It is a strange characteristic of modern journalism that it is so consensus driven that huge stories are completely missed. Such is the case with the surreal resurrection of AIG corporation. Not content with caretaker management intending to quietly sell off the remnants of AIG, the cancer men behind the Obama administration have chosen a pompous retired CEO, Bob Benmosche, to “revive” this zombie corporation.

Recall that the US taxpayers have pumped about $180 billion dollars into AIG, and that the current (highly inflated) market capitalization of the company is only $6 billion. There is not the ghost of a chance that the taxpayers will ever get their money back, because most of it was paid out to back crazy casino bet derivatives. But none of this matters, because the Obama administration does not believe in running corporations financed by the taxpayers. No, this would suggest that the Government could actually manage an organization better than the people who wrecked it.

Thus, we now enjoy the surreal spectacle of a bankrupt organization supported by taxpayer funds hiring a CEO who tells the government to back off and let him run the company according to his whims. We, the US taxpayers, are paying the salary of an arrogant blowhard who insists that he has the right to do with our funds as he pleases because he is a member of the CEO caste.

How many more companies will turn into Federally funded zombies run by loose-cannon CEO’s? How can one even predict the actions of managers who are completely untethered to any financial reality? It is as though the US economy is slowly turning into a comic-book caricature of itself, a Bizarro world of incongruity and excess, with the only constants being corruption and unaccountability.

AIG jumped 26 percent to $33.65 after Benmosche said in an interview in Croatia that “at the end of the day, we believe we will be able to pay back the government and we hope we will be able to do something for our shareholders as well.”

Why, you may ask, does the newly appointed CEO of AIG speak from Croatia? That is where Mr. Bob Benmosche is vacationing, at his million-dollar villa. Despite his weighty responsibilities as the newly-installed CEO of America’s most worthless insurance company, he decided not to interrupt his vacation to go to the office. You might also ask why Bob is so feisty and confident about his prospects when the US government effectively owns his company. The answer is simple. The government owns AIG, but has no effective control over it, and the ever-opportunistic Benmosche realizes this. He can do anything he pleases because the Obama administration desperately needs his cooperation to conceal the dimensions of the disaster at AIG.

There has been no investigation of the AIG debacle, and no effective accounting of the vast funds poured into this company. Now a strutting, blustering, rich CEO is taking over and telling the government to stop meddling in the business that it owns. Everything is back to normal and the inmates are running America’s financial asylum again.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Why should Americans impeach America’s first mixed-race President? Obama should be impeached to protect our nation from a precipitous slide into economic ruin and societal decay. Lacking a constitutional mechanism for voters to remove a President who is providing disastrous leadership, impeachment is our only alternative for avoiding further grievous harm. Like a charlatan physician feeding laetrile to a cancer patient, Obama and his minions have misdiagnosed, mistreated, and mismanaged our economy from his first day in office. Here are some particulars:

1. Protecting the plutocracy. In the Obama administration, the holders of concentrated private wealth come first. Their interests, generally represented in proportion to their political contributions, are defended at all costs. Obama has effectively been bribed to protect the wealthy, and the payoff will come in his future media deals and speaking fees.

2. Rewarding incompetence and reinforcing failure. The economic management team put in place by Obama is led by “experts” whose theories of deregulation and minimal interference with the marketplace resulted in the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. They not only failed to forsee the problems, but are now failing to prevent their recurrence. Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke have presided over the largest transfer of taxpayer wealth to private corporations in American history. Meanwhile, unemployment rises inexorably, while a “recovery” is achieved by proclamation. Some of what has been done in secret dealings between the Obama administration and the malefactors of great wealth rises to the level of criminal conspiracy.

3. Preserving and extending a permanent warfare state. Obama has increased defense spending above Bush administration levels, because he is firmly committed to a permanent warfare state. This enriches the Military-Industrial-Complex, while providing a safety valve for unemployed and restless young people. It is the highest form of treason to engage America in unnecessary wars.

