Tag: Economic Collapse

B.O.H.I.C.A.* – Wall Street’s Con of the Century

Just a few thoughts this miserable Monday on the lemming farm as Goldman’s record earnings are about to be announced and the Republican pigs are shovelling bloody read meat to their dumber than a bucket of shit racist base over the Sotomayor hearings. There is a very good article by Paul Krugman in the damned librul New York Times today on the state of the economic fallout from the decades long class war. In Krugman’s piece, Boiling the Frog he is once again on the mark about Obama’s failings in propping up the looter capitalist system at the expense of the regular Americans.

Goldman Sachs Sucks Our Marrow

“Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.”



– Jan Willem Van De Wetering

The battle has now been joined by the Great Satan (aka Goldman Sachs) as the brilliant Matt Taibbi piece has fortunatly gone viral thanks to bloggers. When the pigs on Wall Street, their legal armies and on call public relations propagandists turn into pirannhas as they are with this piece the fuckers are on the run. The seige on CNBC’s drooling house baboon Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer that was kicked off by comedian Jon Stewart was beaten back with a disinformation laden blitzkrieg and the money changers regained control of the temple. It’s all been the hogwash of the GREEN SHOOTS ever since. And despite the dismal news contained in yesterday’s jobs report the long weekend couldn’t come at a more fortuitous time as the four flushing,gold plated cocksuckers will regroup once again and launch a saturation bombing campaign of more goddammed lies.

Goldman Sachs: The Pigs Win Again

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. ”

– Charles Bukowski



The dazzling propaganda onslaught conducted by the financial sector has been shock and fucking awe as the amazing resuscitation of the FIRE industry roars into the next quarter. A dirty as a pig in shit corporatist media waged total war against reason, morality, facts, history and the law itself in allowing the treasonous looters from Wall Street bounce back off of the ropes and reassert their control over the government and the country at large. Now under the cover of the saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson freak show (I doubt that I will see this shit end in my lifetime) the still annoying little trickles of doom, like the impending implosion of Arnoldland are stomped on by gatekeepers who just play another card from the Whacko Jacko deck of jokers. Face it people, we are fucked! With the celebrity infatuated lemmings in this rotting from the insides empire it is only a matter of time until they start seeing the great one’s ghoulish visage appearing on tortillas and grilled cheese sandwiches. If there were such a thing as a truly American Jesus it would be Michael Jackson. Neverland will become the bastardized equivalent of Lourdes, Jerusalem and Graceland uniquely spliced together to resemble our sick, twisted and mutated national DNA.

Newsweek Newspeak

The green shoots, the most wonderful propaganda onslaught since General Petraeus’s heroic, Reaganesque winning of the Iraq war through the ‘SURGE’ has failed. The stinking undead zombie that is the U.S. economy has not been resurrected through the massive infusions of taxpayer dollars, perhaps spent billions on public relations and lobbying and the changing of the mark to market rules only bought times for the financial predators. The wonderful government subsidized markets are tanking again, there are still no jobs, the housing market is not at all improving, the banks aren’t lending and by the way, there are truck bombs are going off in Baghdad again. While neocons and Repiglicans have their panties in a bunch over Barack Obama’s not getting behind their little Iranian PSYOP the real outcry should be from every taxpayer in Der Heimat beause they have just been bent over backwards and butt-fucked by Barack’s Wall Street Dream Team into funneling billions into the Ponzi schemes, getting nothing but pink slips and foreclosure notices in return and are about to have any hope of a national health care ripped away by the corrupt, on-the-take non-term limited cesspool dwellers in Congress.

And the myth of Ronald Reagan is just like the one about Santa Claus, only silliness for the credulous little children of lemming land. Horseshit, total horseshit.

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.

After the breaking point

As the economic collapse of the United States continues, we are getting very close to the point at which no amount of propaganda will conceal the magnitude of the problem. Rational observers are now experiencing a peak of cognitive dissonance as every corrupt “news” organization bleats out upbeat evaluations of truly dreadful economic statistics. After the breaking point is reached, the general public will share the stunned, disillusioned, and alienated outlook of the well-informed.

What happens to society in a state run by discredited propagandists? If the history of the Eastern Bloc totalitarian regimes is any guide, we can expect serious societal decay: alcoholism, drug abuse, family disintegration, and rising crime. When people no longer believe in the soundness of their government, they regress to more primitive (criminal) security arrangements, and often withdraw to the minimalist state of society, the Hobbesian war of all against all.

I fear that America will endure a dark era in which it slowly purges itself of the endemic dishonesty and corruption that destroyed its prosperity. People who have always taken the easy way out are about to learn that there is no easy way out. Still, we live, and so we must prepare for what is coming. Try to do the following.

1. Turn off your TV and never turn it on again.

2. Make backup arrangements for Internet connectivity in case your ISP fails.

3. Keep a spare computer and parts available.

4. Download and install a Linux operating system and Mozilla browser on your spare computer.

5. Buy tools and learn how to use them to perform useful services and maintain your environment (e.g., table saw, sewing machine, socket wrenches, multimeter, garden tools).

