'Progressives' for looting

Chris Floyd:

"Nothing - absolutely nothing - could be politically safer than opposing George W. Bush. And yet the entire Democratic leadership, Barack Obama included, lined up to support a cockamamie plan proposed by this scorned and shriveled figure, a plan that was transparently nothing more than an audacious raid on the Treasury by Big Money hoods and yet another authoritarian power grab by a gang of murderous, torturing, warmongering toadies. This was the plan and these were the people that the Democrats decided to fight for."

One of the best places to look for a conspiracy is a political party that consistently turns down gold-plated political gifts. The cover story is always the same: we had to do it for otherwise our opponents would call us un-American. Yet this deal, presented to Americans as a necessary take-it-or-leave-it sole salvation of the 'American way of life' - you know, the lifestyle which provokes all that envy in the 'terrorists' - based on an almost comically sudden (see here) discovery of panic in September - as Andrew Card said 'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August' - was obviously deeply unpopular with the American public. House Republicans figured it out: more Democrats voted 'yes' for the gift to the crooked banksters than Republicans.

What the American public is seeing is a Bush Administration conspiracy to loot their country for the benefit of a few crooked and incompetent but unbelievably rich paper shufflers, aided and abetted by the political party that claims to be 'progressive'. If one good thing comes out of this, perhaps it will be the end of various psycho-babble theories about why Americans consistently vote 'against their class interest' in refusing to vote for Democrats. Both parties represent the same class interests, but the Republican story - that everyone benefits if capitalists are supported - is at least a coherent political position. The House Republicans were able to reject the looting on the basis that it was 'socialism' to give money away to incompetent capitalists, as incompetent capitalists don't benefit the whole country. As addled as their analysis might be, it is consistent with their ideology, something the 'progressive' Democrats can't say.

The beginnings of a huge conspiracy theory

Inky99 riffs on a column by Ben Stein (of all people; Stein's been down this road before, and was roundly lambasted for even suggesting Wall Street conflict of interest problems), in which Stein hints at a remarkable Wall Street three-part conflict-of-interest conspiracy theory:

1. Wall Street investment houses were selling investments based on bundled sub-prime loans, while simultaneously gambling that the investments were junk;


2. The gambling was set up in such a way - using derivatives called Credit Default Swaps, essentially insurance policies against certain levels of default in the underlying mortgages (ironically, this 'insurance' was the reason that some of these securities were sold as 'blue chip investments') - that the same investment houses knew, because of their own speculative gambling behavior, would lead to a country- and world-wide financial disaster that could only be fixed by a government bail-out; and


3. The same investment houses, most notably Goldman Sachs, have been quietly staffing high American government finance positions with their own employees, who, if you can believe it, came up with a plan to deal with the problem by showering their own firms with gifts of American government money.
   

Of course, the fourth part of the conspiracy is that both American political parties work for the same mob of investment houses, and will pass whatever legislation they are told to pass, with the Democrats adding a bit of window dressing to prove they are not 'selling out to Wall Street'.

Crisis Zionism

Ron Andreas on intentional instability and crisis in the Middle East and elsewhere (found via here):

"Unlike the Western oil majors, the militant Zionist proponents of greater Israel view stability and peace in the Middle East as inimical to their goals. Chaos and strife create the 'revolutionary atmosphere' (as Ben Gurion one of the key founders of the state of Israel put it) in which more land and water resources can be taken under their control. This fact explains the motive behind the ceaseless provocations and destabilization that the Israeli military and secret services perpetrate.

The 'iron wall' policy established by Ze’ev Jabotinsky prior to the founding of the Jewish state requires the expulsion of Christian and Muslim Arabs from Palestine. Such a goal requires war or other violent means. David Ben Gurion stated, 'What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out . . . a whole world is lost.' This reality, of the necessity for violent upheaval to achieve Zionist aims, exposes which party is the true aggressor in the Middle East."

and (note how 'progressive' writers support this deception while hiding their comments as criticism):

"In their struggle to expand the Jewish state in the 'land of Israel,' Zionists have attempted to portray their interests as coinciding with those of the Western imperial powers. Conversely they have tried to portray their opponents as enemies of those powers. Yet the only business sector of the Western powers that has interests that align with Israel’s convulsive militarism is the military industrial complex. An elaborate structure has been established to forge a de facto alliance between Israel’s war hawks and the US military industrial complex. This alliance is evidenced in entities such as the Center for Security Policy, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs."

and (problems that should be obvious - particularly now! - to Americans; my emphasis in red):

"The radical cabal of Zionists tried to enlist popular support for the wars by alluding to Iraq’s energy resources as Paul Wolfowitz did when he stated, 'Iraq sits on a sea of oil.' However, after five years of occupation likely costing trillions of dollars, there is little hope of securing any preferential access to, much less, reliable control over any energy resources. Prior to the invasion, Exxon/Mobil was the world’s biggest publicly traded entity, a distinction that now falls on its Chinese competitor, SINOPEC.

