Real Change

On Tuesday America will elect Barrack Obama as its next president. The corporate media continues to talk of “tight races” in “key states” but I can’t imagine that anyone who knows anything about what is going on in America really believes them. By now it should be obvious even to the most die-hard neocons that John McCain and his born-again sidekick Sarah Palin are about to be wiped off the political map of the United States.

The Republican Party is in serious trouble and the Democrats, under Obama’s leadership, could do much to rectify the obscenities of Bush’s eight years in office. With absolute, filibuster proof majorities in the both the House and the Senate they could change whatever they felt like changing, literally. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal from the start and crimes against humanity, you say? Well, they could end them in one day, simply by voting to cut off the funding to continue W’s massacres. Of course, they could have done that back in 2006 when they defeated the Republicans the first time around, but they didn’t.

Come to think of it, in 2006 they could have also impeached Bush for any one of a number of his crimes against the US constitution, but that too was undoable. “Impeachment is off the table”, said the newly elected House majority leader, Nancy Pelosi (the same woman who later on would so whole-heartedly push for the tax-payer funded bailout of the Wall Street Banksters).

Gordon Gekko from Wall Street "Greed is good"

And speaking of Wall Street and the class of thieves that continues to run America, the Democratic controlled Congress and Senate could have passed laws two years ago to re-regulate the investment banks that were selling the toxic “sub-prime” securities that are now wrecking financial havoc across the globe. But they didn’t. They had better things to do, even though many of them, I’m sure, had a very good idea of what was going on and a realistic vision of where the housing bubble and the billions being spent on the Iraq war would lead us. They knew and could have done a lot when there was still time to prevent the disaster, but chose not to.

Instead, when the meltdown began and the stock market was losing an average of five to seven hundred points a day, the Democrats were the most enthusiastic supporters of the initial 700 billion dollar give-away (to the same criminals who had caused the disaster in the first place). The entire Democratic leadership stood behind the most massive wealth transfer from the poor to the filthy rich in the country’s history. “We must save the banks and the bankers to save the people”, they told us. A bit like the US soldiers who used to torch South Vietnamese hamlets with their Zippo lighters to “save” them from the Viet Cong.

In 2007 the US Census reported that roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth was controlled by the richest 1% of the country and that the top 10% owned almost two-thirds of America’s wealth. These are figures that were published last year before the crisis and the bailout and the daily stock market slides, and yet they remind me more of the kind of income disparity you’d expect to find in a Sub-Saharan nation or a Latin-American dictatorship à la Pinochet, not in the United States. And yet that is what we’ve become. An oligarchy where a miniscule minority of the population sets domestic and foreign policy and every four years holds elections so that the rest of us can participate in electing their representative, who will run their property (the United States) for their exclusive use and benefit.

I, however, am sick and tired of this system of lies and terror and hope that sooner or later the people of America will finally rise up against their autocratic rulers and take back what is rightfully theirs. Change is not just necessary, as Obama tells us, it also has to be real.

Imperfections

More poetry today from John Lyons:-)

On nature

The patience of three birds
Sitting on the garden wall
Surveying their prospects
For the day, their feathers
Ruffled by a gusting wind;
There is preening
and a conversation of sorts,
The contents of which
Do not bear speculation;
Flight is one of nature’s
Boldest gifts and a permanent
Lesson in humility to all
Who are bound to tread
The lowly turf. These birds
Who possess the most
Sophisticated navigation
Systems and an uncanny
Grasp of the mysteries
Attached to human mathematics
As they flock in groups
Of ten or twelve or four
Or three or seven, remnants
Of an age of angels.
There may exist a place
In which nothing is unknown,
In which everything is
Effortlessly explained
But surely wouldn’t we
Soon tire of such ease
Of ignorance? There is
More to the not knowing
That any mere answer
Can supply. Nature
In its wisdom produces
Flaws, imperfections
As though to round
out its genius, the eye
that does not focus
the hand afflicted by
the tremor of self-doubt,
the silence that no word
of genuine love ever filled.

30 October 2008

Red pumps for Palin

You've got to hand it to America's mass media. No one but no one is as expert as they are in dumbing down the population. With the country's economy teetering on the brink of a financial disaster that will probably make the Great Depression of the 1930s seem like a cake walk, do the New York Times, the Washington Post or any of the other elite news filters ever try to get at the root of this mess and explain to their readers that they have been taken for suckers once again? No, they don’t.

