ADVENTURES IN WRITING! Operating from Northern Indiana, this blog will cover aspects of culture with a bent on humor and the relentless belittling of the mainstream media, politics, and the syphilitic GOP (both major parties). News analysis happens. Put on your adult diapers, this gwine'-a'-be a bourgeois hoot. Some much needed hilarity for working class North Americans and international readers. I'm the part of this human world that bites back. Let's roll.
Showing posts with label The Great Depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Great Depression. Show all posts
Roger Aislesland--If you want your children to gain an accurate picture of American history from life, keep them as far away from Texas and Fox News as humanly possible. For no logical reason (which is their wont), we've got an entire weekend of little blurbs and even entire shows with gushing over one of the most useless presidents in American history besides Herbert Hoover or Warren G. Harding: Calvin Coolidge. Who? Exactly.
Like George W. Bush, the ignorant and unimpressive Coolidge prided himself on being away from his desk more than previous executives, so much so that it almost became a pastime photographing him lounging around the White House lawn and at his personal residence. Being a Republican in 1920s America, after the demise of the Progressive movement (at-the-hands of middle-class and wealthy patrons like Woodrow Wilson), and after the destruction of unions like the I.W.W. and a brief collaring of the AFL, Big Business and finance were able to pretty much do whatever they wanted to, and they did.
Banking regulations? There weren't very many in those days, and Coolidge wasn't going to push for them anymore than his predecessor and successor did. As we know, the crash of 1929 was coming, and it came thanks to a lack of regulation of the banking system. Coolidge was so ineffectual and immobile that he was referred to as "silent Cal." The notion of a hands-off government was popular with a certain crowd then too, and it's likely to get the same results, another global crash.
Needless to say, Coolidge was Ronald Reagan's "favorite" president, albeit he was once a New Deal Democrat. What he really was was a lifeguard and sportscaster who couldn't act, got in over his head in Hollywood, and ran to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the Chamber of Commerce (CoC), and corporations like General Electric, when his mistake-of-a-career began naturally going south--but that's another story for another time. However, this story really is about Reagan and his legacy as a president, the destructive legacy of his administration's ideology and policies.
Why? A couple of weeks ago, former Reagan administration adviser and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), David Stockman, wrote an Oped column blaming Reaganomics and the GOP (and the DNC) for wrecking the economy, for killing it. Stockman was one of the primary architects and salesman of "Reaganomics," meaning massive deregulation of business and finance, returning us to those "glory days"of the 1920s when there was none...and we got the world's largest global economic depression. These crazy ideas gained real credence after Reagan and have continued into today; just watch Fox News at almost any given time of the day and you'll see it.
In fact, you'll see these once-wacky notions of economics (cut taxes for the wealthy, increase spending, especially defense and handouts to the aforementioned rich) arill being preached as gospel on CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, and much of the rest of the conglomerate owned mainstream media. Naturally, the majority of the public doesn't see it this way, and these memes are falling into very real disrepute as millions of Americans lose their livelihoods, their homes--their very way of life. If you want a great example of an ignorant, hollow-eyed nebbish contributing to the downfall of a nation while being applauded by a new generational round of middle-class fools, you need look no further than Coolidge...or Reagan. Or Clinton. Or Bush I and II. Or President Obama.
There's a good reason few remember--or even care about--Coolidge and why he was chosen for a callous and mercenary rewrite of American history: market extremists in this nation always go running to a remote and untouchable past that never was, a hallmark of nihilism and a retreat into the abyss. That's why this economic crisis is really a referendum of the last 30 years of class warfare in America, courtesy of both major political parties, but more of the responsibility rests with the Republican Party. Not only are they not the solution, they're a nexus of anti-Americanism, potentially poised to drag us kicking-and-screaming into Mother Night.
Calvin Coolidge? Who gives a shit? They just come off like the dorks that they are, with no answers since they're the problem.
Ed.--Here are a few photos I took of the town I live in. The photo to the top right shows the building in which John Dillinger, Homer Van Meter and Baby Face Nelson robbed the Merchant's Bank on June 30, 1934, to the left of the front-end of the car in the center of the shot, a building with arches and a tall front. It's now a Cambodian restaurant. The building to the bottom left was once an outlet of the Chicago Stock Exchange, or at least that's what I've been led to believe. The State Theater was featured in some shots of the Party Monster "Shockumentary" that was aired on Cinemax in 1998, about South Bend native and club kid promoter Michael Alig. There hasn't been a hell of a lot going on here since Studebaker closed in 1964.