4. Making the President the supreme arbiter of the law. Obama declared that he alone would ban torture, and that no Congressional action would be required. He blocked the prosecution of Bush Administration war criminals as a further demonstration that all power effectively resides in the presidency. His continuation of the use of signing statements is further evidence of the continuation of Bush’s imperial presidency. This arrogant assertion that the President alone controls the detention and torture of prisoners in an endless war is a flagrant violation of the Constitution.

It is a sad thing that so promising a politician as Barak Obama has failed so badly, but we must accept the unhappy facts. Charm is no substitute for competence, and a smooth speaking style does not compensate for a faulty character. Obama the President is not what we were promised by Obama the candidate. The deficits in his performance are so great that they warrant removal. Impeach Obama while something of America remains to be saved.

Every sane person on progressive blogs is boiling over with feelings of frustration, resentment, and betrayal as the Bushbama administration continues to feed the American people into the ravenous maw of the plutocracy. It was not enough for them to guarantee permanent war to fatten the Military-Industrial Complex. It was not enough for them to use hundreds of billions of future public wealth to assure the rich compensation of Wall Street bandits. It was not enough for them to continue the erosion of privacy and civil rights by making the whim of the President the supreme law of a national security state. No, they now want to create a massive permanent subsidy of a dysfunctional private health insurance system that combines the worst features of greed-based “disease management” with the unaccountability of massive Government spending.

The only way to get this increasingly dysfunctional hijacked government off our backs is direct action against its plutocratic puppet-masters. The Whole Foods boycott and the Glen Beck sponsor boycotts are, I believe, early manifestations of successful direct action that bypasses the profoundly corrupt Bushbama regime. It will take time to bring down the first targets, but once the people appreciate the power and precision of the direct action weapon, it can snowball into the velvet revolution our nation so badly needs.

I urge you to actively participate in any direct citizen action that strikes against the American Plutocracy. This is our only peaceful chance of stopping the subjugation of the American people by ruthless and sociopathic malefactors of great wealth. If we miss this chance, we run the risk of the violent disintegration of American society. It is time to rip the masks off the cancer men who buy our politicians and poison our society. It is time to strike at their wealth, the only thing that they care about, and thus to strip them of the power to destroy our future. Direct Action against the American Plutocracy is the last best hope of American democracy.

Good Democratic operative Leon Panetta comes before us to say that the CIA and the Bush administration should be excused for all of their crimes because it was to be expected that they would behave like frightened children after the 9/11 attacks. This is the “reality of 9/11” to which Panetta refers. This is a bold attempt at normalizing incompetence and shoddy behavior in America’s leadership.

A stupid, ignorant thug, or a terrified young child, would lash out blindly and break the rules, so why should this standard not apply to the President of the United States and his underlings? This is the final argument of the head of the CIA to protect his agency from repercussions for torturing human beings to extract false confessions to serve the White House.

What is being attempted here is nothing less than the overthrow of our Constitution and laws in favor of the supposedly superior principle of impulsive decision making driven by fear and confusion. The American Founders would be horrified by claims like this. The main purpose of government is to subdue and control the wild impulses of humanity and curb the worst insticts of powerful leaders. But Panetta tells us that the highest principle is to trust the gut decsions of frightened men.

Is our nation truly so debased and dishonored that it will tolerate such offensive nonsense? How low have we sunk if we allow such sophistry to destroy our Constitution? What is to prevent the next rogue President from playing the fear card to inflict even greater outrages on our people? Don’t ask Leon Panetta. He is too busy protecting the frightened children who used to lead our government.

The extended sausage making saga that is the American health care “reform” process is teaching us valuable things about how our government works. Perhaps the most important lesson is that the predatory corporations that control our government feed on the complexity of government legislation. Simple laws provide little room for evasion and deceit, but bills that run to a thousand pages invite cheating, chiseling, ducking, dodging, and all manner of lawyer-enabled avoidance of the spirit of the law.

