which they could park their SUVs. It was of course a massive disaster waiting to happen and when it all came crashing down former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (also former CEO of Goldman Sachs) went on bended knee to Congress to get a one of those nice taxpayer funded bailouts for all of his criminal buddies on Wall Street. Then came TARP (interesting acronym for something used to cover up a massive swindle) which both Bush and Obama signed off on and in layman’s terms dry-fucked millions of Americans in the ass so that the banksters could continue to get their bonuses and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street could keep spinning. Matt Taibbi has done a great job of muckraking journalism on the gross plunder and pillage that Wall Street, especially Goldman Sachs (or as I refer to them, the Great Satan) engaged in for Rolling Stone magazine. Taibbi’s work is must reading for those seeking to understand how viciously the anal rape of America by the big banks has been, see The Great American Bubble Machine or the book Griftopia for his writing on the crime of the century.
For awhile though it actually looked like there could be systemic change, had Obama had any balls he would have ordered the nationalization of the big banks, the liquidation of all derivatives and appointed a Wall Street crime czar with endless resources, subpoena power and a mandate to thoroughly cleanse the system. Back in early 2009 the financial racketeers were on the ropes, AIG executives were besieged by protesters at their homes, CNBC con-artist Jim “Mad Money” Cramer was being publicly pilloried and left-gatekeeper Bill Maher went on HBO and suggested that hanging two randomly picked bankers by the big board at the New York Stock Exchange with their balls in their mouth would set a good example. Then something happened, the tide turned in favor of the big banking racketeers who had bamboozled Americans by the millions to buy their yachts, only in America could something this obscene happen, a land where cunning hatchetman CEO’s are treated as gods and decades of incessant propaganda have effectively brainwashed a population that while incapable of understanding the most basic concepts of incremental losing into actually thinking that one day they too can be rich!
The bankster pushback actually started with CNBC’s greasy little pimp Rick Santelli went off on camera in the much hyped rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange that effectively co-opted the former libertarian tea party movement and brought it under Republican/Koch Brothers control. That would have serious implications later on with the mass counterattack by big business as they had in the blink of an eye with a big assist from FOX an army of angry, ignorant, racist fatties to mobilize as brownshirts against any sort of serious reform efforts. It has always amazed me (but not really) how so many could be so easily duped into action against their own economic self-interests, in a historical sense the Tea Party (just a rebranding of the die hard haters of the GOP base post-Bush) is on the side of the British Monarchy although rich in irony it is far beyond their comprehension. The next step of the bankster’s Battle of the Bulge was the ‘leaked’ internal memo by Citi’s Vikram ‘the bandit’ Pandit that things really aren’t that bad after all which put a floor on the stock market plunge. Then came the 60 Minutes appearance of Ben Bernanke, Obama’s re-appointed Bush holdover Fed Chairman that there were marvelous “GREEN SHOOTS” of an economic recovery already popping up, Bernanke’s jacking off of the public was followed by Tim Geithner’s obviously rigged stress tests of the banks. Lost in all of the hype and propaganda was another critical part of the effort to deceive the sheep into lining up for another shearing at the Wall Street casino tables, the Financial Standards Accounting Board (FASB) quietly changed the mark-to-market rules so that the worthless toilet paper mortgage backed securities could now be valued at whatever the pit bosses desired. The hustle had been pulled off, soon the media was focusing on the staged Tea Party bund rallies against Obamacare (really a massive giveaway to the insurance parasites) and Bernanke was crowned as Time’s Man of the Year (now changed to person of the year thanks to the political correctness Nazis).The greedheads got bailed out, the taxpayers got the shaft and the looting spree was back on. To borrow a great analogy from gadfly Webster Tarpley (which I paraphrase) in reference to the bailout – when Dracula is sucking the blood out of a victim the thing to do is to pull him off and drive a stake through his heart but the Obama administration is trying to save the victim by giving Dracula a blood transfusion and hoping that it would flow back into the victim or something along those lines, I don’t have the exact wording.
Now two years after the Santelli dog and pony show, the Citi memo and GREEN SHOOTS the economy is still a disaster, the dollar is in freefall, Bernanke has the printing presses set on ramming speed and there are widespread flareups of unrest largely thanks to food prices sent into the stratosphere by pigs who speculate in commodities. Look for matters to only get worse too, it’s now obvious that the Japanese government has been lying about the massive humanitarian catastrophe thanks to TEPCO’s Fukashima radioactive meltdown which I strongly suspect is motivated by the need to keep the global derivatives casino open for business and there is austerity coming to America along with a failed political system that has neither the will nor the desire to treat the rapidly metastasizing capitalist cancer. Food prices are about to explode her in Der Heimat thanks to gas prices well on the way to 4 bucks a gallon and yet another ruinous and expensive war. As Hunter S. Thompson once wrote: “In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely”.