I've written about my grandparents on here several times and what wonderful, homespun Populists they were, and not the wacky right wing kind either. That was for their siblings to take up, they're thickos.
My grandmother was literally from the dirt. Her Scotch-Irish parents were monsters who tried to pump their kids with religion, neglected them, and beat them. They were literally hillbillies living in the Ozarks in the 1920s-30s, and they were poor, very poor. I'm pretty certain that my grandmother had her religious beliefs, but she had a very interesting mistrust of "preachers," as she called them. She was an Ozarks Cinderella who went to a "seeing woman" to guess the sex of her one child, my mother, while she was pregnant.
"A preacher should get a real job," she would insist when we even casually talked about organized religion. Was it just her opinion that swayed me against all forms of organized religion? No, it was the experience of it and how inhuman, uncaring and revolting most of it is. I hate virtually all organized religion and look at it as an abomination before all humankind.
"The preacher man doesn't know any more than you do about what comes after this." she would often follow-up with. I couldn't have agreed more with her then or now. What's interesting is that this is a heretical belief, yet she thought of herself as a very religious and spiritual person; she just didn't trust people to do the right thing in groups, and she certainly didn't trust the preacher man. Neither do I, and never will. In fact, I see just about all of them as hopelessly deluded and corrupt, like most people when they're given just a smidgen of power, and ultimately, that's what this series of observations is all about, power and how it makes people who hold it and the people they hold it over to lose their ability to reason. Most of them came pre-damaged anyway and were budding authoritarians before any boss told them what to do. But others think for themselves, reject their upbringing, and grow-up and out of it.
My grandfather lived in rural Kansas. His father worked on the railroad as an engineer, and at one point, the family owned a hotel that burned down during the 1920s. His father was a patriarchal nimrod who rarely communicated with his children other than with his belt or his ring-festooned backhand. By the early 1930s, this idiot was fired from what was a very good-paying job at a time when there were almost none, and dragged his family to Arkansas to be...a dirt farmer, and at a time when family farms were failing. Father knows best. It was a disaster, but somehow he found other work. As far as I can tell, they were typically religious for the time, and he was a stern patriarch who isolated himself to his den and read all the time, the only thing I can give him credit for. Children were to be seen and not heard. As far as I can recall or ascertain, my grandfather finished high school while my grandmother did not.
What did they do for a living? My grandmother picked cotton to buy her wedding dress. They worked in factories for their entire working lives, first in munitions plants during WWII and the Korean War, then various other industrial occupations over the years. They worked very hard at work and at home and were very industrious people, but they weren't intellectuals and didn't have expansive educations. They were just working-class people who did the best they could and treated others as they would have liked to be treated; they followed the "golden rule" better than any other people I have or will ever know in my life. I was lucky: my immediate family on my mother's side weren't users, manipulators, or liars. But the rest of them were, so my grandparents left Kansas after WWII for the industrial North.
Again, these weren't really well-educated people at all, but they were sharp and smart, and they knew the score when they saw it. They were staunch unionists, and they were generally progressive. This wasn't atypical. The fact is that they were--and still are in their death--mainstream America. This is the real America, the good side. From the 1970s when I was a little kid reading about the Great Depression thanks to a childhood illness and a curiosity for human history, my grandparents continued the same mantra until their deaths during this current decade: "You watch: these dummies [most voting Americans] are going to vote the Republicans back in [as a majority], and we're going to have another Depression all over again, they'll make it happen again, you'll see." So they have, so they have.
My earliest memory of my grandmother saying this comes from 1978. Think about that for a minute. This wasn't an economist saying it, this was an ordinary working-class person who actually lived through the Great Depression (for real, the hard side of it) as a child, and therefore, knew what she was talking about. Why would she understand what caused it (lack of proper regulations, as she often told me herself many times) when she never lived with electricity or running-water as a little mountain girl? She bore witness to her era as her husband, and they didn't have dust in their eyes or shit in their ears, they didn't miss much, if anything. They stayed civically and politically engaged their entire adult lives because they knew that if they didn't, catastrophe for future generations was all-but-inevitable since the business jackapes are always waiting at the gates to abuse government. But their kids weren't carrying their share of the load after them and most were ignorant of how things had been before the New Deal and the accomplishments of organized labor. They were critical even of the "union bosses," but had good words for labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the UAW, of which they were both members.