While the relative market share of U.S. oil majors has declined, the destruction of Iraqi society, the devastation of its scientific and intellectual institutions, and the dismantling of its industrial infrastructure, all Zionist goals, have been achieved. Similarly, the American economy has been brought to a standstill due to high oil prices resulting from the wars and the current account deficit that is largely a result of borrowing for war spending. Over the course of the occupation, the U.S. dollar has declined in value by nearly 40 percent.

Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz has stated that the sanctions imposed on Iran coupled with the war atmosphere in the Gulf region, in general, has caused investment in and development of new oil production to come to a halt, exacerbating the high prices that result from the constant threats issuing out of Tel Aviv and the neocon institutes in Washington. It remains to be seen whether the non-Zionist elites in the Western world can begin to challenge the endless wars for Israel by at the very least opposing the sanctions against dealings with Iran."

It is curious how normal people in the world find it difficult to understand that others have goals which actually require conflict and instability. Much of what we see happening in and around Israel and Zionism can only be explained by the fact that the Zionists have always understood that the highly unlikely goal of Greater Israel can only be obtained through confusion, destruction, crisis and war. Even the Cold War, now being revitalized by Zionists in the American government, is part of this program. As I keep repeating, the choice is stark: you can stop them now, or you can wait until they wreck the whole world.

Capitalism versus Zionism

The deep tension between capitalism, which in the newspaper business requires at least the appearance of attempting to tell the truth, and Zionism, which requires a constant series of lies, is starting to play out even at that bastion of lying, the New York Times, which is now admitting that official Iranian government policy isn't calling for the destruction of the inhabitants of Israel, but rather the holding of a democratic vote of all the inhabitants of 'lesser Israel' to determine the future of the country. Of course, the liars can't help but repeat the big lie - based on the usual Zionist mistranslation - that President Ahmadinejad said that 'Israel should be wiped off the map.'

Blame the bloggers

Troy A. Eid, the United States Attorney for the District of Colorado, the guy who bizarrely decided that the self-confessed Obama assassination plotters weren't even worthy of a prosecution, weighs in on the controversy. Guess what? It's all the bloggers' fault. "Does Blog Nation mean an endless race to the bottom?" Apparently not. As long as there are boot-licking traditional 'journalists' around, there will always be somebody to defend the obviously racist - and extremely dangerous, as it puts a target on Obama, making it easier to find future patsies who know that prosecutors will protect them - decision not to even attempt to enforce the laws of the United States if the intended victim happens to be black.

Gone to ground

The greatest financial crisis in the United States since the Great Depression and President Bush is in hiding. You would at least expect a few nonsense platitudes intended to buck up investor confidence, but nothing. Drinking again? Probably, and thus in no shape to be giving press conferences. The only good thing about all this is that it is obviously happening on Bush's watch, making it difficult for the usual suspects to blame it on President Obama (but they will find a way!).

The debate shouldn't be over whether Bush is the worst President in American history, but how many orders of magnitude worse he is than the second worst President.

The dogs that didn't bark

The only reference to anti-Semitism concerning the peculiar - and unique - failure of Wall Street and the U. S. government to bail out Lehman Brothers is from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (of all people), at the beginning of a discussion of Lehman Brothers being 'fed to the wolves':

"One can date the onset of the Great Depression from December 1930 with the collapse of the Bank of the United States, a mid-size lender to the Jewish community in New York.

It is often alleged that the Anglo elites let the bank fail from motives of anti-semitic malice.

True or not, the consequences were dire for almost everybody. The failure set off a worldwide run on US gold deposits (ie, the dollar), and forced the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates into the slump. Some 4,000 lenders were ultimately driven to the wall.