There will be no help for anybody but the pigs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase coming from the Obama administration, face it people, the only change that the Pope of Hope really ever stood for was left cover for the gargantuan redistribution of wealth upwards. Obama is quite obviously even worse than Bush as the wars continue and mount in number (under the malarkey guise of humanitarian interventions), the torture never stops, the constitution continues to be disemboweled and the airports are filled with dooling thugs in TSA uniforms with the full blessing of the U.S. government to feel up prepubescent little boys and girls. Hell, Bush never could have gotten away with that one and when it comes to economic relief, Le Enfant Terrible did actually send people checks for $600. I always got a sardonic little kick out of the silly liberals who only made excuses for Obama (and still do) in that he was the chess master, or Michael Jordan just studying the opposing team’s defense and ready to explode at any moment into a whirling dervish of athletic daredeviltry as he broke down the formidable defense of the Bad Boys for the championship hardware. The truth, and it is as dark as the proverbial black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night is that Obama is the chess master, it’s checkmate for the working class and he is just like Michael Jordan, a greedy, amoral, selfish multimillionaire prick who once commented “Republicans buy sneakers too” rather than doing the right thing in using his global celebrity to promote progressive social change.For some reason Jordan’s famous quote conjures up one of Obama’s, the one where he proclaimed that if Americans were being denied their right to collectively bargain that he would put on his own pair of comfortable shoes and join them on the picket lines. This alas like so many other things (wars,closing Gitmo, renegotiating trade pacts etc) was just more of the same bullshit about hope and change marketed by Wall Street’s soon to be new bagman at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
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.
Americans, like human beings everywhere believe that many things are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleanic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
When elevating the moneychangers to revered figures Americans have bought the disinformation funded by the plutocrats decades long spending spree on think tank ‘experts’, news manipulation and balls out bribery of public officials to rig the game for the rich. In a decomposing corpse of a once vibrant economy it is only natural that the biggest maggots eat the best. Donald Trump is a shining example, more visible than the rank and file crooks and robbers who don’t happen to be household names like Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, Ken Lewis and Jamie Dimon the mouthiest multi-millionaire in America is the one who is king. For all of his millions one would figure that a pathologically vain egomaniac like ‘The Donald’ could at least afford a decent rug to put on his head, so much for the beautiful rich. And now Trump is ready to make a presidential bid in 2012, he is already invoking the Birther bullshit to appeal to the peckerwoods and if he has any serious political sense soon will start dropping his g’s to appeal to the dumber than dogshit red state fascists. He will need someone with clout for V.P. though, likely the moonbat Michelle Bachman who can mobilize brigades of the fucked over by the system but too ignorant to blame it on anyone but the niggers and A-rabs of teabaggers. Sarah Palin has for the most part been kicked to the curb like yesterday’s garbage after her idiotic “blood libel” response to the Tuscon shooting where she portrayed herself as the real victim, not Congresswoman Gibson, a federal judge and a handful of others including a nine-year old girl who were murdered. Just imagine President Trump, Vice President Bachmann now that would be something for it would once and forever strip the veil of legitimacy from the gangster fascist state that is America and it’s population of fear-filled, overfed and undereducated nitwits, it would be there for the entire world to see.
I often reference the work of Chris Hedges, a man who I feel is the moral beacon of these heinous times. His latest piece, The Collapse of Globalization truly sums up the hopeless mess that is America in terminal decline and I excerpt the following below::
We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Jersey Shore.”The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.
Crack Ho Economics
Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gates – Wall Street is the enemy of America. These financial terrorists continue to ravage the country, yesterday’s announcement of February job losses of nearly 700,000 brought a spike in stock prices, another mainline hit to the crack ho economy. With the misery mounting the Obama administration and the entrenched Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve bandits who really run the system are mounting a withering counter attack on any plans to dismantle the existing system of avarice by watering down the stimulus (an ass fucking with a reacharound) package and calling in the markers with all of their whores in Congress and the media to preserve the existing spoils system. When the sock puppet occupant of the White House, our shining new Jesus even emerges as a shill for Wall Street you can rest assured that the fix is in and the only change that you will be getting is chump change.
It now appears that the naysayers were right. While the new frontman and his gaggle of recycled Clintonistas and Goldman Sachs and Federal Reserve moneychangers are asking for austerity from everyone else but the pigs on Wall Street continue to have their piggie troughs filled with more and more stolen loot. I have heard a lot of stuff on how this is just another opportunity for the oligarchy to bust everyone else and then consolidate. This sadly seems to be the case and once the entire middle class has been butt-fucked into bankruptcy the malefactors of great wealth are going to swoop in to buy up everything for pennies on the dollar.
Some people are saying that this is only another step towards the ‘one world government’ that has always been discussed by the paranoid elements of the far right as a communist or socialist takeover. They are wrong though, the driving force behind this would be financial kingpins of capitalism and the one world system would be corporate fascism.
The Obama administration is not going to reign in either the bankers (who really run this system) or to stop the wars of imperialism, the population will be beggared and the police state brought in to put down the rabble so that the big con goes on.
I don’t know if anyone has ever ever heard of Carroll Quigley but you need to check out what he says on finance capitalism and global banker control – it’s too complex to go into at lenght right now but is worthwhile background information. A good read is a post by blogger Tocque Deville entitled History: How the U.S. Government Was Overthrown in Three Easy Steps.