They understood that you must be eternally vigilant against corruption in all its forms, especially political, since the government at least is theoretically capable of being held accountable, while corporations are not without that reasonably clean and strong government. Yes indeed, they supported the New Deal. If you ask--and you'd better do it fast now--anyone with sense who lived through that era (and I mean really lived through it and can remember it) and they'll tell you what an "idiot" Republican President Herbert Hoover was for his inaction during the worst years of the Depression, and it was common currency with these folks. Most of them used far less polite words for him, even decades later.
Why do you think it took five decades to create a "Republican majority" (that rapidly imploded)?
Why, then, did my grandparents "get" it--that you don't blindly accept authority at its word and that another Great Depression was coming when so many others claim not to have? First off, many of these people today--these "experts"--were part of the corruption on Wall Street, in Congress, the White House, and in our Courts, so they're either lying or were too close to it to see anything except dollar-signs. My grandparents were just working-class people who saw the reality on the ground and knew bullshit when they read, heard, or saw it, and the GOP was always bullshit to them. They learned the lessons of their time. The truth is that the baby boomers lived through unprecedented prosperity and forgot these lessons and were slow learners when it came to constructively taking on an oligopoly that's running this nation into the ground while simultaneously destroying its soul, its spirit. Like any generation, they've overstated their accomplishments.
It didn't take a genius to see all of this coming. The cheap credit, the wholesale deregulation of the business and financial sectors by both major parties, and a runaway corporate crime spree and war profiteering, made the mess we're in inevitable. Only a ten-year-old or someone very old could have seen it--at least someone who wasn't or isn't an old fool. The rest tend to be a glob of self-serving, brainwashed turds. It takes a good education to become indoctrinated by a bad system, just ask the Einsatzgruppen units that slaughtered Slavs and Jews on the Eastern Front during WWII (but do it quick). Most of them were college educated. A fool with a degree is a still a fool, and an criminal sociopath will always be a criminal sociopath regardless of how much you shave and primp them and put them in a nice, new suit. But there are good people in this world. Not only were my grandparents warm and kind to me and my family, they were smart and actually gave a damn about their neighbors and society. This is why democracy works. The average person is smarter than the leadership and the loud-mouths they rook in to drown everyone else out. They are the real threat to America, forget terrorism.
None of this is to suggest that learning is bad. Quite-the-opposite. But you had better learn where you come from if you want to know where you're going. How can you know where you are, when you don't know where you've been? It's not hard to understand why children are so troubled about having an identity: we're not giving them one, we're not transmitting the lessons of the past to them enough. People must know who they are and where they come from to be whole, to be reasonably at peace with themselves. In these areas, we're failing our children again, and again, and again, in our assembly line educational system. We can always do better, and we should always keep trying to make a better world for the babies as well as the adults. What is a society for if not for us all to band together to help each other survive? To suggest, for example, that there's no need for a safety-net for the unemployed is antisocial, sociopathic, so it must come from the business community and high finance. Find yourselves and where you have really been.
WWW--Face the facts: you lost the election for Ralph Nader by voting for an unknown quantity, Barack Obama, a kiss-ass corporate lawyer. He was never going to do the right thing, unless you mean right-wing, meaning in the service of money and power. Ten year olds saw this shit coming, it wasn't hard to miss. No, you fucked up, all of you, because you go for the name brand first rather than looking at someone for what they really are. He's like Lincoln alright, not FDR.
But none of this really matters. The system is going to keep crashing, again and again, dragging your asses firmly down to earth, grounding you whether you like it or not. I'm the kind of person who's going to get a lot of entertainment value out of this, watching smarmy, spoiled assholes suffer for a change. God knows it's going to have been earned.
To my delight, you're going to learn the hard way: what the the social contract means; what a society is for; why we must work civilly through the legal system; that the free market system was always a tottering mess that was poised for eventual extinction; what "dumbshow" means; how "conventional wisdom" tends to be utter bullshit; why civic duty is supposed to be non-negotiable; how greedy and empty you are; how stupid you are; why you suck; how conceited you are; how you have almost no intellect whatsoever; why Johnny can't read; how you don't even know the very short history of your own country; what it takes to get you off your lazy asses.
It goes without saying that the vast majority of so-called conservatives fit this bill, but so do most mainstream Democratic voters. So you hated George W. Bush? Welcome to the club, but that doesn't mean you're not the same kind of slob, the same kind of drooling asshole. Nope, you are the same kind of asshole, quit fooling yourself.