We will find out soon enough whether the decision to throw Lehman Brothers to the wolves over the weekend was any wiser."

I don't know, and can't know, whether singling out a firm known on the Street as Jewish, one with a Jewish Chairman, Jewish history, and big ties to Israel, was anti-Semitic. I do know that that it is remarkable that the usual barking dogs, the ones who find anti-Semitism in every comment about Israel, have nothing to say on the matter. I'm positive there is a lot of dark muttering going on, but why the silence? Could it be that claiming anti-Semitism in a real case of anti-Semitism would break the spell, the idea that Gentiles and Jews have identical goals in America, that 'dual loyalty' is impossible, that the neocons are just a bunch of misunderstood American patriots?

Then they came for the Lehman Brothers, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Lehman Brother

Inevitable. World Jewry and its American friends have so misused the slur to describe legitimate criticism that they are tongue-tied when real anti-Semitism rears its ugly head. Wall Street and the U. S. government have lots of money to bail out everybody, including huge Chinese government investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but when a big Jewish firm gets in trouble . . . the well runs dry (Goldman Sachs better not need any help). That, my friends, is what real anti-Semitism looks like. Too bad the slur has been so misused that there are no longer any words to describe it!

Who the hell do you think you are?

Ah, the never-ending debate over why people seem to vote against their class interests, a subject much beloved by Democrats, who can simultaneously display their erudition and their superiority. I'm sure a lot of the suggestions are true: some people are addled by religion, some people are prone to fall for identity politics for various reasons, some people vote for the class interests of the class they aspire to rather than the class they are doomed to stay in, some people are just plain dumb. The main reason why people vote Republican? It's what I've been saying here for a while: the United States, unique amongst its peer countries, has only two parties, each of which, by the standards of any of those peer countries, would be considered to be an e-x-t-r-e-m-e right-wing party. In fact, the Democrats couldn't get elected anywhere else, as they would fall too far to the right of the most extreme mainstream right-wing party in any other country. 'Progressive' Americans are blind to the fact that American politics has accelerated so far right that the Democrats aren't much of an option. A regular voter has a stark choice: the party that unabashedly represents the interests of big corporations, with a promise of a likelihood of a little 'trickle down', or a party which represents the interests of the same corporations, but lies and pretends to be 'progressive'? Do you vote for the devil you know, or the party that is trying to deceive you? It's not much of a choice, and it is not irrational to opt for certainty and avoid the lying party. Of course, the Republicans lie too ('compassionate conservatism'?), the difference being that they lie with a smirk, and everybody knows they are lying.

President Obama is going to be a tremendous disappointment to 'progressive' Americans, and it won't even be his fault. Sure, he's led them on by encouraging them to read into him all sorts of wonderful things, but there is nothing in his record as a straight-down-the-middle Democrat, and nothing in his platform, to indicate any real change in American politics. I'd like to ask Americans who think that this 'Magic Negro' will right all the wrongs of the United States, 'who the hell do you think you are?' Americans have been slaughtering people for centuries now, including over a million in Iraq as I type this (over a million dead people completely unnoticed to Americans), all in aid of the Rise of the American Empire, and to supporting the American 'lifestyle'. On this big day in the future history of the Fall of the American Empire, you are not even allowed to say why Obama will in fact be a temporary savior of the Empire, and an improvement for the average person over McCain (it's only because he won't fight more Wars For The Jews, something you can't say, not because it is hateful to Jews, but because it consists of lèse majesté, a kind of blasphemy against the power of the Empire, and the sense of security of Americans - who fear all those dead people will arise, like zombies, looking for revenge - to even suggest that the Empire could be so easily tricked into acting against its own best interests). More and more extreme right wing politics - paradoxical in that it eventually ends up destroying the big corporations it tries so hard to please - and the complete inability of Americans to even begin to understand what their real problems are (or even find the non-blasphemous language to talk about it) are clear signs of the rapid decline of Empire, or, one of the main themes of this blog, that the United States, and Americans, are fucked. Obama notwithstanding, irredeemably so.

Slim pickings

Carlos Slim Helú, the richest or second richest man in the world, has taken some of the load off the Sulzberger family by buying a 6.4% stake in the New York Times Company. Don't worry: there is absolutely no chance of some truth slipping into the Times. Slim's of Lebanese descent, a Christian Maronite, and diaspora Maronites - one of the last group of true historical fascists in the world - consistently take an ultra-Zionist stance. Curiously, that view appears to be shifting in Lebanon itself, with some Maronites beginning to see that Israel is the real enemy - the never-ending obsession with stealing Lebanese land and water will result in never-ending Israeli attacks on Lebanon - and Hezbollah is the only real defense against losing the southern part of Lebanon to the thieves.