6. Invest in improving your relationships with family, friends, and neighbors. You will need their good will.

7. Practice honesty and reliability in all of your dealings with others.

8. Participate in the Internet community by sharing all useful information you have.

9. Avoid contact with and reliance on anyone who knowingly makes false statements.

10. Minimize your dependence on cash transactions.

The money culture is slowly collapsing. It will eventually be replaced by a culture based on esteem. Cultivate esteem and disengage from money to help rebuild our society.

Auto Industry: Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Be Privately Owned

Richard Wolff, American Economist well-known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology and class analysis, Yale University Ph.D. in Economics, and Professor at The New School University in New York City, talks with Real News CEO Paul Jay about the reform needed to pull the United States out of economic crisis.

“If we say something is too important to let it die, too big to fail, then we’re saying it’s so important to the society as a whole, but if it’s that important, it can’t be in the hands of a few people in the first place. If you’re too big to fail, your too big to be in private hands.” He goes on to suggest that if there is chaos in the US economy, the rest of the world will have chaos as well. “We have an unknown situation, the outcome of which could be very bad, we actually have a vision of that already, Mexico, it’s a society in free fall.”



Real News Network – May 2, 2009

Too big to fail, too big to be privately owned

Auto industry affects the whole society, it’s too significant for private ownership


Hooray! The Surge is Working…Again

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

-H. L. Mencken

The previously discredited CNBC ace shill Jim ‘Mad Money’ Cramer has now become the point man for the regenerated Wall Street hydra, launching into a sleazy Rovian war with a real life economist who actually got it right in predicting the collapse Nouriel Roubini. Roubini, a man who was from the outset mocked, scorned and derisively labeled ‘Dr. Doom’ by the same type of four-flushing assholes who brought us Deep Capture has been declared public enemy number one and must be taken out with extreme prejudice for the big con to succeed. The oafish court jester of looter capitalism is now back with a vengeance as he according to this piece by Frank Rich of the damned liberal New York Times states in his recent piece Awake and Sing!:

“I am pronouncing the depression over!” declared CNBC’s irrepressible Jim Cramer on April 2. The next day the unemployment rate, already at the highest level in 25 years, jumped yet again, but Cramer wasn’t thinking about the 663,000 jobs that disappeared in March. He was thinking about the market. Mad money. Fast money. Big money. The Dow, after all, has rallied in the weeks since Timothy Geithner announced his bank bailout 2.0. Par-tay! On Wednesday, Cramer rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, in celebration of the 1,000th broadcast of his nightly stock-tip jamboree.

Goldman Sachs: The Real Pirates

In the ongoing media Battle of the Bulge of the finance oligarchs that has brilliantly sold idiot America the blatant falsehood that the economy has turned for the better (tell that to all the poor bastards in the tent cities that are sprouting up across the fruited plain) the big boys have struck back. In a masterpiece of propaganda only surpassed in recent history by the great General Petraeus led SURGE that flushed a bloody defeat in Iraq down the memory hole the same strategy has been applied in selling the notion that the zombie banks are alive and well. I am going to address this in far more detail in my upcoming piece that will be out in the next few days entitled Hooray! The Surge is Working…Again but I just wanted to chime in on this news.

Tom Ferguson: Obama’s Economy Plan “Recipe For Disaster”

Crossposted from Antemedius

Thomas Ferguson is a political scientist and author who studies and writes on politics and economics, often within an historical perspective. He is a Political Science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a contributing editor of The Nation, and is also the author of several books, the most recent of which is Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political System.

Today, in the fourth of a series of interviews with Real News CEO Paul Jay, Ferguson calls the Obama/Geithner/Summers plan a “recipe for disaster”.

Real News – April 4, 2009

Obama should save the banks, not the bankers Pt.4

Tom Ferguson: Obama’s plan is a “recipe for disaster, if the US reflates, the rest of the world doesn’t”

Note: I believe this interview was done before the G20.

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 Black Hole Of The Economy

Crossposted from Antemedius

A black hole gravitationally sucks in everything that comes near it, and nothing can return from the other side of the event horizon once sucked in.

Banks lending money is one of the major, if not THE major way they produce revenue and profit. In any business, when sales are down you do everything you can do to increase sales revenue – or you go bust – UNLESS you can produce revenue another way.

Yet the real message coming through is that the banks BANKERS seem to have decided that they do not want to increase revenue in any other way than simply taking it from taxpayers instead of lending to generate revenue.

This leads me to suspect that they have no intention of returning to providing the “product” they have always provided to generate revenue, but instead have decided to simply and openly steal it, and that the current economic crisis is not something the government is trying to correct but is instead actively a partner in intentionally manufacturing.

With government help. With Geithner’s help. With the presidents help.

We have a big problem. The problem is not the economic crisis.

What is “government”?

Very simply, it is an agency of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of coercion — such as the Mafia. So to be more precise, government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices.

   –Harry Browne

Thomas Ferguson is an American political scientist and author who studies and writes on politics and economics, often within an historical perspective. He is a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is also a contributing editor for The Nation.

Today Ferguson talks with Real News CEO Paul Jay about the banking crisis and the black hole at the center of the crisis, the Obama administrations response so far to it, and about something he thinks really needs to be done that is not being done.



Real News – March 25, 2009 – 12 minutes 25 seconds

Obama should save the banks, not the bankers

Tom Ferguson: Stimulus package is dangerously small; plan for toxic assets shovels money to bankers

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