Nader voters didn't spoil anything, it was assholes like you who think you can just pull a switch and everything's fine, fixed. History never, ever works that way, it's an endless struggle between the majority and concentrated power. There are no breaks in this, no respite, it's eternal, hence the term "eternal vigilance" coming from people like Thomas Jefferson and Paine, but not James Madison. Democracy isn't a microwaveable pizza. You spoiled the elections, not us. You should have voted for Ralph Nader, the best deal on-offer in the realm of third parties, since voting for Ron Paul is completely batshit crazy.
WWW--Below is a link to a set of observations I wrote nearly three years ago. At the time, I don't think most people really "got" it at all or still do, not that I was the only one predicting an economic crisis, perhaps even a collapse. A groundswell was needed then and is needed today. I believe it's coming, and that Americans never rise to the occasion until their asses are pushed to the wall. So be it...
South Bend, Indiana--This week, our friend and neighbor Bert Szymanski. He was 87 years old and is one of the last surviving people in Indiana (besides his widow) who saw John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson in life. Bert was also a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather who was loved by many. Bert was a trucker who helped build the Alaskan highway during WWII. Like many of his generation in South Bend, he worked at the Studebaker plant for several years and was laid-off when it closed in 1963.
Bert told me in January of this year some interesting details that are corroborated by Dillinger's lawyer's (Louis Picquett) book regarding the gang's hideout--a safe house--here in South Bend during the 1933-34 crime wave.
Details told to me by Bert fit Picquett's account of their staying in-hiding in South Bend like a glove. There were other Dillinger gang hideouts in this are, one at Koontz Lake that's long gone, destroyed by a freak tornado in the 1960s (my father showed us the remaining steps and foundation during the 1980s).
Dillinger was chased just down the road of our current residence by Indiana State Highway Police on old S.R. 6, just ten miles down the road from our home in Walkerton, Indiana. This was his stomping ground. Bert and his wife Sally saw Dillinger inside the Biograph just minutes before his murder by FBI agents in the alleyway of the theater, but fled the scene out of fear. They were just kids, no more than 13. Amazingly, I don't think Bert ever told his children about this, but then, I don't think he and Sallie were supposed to be in East Chicago on that hot summer day in 1934 either.
We're losing these stories to mortality every day, and it's a shame that we don't take more care in preserving our history. Sounds like a job for the federal government and a new W.P.A. oral history program.
Bert was a good man who loved his family, his children, his grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and his neighbors. He was a good friend of my late grandparents and he will be missed. Bert and I reflected that he lived to see two Great Depressions in his lifetime, but he was pleased that Barack Obama had won the election and was hopeful that he could be our FDR. He was a smart man, a working man. I helped Bert from the floor of his garage twice--which contributed to a hernia! I will never regret helping my neighbor, he was quite a man. He was buried this morning, and hundreds attended his viewing yesterday. I'm going to miss taking him vegetables from our garden. Sleep well, the neighborhood isn't going to be the same without you.
"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set." --Lin Yutang
WWW--It was coming from Michael Moore, Naomi Wolf, and from all-points-in-between on the political spectrum back at the end of this last September and October: the bailout of Wall Street was a coup because "we're all being robbed," case closed. That we're all being robbed is a certainty, but a coup? I still keep hearing this weird contention, yet I'm not seeing any proof that any of the players being bailed-out are different ones.
Why should we care if it's the same people? Because that's one of the main preconditions of a coup--someone else has to be in-charge, replacing the last group. What coup? It doesn't fit the definition, yet you have progressives and conservatives screaming one has occurred all over the place. Was there one? Well, yes, ages ago, and they missed it. They're making strange sounds over this, and I wanted to know why, and I've given it a lot of thought and reached a few tentative conclusions.
My belief: people like Michael Moore have had major investments on Wall Street like many of us have had (not me, however!), and that includes folks like Arianna Huffington, Al Franken, much of the wider society, and maybe even a few investigative journalists and media-outlet owners out there. But aren't they begging the question? That was my feeling back in September, and it still is, with a few more historical reflections.
Now, if you lost your ass on Wall Street and you heard that others were being bailed-out--and you weren't--wouldn't you be freaking-out and yelling too? Sure you would, and if you had a soapbox bigger than everyone else's, you'd use it, right? Perhaps. This shouting that the first bailout of the banks was a "coup" by some of these celebrities across the political spectrum reminded me of someone from our past: Father Charles E. Coughlin, the radio priest.