There is no intention of providing Americans with anything even remotely resembling real choices in their political system, ‘leaders’ and government and this was stated by Professor Quigley in his outstanding and largely obscure book Tragedy and Hope which revealed the way that the system really worked in regards to the financial elite and the secretive round table groups who represent the puppeteers for the easily blackmailed, controlled and greedheaded arrogant buffoons who are the political actors who are trotted out for public consumption. Quigley in the extensive research that he did on the global elite states:
There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.
And…
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.
And…
The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.
So the game is rigged already, it is supposed to be rigged and the only question is whether this financial catastrophe was set up or was being set up and was then triggered prematurely through greed, incompetence and the entire monstrosity just becoming unsustainable.
And the one-eyed idiot, Gordon Brown has just appeared before Congress to continue to push for the globalist dominination, the shock doctrine writ large, the grandest robbery in history. His editorial for the London Times on March 1st shows that the future is global consolidation and a new feudalism.
Blowing The Roof
In the great 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. 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 perps to escape to their beaches of choice where they could bask in the sun collecting interest on their plundered loot.
The criminal Bush administration, Goldman Sachs stooge Hank Paulson, the feckless Pelosi Reid Hoyer Judas Congress and the every incompetent Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke are now blowing the roof with the greatest swindle of the American taxpayer in history. The mother of all bailouts which is the end result of looter capitalism taken to its logical end may have been temporarily halted by mass outrage along with a cadre of crybaby Republicans whose poor feelings were hurt by the whore Pelosi’s stinging speech and then threw a hissy fit (allegedly engineered by one neocon snake that goes by the name Newt Gingrich who already has his eye on the 2012 election) that derailed what the hated Michael Moore referred to as the rich staging a coup. The Dow then demonstrated that Newton’s law of gravity was still in effect by dropping a whopping 777 points (likely staged by the Plunge Protection Team failing to contribute their daily manipulation to send a message) sending shockwaves through the global casino of the great Ponzi scheme. Not to worry though, a bill WILL pass this week, it will be WORSE than the last one and Paulson and all of his Wall Street cronies will be given total AMNESTY for blowing up the system for their own greed. I don’t have much else to say right now but these comments by a die hard Marxist friend of mine pretty much sums it all up in this epic rant:
The Financial Crisis
He certainly has a right to have his say now that the entire fucking capitalist system is exploding before our eyes, while not a Marxist myself perhaps Marxism bears a more serious look for what to do as we are sorting through the mess left behind by the economic terrorists of Wall Street.
1. The financial crisis was not “caused” by Bush’s regime.
2. It was, however, “triggered” by the Bush regime. There’s a difference here between the word, “caused,” and the word, “triggered.”
3. The financial crisis was not “caused” by the economic philosophy of the Bush regime alone, but, rather, it was “facilitated” by the economic philosophy followed and pursued from the time of the last years of the Jimmy Carter administration through the years of the Reagan administration, the Bush One administration, the Clinton administration, and the Bush Two administration.
4. It is most certainly correct that the economic philosophy that “facilitated” the financial meltdown is the “no regulations” economic philosophy, and it is most certainly correct that the more “libertarian-minded” Republicans of the far right in economics — so-called “free market fundamentalists,” or “free market extremists” — are responsible for pushing that for the past 3 decades since the 1970s.
5. But it is also equally correct to say the Democratic Party have just as much pandered to and adapted to this economic philosophy in practice, and that they, too, have lessened government regulations of financial markets, investment banks, other banks.
6. But underlying the economic philosophy and what has happened to the financial markets are material causes. Being determines consciousness and ideas, not the other way around.
7. It’s correct to say the financial institutions of this country “lack liquidity,” which is simply another way of saying, “they’re insolvent,” or more bluntly, “they’re bankrupt.”
8. But it’s also correct to say, “their owners did that to themselves.”
9. It’s correct to say, “Bailing them out in a private and for-profit capitalistic-system-based framework equals making the masses of working people, who are also taxpayers and also consumers, pay for it,” because so long as operating in the private for-profit capitalistic-system-based framework is the framework in which one decides to operate, there’s no alternative to making the masses of working (taxpaying and consuming) people pay for this enormous financial bankruptcy.
10. The reason why continuing to operate in a private-for-profit-capitalistic-economic framework with government regulations and government intervention means, making the masses pay, is because the kind of “socialism,” to use the word the right-wing Republican “free market extremists” or right-wing Republican “free market fundamentalists” call the Republican Paulson-Republican Bernanke-Republican Bush-Democratic Senatorial/Congressional-Partially Republican Senatorial-Partially Republican House plan, is because this kind of “socialism” accepts the given and existing economic class division of existing society into capitalist employers (bosses, owners), and, on the other side, workers (employees), the basic class division of existing society.
11. This is, therefore, exactly as those both on the extreme “free market fundamentalist extremist” right, and those on the liberal “progressive” pro-Democratic Party reformist fake “left” say, “socializing the losses of the mega-rich, mega-bosses, mega-owners of the mega-banks and mega-corporations” at the expense of the masses of the people of America.