Nor do they ever write about the economic and moral black hole of our wars of conquest in the Middle East. This is a taboo subject in America and it’s a shame because the estimated 1 trillion dollars that is spent every year on the Military/Industrial complex in the United States could easily pay for all the state deficits ballooning out of control from California to Maine, or the mortgages that millions of Americans can no longer afford to pay on their homes, or the public health-care programs that only government employees have ever had. There is, in fact, an enormous and ever-growing list of homegrown emergencies in America that need to be dealt with and fast, but don’t expect anybody in the next administration to get around to it. That money has already been spoken for (by Wall Street and the Pentagon) and no one in the media is writing about this. It just isn’t newsworthy in the USA.

Sarah Palin's "Naughty Monkey Double Dare Pumps" available for $89.95

Instead, they talk about "Joe the plumber", the average guy who is worried about Obama raising his taxes, or about Obama's "radical ex-preacher", Reverend Wright and his “racist views” (he was the one who made the unpardonable mistake of shouting out in one of his sermons, and letting his anger be captured on video, “Goddamn America for what it’s done!” On the other hand, they don’t talk much about McCain’s advanced case of skin cancer or that many melanoma specialists are giving less than a 25% chance of living to the end of his first term should he be elected.

Yet, perhaps the most bizarre news item from last week is the $150,000 that the Republican Party spent on Sarah Palin's campaign wardrobe. She is not, we now discover, the working class, Hockey Mom that we thought she was because she wears designer clothes from Neiman Marcus, and ruby red pumps from Saks Fifth Avenue. No doubt, we’re all supposed to be shocked by this and given the incredible gullibility of Americans many people will in fact see this routine image make-over as a kind of betrayal. In other countries voters tend to understand that politicians are professional liars and that just about everything regarding their media image is contrived, but not in the USA. Subterfuge will not be tolerated in American presidential elections, because a man, or a woman, has to be what he or she was marketed as being. The important thing is “staying on message”, never deviating from the script.

The system may be rotten to the core, corrupt beyond anyone's wildest imagination, full of distorted images and unrealistic expectations, but the farce that is these elections has to be believed. The lies and crimes at the root of our precipitous decline have to be ignored, at least until power can be successfully transferred from one faction of the nation's business party to the other.

It is the American way.

True love

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has long been an admirer of America and especially of its current leader, George W. Bush. Berlusconi, whose name in the early 1980's was discovered on the lists of the secretive, far-right organization P2 (led by the noted fascist Licio Gelli), is an ideological soul mate of our War Criminal-in-Chief.

At the recent meeting between the two in Washington, Berlusconi could not control himself and gushed: "You will go down in the history books as a hero, George!"

Silvio Berlusconi and George W. Bush at the White House

W then turned to Silvio and said that there was still much to be done in the few months that remained of his presidency. There were the billions, even trillions of dollars to be pillaged from the U.S. Treasury and distributed to Paulson's buddies on Wall Street, so that they would never have to suffer the effects of their risk taking. The Republicans, he sadly admitted to his little Italian friend, would not be in power much longer.

"But the people don't understand you, George, not like I do", whispered Silvio, with a lump in his throat.

Timeless beauty

Here's a poem that John Lyons let me read and that I asked him if I could post because it reminds me a lot of my own little girl.


Chiara on her grandfather's birthday


Beauty has its own melody
speaks with honesty
and spontaneity
has a clear eye
for what is good,
for what is better
for what is best
in human nature;
beauty loves the truth,
always,
and swears
by the power of love;
beauty
glows under the skin
and sets the lips
alight with a smile;
beauty is that child
on the road
to adolescent innocence,
never bored with
clumsy perfections,
never eager
to find fault but
content to stretch
the moment shared
into infinity;
beauty is the authentic
kiss of life, number
personified, intuitive
peace lived beyond
the wildest stretch
of the imagination.

7-10-2008

John Lyons

Seven Days That Shook The World

Much has happened in the last week. In seven days I’ve seen the beginning of the end, the mother of all deflationary spirals and the shape of things to come. On Monday, the US Congress at first rejected a 700 billion dollar bailout for Wall Street only to pass that very same bill (with an additional 100 billion in pork to sooth the nerves of some rebellious Republicans representatives) four days later. Then on Thursday there was the surreal debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. Surreal as only a debate between two politicians can be, when both are pledging their support for the working class (the hockey moms and the six-pack Joes) while their respective bosses, John McCain and Barack Obama, are doing everything they can to get the bailout (a bill which gives everything to the mega rich and nothing to the common man) passed.