Today, most Americans have no idea who Coughlin was, but you could say that he was one-part Rush Limbaugh, one-part Michael Moore, and one-part Joseph Goebbels. Yes, this is about the 1930s and the Great Depression, what else would it be about? Coughlin was originally from Ontario, Canada and had confronted a group of the KKK who had tried to burn his church in an act of anti-Catholic hate, so he began with "progressive" and populist credentials. At the dawn of the Great Depression, Coughlin sounded like a voice of reason to many, and they supported him with money and activism. He went as far as founding a short-lived political party, the NUSJ (The National Union for Social Justice), and was most popular with Irish-Catholics during the 1930s, but had a much wider appeal.
Incredibly, he and Gerald L.K. Smith (a lieutenant of Huey Long) could be fairly credited with creating the white supremacist movement. How did it end up that way? From frustrated populist aspirations and a deep disdain for Western-style capitalism. Some people react dysfunctionally to social injustice because they're terminal racists. Where did it all begin for the "radio priest"?
Father Coughlin's American parish in Royal Oak, Michigan began doing radio broadcasts of his sermons sometime in 1926 out of Detroit's radio station WJR, the beginning of the radio age. It has been calculated that Coughlin had a listenership-peak of as many as 40 million, an incredible number for its time. Coughlin was radically populist one moment in his speeches, backing Roosevelt completely one day, and then making remarks totally against the New Deal the next depending on which way the political winds were blowing at the moment. For him--as with Limbaugh--it was all about ratings. In this respect, little has changed since the 1930s, but he accidentally pushed FDR further to the left, so he had some value.
While Coughlin was railing against Wall Street, he was heavily invested in it at a time when almost nobody in the general population was. Who had money then? Demagogues like Charles Coughlin, that's who; the radio priest was getting rich slamming Wall Street, from his appeals for donations, and his weekly radio program's advertising revenue. Unbeknownst to most Americans, by the mid-1930s, Father Coughlin was one of the largest holders of silver in America. In other words, he was a hypocrite in most respects, and vanity assured his fall. Coughlin began with very enthusiastic support of FDR's New Deal programs, but by 1934 he started having political aspirations of his own and began bitterly attacking Roosevelt and his policies. He also began broadcasting and writing anti-Semitic remarks and began his love affair with Continental fascism and the Nazi State.
By 1938, he reprinted the Tsarist secret police (Okhrana) forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in his own newsletter, "Social Justice," and was witnessed at a Bronx speaking- engagement doing the fascist salute. It was all downhill after that, as radio stations stopped carrying his programs and the Roosevelt administration moved on him to curb his ability to disseminate first his radio programs, then his newspaper and related literature through the postal system. By 1942, with his support of Nazism all-but-complete, Coughlin became a marginalized laughingstock, and went back to his tiny Royal Oak parish to live out the rest of his life in relative obscurity.
Interstingly, he had connections with a domestic fascist group called the "Christian Front," who plotted to overthrow the government of the United States. He never renounced his connection to them.
I don't think Michael Moore is exactly the same kind of creature as Coughlin, and this isn't some attempt to smear him with the same brush at all, because it's not accurate or fair. But there are a lot of parallels between his life and that of Coughlin, and he's not alone. New communications media have empowered many individuals in the last two decades like never before, and with that access comes the same kinds of issues that arose during the 1930s, a time when radio was first emerging as a force. But the cries of "coup" smack of similar hypocrisies that people like Coughlin once engaged in. One might ask such celebrities like Limbaugh and Moore (or even "conspiracy" writers/activists like Alex Jones) what their holdings on Wall Street are today. You might get a very surprising answer indeed, even with the contemporary prevalence of investment.
Now is definitely a time of demagogues, but the question is: "Who are they exactly? Who are the demagogues?" Rush Limbaugh and most of the right-wing noise machine certainly fit that bill, but there are others out there, right now, waiting for their time. Intellectual honesty is as good an inoculation as you're likely to get, a proactive solution for the ages.
WWW--The Nation has reprinted this article when--I know it's hard to imagine--there was an era of unprecedented corruption under Republican rule that led to an economic crisis. If you changed the names, you would think it was written this week.
But we are taking leave not merely of a single Administration. For twelve years the Republican Party has been in power. During ten of those years it controlled the executive and legislative branches of the government. When, a few years hence, an attempt is made to minimize the disaster of this last quadrennium, and to point to a preceding eight year period of material development and growth, let it be noted that in a purely material sense the American people are much worse off today than they were twelve years ago. Far more than was gained has been swept away. Savings have been dissipated, lives have been blasted, families disintegrated. Misery and insecurity exist to a degree unprecedented in our national life. And spiritually the American people have been debauched by the materialism which made dollar-chasing the accepted way of life and accumulation of riches the goal of earthly existence.