12. McCain sees this, and is — cynically, as Democrats suspect, deceitfully, again as Democrats suspect, but certainly quite masterfully, if one approaches how to win an election or profit politically from a set of circumstances from the standpoint of the suggestions made by the great Italian political philosopher, Machiavelli, in his most masterful explanation of how politics works, The Prince, and certainly masterfully in the short run if one appreciates just how vilely and corruptly, but masterfully deceitful and masterfully cynically Hitler operated — poised in his view to successfully mobilize a very large social base of quite justified hate, resentment, and opposition to this Paulson-Bernanke-Bush-Democratic-Partial Republican joint bipartisan capitalist bailout plan calling for the masses to pay for the losses incurred by risky financial decisions made by the big financial capitalists on Wall Street.
13. The fact financial 24/7 cable news channels like Bloomberg focus in on the right-wing Republicans’ opposition to this bailout plan and call McCain’s opposition to it “risky” illustrates that their constituency is most limited to a very small population — the mega-rich owners whom the bailout plan would serve. Therefore, from a purely electoralist political standpoint, they are missing the Machiavellian and, in a certain sense, Hitlerian-cynical, calculations of the McCain camp.
14. McCain is also banking on Barack Obama’s defense of some version of the bailout plan, particularly the version supported by the Senatorial and Congressional Democrats which is calling for some very tepid “protections” for what these people call “middle class” Americans. McCain, too, is having no difficulty aligning himself with notions of “protecting” what he, too, calls “middle class Americans.” But he is deliberately refraining from taking a hard and fast stance until the end of the decision-making process on the bailout plan so he can then position himself afterward for maximum political electoralist advantage, and destroy the Democrats in the upcoming election. He knows from his advisors exactly what he is doing.
15. The Democrats mistakenly think they can isolate McCain, and they also make the mistake of thinking that the general business opinion of people whose only constituency is a very numerically small constituency, the mega-rich whom the bailout plan will serve, equals the opinion of the masses of the American voters. In a sense, McCain knows this, too, and he is banking on the Democrats aligning themselves with a bailout which is, generally, enormously unpopular with the voters, to destroy the Democrats in the election and win him the presidency in the November 2008 election.
16. But, of course, the Democrats themselves helped create this situation over decades of pandering to the far extreme right-wing on economic policies in this country. Organizations like the right-wing Democratic “Democratic Leadership Council,” for instance, helped create it. The semi-de-regulation in some financial areas in the latter years of conservative Democrat Jimmy Carter’s administration in the later 1970s helped intensify and exacerbate the bipartisanly-supported right-wing free market fundamentalist extremist Republican Ronald Reagan policies of the 1981-1988 period. Ironically, the Republican presidency of George H. W. Bush the First with the bringing into existence of the Resolution Trust Corporation (a government-sponsored entity) to address the failure of savings and loans operated in a more bourgeois centrist bipartisan Demopublican-Republicrat fashion, recognizing the dangers of the savings and loans failures to the mega-rich (bourgeoisie). But, of course, it didn’t destroy the rule of the ruling class (bourgeoisie), because it was never designed to do that. Nor was the support it got from the Democrats designed to do that.
17. But there is no way out of the financial crisis and its repercussions, which will, indeed, result in the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s, exactly as Bush warned, that does not result in the destruction of the incomes and economic well-being of the American working (also consuming and taxpaying) masses so long as the kind of “bailout” “plan” still accepts the continued existence of the bourgeoisie as a class — that is, the continued existence of the class division in society between capitalist employers (bosses, the bourgeoisie, the mega-rich bosses and owners who brought on this whole crisis themselves under the unregulated or semi-regulated benevolence of multiple bipartisan Demopublican-Republicrat administrations), and workers (a/k/a employees a/k/a the great mass of consumers a/k/a the great mass of taxpayers a/k/a the masses of the American people a/k/a the vast majority of the American people).
18. The only way out, in short, is the only kind of “bailout” that will work for the majority: a working class socialist revolution from below that expropriates, without compensation, the entire capitalist system, by the action of constituted, from below, by the masses, and elected, from below, by the masses, councils of delegates of the working people from every part of this country, and turns over all the wealth of the country that was originally produced by the working people to the working people. Nothing short of this kind of “bailout” will avoid the destruction of the economic and financial position of the enormous majority of the American people, and certainly neither voting for McCain nor voting for Obama nor, for that matter, voting for McKinney, Nader, Barr, or even reformist-minded “socialists” of small fake “socialist” parties, will do it, either.
19. In short, what is needed is, a socialist policy for the enormous masses and majority, not a fake “socialist” policy that continues serving the bourgeoisie (bosses, super-rich, mega-rich).