US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's new hairdo after the Wall Street bailout

Over the weekend the “Sub-prime” tsunami picked up steam and in Europe leaders of the major economies were meeting to see if they couldn’t forestall the inevitable with a coordinated bailout of some of the continents major financial players. Sarkozy, Brown, Berlusconi and Merkel met in Paris and essentially agreed in a quintessentially European way not to agree on anything. It’s every man for himself in the crash of 2008 and bank nationalizations (the Fortis Bank in the Netherlands) and failures (the colossal Hypo Real Estate company of Germany) are the order of the day. Iceland is on the brink of bankruptcy and has seen its once strong currency plummet against the dollar and the Euro. In Ireland rumors of a run on the nation’s banking system forced the government to declare that it would cover all personal deposits, which it probably wouldn’t have the money to do if everyone did try to get their money out, but something had to be said.

Finally, in an effort to calm the markets before they re-open on Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced with her finance minister that the government would, like Ireland, cover all personal accounts in German banks. In doing this she pledged to insure about 500 billion euros, more or less the amount that the US Congress had refused to hand over to Wall Street on Monday. With Merkel having to make that kind of guarantee it’s no wonder that the objective of the Paris meeting (a coordinated, pan-European bailout plan) came to nothing. The Germans know that the worst is yet to come and have decided to first take care of their own. If the banks in Greece, or Italy, or Spain start to fall, it will be up to their governments to save them if they can.

I could be wrong but I can’t help thinking that the world is about to enter a period of prolonged economic depression. The Banksters have bitten off a bit more than they can chew this time. The high priests of “turbo capitalism” have led us all, willingly or not, to the edge of the cliff and over the precipice. And as any truthful economist will tell you, once all the bubbles have been burst there’s really nothing you can do to stop a system from de-leveraging. No bailout will ever hold and the house of cards built with deceit and the purest strains of capitalist greed must fall.

The world as we know it is about to change and whether we are all eventually governed by corporate dictatorships or finally decide to throw off our chains and live as free men has yet to be seen. The choice is ours.

Notes on how to stop the bailout

Here is an email that I received this morning from Larry McGuire regarding the proposed bailout of the Wall Street "banksters" and what we can do to stop it. It's a good example of the kind of activism that I think America and Americans need more of.

Notes on how to stop the bailout:

1) Though there is talk to limit executive pay for CEO's whose companies
have accumulated toxic debt and want your tax dollars to buy that debt,
remember that for years these same executives have been paid millions a year
to package and sell and buy these debt products, and there is no plan to
make them pay back the money they made (stole). Also, just google any of
the names of the executives removed recently after the bailout of AIG, Fanny
Mae, etc. or the bankruptcies of Lehman Bros. etc., or the failure of
Washington Mutual. ALL those executives left with millions of dollars of
severance pay. If you are fired for doing a lousy job, do YOU expect to be
paid millions?

2) The best way to understand 'toxic debt' is to visualize it as a product
built to be sold, a financial widget. The banks created these products
(generally called 'collateralized debt obligations', CDO's) by bundling
together the MORTGAGE DEBT of ordinary people. So they created a faulty
product and sold it to people around the world, making millions in the
process, and kept some of this product themselves, and now the product is
worthless, nobody wants to buy it. Do you think if YOU made a faulty
product, a widget of some kind, which nobody wanted to buy, that the
government should step in and buy YOUR faulty product? Or do you think that
if you BOUGHT a faulty product (because you were greedy and wanted a high
profit margin by selling it on down the line), which you subsequently
realized was faulty and could not sell, that the goverment should BUY that
product from you?

3) Note the bipartisan support for giving away your tax dollars to
millionaire bankers. Note that the third party presidential candidates
(Ralph Nader, Independent candidate; Bob Barr, Libertarian; Cynthia
McKinney, Green;) and former presidential candidates such as Republican
Senator Ron Paul and Democratic Senator Dennis Kucinich are all AGANIST the
bailout. As many of us have been saying for years, there is no fundamental
difference between the Democrats and the Republicans at the leadership
level, BECAUSE THEY RECEIVE CAMPAIGN FUNDS FROM THE SAME RICH PEOPLE AND
CORPORATIONS. The bailout plan shows this clearly.

4) Note that they have already watered down the proposal, because they are
AFRAID of public opinion and AFRAID the voters will punish anyone who votes
for the bailout. If you want to STOP the bailout you must let your
representative know that you will NOT vote for anyone who supports the
bailout. You also need to spread the word to help build resistance. They
want to rush it through because they KNOW resistance is building very
quickly. Don't let the politicians and bankers get away with stealing your
money and your children's money (because the cost will escalate and must be
paid for years).

Various opinions criticising the bailout plan, and actions of resistance,
can be found at the following websites:

http://www.votenobailout.org/
http://housingpanic.blogspot.com/
http://www.freshaircleanpolitics.net/
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
http://www.lp.org/
http://www.gp.org/index.php
http://www.votenader.org/index.html