Sound familiar? If it doesn't, you might check to see if you have a pulse. Farewell to the Republicans and everyone like them, and may God damn those who still support them and their agenda.
"A Farewell to Republicans," The Nation, March 8, 1933:
Ed.--And it's still not coming fast enough. Let the hearings and investigations commence!! We're not taking "no" or "it's off the table" for answers anymore. That's done, it's over, and we're going to continue to demand and act on this. The public has had enough of this systemic-corruption.
Heads must roll, people must be investigated, and if found guilty, sent to prison. Where to start? Start anywhere, but let's finally begin getting to the bottom of the Bush II energy policy meetings and their role in the Wall Street crash. Then, we can party like it's 1929.
Quit fooling yourselves--the Democrats enabled a lot of this, and some of them are going to have to go as well, sentimentality-be-damned. The first thing President-elect Obama needs to do is purge the bureaucracy of every single appointment made by George W. Bush and--in turn--hirings made by those appointees.
The appropriate time for the creation of a Special Prosecution team is January 20th, the 21st at the latest. There can be no "putting the past behind us," as President-elect Obama stated recently on George Stephanopoulos's program "This Week:". It's an attitude that's unacceptable in a democracy after what's happened out in the open under George W. Bush, putting aside what we don't know. Three days left. It's too long.
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
---Oscar Wilde Wall Street/Madison Ave.--No, no, the conspiracists haven't seized on this one...yet, but I'm about to. Besides, it's only been a few hours, the corpse is still warm and some of the ambulance chasers are still sleeping, what with all these goddamned time zones.
Yes folks, that's right, he was "murdered," it was "the government" (which is comprised of the American people), and they even kilt some before there was a Washington D.C.. Medics at the scene checked Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet (could he have a longer name? please?) for a pulse.
There was none. Normally, they wouldn't be alarmed by this as Villehuchet ran a hedge fund on Wall Street, but the patient was 65 so there were rules and procedures to follow. His papers were in disarray, pointing to...uh, something sinister, and he knew certain shady characters.
Losing $1.4 billion for your clients can be deliterious to one's health, and it appeared that Villehuchet's wrists--Agatha Christie stylee--were found cut, clearly by some intruder who wanted their money back, or at least coffee and a doughnut, some paper clips, and a reference.
The New York Medical Examiner stated today in the French newspaper "La Tribune" that Villehuchet's condition had not improved or changed--still no pulse. Members of the Religious Right were notified as to his condition at all times, and weren't going to be caught off-guard. They knew the chances this was an assisted suicide, the single most important issue facing the human race today. A videotape of Villehuchet was sent to former doctor/politician/human BillFrist: "I say, I say, he's alive!" exclaimed the perfect human simulacrum of Foghorn Leghorn. God hates Pinellas County, it seems.
It didn't matter. The patient wouldn't budge, there was still no change in his condition. Neither would the economy, or Mr. Villehuchet's chances of recovering his investors' money from Bernard L. Madoff, death being that final mitigating circumstance.
So, the medics tagged-and-bagged the stiff and sent him to the Smithsonian where he'll be on-display next year.
Yes, it breaks one's heart that stellar names like the Rothchilds and Swiss bank clients are losing their asses these days, it's a crying shame. The phones at Access International Advisors are ringing and ringing, while Madoff's is ringing off-the-hook with one death threat after another. And what of the Astors? John Jacob Astor--the first American millionaire--made his first fortune selling bad whiskey to the Indians, there's worse, there's far worse.
$50 billion isn't chicken feed, after all. Like a good business Samurai...no, a clean murder by "the government" sounds better. It wasn't me, it was the big, bad government. It wasn't that I was stupid, greedy, and avaricious--it was the big, bad government, because they control everything, even when they don't (if you know what I mean, I don't).
Belly up to the bar boys: the Republicans knew that the 80th anniversary of the Great Depression was coming, they yearned for that underdog status since they don't know much else, and it was time to create another one just for nostalgia's sake. Besides, the little people needed some reminding, and they're looking wan and fat these days, but it won't last. They say that every country is three meals away from insurrection, but for America, it's just two snacks.
"Why not?" said the RNC's central committee members, "It's been too long, so very, very long. We miss it. Yes, why not?" They all agreed to agree with themselves as is their wont to do, and they all shook their own individual hands. Forbidden sex soon followed as the sun set on the Watergate...