20. Some short-hand ideas for what a revolutionary socialist addressing of the financial crisis would do would include:
a. expropriate the banks and corporations and all major industry, finance, transportation, distribution, means of production, from below, and operate them all by the operation of elected councils of the working people;
b. cancel the debts owed by the enormous mass of the people to all the banks;
c. raise the minimum wage to maybe $75 dollars per hour;
d. radically shorten the work week to 30 hours at no loss in pay, thereby immediately resulting in more available work to be immediately spread to the unemployed;
e. labor, unionize all non-unionized workers 100 percent, but kick the cops, security guards, prison guards out of the labor movement–for class struggle tactics to organize all labor, not begging the bosses, not begging the Democratic and Republican Parties of the bosses, not begging the bourgeoisie, not fighting on the turf and terms of the bosses, but fighting on the turf and terms of the working class to unionize all non-union workers 100 percent–bring back such militant class struggle tactics as the labor “flying squads” of the 1930s, the mass workers’ occupations of struck plants, factories, workshops, offices, department stores, the mass workers’ picket lines in front of struck plants to defend the workers inside against the scabs, the scab-herding and strikebreaking cops, the bosses’ private militias and bosses’ private security guards, the bosses’ fascists, bosses’ neo-Nazis, bosses’ Ku Klux Klanners, and other bosses’ tools — bring back the workers’ defense guards to defend striking workers and defend those plants, factories, workshops, stores, offices occupied by striking workers, kicking out the management and owners and making the plants, workshops, factories, stores, offices where the workers and employees work controlled by the workers as a negotiating tactic in the class struggle against the bosses–no subordination of the objective needs of the workers’ class struggle and workers’ class war to the fake and fraudulent “need” to get “lesser evil” capitalist politicians, either Democrats or Republicans, elected to office–labor must rely strictly on labor’s own needs and own interests, not on the bourgeois (bosses’) needs and interests, not on the turf and terms of the bosses (bourgeoisie) and their labor-hating, racist, sexist, bigoted, violent, imperialist, colonialist, capitalist government;
f. workers need a government of workers’ councils, a government of the multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, racially integrated working class, a government strictly of the armed workers, a dictatorship of the working class that is dictatorial against the enemies of the working class and is democratic where the interests of the working class and toiling and exploited people, workers, employees, the poor, unemployed, the mass of the old and pensioners, oppressed and exploited minorities, women, gays, immigrants, are concerned–we need a proletarian dictatorship against the violence of the old exploiting and oppressing classes that is a proletarian democracy for the working, toiling, and oppressed peoples;
g. expropriate all unused condo buildings, office buildings, the multi-roomed mansions of the mega-rich, and turn them all over to the homeless as an emergency measure to smash homelessness and give homeless people a place to live; end all mortgage debts on poor homeowners, working class homeowners, lower middle class homeowners and lower petit-bourgeois homeowners, cancel those debts, and expropriate the banks to which they owe their mortgage debts so they can own their homes outright; expropriate the multi-roomed mansions of the fat cats, super-rich, mega-rich bourgeoisie or bosses, and turn them over to the homeless;
h. radically raise the social security and retirement pension of the enormous majority of the old people to a genuinely livable wage, say a minimum wage of $75 dollars per hour, so finally the great majority of old people receiving social security have something to actually live on that can give them some kind of quality of life;
i. immediately create free quality health care accessible immediately to all and free to all;
j. immediately create free kindergarten-through-Ph.D./Doctorate education available and accessible free to all by expropriating the private colleges and universities, entirely abolishing their boards of trustees (which are entirely capitalist or pro-capitalist boards), and putting all colleges under the control of elected councils of the working people, teachers, students, and abolishing entirely all tuition payments for students; make all remedial adult education programs free and accessible and available to all; smash the non-union nature of employment and organize all workers into labor unions; implement in all workplaces ongoing remedial education and training and upgrading programs; bring into workplaces affirmative action for minorities, and women, controlled by the workers’ organizations, workers’ councils, democratic organizations of the working people;
k. workers in all unsafe workplaces, industries, factories, plants, workshops, offices, stores, construction sites, must have the immediate and unconditional right to strike and receive full wages while on strike while the unsafe working conditions are immediately addressed and repaired–no more collapsing coal mines, no more workers killed from collapsing cranes at construction sites and from workers falling from worksites due to shoddy and private-profit-based badly made “safety” equipment, no more unsafe airplanes killing crew and passengers because such planes are flying firetraps and are not made safe because of private profit greed of the owners, no more unsafe trains colliding into each other killing crew and passengers, no more collapsing bridges built on the basis of the lowest and most profitable bid, no more exploding steam pipes built on the lowest and most profitable bid, no more overthrown and overturned and destroyed levees built on the lowest and most profitable bid that let entire cities drown–expropriate all the capitalists, smash outsourcing by militant labor action to unionize 100 percent all workers and by class struggle tactics to smash outsourcing to private contractors, expropriate all sleazebag private contractors who shortchange safety conditions for profit, and jail the sleazebags who do this–rebuild everything on the basis of a series of 5-year plans based on the precept of socialist re-industrialization and socialist re-modernization of the country from below run and operated by a socialist plan administered from below democratically and controlled from below democratically by the elected workers’ councils from below, with the full right of all within the workers’ councils who as the genuine precondition to having their ability to participate defend the elected and armed workers’ councils as the core form of government of a proletarian dictatorship against the old exploiters and oppressors and a proletarian workers’ councils-based democracy for the working, exploited, oppressed, and toiling peoples, and the precept of a proletarian government-socialist planned economy as the core form of economy of society–within that context, for the full and unconditional and unfettered right of any and all workers’ factions, caucuses, parties to form in such workers’ councils to make and debate alternative policy alternatives for the furtherance and progress of the workers’ society;
