Ooh, CNN is reporting Congress is about to get tough with AIG. This is like saying Baby Huey is going to get tough with his diaper pins.
Yeah, Congress, you remember them. Giving Kucinich and a few others a pass, almost 535 fellow citizens who give cowardice a good name in comparison to the craven, corrupt and gutless policies they pursue. Congress made up of used car salesmen with law degrees, is going to tax back $165 million of virtually worthless smackers from AIG for paying bonuses to managerial technocrats following the orders of free-range executives to maximize profits at all costs by filling regulatory loopholes (or caverns) with snake-oil chicanery.
Ooh. You better be scared AIG. Congress is coming! Ooh!
“In the past few years, we’ve seen too much greed and too little fear; too much spending and not enough saving; too much borrowing and not enough worrying,” Summers said Friday in a speech to the Brookings Institution. “Today, however, our problem is exactly the opposite.”
Larry Summers – Idiot
Oh, the twists and turns of elite logic make for so much fun. Fun, that is, if there weren’t tent-cities rising like wild mushrooms along the decayed American landscape. If the fruits of the “ownership society” weren’t un-payable usurious debt, debauched currency and foreclosed houses full of slave-labor crap; the envy of first-worlders everywhere – never to mention the literally billions of human beings who live on less than a devalued dollar a day.
Note to the nervous, and people always seem to get nervous at the words “Class War” are spoken! Perhaps the greatest service McCain did in his campaign was draw the lines of the Class War. If you make under the McCain Line of $5 million a year….
“They don’t get it,” McCaskill said on the floor. “These people are idiots. You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses… What planet are these people on?”
The one where they get away with starting illegal wars, torturing, looting the economy for billions of dollars, War Profiteering, (yes YOU, Halliburton) growing rich on the deaths of our (lower class) soldiers in Iraq, politicizing our government to their advantage and outting CIA agents with absolute impunity….while record numbers of the Lower Classes serve hard time for minor drug offenses or stealing bread to feed our families?
Tired of feeling helpless as Class War is waged upon you?
Everyone knows that the Bush Administration committed War…and many other….Crimes. Even leaders of The Republican Party (the political arm of the Ruling Class) like Sen. Cornyn and Sen. Spectre, who tried to blackmail or extort a promise NOT to prosecute the Bush Administration from our soon to be Attorney General Holder. If there WEREN’T crimes, why would they try to strong arm the new AG from investigating and prosecuting them?
WE know they are guilty, (at LEAST guilty enough to thoroughly investigate) ‘THEY know’ Bush is guilty. Why then is there so much talk of “Looking Forward” and such angst about an honest AG being appointed?
Because the Ruling Class protect their own.
The only reason not to prosecute is to protect the Ruling Class from responsibility for their crimes. How does excusing yet another round of the crimes of the Ruling/Political Class from prosecution benefit anyone besides the Ruling Class?
Because Congress and the DOJ has “better things to do” than investigate and prosecute? You mean better things like bailing out The Ruling Class with tax money provided by the Lower Classes? Yeah, we better let them get to that before demanding justice….or something bad might happen to us. Like…maybe…being put under house arrest in our 7 million dollar home for stealing 50 Billion dollars….how inconvenient is that? Or maybe having to sell one of our seven houses. As the economy crashes around us….and NO ONE is held accountable for the mess they made. Yeah, nothing is more important than making sure that this system continues as it is….or people might suffer.
Thus, the most effective blow we can strike in the Class War that is being waged against us is this: Hold them accountable. Do NOT let the two tiered justice system that the Ruling Class has created to prosecute us and excuse them work this time. Demand justice. Demand accountability. Demand that the Ruling Class be held responsible for their crimes.
What suffers most in a Class War? Justice. How can we strike back in the Class War….by doing the right thing…. and show that we are not going to just lay back and take it? By fighting for justice for the Ruling Class. Not out of spite or resentment or revenge, but because IT IS the right thing to do, to hold them to the Rule of Law. To be sure that they are held equal, no more and no less, in this allegedly egalitarian democracy.
Scarface is a rapper. He made his bones with Houston’s legendary Geto Boys in the late 1980s and into the ’90s, along with Willie D. and Bushwick Bill.
No superstar, he still makes a living from hiphop. And Scarface has a few things to say about the economic meltdown:
This game ain’t about flossing no more, man. Ain’t nobody got no money…
When Merrill Lynch merged with Bank of America, it was just the beginning of some frightening shit. I remember when Bank of America was Nation’s Bank and Merrill Lynch had all the money. Now it’s definitely real in the field. Dope money is even funny right now. Niggas better hold on for dear life, man. Really.
It boils down to class. It’s the rich, and then there’s the poor. If someone gets rich, just know that somewhere, somehow, somebody is suffering from [that person] getting rich. Y’all can sit in your big houses on however many acres you got and however many billions are in the bank, but looking down at the have-nots–no bank account, no meal, living government check to check–is an insult and needs to be corrected.
Everybody’s suffering. Some mu’fuckas got money, but they got cats standing next to ’em that ain’t got no money at all. [But] if America got enough money to go to war, then America should have enough to keep the economy going.”