And yet, Mr. Madoff keeps smiling on his way in and out of his now confiscated townhouse, wearing his dopey baseball hat and lookin' significantly more nebbish than he did just weeks ago. Stick 'em up! Bye-bye dumb old order, hello new one. It was 7:50 A.M. when they found Villehuchet's cold, dead body. The conspirator Madoff got out of the office before they came, months before.
Early to bed, and early to rise, though they say the morning sun at Rennes-Le-Château tends to get in your eyes. God knows Melville would love what's happening in New York City these days.
Washington D.C.--It's official. Louisiana Senator David Vitter is filibustering passage of the legislation authorizing the loans--not a bailout--to the big three auto manufacturers along with Sens. Richard Shelby, pone'-fed Mitch McConnell, and Jim Demint. What a guy. You think he drives a foreign car when he's out hunting for prostitutes?
Again, if they're all willing to take full-responsibility for what happens after the collapse of the auto industry, then by all means keep obstructing. A Black President was a good run-up for the collapse of the Republicans as a national party. Keep doing what you do best and don't go changin'.
Question: why didn't the GOP throw-in Larry Craig? He's an equally worthless pariah.
Whatever, you all have a date with repeating 1929-32, meaning exacerbating an economic calamity that you created into an unprecedented Great Depression by neglect, indifference and inaction. Attempting to block the unions isn't going to work anymore either.
The Republic Windows and Doors workers have won their sit-in strike, and more strikes are coming, more than you ever imagined possible. Welcome the return of history and the death of Reaganomics, if not capitalism itself.
Chicago, Illinois--Just as FDR finally relented in 1935 and backed the right of the UAW, the CIO and other national unions to legally organize and recruit, Obama's support of this strike is a very real step forward. The passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935was a momentous step in our history that guaranteed the legal right of collective bargaining with ownership, and the right is being reaffirmed. There's nothing "socialist" or "communist" about this, the desire for workplace democracy is as American as apple pie.
It could only have happened because the workers--the laid-off no less--of that factory said, "No more, we want what's due to us."They've used their collective-heads and found that they aren't cowards and that they have guts. There really is strength-in-numbers, which is why employers in this country have done their best to keep us all divided. This is because they were always redundant.
The business in Chicago was shuttered giving Republic workers just three days notice, rather than the sixty required by law. Bank of America now holds the debts and obligations of the company but won't pay them. Republic's "bankrupt" owners appear to be in-hiding.
Several politicians have smelled the opportunity that escapes the average American, and have come down to show their solidarity with the workers there who are getting stiffed out of their benefits. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has also thrown-in, stating that Bank of America is under a statewide business injunction until Republic workers receive these benefits.
...We have contacted all of our agencies across state government and as of right now, every agency has been ordered to suspend doing any business with the Bank of America. The Bank of America received $25 billion in taxpayer money as part of the financial bailout. This is exactly, precisely the kind of thing that isn’t right -- when one the one hand, powerful special interests get the help of taxpayer money to bail them out -- the banks -- and yet the purpose of that money was supposed to be to provide a line of credit to businesses like this to keep workers working and keep people employed. And yet the Bank of America has yet to step up and say that they are going to be helpful to this company and keep these workers working. ...
This all sounds like the 1930s again, doesn't it? It's almost been that long since any American governor would dare to say such things towards the business sector. Unionization is coming back, bigger and better than ever, it's coming, and it's time to recognize the opportunities. Make it happen if you want a future. Many of the Republic Window and Door employees are Hispanic, and the UEW (United Electrical Workers) is doing a very good job indeed in lending their support. Solidarity must continue to cross racial and cultural-lines.
In this mix, Obama's endorsement is a very refreshing breath of air, it's going to have a very big impact. He's set himself up for a follow-through. Being the party of big business, the GOP will do their best to ensure he doesn't do this, because the last thing they ever want to do is assist the American worker in anything but emptying their wallets without too much fuss.
I've paid my dues - [REDACTED] Time after time - I've tried forming a correct sentence But committed no grammatical crime[REDACTED] And bad mistakes["The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."] I've made untold thousands ["I'm sorry about the economic crisis."] I've had my share of Iraqi sand kicked in my face, but not nearly enough since Americans have no self-respect or balls.Why wouldn't you stop me? Please? Someone?Please? But I've come through, with the help of a complicit Congress, press and business community (And we mean to go on and on and on and on)
We are the[REDACTED]--my friends- At least until the collapse and general strikes bring us to the end - We are the champions - You aren't the champions No time for losers, not even the GOP 'Cause we are the champions - of the world - even if we aren't anymore.
