To the Barricades of Heaven

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Running down around the towns along the shore,

When I was sixteen and on my own.

No, I couldn’t tell you what the hell those brakes were for,

I was just trying to hear my song . . .

Now I’m sitting by the highway,

Down by that highway side.

Everybody’s going somewhere,

Just as fast as they can ride.

I guess they’ve got a lot to do,

Before they can rest assured.

Their lives are justified.

I’ve been up and down that highway,

But no matter what I see,

I can’t help feeling,

We’ll never get where we want to be.

A friend said, close your eyes, and try a few of these,

I thought I was flying like a bird,

So far above my sorrow,

But when I looked down,

I was on my knees.

RePugs said close your eyes, America . . .

And try a few of these tax cuts for the rich, the wealth will trickle down.  And America believed them.  

America thought it was flying like a bird,

So far above its sorrow.

But when it looked down,

It was on its knees.

RePugs told us close our eyes and give their tax cuts a try, to close our eyes and give their deregulations a try, to close our eyes and give their wars a try, to close our eyes and give their torture and lying and NSA spying a try.   So America closed its eyes.  America gave all that a try.   And now we’re on our knees.  With blood on our hands. Kneeling at the edge of the grave we dug for ourselves with RePug shovels.

Now Obama and the morticians in that other branch of the Corporate Party are telling us to close our eyes again, they’re telling us to give their Wall Street bailouts a try.  The recovery will trickle down. They want us to be patient.  We’ll get our share.  Five cents of it will trickle down to our bones by 2509.  3509 at the latest.      

Sandy Lewis and William Cohen in the New York Times . . .

Whether at a fund-raising dinner for wealthy supporters in Beverly Hills, or at an Air Force base in Nevada, or at Charlie Rose’s table in New York City, President Obama is conducting an all-out campaign to try to make us feel a whole lot better about the economy as quickly as possible. “It’s safe to say we have stepped back from the brink, that there is some calm that didn’t exist before,” he told donors at the Beverly Hilton Hotel late last month.  

Mr. Obama thinks that the way to revive the economy is to restore confidence in it.  If the mood is right, the capital will flow.  But this belief is dangerously misguided.  The storm is not over, not by a long shot.  Huge structural flaws remain in the architecture of our financial system, and many of the fixes that the Obama administration has proposed will do little to address them and may make them worse.

Michael Lewis, the former Salomon Brothers trader who wrote Liar’s Poker about the excesses of Wall Street during the 1980’s, delivered a devastating critique of the financial industry and of the government bailout . . .

There’s a false sense that it’s over, that the crisis is passed, but I don’t think the crisis is passed. The government’s rescue efforts have only served to postpone a day of reckoning for Wall Street.  They haven’t even properly evaluated the institutions, they haven’t been honest about what these institutions have on their books.  They’ve had phony stress tests.  One of the things that’s odd about the current situation is that the people who created the problem are so powerful in deciding what the solution to the problem is going to be.  There is a great tradition on Wall Street of making a fortune, creating a mess, and then making a fortune cleaning it up.  But to do it on this scale is breathtaking.

Raking in a fortune by fucking up the whole world, then raking in another fortune by unfucking it up for awhile until its time to fuck it all up again is a Wall Street tradition.  And letting Wall Street do that over and over again is an American tradition.  

Close your eyes and give the plutocrats another try.  Close your eyes and give those war supplementals another try, close your eyes and give the big drug companies and big insurance companies and K-Street assassins of democracy another try.  They haven’t managed to blast us all into oblivion quite yet, so close your eyes, America, praise the Lord, and pass them another ten trillion dollars of ammunition.  Then kiss your ass goodbye.  

Faded pages of the Constitution no one in Washington wants to read, faded pages of laws no one in Washington wants to enforce, faded pages from America’s past none of them want to remember. Faded pages that remind us what we once were, what we once stood for, what we once believed in.  

We’ve become a nation of criminals on Wall Street and robbed blind victims everywhere else who are too chickenshit to get up off their knees and fight back, that’s what we’ve become.  

That greater awakening is coming.  But it won’t come until America hits rock bottom, until Americans are bled dry and have nothing left to lose, until this country finally wakes up, until we bring our own redemption to the barricades of heaven where justice is from, until We the People become justice and shut down this criminal plutocracy so we can give real democracy a try.