Tag: Economic Collapse

Mar 21 2009

Inviting the Sheep for Another Shearing

What do you get for pretending the danger’s not real.

Meek and obedient you follow the leader

Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.

What a surprise!

A look of terminal shock in your eyes.

Now things are really what they seem.

No, this is no bad dream.

-Pink Floyd (sheep)

In the ongoing madness of an America in terminal decline, the great Surge II is now underway. This one has nothing to do with mass brainwashing that all is ell in Iraq and that we are indeed winning thanks to our shining medal festooned superstar quarterback otherwise known as General God (aka David Petraeus) to divert the flocks attention away from a doomed imperialist crusade. Nope, this one hits closer to home, it started last Monday with a sly piece of internal propaganda from Citigroup’s CEO Vikram Pandit having its best quarter since 2007 which triggered a sucker rally in the Wall Street casinos that dictate to the inhabitants of chumpland. The pocket media once again did their job, selling this latest call for the sheep to come and be sheared with all the effectiveness that they pimped the murderous lies of George W. Bush, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. Things – ARE getting better you see, the gloom-gloomers, the glass is half-empty pessimists, the neurotic nervous nellies and the naysaying Eyores are all wrong, it’s a disease, in their heads, the economy is rocketing its way back to robustitude. The most incredible example of just how thoroughly corrupt that the corporatist media has become is the pernicious cover story of the latest edition of Newsweek magazine that has a picture of good ole Uncle Sam saying that he wants YOU to START SPENDING!… YOU need to INVEST in America – before it’s too late.

Mar 19 2009

3 Million Hit The Streets To Protest The Economy

Sorry to say, those 3 million people are in France, not the US. Why is it that the French hit the streets while we Americans don’t?  Like the writer of the piece says, “France is France.” I wish Americans hit the streets more often. It might not fix anything in the long run (though it just might), but it sure beats huddling in front of our teevees and just “taking it,” which is what we’re all doing now. If the AIG bonus nonsense was happening over in France, I guarantee there would be about 1.5 bazillion pissed off frenchies outside the corporate HQ setting up Madame Guillotine. As to why we Americans don’t get out there like the French do, I suspect it’s a side effect (a planned side effect?) of the whole “rugged individualism” myth, that toxic, retrograde aspect of the American character that says: I got mine, screw everybody else, and anyway “solidarity” starts with a “s” and so does that there “socialism”, so it’s gotta be bad fer ya.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/eur…

Why is it only in France that such demonstrations are taking place?

After all, it is people the world over who are bearing the brunt of the recession. But they are not on the street.

The answer is simple. France is France. It has its own political and social codes, forged in the Revolution and over the course of two turbulent centuries.

Mar 14 2009

Mad Money Cramer: Blue Horseshoe Loves Anacot Steel

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Wake up, will ya pal? If you’re not inside, you’re outside, OK? And I’m not talking a $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable, I’m talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars buddy. A player, or nothing.



-Gordon Gekko

In the movie that would serve as a blueprint for the future lives of young turks shat out of the womb of 1980s Reagan eat the poor capitalism a young broker named Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen) engages in a bit of trickery to manipulate stock prices by invoking the magic words “Blue Horeshoe loves Anacot Steel” over the phone to players and media hacks. The movie was Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and the young Fox was in the process of selling his soul to the canny devil in suspenders who would become an iconic cultural figure. The seducer was big time corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) whose amorality and worldview rooted in the dogma that “greed is good” would serve as the role model for the very large scale looters, charlatans, thugs, hedge fund hyenas and money grubbing sociopaths who are responsible for the global financial collapse. Through their avarice, their blood-sucking vampirism and their relentless pursuit of zero sum game, fuck you capitalism they have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, beggared millions and first built and then destroyed trillions of dollars in fairy tale wealth that never existed in the first place other than in numbers in a computer. The smart ones cashed out and put their money into real assets, gold, real estate, commodities, off-shore bank accounts that would allow the chiselers to evade taxes on their ill-gotten gains.

Mar 04 2009

Stop giving our cash to bankers – Sack them!

Original article via Socialist Worker (UK):

Disgraced banker Fred Goodwin is going to keep his £16 million pension, despite some bluster from elements of the Labour government.

Mar 03 2009

The Last Picture Show

Original article, by Richard C. Cook, via dissidentvoice.org:

[The Last Picture Show was a 1971 film depicting the decay of small town America. It took place in the fictitious town of Anarene, Texas.]

We hear a distant tune reminiscent of America’s high and lonely places and the sound of a dry wind blowing. It’s March 2010 in the tiny West Texas town of Anarene. Nothing much happens here any more. The last business shut down a couple of years ago. It was a cement plant that went broke after the housing bubble burst and the banks stopped lending. The kids out of high school drive their jalopies from one end of Main Street to the other past boarded-up storefronts.

Feb 27 2009

Soylent Red, White and Blue

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Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

-H. L. Mencken

I: Republican Ratfucker Dead-Enders

“May you live in interesting times” goes the familiar and eerily relevant Chinese curse and America circa 2009 is an eerie example of what whomever came up with that one had in mind. The economic collapse is gaining in momentum with the fraudulent markets in freefall, the ripple effects of the implosion of the FIRE economy now spreading into the real economy and the system desperately trying to save itself even if it must destroy the country itself in order to do so. In a land gripped by growing madness the dead-enders of the fascist Republican party become more angry, irrational and outright seditious with each passing day. The latest outrage this week is the ugly public tantrums of several Republican governors who are shamelessly and publicly balking at accepting funds for some programs from the diluted economic stimulus package that was signed into law last week by President Barack Obama. It is once again political party before country for these miscreant thugs, the whores of the oligarchy and their religion of tax cuts for the wealthy, an endless fountain of corporate welfare and a dumbed-down and desperate populace that is more easily controlled.

Feb 16 2009

Time to Stick a Fork in Reagan’s Ass

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The Fucker’s Dead!

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

-Imperial Grand Prophet Ronald Reagan (mystically foreseeing TARP)

With the passage of the massive economic stimulus plan set to be signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday in Denver the dying squeals of Republican piggies grown fat on the failed policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan are becoming more shrill, psychotic and deafening. The stimulus plan, even as diluted as it is by the inclusion of all of those great tax cuts that have resulted only in proving that trickle down economics is nothing more than Gulliver pissing on the heads of the Lilliputians (translation: the working class) and doing so with sadistic mirth. What the stimulus package represents more than anything even including the ridiculous fucking tax cuts is that the end of an era is nigh and that the machinery of government is being slowly redirected to a previous form where it was not weaponized by overly wealthy pigs, Wall Street looter capitalists and avaricious corporations who only stand for, to borrow from the words of the late, great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:

… the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”

Jan 03 2009

US and global manufacturing collapsing

Original article, by Joe Kishore, via World Socialist Web Site:

Manufacturing in the US is collapsing, with a key index falling to its lowest level in 20 years on Friday. Other figures released yesterday show a downturn in production throughout the world.

Dec 22 2008

A union in name only

Original article, by Barry Grey, via World Socialist Web Site:

Some of the more astute and honest commentators on the “bailout” of the American auto companies announced Friday by President Bush have pointed to a critical aspect of the plan to shut plants, wipe out jobs and bring the wages, benefits and work rules of United Auto Workers members in line with those of workers at nonunion foreign-owned companies in the US.

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