Although we do not know what form the final health care bill will take, we can be absolutely sure that it will be grotesquely complicated, because it has effectively been written by lobbyists. After the bill is passed, month after month we will see revelations of “legal” methods by which hospitals and insurance companies evade the intent of the health care reform by exploiting fine print and ambiguities in the legislation and administrative guidelines.

It didn’t have to be this way. But by electing a politician owned by the corporate establishment, we assured ourselves that Obama would generate a bumper crop of legislative complexity to fatten the profits of predatory corporations and the salaries of their lobbyists. This is the reason single payer was killed off immediately at the start of the health reform negotiations: it is too simple a system.

The proposed health care system will be a four-ring circus of private insurance, a government-run insurance plan, non-profit cooperatives, and Medicare/Medicaid. If anyone believes that this can be implemented efficiently and that the insurance companies will be any more responsible, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Obama is giving the corporate predators exactly what they want, and he is packaging it as reform. This is a cruel deception, and it remains to see how many of the American people will be deceived.

Imagine if the passengers of the Titanic, informed of their grave peril, began arguing over how the deck chairs should be arranged so as to provide the most comfortable sinking experience. That is an appropriate metaphor for what passes for political discourse in the blogosphere these days. Here are some examples:

1. The health care fiasco. The insurance and drug industries have such a powerful hold on the US Congress that nothing resembling what the public wishes (a national single-payer plan) has a hope of emerging from the process. So what is all the excitement about? It’s about whether Obama can pass ANYTHING resembling an improved health care plan.

2. The forever war. Obama’s election caused the US antiwar movement to implode. Hey man, Obama is pulling us out of Iraq! We are still in Iraq, and we have expanded the war in Afghanistan to more than offset any reduction of expenditure of blood and treasure from Iraq. So what is the debate about? How soon we can pull completely out of Iraq to increase the commitment to the quagmire in Afghanistan.

3. The crumbling economy. Nobody believes Wall Street or the Government any more, because their lies are plain to see. Our economy is deflating like a punctured balloon as the debt-fueled building of unsustainable living patterns hits the wall of fiscal and ecological reality. So what are we arguing about? How quickly we can resume building McMansions and selling more SUVs.

4. The torture follies. Everybody now knows that half of Americans support torturing human beings in order to protect “national security.” This is the final verdict on American society in the 21st century: we are a cruel and wicked people who deserve to be punished. So what are we arguing about? Which Republican politician (Cheney?) can be made to absorb all the blame for a torture policy that half of America supports.

What passes for politics in America is now fully decoupled from the discussion of the problems that face us, as we drift in a fantasy land of bogus “issues” to avoid dealing with the truths that we just can’t handle. But as we adjust our political deck chairs, the ship continues to sink.

The supreme act of corrupt power is to murder with impunity, and it is this act that may bring down Dick Cheney. Today Lawrence Wilkerson had this to say about Cheney’s secret death squads:

“What I suspect has happened is what began to happen while I was still in the government, and that was we’re killing the wrong people,” Wilkerson added. “And we’re killing the wrong people in the wrong countries. And the countries are finding out about it, or at least there was a suspicion that the countries might find out about it, and so it was shut down. That’s my strong suspicion.”

For monsters like Cheney and Bush, the thrill of the kill was not diminished by making mistakes. No, this simply added to the feeling of unbridled power. That’s what it means to kill with impunity. There were no checks on the heads of our national security state. They were no different from Louis XIV or Caligula. They held the power of life and death over hundreds of millions of people, and it was intoxicating.

We are told again and again that economic solutions dictated by simple common sense are politically impossible:

1. Shifting hundreds of billions of dollars of government expenditure from weapons procurement and warfare to civilian construction is impossible.