Across Europe there is a growing rebellion against attempts to make ordinary people pay for the economic crisis. Socialist Worker reports on the protests that have swept Greece, Italy and Germany in the past week
Original Article, titled Jamie Oliver: food for thought and subheaded Jamie Oliver has hit our screens again, this time teaching people how to cook. Amy Leather welcomes his take on food and class, by Amy Leather via Socialist Worker (UK):
In the last few years a moral panic over food has taken hold in Britain. Working class people are given rubbish to eat. This can mean a lifetime of health problems such as diabetes, obesity and even early death. We are then blamed for these effects.
The government and the media have made food into a personal and moral issue. What we eat – we are told – is down to decisions made by individuals. So if we make the wrong choices, it’s our own fault and we deserve the consequences.
First of all, unless you are over the John McCain line of the Middle Class ….Five Million Dollars a Year, the Class War is NOT directed at you. The term Class War tends to make folks nervous if they are doing okay. The propaganda is that the poor want to wage war on the Middle Class. That is NOT true. Class War is the Middle Class and the Lower Class against the Ruling Class
So, relax! Well, come to think of it, you can only really relax if you are on the side that is winning The Class War. If you do happen to make less than $5Mil….you aren’t. If you make less than $5Mil….you are losing The Class War.
It was very nice of Dear John to delineate the dividing line of The Class War that is currently occurring so succinctly!
The Bush Administration came into office with one overriding, clear, and definite objective: Make the Rich richer. To insulate and inoculate the Ruling Class from the pesky yammering of the Middle and Lower Classes that vexed them under the tenure of Democrats. Yammering like…paying taxes… regulations that were inconveniently forcing them to be responsible stewards of the economy…and of course, yammering about egalitarianism in America. The idea that we are all equal, no matter how much we earn. The idea that our democratic system of government is for the benefit of ALL Americans, not just the Ruling Class.
But they have gone too far at exactly the wrong time and THEY have made this a Class War election. Us regular Americans who think that this is the America of our forefathers, the America of the patriotic myths we were brought up on, the America that exists to benefit ALL Americans….vs…Them. The ones who think that the only function of America and its government is to make them richer, and now to bail them out when they fail. It is OUR job to save THEM? I don’t think so.
THAT is why Obama is going to win this election, and quite possibly, win it in a landslide.
The likely outcome of the Bush-led Republican raid on America astonishes me. As America’s national nightmare approaches the eight-year mark, the Bush administration is apparently going to escape unpunished. They are going to skate scot-free. They have brazenly committed major crimes against the people of the United States, not to mention the terrible things they have done to much of the rest of the world…and these bastards are going to skate scot-free.
It’s refreshing to see that some businesses are doing well in today’s economy. Perhaps the most successful venture going today is the pawn shop. From Peoria to Pasadena, pawn shops are seeing a boom in clients.
Says Doug Robinson, a pawn shop owner in Pasadena,
We’ve been on a continuous uphill run for a number of months. I don’t see anything that will stop it.
Worse even than the paycheck advance loans, a pawn shop loan typically involves an annual interest rate in excess of 50%. Yes, that is fifty percent per year. In Mississippi, the cap is 25% per month, which is 300% per year (if not compounded monthly).
Given that credit card debt is often 18% or higher, it is incredibly sad to imagine the poor soul who pawns an object at 50% interest to pay that very same object off on the 18% credit card debt.
The bitter and recalcitrant Hillary Rodham-Clinton’s whopping 43 percent win in the West Virginia primary despite the category 5 spin doesn’t mean jack fucking shit. Consider that the mountaineer state’s demographics, the sort of folks that Clinton aide Mickey Kantor so eloquently refers to as “white niggers” make the longtime GOP red state base denizens of peckerwood nation down south of the Mason-Dixon Line look like a fucking master race by comparison. These hard-workin’ (when they are able to even find jobs that haven’t been offshored) white voters are as easily duped with allegations of secret Muslim conspiracies, anti-Americanism by a ‘darky’ who refuses to wear a flag pin or hold his hand over his heart during the ridiculous fucking Stalinist pledge of allegiance and actually gives a rat’s ass about economic conditions in such capitalist desecrated shit holes like West Virginia rather than engage in laying stink bait about guns, gays and God.
Now that even the corporatist beltway elite lackey media has slowly come to recognize the inevitability of the political version of the unbeatable New England Patriots losing the big one it’s time to put the intramural pissing matches aside and to start reorganizing for a shot at the true target. The Hillary Rodham-Clinton campaign now faces fourth and thirty-two, has the ball at it’s own twenty yard line, is down by eight and there are sixteen seconds left in the Super Bowl. It’s not exactly officially in the books yet but the fat lady is humming and the opposing team has just administered the traditional Gatorade baptism to their head coach on the sidelines.
Today I read a lot about the Astor Place Riot of 1849. It’s not exactly holiday reading. But it is a story worth telling here.
The Astor Place Riot occurred May 10, 1849 at the Astor Place Opera House. When it was over 22 people were dead and another 38 were injured. It was a deadly confrontation between the poor and the rich, who controlled the police and militia. The riot was triggered by rival performances of The Scottish Play by Shakespeare.
