Newsweek Newspeak

The green shoots, the most wonderful propaganda onslaught since General Petraeus’s heroic, Reaganesque winning of the Iraq war through the ‘SURGE’ has failed. The stinking undead zombie that is the U.S. economy has not been resurrected through the massive infusions of taxpayer dollars, perhaps spent billions on public relations and lobbying and the changing of the mark to market rules only bought times for the financial predators. The wonderful government subsidized markets are tanking again, there are still no jobs, the housing market is not at all improving, the banks aren’t lending and by the way, there are truck bombs are going off in Baghdad again. While neocons and Repiglicans have their panties in a bunch over Barack Obama’s not getting behind their little Iranian PSYOP the real outcry should be from every taxpayer in Der Heimat beause they have just been bent over backwards and butt-fucked by Barack’s Wall Street Dream Team into funneling billions into the Ponzi schemes, getting nothing but pink slips and foreclosure notices in return and are about to have any hope of a national health care ripped away by the corrupt, on-the-take non-term limited cesspool dwellers in Congress.

And the myth of Ronald Reagan is just like the one about Santa Claus, only silliness for the credulous little children of lemming land. Horseshit, total horseshit.

So Newsweek Magazine, a month or so after a ‘change’ to move away from celebrity swill in favor of more hard-hitting and provocative ‘journalism’ has after cover stories featuring celebrities Stephen Colbert and Oprah (so much for ‘change’) rolled out an issue with a cover story – GAG – The Capitalist Manifesto. The piece in question is written by that ubiquitous little geek Fareed Zakaria and in any sane and honestly run news operation would be more honestly entitled The Bullshit Manifesto. But then we are talking about Newsweek, a sorry shitrag that is owned by the Washington Post and is the fruition of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. The salad days of the WaPo and the crusading investigative journalism in the form of Bob Woodward (a man of questionable integrity) and Carl Bernstein have long been flushed down the memory hole and the herald for the beltway elite and well-connected is a shameful example of just how vile and corrupt that the American media has become. The WaPo last week fired its best columnist Dan Froomkin for his daring to go up against the insipid and overly influential neocon house shill Charles Krauthammer over torture. See Glenn Greenwald’s excellent pieces on the firing of Mr. Froomkin, the hiring of Paul Wolfowitz to augment the neocon Wurlitzer and the sad state of the establishment media in general. Oh, and Newsweek also offers a place for a slimy, bitter, chain smoking, fascist pigfucker Robert Bork to rail against Sonia Sotomayor as he continues to inveigh against all that was once decent or free in this rotting empire of gluttony and greed.

As for Zakaria his long essay in which he defends the scoundrels, money grubbers, chiselers, cheats, schemers, high rollers, paper dealers and four flushing TARP fund welshers and the vile cancerous economic system of capitalism had my bile rising before I was even into the second column. It starts out like this:

A specter is haunting the world-the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. “Another ideological god has failed,” the dean of financial commentators, Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will “fundamentally reset” the way they work, said the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. “Capitalism will be different,” said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

No economic system ever remains unchanged, of course, and certainly not after a deep financial collapse and a broad global recession. But over the past few months, even though we’ve had an imperfect stimulus package, nationalized no banks and undergone no grand reinvention of capitalism, the sense of panic seems to be easing. Perhaps this is a mirage-or perhaps the measures taken by states around the world, chiefly the U.S. government, have restored normalcy. Every expert has a critique of specific policies, but over time we might see that faced with the decision to underreact or overreact, most governments chose the latter. That choice might produce new problems in due course-a topic for another essay-but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown.

“but it appears to have averted a systemic breakdown”?? Whaddafuck??? Jesus Fucking Christ, we are at the gates of Hell right now as a result of capitalism. However to highly paid ideologues like Fareed and his fellow travelers like Thomas Friedman who make a good chunk of coin on the circuit serving up globaloney to the suckers and don’t have to worry about the trivial existential horrors of the maxed out, stressed out, thrown out and fucked over and fucked out American on the streets the view is of course much different from atop the ivory towers. Here is some more of this rancid tripe:

Many experts are convinced that the situation cannot improve yet because their own sweeping solutions to the problem have not been implemented. Most of us want to see more punishment inflicted, particularly on America’s bankers. Deep down we all have a Puritan belief that unless they suffer a good dose of pain, they will not truly repent. In fact, there has been much pain, especially in the financial industry, where tens of thousands of jobs, at all levels, have been lost. But fundamentally, markets are not about morality. They are large, complex systems, and if things get stable enough, they move on.

More punishment? How about ANY punishment at all. Shit, those greedy pigs are the only ones that did get bailed out and are now engaged in a feverish orgy of speculation that will have gas at $5.00 a gallon by the time the snowflakes start falling, heating oil will also massively spike and along with the accompanying rise in food prices as commodity markets are cornered one hell of a lot of people are going to have to choose between heating and eating. So Zakaria should spare us that elitist scolding, we never did get to see Bill Maher’s suggestion of two bankers hanging from the big board at the NYSE with their balls in their mouth and other than a few big tokens who are going to be given show trials and slapped on the wrist the pain is all passed on to the shmoes and peasants as it always is in Capitalist Murka. It would be just too much to ask an egghead of Zakaria’s stature why a starving father can be busted stealing a can of fucking Chef Boyardee ravioli to feed his cold and hungry family and disappear into the bowels of the vast for profit prison gulag system while the treasonous looters are not only smacked on the wrist with a wet noodle but given more of the house money to piss away gambling. Here is another piece of the essay if, that is if you can stomach it:

A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East Asian currency crises-which were far more painful in those countries than the current downturn has been in America-we saw the pace of market-oriented reform speed up. If, in the years ahead, the American consumer remains reluctant to spend, if federal and state governments groan under their debt loads, if government-owned companies remain expensive burdens, then private-sector activity will become the only path to create jobs. The simple truth is that with all its flaws, capitalism remains the most productive economic engine we have yet invented. Like Churchill‘s line about democracy, it is the worst of all economic systems, except for the others. Its chief vindication today has come halfway across the world, in countries like China and India, which have been able to grow and pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by supporting markets and free trade. Last month India held elections during the worst of this crisis. Its powerful left-wing parties campaigned against liberalization and got their worst drubbing at the polls in 40 years.

Whenever a neocon or in Zakaria’s case, a neoliberal scoundrel needs to invoke a bit of legitimacy with the masses of asses it is the bread and butter to bring up good ole Winston Churchill. And the drivel about capitalism lifting hundreds of millions up out of poverty is just that, in layman’s terms it’s total bullshit. Capitalism itself, is as iconic Wall Street god and role model to the Reagan generation of shit Gordon Gekko once eloquently put it “a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred from one perception to another”. So Zakaria can engage in as much spin as necessary to argue his case, tell it to the millions of uninsured Americans, the jobless whose employment was shipped overseas to third world shithole sweatshops that are never seen. No, no no…when the shills for the financial cartels want an example of the wonders of globalization they show the glimmering steel and glass towers of modernity in Bangalore, just another Potemkin Village that obscures the ugly truth that capitalism is destroying the planet. Showing the slums, ghettos and slave labor staffed factories would interfere with the grand vision of the Lexus and the Olive Tree. I have had just about enough of the column that I can take without vomiting on my keyboard but just want to throw in this last little piece:

More broadly, the fundamental crisis we face is of globalization itself. We have globalized the economies of nations. Trade, travel and tourism are bringing people together. Technology has created worldwide supply chains, companies and customers. But our politics remains resolutely national. This tension is at the heart of the many crashes of this era-a mismatch between interconnected economies that are producing global problems but no matching political process that can effect global solutions. Without better international coordination, there will be more crashes, and eventually there may be a retreat from globalization toward the safety-and slow growth-of protected national economies.

Now the more conspiratorial (or to avoid the pejorative tin foil hatter – aware) types this is starting to sound strangely like a case for that dreaded New World Order aka a global corporate government that is being pimped. You can read the rest of the article yourselves if you have a high tolerance for bullshit. It bears mentioning that Fareed Zakaria is a Council on Foreign Relations mouthpiece and like the rest of his ilk is out there shilling for globalist predatory capitalism in a major publication like Newsweek. We are basically fucked right now because the establishment has rigged the game, Mr. Zakaria, like Obama is there to do the soft closing for those who are actually able to fucking read. For the rest, the prison camps await along with the reeducation to be a good little capitalist slave – think of O’Brien and his pet rats in Room 101, you get the picture.

The CFR along with all of these other big time elite groups (Bilderberg,Trilateral Commission, Davos, G8 etc) are nothing other than proponents for a global corporate state where we are all reduced to chattel and indentured servants in their system. Actually railing against these elitists is one of the few things that the knuckledraggers on the far right actually do that is remotely constructive – unfortunately it is then filtered through CIA fronts like the infamous John Birch Society to meld it with anti-immigrant racism, gun grabber paranoia and in the biggest lie of all turning it into a great Communist conspiracy rather than the quite obvious one of fascist corporatism. The future of capitalism is going to be patterned after that great model that is our top creditor China and the authoritarianism, censorship, goon squad paramilitary types who will grind our bones to make their bread. And this ties back into the Iran uprising, whether it is real, partially real, fomented by spooks or over sensationalized by the pocket media is irrelevant. Until Americans are ready to lay it on the line and take to the streets rather than sitting on their asses in front of state controlled television propaganda and don’t replace Twitter with guns then we are fucked. That’s just the way that it is and our revolution won’t be televised.

It is becoming more apparent that the shits won and won easily, hell our great savior for change Backless Barrack never even gave change a chance, just turned the policies over to pigs like Summers and Geithner so that they could save their casinos and their offshore money pools. The new issue of Foreign Affairs (the CFR journal) gives some time to the concept of G2 which is the U.S. and China. China is the perfect next stage of capitalism, once it has sucked the life out of the working and middle classes it needs an authoritarian police state to function at maximum capacity. Thanks to the Bushreich we already have the police state apparatus here (spying, paramilitary police etc) and not smiling Barack the new face for all of it is ensuring that generations will be condemned to corporate bondage, their fate has already been sealed with his acquiescence to Wall Street paper pushers.

I would recommend an alternative to Fareek Zakaria’s elitst propaganda in their polemic for the rich Newspeak. Harper’s Magazine, a fine, truly American intellectually solid publication has a wonderful cover story on the failure of the Pope of Hope, check out Barack Hoover Obama, subtitled The Best and the Brightest Blow it Again by Kevin Baker. It’s better written, more historically accurate and not delivered by the sort of conniving little swine who would piss down your back and try to convince you that it is raining for an establishment that swears 2+2=5.