2. Creating an efficient single-payer national health care system is impossible.

3. Putting the unemployed to work rebuilding our infrastructure is impossible.

4. Reconstructing America’s intercity rail network is impossible.

5. Investigation and prosecution of rogue corporations is impossible.

Why are all of these things impossible? Because, ever since Ronald Reagan and his allied ideological vandals commenced an all-out assault on government, the American people have been barraged with plutocratic propaganda persuading them that the government that built the atomic bomb, landed men on the moon, established the Internet, and ended racial discrimination is worthless and incompetent.

The dominant political meme in Washington is still “everybody knows that the government can’t run anything properly.” This pernicious myth will drag us down into economic misery so deep that we will eventually be forced to discard it. No combination of individuals or corporations has the power and resources to get us out of the ditch we are in. Only the Federal government can pull us out. But as long as it remains reviled and discredited, we will lie in the ditch.

This is why things will get much worse in America before they get better. It took a huge amount of effort to poison the minds of the citizenry against their own government, and only a massive amount of suffering will bring the political realignment necessary to cleanse this poison. Until our people renew their trust in government, a widespread economic recovery will be an impossible mission.

It’s time to blog the future of our Great Recession, and it looks just beautiful. What America’s owners are coming to see is that our heavily narcotized population can be persuaded that 10% unemployment is the new normal, and that further concentration of wealth is just the new shape of economic recovery. As long as Goldman Sachs is breaking compensation and bonus records, our nation must be on the mend.

Proof of America’s pathological addiction to fantasy was the transformation of Michael Jackson, an emotionally disturbed sex offender who had been unemployed for 20 years, into “the greatest entertainer who ever lived” in an orgy of television revisionism that proved that the majority of the population will believe anything that is delivered with high TV production values.

Those who are curious about how the recession normalization process will work should look for these magical memes:

1. Unemployment “lags” the recovery, so we can have 20% of the population un- or under-employed for a few more years while the champagne flows on Wall Street. No worries.

2. People will help each other by taking in the children of relatives rather than having them go to homeless shelters. This is a great opportunity to celebrate America’s social conscience.

3. Military service is a wonderful way to earn a living while defending our great nation. Being a paycheck killer puts food on the table and dead insurgents in the ground.

4. Rich people are the best hope for America’s future. Their ability to prosper proves that our economy is strong, and if more people have to sink into poverty to feed money to the rich, then that is our patriotic duty.

5. Our government is doing the best that it can, and our President looks cool on TV. The First Lady is growing organic vegetables in the White House garden while negotiating her book deal. The Obamas share our pain.

6. If you are suffering economically, it is your fault. Working harder is the best way out of economic difficulty. As the Germans say: “Arbeit macht frei!”

The question that haunts progressives in Internet forums is “What comes next?” What will break through the entrenched resistance of the corporate-owned political establishment and turn the Internet into a medium of democratic (small d) political action. I believe that many progressives have wrongly concluded that nothing further could be expected from Internet political phenomena than that they should function as helpful adjuncts to traditional clubhouse politics (e.g., the DKos model). I disagree strongly, and herewith explain what I think has gone wrong and how to put things right:

I.  What has gone wrong with political blogs

We have been disarmed by a focus on information. The notion that a properly informed citizenry will act in its interests is manifestly faulty, because it neglects the obvious psychological obstacle of a citizenry that has been frightened, narcotized, or otherwise manipulated into passivity. For example, almost every American knows that the Iraq war was a cruel joke played on our citizenry, our soldiers, and the people of Iraq, but the war continues, year after year after year.

As a thought experiment, pretend that the Internet existed in Germany in 1944 and that citizens could access reports of holocaust genocide being committed in Nazi death camps. Do you think the “good Germans” would have rebelled and brought down their government? Of course not, they would simply have ignored the evidence and carried on with the war, just as Americans have ignored the evidence of the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo and are allowing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to continue.

The Nazi concentration camps were not shut down by newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, informative pamphlets, or religious appeals. They were closed by the forcible defeat of Nazi Germany. In our era, rogue corporations will never modify their rapacious behavior because of information – no matter how sophisticated its composition and delivery. They will change only when they are forced to change by action that directly impinges on their profits or threatens their corporate existence.