l. organize the enormous majority of the workers at their workplaces into armed and racially integrated labor organizations and mobilizations to root out the nests of Ku Klux Klan filth, neo-Nazi filth, right-wing anti-abortion clinic-bombing filth, right-wing anti-abortion anthrax-sending filth, anti-gay and anti-women’s equality rifle-toating murderers of Unitarian, liberal, and other equality supporters, racist murderers of black and other nonwhite people, bigoted terrorist murderers of gay people, racist and bigoted murderers of immigrants — for the right of the racially integrated working people, black, brown, red, yellow, white, male, female, men, women, “gay,” “straight,” immigrant, native-born, mobilized by a revolutionary workers’ party, to keep and bear arms — no guns for the bosses’ (bourgeoisie’s) labor-hating, racist and anti-black, strike-breaking, civil and human rights-crushing cops, no guns for the sadistic racist and poor people-hating prison guards, no guns for the armed militias of the labor-hating and strike-breaking bosses, no guns for the armed labor-hating and union-busting private security guards of the bosses, who bust labor strikes, beat up labor strikers, shoot down black people in the inner city black ghettos without accountability, shoot down immigrants without accountability — repel and repulse the white racist bigoted anti-immigrant thugs on the Southern borders by racially integrated, ethnically integrated mass mobilizations of black, brown, yellow, red, white, immigrant, and native-born workers, level-headed, but armed — for joint campaigns of labor and unions to organize workers on both sides of the border into fighting class struggle-based labor unions and labor organizations to upgrade labor on both sides of the border in wages, working conditions, job conditions, safety conditions, democratic rights, human rights — smash every kind of fascism through mass mobilizations of labor and minorities;
m. down with the racist, class-biased death penalty–free immediately and unconditionally Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent man who’s rotted on death row since 1982 because of a joint and bipartisan Democratic-Republican frame-up murder machine of death — jail the persecutors and sleazebag scum who framed up Mumia Abu-Jamal, including the corrupt prosecutors, corrupt cops, corrupt judges, the entire sleazebag operation that framed him up — free Troy Anthony Davis, an innocent man — jail the entire corrupt sleazebag and scumbag operation that framed him up, including the corrupt, coercing, violent racist cops, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt judges, corrupt Georgia board of pardons and paroles — smash the prisons — rehabilitate the enormous majority capable of being rehabilitated in the prisons; those incapable of being rehabilitated, provide whatever available remedial and palliative help is possible to provide — most in prison are there because crime is caused by capitalism, an inhuman, rotting, decaying, putrefying putrescent, decadent system based on private profit-greed, racist oppression, sexist and bigoted oppression, nationalist and imperialist oppression, colonialist oppression, and the sucking of profits out of the working class by the capitalist class, and the jails and the cops are the state, the violent instrument of class violence and class terrorism against the working class by the capitalist class and its government — they were often destroyed as humans by an inhuman and bestial capitalist society; make sure the hardest of the hardcore psychopaths are kept isolated from the masses, but the principle that must operate in keeping them so is not retribution and vengeance, but simple social expediency, and so, what must operate is not the principle of vengeance and retribution, but the principle of some sort of humane isolation from the majority of society for the hardcore psychos and ongoing rehabilitative efforts in that context; for the vast majority, however, who are not hardcore psychos, there must be ongoing rehabilitative efforts and full social re-integration back into society and efforts to make that happen that are part and parcel of a humane, compassionate system that recognizes ex-cons are human beings — for the rights right now of prisoners for form labor unions, to strike for higher wages, to engage in collective bargaining with prison administrations — again, disarm the sadistic prison guards and labor, kick them the hell out of the unions — no more slave wages for prisoners, which simultaneously hurt prison labor and bring down the wages of all labor — for full union labor wages for all prisoners, and make the minimum wage throughout society in all industries, including prison industries, about $75 dollars per hour — for the immediate restoration of civil, voting, and related rights to ex-cons at the moment of their release, for remedial, job-training, skills, and similar sorts of education for ex-cons, for upgrading, and for employment for all ex-cons at wages no less than the wages of the minimum wage of a workers’ society, which should be approximately $75 dollars per hour, so they can live like human beings and become fully re-integrated back into society again — no more sadistic discrimination against ex-cons in areas like refusing them driver’s licenses, social and health care benefits, housing–smash all discrimination; labor, labor organizations: kick cops, security guards, prison guards, the hell out of your labor organizations, for they are a knife pointed at your own throats;
n. down with the war on drugs; legalize/decriminalize drugs–for massive investment in drug rehab programs and similar sorts of programs, not only in conventional physical and physiological health care programs, but mental health care programs;