Controlled-demolition irony

NIST has come up with a very unsatisfactory explanation for the collapse of WTC7, basically saying it is the first such building to collapse entirely due to fire. This won't satisfy anybody, but the report came out so late nobody may notice. The irony is that the glaring inconsistency between the official explanation for the twin tower collapses and the new NIST report is unavailable to twin tower controlled-demolition theorists, who of course say that the plane crashes were insufficient to account for the building collapses. The standard view of all legitimate structural engineers, including the guy who actually designed the WTC, is that the towers fell as the airplanes knocked the insulation off the steel girders, insulation that was put there for the specific purpose of preventing a fire from weakening the strength of the girders to the extent that they could no longer fulfil their structural requirements. Of course, no planes hit WTC7, meaning the insulation should have remained intact. Since, in the view of the controlled-demolitionists, the planes are irrelevant, the inconsistency in the NIST explanations is not available to them.

CIA-Khan

Let Sibel Edmonds Speak has been all over this recently (the problem, of course, is that most Americans wouldn't see CIA anti-proliferation efforts, or even CIA-Turkish promotion of Muslim nationalist movements in the southern sphere of Russian influence, as either treasonous or bad), but I noticed this piece by Ludwig De Braeckeleer in which he writes:

"In May 2006, I suggested that the Libyan nuclear program might have been a CIA-MI6 sting operation designed to bring down the A. Q. Khan nuclear mafia."

Curiously, the rest of the piece seems to support the exact opposite conclusion, that the CIA was working with the 'A. Q. Khan nuclear mafia'.

Neck apotheosis

The most striking thing about Palin is that she could represent the highest political position that any redneck has reached in (modern?) American political history. White trash constitutes the lowest caste in the American caste system, lower than even blacks or Hispanics. In fact, necks are so low on the totem pole - perhaps not as low on the totem pole as natives! - that they don't even expect to have any political power, which puts them at an even lower point of political consciousness than the lowest castes in places like Japan or India. The Republicans look to them for votes and cannon fodder, but not political leaders. In fact, most high-level Republicans had probably never seen a real neck before, and looked upon this gift from the Christian Zionists with a mixture of bemusement, curiosity, and horror. They'd seen black people before, and Hispanics are necessary to mow the lawns at the Palm Beach or Scottsdale residences, but where would bi-coastal big-city dwellers who vacation at European ski resorts and the Caribbean ever see a neck? It is amusing in a year where Americans are congratulating themselves on a black Presidential nominee that an even larger group of politically invisible people finally enters American politics. Necks are such an invisible caste that nobody even recognizes them as a caste.

Sharpening the axe for Saakashvili

From "The Trouble With Saakashvili" by Jackson Diehl (my emphasis in red):

"The irony is that, beneath that overweening campaign to contain Russian belligerence, American officials are still seething at Saakashvili. His impulsive and militarily foolhardy attack on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 8 opened the way for Putin's aggression. True, provocations by Russian-controlled Ossetian militias preceded the Georgian move, and Russian troops' subsequent takeover of much of Georgia was clearly planned and prepared well in advance. But the mercurial Saakashvili disregarded direct American warnings that he not fall into Putin's trap. He embarrassed his staunchest defenders in Washington and plunged both his country and the United States into what has been a costly - and so far losing - battle.

That's why during the same State Department news conference at which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that Georgia would become one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid, Saakashvili's move was again labeled 'a mistake' by his principal administration handler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza. It is also why other administration officials are privately far more scathing in their assessments of a man who repeatedly has presented Washington with ugly surprises. Just nine months before the South Ossetian fighting, Saakashvili sent riot police to attack demonstrators in his own capital and closed down an opposition television station, forcing a U.S. intervention to rescue the political freedoms that justify the American alliance with Georgia."