You may think it a strong claim that I declare Internet political blogs to be impotent, but I would go further. To the degree that they act as energy sinks and emotional outlets for politically engaged individuals, they actually subtract from the potential for effective action. Think of how often you have enjoyed the cathartic process of reading of some fresh outrage against humanity, then posting your own amplifying comments. It may feel satisfying, but it is the equivalent of empty political calories, because nothing has been accomplished, other than generating a bit of traffic for a blog site.

II. How to make blogging politically effective

Political change does not come from enlightenment of the oppressed; it comes from defeating the oppressors. You can’t change the behavior of Goldman Sachs or Halliburton by explaining their mischief in elaborate and irrefutable detail. The American people already know that these are gangster organizations. But the people, and their elected “representatives,” are too intimidated and paralyzed to attack these monsters.

Political activity on the Internet needs to be “weaponized” in order to change the power relationships in world society. There is no “arsenal of democracy” in the political forums of the Internet. The armory is empty. All we have are crumpled informative handbills blowing in the wind of irrelevance. How do we build an arsenal of democracy on the Internet? Here are some ideas:

1. The Burning Lens. Every child has seen how a simple magnifying glass can concentrate the rays of the sun to create a spot of intense heat that can set things afire. This is the crucial metaphor for using the Internet as a political weapon. Only a small fraction of the population is politically active and willing to devote more than a fraction of their time to securing political change. The advent of the Internet substantially increased the power of this activist minority, but the evolution of organizational structure to concentrate Internet activism on a SMALL NUMBER OF TARGETS has lagged. Like children in a candy store, today’s Internet political activists are so dazzled and disoriented by the array of issues before them that their efforts are widely scattered and diluted into insignificance. Consider what would happen to Goldman Sachs if 50,000 people devoted a significant portion of their time to a collective effort to curb the pernicious behavior of this corporation. Without focus and convergent effort on selected targets of direct action, political action on the Internet will remain feeble and irrelevant.

2. The People’s Charter. Corporations have already set up world governments. They operate globally and play off nations against each other to advance their interests. They use nation-states and their thickets of jurisdictional legal obstructions as weapons against the people of the world. Political activists must accept that there is only one standard of health for the world; there is only one value of human life for the world; and there is only one definition of personal freedom for the world. Just as the Magna Carta secured fundamental liberties for the English people centuries ago. A single global people’s charter must be developed to present a common political platform for humanity against the rapacity of the corporations.

3. The Corporate Death Penalty. Corporations do not enter the world through immaculate conception. They are chartered by political bodies for the good of society. What is chartered can be un-chartered. Removing a corporation’s charter is the equivalent of sentencing it to death. If politicians cannot be persuaded to de-charter a corporation, then the corporation can be killed by free market means, through boycotts, strikes, and customer-directed and supplier-directed campaigns. Capital punishment advocates have long argued for the deterrent value of the death penalty. Although this deterrence has not been proven for individual criminals, it is very likely to be an effective mechanism in curbing destructive behavior of rogue corporations.

How are these political weapons to be wielded? In this sequence:

I. A rogue corporation is identified as being in violation of the People’s Charter.

II. The rogue corporation is selected by Internet progressives as an exemplary target.

III. Burning Lens sanctions and direct actions are conducted against the rogue corporation until its business fails or it is de-chartered.

IV. Other corporations observe the outcome of this process and modify their behaviors accordingly.

We can shout the truth from one hundred million web sites forever, and not one corporation mercenary will lift a finger to trade profit for ethical conduct. Yelling louder does not work when malefactors are ethically deaf. Rogue corporations can be defeated only by weapons designed to injure them, not by words meant to cajole them. The empty arsenal of Internet democracy must be filled with arms that can change the world, not with impotent cries of rage.