o. U.S. Imperialism: get your bloody, filthy, stinking hands off the rest of the planet — U.S. out of Iraq now, out of Afghanistan now, out of the 130 countries where U.S. troops are stationed now, no “conditions,” no “compromises,” no delays, but OUT NOW, PERIOD; disarm the pentagon, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, NSA, federal cops, state cops, local cops — for the right of the racially integrated working people to keep and bear arms; U.S. hands off Iran, hands off Syria, hands off North Korea, hands off Russia — U.S. Imperialism, no support to right-wing nationalist nutjob head of country of Georgia, Saakishvili, as all that is is an ongoing provocation of Russia — Russia, hands off Georgia — for the democratic and national rights of the peoples of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to make their own decision as to whom they wish to affiliate with or not affiliate with — for a joint revolutionary internationalist egalitarian communist proletarian party of the workers of Georgia, the workers of Abkhazia, the workers of both South and North Ossetia, and the workers of Russia fighting for a Russian Socialist Federation of Fully Independent and Equal Workers’ (Proletarians’) Socialist States; U.S. Imperialism, get your bloody provocational hands out of Poland — no U.S. “anti-missile” shield in Poland, which is nothing but a provocation against Russia; for the equal national rights of both the Palestinians and the Hebrew-speaking people in the context of a Socialist Federation of the Near East–for joint mass mobilizations of Palestinian working class people and Hebrew-speaking working class people to drive the Zionist, clerical-fascist settlers out of the West Bank–all Israeli troops, tanks, soldiers, out of the West Bank, out of the Gaza Strip, out of the Golan Heights, out of all the Occupied Territories–for a joint Arab-Hebrew revolutionary internationalist, egalitarian, proletarian communist party in the Near East fighting for an Egalitarian Socialist Near Eastern Federation and the unity of all working classes throughout the Near East–for the strict separation of religion and government throughout the Near East, including the liberation of women, gays, transgender people, and the smashing of every kind of religious fundamentalist-inspired bigoted terrorism, from clerical Zionist through Muslim fundamentalist– for the freedom of conscience of all and for no government support for any religion anywhere in the Near East–for proletarian socialist revolutions against every rotting and reactionary regime in the Near East, from that of Saudi Arabia through Syria, through Lebanon, through Egypt, through Jordan, through the Zionist regime of Israel — for revolutionary proletarian Marxist secularism and egalitarian socialist internationalism — for full equality for women, gays and homosexuals in a Near Eastern Socialist Federation and for separation of religion and government;
p. for free abortion on demand–no to forced sterilization–defend Roe v. Wade–keep abortion legal–for women’s liberation through socialist revolution–for the right of abortion clinic personnel, family planning clinic personnel to arm and train in self-defense of abortion clinics and family planning clinics in self-defense against the right-wing terrorist filth seeking to shut the clinics down–for mass mobilizations of labor, minorities, women, to defend the clinics and drive the right-wing garbage away from in front of the clinics; bring back and pass the Equal Rights Amendment for women;
q. for full democratic and equal rights for gay, homosexual, lesbian, transgender people–for gay and transgender liberation through socialist revolution–for the right of gay, homosexual, lesbian, and transgender people to self-defense, up through and including the right of armed self-defense, against bigoted terrorism; defeat Amendment 2, the “marriage amendment,” in Florida on November 4, 2008 — for the equal right of gay, homosexual, lesbian, transgender people to marry, and divorce, and to secure, equally with non-same-sex and non-transgender people, all economic, social, and related security and benefits accruing therefrom;
r. for the strict and uncompromised separation of religion and government — no funding of religious schools by the federal government, state governments, local governments — no funding of “faith-based” education programs — instead, for billions of dollars in investments into the public school system and for free, quality, racially integrated public education for all — bring back and defend busing to buttress and support quality and racially integrated schools most particularly for black kids, other nonwhite kids;
s. time to finish the Civil War–for black liberation through socialist revolution — smash racial segregation by proletarian socialist revolution — for the establishment of racially integrated armed workers’ self-defense guards, drawn from responsible and level-headed labor union men and women, to defend school buses busing black kids into lily-white bourgeois neighborhood-based schools, and to bus white bourgeois kids into impoverished hellhole inner city black ghetto city schools — as the revolutionary communist, Karl Marx said, when the rich start getting sick, they start finding cures for diseases which the poor typically suffer — but to smash educational inequality, it’s necessary to smash capitalism by proletarian socialist revolution.
21. In my view, nothing short of a revolutionary socialist — an authentically Marxist communist — “bailout” plan carried out by the enormous working class majority of the people can resolve the financial crisis in a way that does not destroy the economic and financial position of the enormous majority of Americans
The March of the Hillemmings
Onward to West Virginia! After duping fewer of the “white niggers” in the Hoosier state into believing that she is some sort of brawling, beer drinking, elbow wrestling, blue collar ‘one of them’ the bitter and recalcitrant monster that is Hillary Rodham-Clinton moves the goalposts one more time. The non-elitist who just happens to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of at least $ 109 million dug around in the sofa cushions in order to lend her never ending crusade another $ 6 million and change in order to remain solvent while the operatives work their chicanery and try to strong arm, sweet talk, cajole and bribe those superdelegates into getting with the fucking program and throwing in the Clinton restoration – when will those fuckers get it that Tracy Flick 2008 is entitled to the presidency goddammit?