This is awe-inspiringly back-asswards. Can you imagine that Saakashvili would have dreamed to attack Russia without the complete backing of the Americans? What we witnessed was an attempt by almost-powerless Cheney and the gang to either start WWIII or at least jump-start the Cold War by tricking the Georgians into a hopeless attack that they knew would provoke a Russian reaction they could use. Now. with the Americans embarrassed at the outcome (with the adults now in charge unwilling to start WWIII and unhappy about the new Cold War For The Jews), we're getting a big dose of revisionist history, putting all the blame on reckless Saakashvili, whose mistake it was to trust Dick Cheney and the various Israeli advisors hanging around his country. If Saakashvili manages to live long enough - a doubtful proposition - I'd like to hear his side of the story.

Deep Palin

You know you are deep in conspiracy land when the people who are supposed to know things pronounce themselves dazed and confused. The two Palin questions:

1. where the hell did she come from?; and
   
2. how could McCain have made such an awful choice?
   

are starting to be answered, leading us to some amazing conclusions.

Remember that it was Israel that started the renaissance of the Right in the late 70s. At the same time, the Israeli government was actively courting the new 'religion' called Christian Zionism, an unlikely alliance as the Christian Zionists were profound anti-Semites. The big plan was that the moribund Right would revitalize itself with the spice of Christian religious outrage, and the Christian Zionists would be turned into temporary supporters of Israel as Israeli strength was needed to lead to the 'rapture', an old idea brought to the forefront by a lousy and obscure novelist named Tim LaHaye. The 'war on terror' was added to the mix later to give the Americans a reason to continue to support Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union (the recent revitalization of the Cold War is another front in the same quest).

Palin was secretly chosen by a cabal of Christian Zionists called the Council for National Policy. Its members include . . . Tim LeHaye (I wonder who paid him to write his books?). McCain, who didn't even know Palin before she was picked, had nothing to do with it. Rove told him he couldn't pick his old pals Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge as they were too 'liberal', and the only way to ensure the Christians would accept the pick was to let them make it. The Christian Zionists, who were only supposed to be an 'add-on' to allow the Republicans to play identity politics, have now taken over the whole party. The old party establishment has been completely excluded, and Wall Street is sending its money to Obama. The Republicans are very close to turning into the bunch of unelectable cranks that everyone accused the Democrats of turning into.

The downside is that the Democrats, already an extreme right-wing party, will become even more dominated by big business (that's the message they sent making Biden, a man who loves big corporations, the VP nominee). The Democrat platform: fascism plus abortion rights. The irony is that the Christian Zionist genie has escaped the Zionist bottle, thus denying the Zionists their most profound dream of Lieberman as VP, and a rabid Zionist President of the United States when McCain croaks.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Tuesday, September 2, 2008:

1. A particularly silly bit of 'Iran talk', with the Dutch hurrying their spies out from under the falling nukes (!). This is more like it.
2. Mai Pederson, whose disappearance after the Kelly assassination made her look like a shady character/femme fatale, explains (or here) why Kelly was physically incapable of killing himself by inflicting the wound found on his body. Would that she had explained this to that rascal Lord Hutton, who might have had a bit more trouble with the cover up (the police had her statement before the inquiry, but, of course, withheld it). This is a fairly typical assassination cock-up, like putting the 'suicide' gun in the non-dominant hand. It appears that Pederson was nowhere to be found for the rather understandable reason that she was terrified that the same assassins might come after her. Unfortunately, her credibility is damaged by her pointing the blame at Iraqis.
3. One of the main reasons World Jewry is in too much of a hurry.
4. An Israeli winery has moved its operations from a West Bank settlement to Israel as the illegal location of the winery was causing difficulty in selling the wine.
5. Sarah Palin is rebutting allegations that she pretended to have her teenage unwed daughter's baby - can these people even breathe without sounding like a soap opera? - by claiming that her teenage unwed daughter is pregnant. So she's moved from doing something that is weird but arguably admirable - protecting the reputation of her daughter and family (the Christian Zionist mothers out there, who are thinking about their own slut-whore teenage daughters, and are saying 'there but for the grace of God go I', would certainly find it admirable) - to doing something that is clearly not admirable, broadcasting her daughter's embarrassing state for crass political motives.
   
6. Lord Black in making out like a bandit in prison, and appears to have joined the Crips (or, more accurately, they have joined him). Next week they'll go public and steal their employees' pension fund.
7. Canada has the world's lowest rate of poverty among elderly people. Why? Income redistribution. How can that be? The right-wingers keep telling us that income redistribution just makes everybody poorer.