Tag: oligarchy

The Green, Green Shoots of Hope

“Well, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet. …”

-Winston Wolf

A quick Google search brings up in the neighborhood of 28,000,000 results for the masterfully concocted propaganda term “Green Shoots”. Just when it appeared that looter capitalism was on the ropes with Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer being exposed as a preposterous fraud who shilled for the Wall Street casinos and angry mobs were descending on the homes of AIG bankers the oligarchy went to the mattresses to save their spoils system. Helicopter Ben came out and launched the first fusillade of this malarkey on his 60 Minutes interview of March 15th. This on the heels of the now famous leaked internal memo from Citigroup CEO Vikram ‘the Bandit’ Pandit that spoke of wonders of money falling from the sky and the healthy quarterly results of his banking colossus and the pure hit of optimism opium was picked up and run with by the corporate public relations armies and their pocket media. The crack ho economy received the kiss of the sweet, sweet spike and it’s been to the moon Alice ever since. But it’s all a big lie of Hitlerian proportions.

“We showed the world today that the people can win”

Crossposted from Antemedius

How much more will Americans take from Wall Street and the US Government before we start to see people rise up the way they are in Thailand?

ASEAN Summit Called Off As Thai Protesters Storm Site

by Charles McDermid, Los Angeles Times, via truthout.org
Saturday, 11 April 2009

   Pattaya, Thailand – Thousands of protesters smashed through a glass entrance and stormed a hotel complex today during a key meeting of regional heads of state.

   Thailand has declared a state of emergency in the summit’s host city Pattaya and the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has been called off. Other protests have now been reported in the northern city of Chaing Mai, where protesters have blocked a road, and in Udon Thani, where demonstrators have surrounded City Hall.

   The widespread turmoil caps a week of anti-government protests that have paralyzed Bangkok and raised new fears about Thailand’s political stability.

   Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiv apologized to his regional counterparts and lifted the state of emergency in an impromptu press conference held in the abandoned venue seven hours after the protesters’ assault.

   “Anyone who declares this a victory is an enemy of the country,” said Abhisit.

   The demonstrators swarmed past police barricades and riot police in Pattaya for the second day to demand Abhisit step down and dissolve the government.

   Protest leader Kerk Somsan said the group overran the hotel in retaliation for one of their members allegedly being shot dead and others injured by gunfire in a clash with rival protesters earlier that day. They carried through on a vow to occupy the hotel if the government failed to make an arrest in the case within one hour. A Thai government spokesman said authorities are investigating the incident.

   The red-shirted protesters pushed police lines up the hotel’s steps and trapped them against the entrance. After several moments, the heaving glass shattered and protesters stormed the hotel. Many were waving flags, blowing whistles and horns and chanting “Thaksin,” the name of their exiled leader and benefactor, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

   The unarmed group raged through several adjacent buildings in the sprawling Pattaya Exhibition and Conference Center before gathering outside the meeting hall where nine leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, were inside having lunch. The leaders were later evacuated by helicopter from the resort’s rooftop, according to reports.

Tim Geithner’s Oligarchs, Or How Financial Powers Control The US Government At Your Expense

Crossposted from Antemdius

Political Economist F. William Engdahl is author of the book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.” Mr. Engdhahl has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. Mr. Engdahl contributes regularly to a number of publications including Asia Times Online, Asia, Inc, Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine; Freitag and ZeitFragen newspapers in Germany and Switzerland respectively.

On Sunday Engdahl spoke with Real News CEO Paul Jay about Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s so-called “Private Public Partnership” plan to rescue the financial institutions in the United States, explains what Geithner is not telling you, says the plan does nothing to address the concentration of financial power in the United States that is based in the five major financial institutions that compose what we refer to collectively as “Wall Street”, and describes the Geithner/Obama plan as a “band aid for a bad hemorrhage”, a hemorrage that will exponentially increase over the next two or three years and mushroom into something much worse than the 1930’s depression.



Real News – March 30, 2009 – 11 minutes 58 seconds

Geithner’s Oligarchs

Engdahl: Obama must confront the oligarchical power of Wall Street to solve crisis

Usurious Bastards

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The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.

-Carroll Quigley

As the conventional wisdom goes, the stock market is predicated on trust and as a crusty old uncle of mine once said to a young and impressionable teenager with zero knowledge of the way that the world really worked: “trust me is just another two letter word that means the same as fuck you.” Old Uncle Harvey’s words of wisdom came home to roost on this Monday morning in America when the finance oligarchs were able to use their inside juice to pull off the grandest and most audacious heist yet in this season of sleazy swindles. Obama Treasury Secretary and Wall Street fixer Timothy Geithner delivered the bacon for the bankers, gave the crack ho stock market a wonderful and intoxicating fix that sent the Dow screaming up by nearly 7 percent in a matter of hours and locked in the losses for the great grandchildren of every poor schmuck with the misfortune to be living through this period of plunder and wealth consolidation.

The Economic Equivalence Of 9/11

High Noon: Geithner v. the American Oligarchs

Bill Moyers, The Bill Moyers Journal via Truthout, Friday, 13 February 2009

Moyers talked on Friday’s Bill Moyers Journal with Simon Johnson, Former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), MIT Sloan School of Management professor and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who examines President Obama’s plan for economic recovery.

Score One For The Oligarchy

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

I live in NY-20, the district allegedly represented by Kirsten Gillibrand, and have lived here in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains for more than 22 years.  Maybe that has made me cynical.  It means I lived here when it was part of militaristic Gerry Solomon’s conservative fiefdom.  You remember his most memorable contribution to the nation: a law that if you plead guilty to a non-criminal possession of marijuana for personal use, you lose your federal financial aid for a year.  Great policy, Gerry!  Salute!  And then it was represented by his hand picked, militaristic successor, John Sweeney, him with the DWI arrest with a woman, not his wife, allegedly sitting on his lap. When he ran against Gillibrand it was in the wake of allegations that he (still) beat his wife.  Great politics, John.  Salute!

Does Democracy Have a Future?

While in a discussion in yesterday’s essay We’re Not In Kansas Anymore  NLinStPaul asked me to expand my comments on the fact I believed that democracy cannot function the current cultural atmosphere and that we should hope that the oligarchs that run the joint can be wise.

To me this is an easy statement to make because democracy, as we have come to understand the term, is not a natural or common state of human culture. History and social science has shown us that most people inevitably follow authority and will follow authority. It also shows that power corrupts and that, in many ways, both the powerful and the weak cooperate in a kind of sado-masochistic scene (check out the Stanford Prison Experiment). People want and need norms and authority and will tend to gas Jews or torture prisoners if asked by the powerful to do so (see the Milgram Experiment). People will tend to conform to cultural views of reality even when it clashes with their own direct perception (see the Asch conformity experiments–you don’t even have to read about that to see how it has happened in this country particularly during the lead-up to the Iraq War).  

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