The encouraging thing about the narrow Clinton ‘win’ in Indiana is that there seems to be a limit to the stupidity of at least enough of the people to have not bitten on the race baiting, the demagoguery and that idiotic fucking suspension of the gas tax over the summer as some sort of band aid on the sucking chest wound of the average American’s budget courtesy of the economic disaster brought on by a quarter century of deregulation, fucked up trade policies, the enshrinement of greed as the highest possible virtue (the giveaway on this was that television show where people actually competed for the honor of licking Donald Trump’s balls) and a flood of easy credit that unregulated Wall Street ivory tower ‘banking’ houses (casinos is a more appropriate word) then packaged into toxic debt instruments and sold to suckers worldwide. As the old saying goes ‘if something appears to be too good to be true then it is too good to be true’ or something along those lines and it was only a matter of time until the music stopped and now millions of saps who bought into the big con have suddenly discovered that they have no chairs.
American idiots can only blame themselves for being dumb enough to be swindled into ignoring reality and their own economic self interests in order to vote for the most dumb and superficial reasons while keeping their heads in the sand and the home equity credit lines open to buy all of the trinkets and baubles necessary for them to still go to bed at night miserable, unfulfilled and deeper in debt. I find it ironic that the degenerate pigman Rush Limbaugh is throwing out a rotator cuff patting himself on the back for inducing his army of angry idiots to crossover and vote for Clinton in the obviously Animal House inspired “Operation Chaos” that have given the bitter old bitties who see Hillary as their own personal version of Taarna the avenger enough backup to keep Obama on the ropes until the dirt diggers can find a big enough chunk of kryptonite to vanquish him once and for all. Limbaugh, the human (and I use that term very loosely) version of the giant gas filled pig balloon that Pink Floyd used as a prop during shows and who is a similar icon for the fascist Republican party is largely responsible for today’s economic misery that will only continue unabated under the neocon dream of McClinton. After all, it was his modern day Father Coughlin propaganda that harnessed the anger and misery of the economic diaspora that began to emerge during the 80s when Reagan’s war on the middle class was kicking into high gear with the farm crisis and the closing of the mills. The heartland and the rust belt were the first to be thrust upon the alter of greed for sacrifice to the gods of Milton Friedman style voodoo economics and the down on his luck loser Limbaugh was discovered and recruited to propagandize the hurt, scorned and angry to scapegoat minorities and liberals for their deteriorating lives.
Limbaugh’s act worked to perfection to the extent there the lazy, mainstream media public relations flacks who pass themselves as legitimate journalists in this sorry era of the fucked and dumb actually feel comfortable in citing him as some sort of legitimate public figure to be respected and quoted. Well, John Wayne Gacy once had a similar aura of respectability and we all know how that ended up so perhaps there is at least some hope that the drug addled, thrice divorced, multi-millionaire grand poobah of white populist propaganda will soon come crashing down as well. His insertion of himself into the perennially clueless and hapless Democratic party primary season of no end may be the petard upon which his mammoth carcass is finally hoisted. People start to look for different victims when gas is approaching four dollars a gallon, their overpriced homes are in pre-foreclosure, speculators driving up food prices make it harder to put food on the family and jobs are being sent by the thousands to whatever third world shithole has the cheapest slave labor gulag system. The fingers of blame are very slowly starting to be pointed upwards as indolent Americans begin to realize that the ultra rich four flushing asshole class that Limbaugh works for are the ones to blame for their misery and not the brown menace.
The failure of what was perceived to be the bread and butter of the massively overhyped by both the multi-millionaire Clintons and the Republican looter establishment Reverend Wright race card is by all indications from Indiana going up like a flaming bag of dogshit on the castle doorstep. When race baiting and fear mongering no longer work then the establishment is in big time trouble. It’s hard to blame the black man for everything during those long cold winters when the furniture is being burned for heat and the family pets begin to look like a cheap way to eat for a few days. Now I am not naïve enough to think that the American sheeple will ever be able to muster up enough gumption for a full fledged peasant revolt but their not being duped by the standard horseshit that politicians shovel out in order to distract and keep from talking about the real issues is at the very least a flicker of light in the darkness. That Clinton didn’t win Indiana by at least 30 points given the massive ignorant hick demographic and the temporary loan of battalions of Limbaugh’s angry army of dittohead drones proves that things just might be different this time and that would indeed strike deeply at the very heart of the oligarchy. Even that philandering little fascist dwarf Newt Gingrich is freaking out that the GOP mojo is no longer working.
So onward march the Hillemmings, a proxy army to defend the status quo who have much in common with their newfound brethren on loan from Lord Limbaugh, towards West Virginia, towards the edge of the abyss and with any luck ultimately off of the edge of the cliff.