I've taken my bows, and I'll drag you all straight to hell And my curtain calls - they never rang my bell, or dingled my tingle. You--my rich donors[NAMES REDACTED]--brought me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it, I thank you all - and now, so long suckers...
But it's been no bed of roses, 'cause roses gotts them thorns, I hear tell. And it don't give me the same kicks as that "demon booze" - I considered this administration a challenge against all the human race - And I ain't gonna [REDACTED FOR NATIONAL SECURITY PURPOSES]- (And we mean to go on and on and on and on, a boot in a human face for a thousand years...)
Neocons are the champions - my friends - until the real crash And we'll keep on lying - till the end - even under oath We are the champions - You aren't the champions No time for losers 'Cause we are the champions until someone with balls comes for us with the tar and the feathers we were born to be swathed in.
Please don't hurt me. [Keep waiting for justice, we want you to.]
Washington D.C.--No kidding? Really? I wasn't aware of this, and neither were all the firms that pushed for it...then crashed, went bankrupt, and are either asking for a hand-out from the government or no longer exist anymore (the latter being the best).
It seems that no matter what this administration does, nobody has any will or desire to hold them accountable. That's because it isn't all about them.
The administration's blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of a philosophy that trusted market forces and discounted the need for government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.
"We're going to be feeling the effects of the regulators' failure to address these mortgages for the next several years," said Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, who warned regulators to tighten lending rules before it was too late. ("AP IMPACT: Under pressure, US eased lending rules," AP, 12.01.2008)
Yes, it's a good thing we have AP and the rest of the soon-to-be former scions of this order to tell us this. Notably, it was Allen Greenspan who advocated much of this deregulation--you remember him, the man everyone listened raptly to just a year ago, genuflecting to every utterance he made. They love you when you're making them rich, but they'll think less of you when yours and their ideas don't work anymore.
These are the rewards of getting your way almost every time. The temporal universe has a way of correcting any organism (or institution) when it's running amok, and we're seeing this writ large now in the developed world. Like emotions, stupidity and delusion are highly-contagious in human society.
When people are riding high and making so much money, they falsely presume what they're doing is correct because it benefits them. Academic join-in on this game, playing along and keeping the horrible truths from us as much as they humanly can. We didn't need them to tell us what they're telling us today: "The NBER says its group of academic economists who determine business cycles met and decided that the U.S. recession began in December 2007." ("Panel says US has been in recession since December 2007," AP, 12.01.2008)
Who could have told them that a pre-1929 approach to the American economy would result in a collapse? Besides the few ten-year-olds I know as neighbors, nearly anyone with a clue. But most Americans don't know their history, and the general attitude is that it's irrelevant, unimportant, and--most importantly--a lot of work and boring to explore. Additionally, there is the contention that it's "worthless knowledge." How worthless is it today, and how much would it have saved the public had we all been more informed and vigilant? More than $1 trillion USD.
Is understanding the last Depression so "worthless" today? It took us almost eighty years to forget what led to the last collapse. How long will it take next time? Probably not very long, since we're bound to keep doing the same things that led to this problem, which works for me.
At that point, history isn't going to let us repeat the same mistakes any longer and this order will be permanently dead. Market rule will be over for good. There are forces stronger than the human race, and we should be glad for it. In sum, whether we learn from it this time is irrelevant: the world trumps the powerful and the groundswell is coming, the general strikes are coming, and modest reforms aren't going to cut it.
In that sense, we have little to worry about with President-elect Barack Obama (at least he's qualified and actually won the election legally), because he's not going to have any choice but to create change with substance in America. That doesn't mean we won't be pushing him--we will--but events have a way of pushing everyone out of the narcotized inaction we've all been in for far too long. Now things affect those who always said, "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care." The fun is over, even for the comfortable these days.
Now things affect those who always said, "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care." The fun is over, even for the comfortable these days. Of course the Bush II administration went well beyond deregulation. They told the business and financial sectors that they could do whatever they wanted to, that nobody was watching.
Today is just a corroboration of what we all knew. Regardless of how many exposes, breaking stories, and general revelations of misconduct, nobody's going to seriously go after the members of the lame duck Bush II administration when they're just as guilty, the problems are systemic. Watch--with glee--as the whores run for cover, even when there ultimately won't be anywhere to run.
We're a strange species, but at least we're beginning to confront power again. Welcome to the end of Reaganism.
