Tip of the hat to the Real NEO blog which nails the plagiarizing Kevin O’Brien, the shame and embarrassment of the Cleveland media.
We always knew he was lazy intellectually but stealing from Canadian right wingers?!? How lame is that?
Hey Ted Diadiun!!! Hey Sue Goldberg!!! Your journalistic embarrassment is showing. Do you care?
Of course not!!! He serves your corporate masters!!
Categories: Local flavor · media
Danny Schechter’s latest, as always, is a great if terrifying read.
NEW YORK — If you walk through London’s High Gate cemetery and wander over to the grave of the late Karl Marx and then listen closely with your ear to the ground, you might hear a repetitive murmur of the phrase “I told you so” in a distinctly German inflected accent.
You might also see the earth moving ever so slightly as what’s left of the bones below turn over in the realization that capitalists, not the proletariat, are the ones bringing down the system.
Schechter’s story points out that tent cities of the dispossessed are now springing up outside of Los Angeles:
Today’s Contemporary Americana!
Would we call these “Bushvilles?” I suppose Kevin O’Brien and the rest of the capitalist bootstrap enthusiasts would object. Well, screw them. Hopefully.
I always like to compare and contrast because its fun and ironic in that post-modernistic sense. So compare and contrast the above BBC story to this snippet, also from Schechter’s story:
A week earlier, Bear Stearn’s former CEO bought a Manhattan condo for $28 million, no mortgage needed. In December, compromised Wall Streeters walked off with $31 billion in bonuses, just a billion below the record set a year earlier.
So if they can walk away, why can’t the Skaggs?
Reported the San Francisco Chronicle
“As their home values tumble and their mortgages rise, these “walk away” homeowners” decide to cede their houses to their lenders. “It’s throwing good money away after bad” to pay an escalating mortgage on a home that’s plunging in value, said Army Sgt. 1st Class Nicklaus Skaggs.. He and his wife, Tishara, stopped paying their mortgage in February. They signed up with a new company called You Walk Away to help guide them through the multi-month foreclosure process.”
Other homeowners are so angry that they trashing or burning their own homes.
I’m all for that except it seems misplaced. Should we not be going to the homes of the former CEO of Bear Stearns all all the other Wall Street robber barons and trash and burn them? Preferable with them inside their homes?
Ah yes, Americans are so polite and law abiding. We wouldn’t dream of doing things like that anymore. We’ll just take whatever shit we’re fed. We don’t expect justice any more.
Oh my! I am criticizing American society? That’ll never do. I’ll never be President. Everyone knows this is paradise. And its getting more like paradise every day.
By the way, I linked the You Walk Away site to the above snippet. The Chronicle didn’t, but I figured I’d do my bit to help out anyone in desperate straits.
Now I see a lot of comments on various boards that these desperate homeowners just are getting what they deserve because they’re stupid American losers who actually bought the American Dream when they should have realized they weren’t entitled to it.
After all, just because someone dangles the Dream in front of you, the one all the commercial media tell you that you deserve, doesn’t mean you actually should grab for it. Have you gamed the system successfully? Well?
Of course, the people who are excoriating the American schmucks who got screwed out of their homes are strangely silent about the corporate chieftains who ran these little schemes that are now causing the whole economy to implode. I guess the message to our kids is now crystal clear. Rub your American flag lapel pin a little extra hard and remember this land is your land. Or at least it was. Now it belongs to the Chinese and the Arab sovereign wealth funds.
And yet there’s still enough righteous indignation among the Lou Dobbs crowd that they’re working themselves into a high dudgeon about what Barack Obama’s pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said from the pulpit. I can’t vouch for the ‘we invented AIDS’ claim and the total story of 9-11 remains in dispute. But in any case, what else did Wright say that was inaccurate?
As anyone who has bothered to ferret out the true history of the United States knows that Wright’s take on America is, if not in essence, accurate, is at least understandable as history is always written by the victors.
But telling the truth is a mortal sin in American politics and society. We drank the kool aid in grade school where we NEVER learned the parts of American history that were left out - the smallpox blankets, the Trail of Tears, the 1863 Draft Riots, the Haymarket riot, the Wobblies, the Filipino Insurrection, the Bonus Army, Tonkin Gulf, and on and on.
No, no, no. Can’t have that. You’ll have to read Howard Zinn on your own kiddies.
So it’s no surprise that Americans have a predictable Pavolvian reaction to Wright’s invective, especially well-to-do white people.
What seems especially clear at this point is that the powers that be most emphatically do not want Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee or President of the United States. That, despite his slavish fealty to AIPAC and the Wall Street brokers who have pumped his campaign full of cash.
He’s a hope, albeit a faint one that apparently must be crushed at all costs even if it means Hillary’s dirty tricks brigade join forces with the right wing’s flying monkey squads to make it happen.
One wonders if Obama, if he really understands the depths of the financial mess the next President will inherit, really would want the job? John McCain readily admits to his ignorance of economics so he doesn’t really care. But even Clinton must understand that any serious measures that could be taken to stem the hemorrhaging will only make the short term pain worse and make the next POTUS even more hated than Bush, if such a thing is possible.
So one seriously has to wonder if there’s some other kind of game afoot.
Today Bush said the following:
“The surge … has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror,” the president said. “We are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his terror network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated.”
Bush appeared to be referring to recent cooperation by local Iraqis with the U.S. military against the group known as al-Qaida in Iraq, a mostly homegrown, though foreign-led, Sunni-based insurgency. Experts question how closely - or even whether - the group is connected to the international al-Qaida network. As for bin Laden, he is rarely heard from and is believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
The U.S. has about 158,000 troops in Iraq. That number is expected to drop to 140,000 by summer in drawdowns meant to erase all but about 8,000 troops from last year’s increase.
Bush, who has successfully defied efforts by the Democratic-led Congress to force larger and faster withdrawals, said they could unravel recent progress. “Having come so far and achieved so much, we are not going to let this happen,” he said.
Does that sound like someone who is planning to give up the reins of power in 10 months?
Now that the pesky Admiral Fallon is out of the way, there are many who feel that the attack against Iran is inevitable. In such a case, Bush could screw things up so thoroughly that he’d declare a national emergency and assume dictatorial powers including postponing the election.
OK, it sounds crazy but with the economy also tanking spectacularly the cornered rats might be getting desperate. A national emergency would short circuit all pesky investigations into the giant financial swindle now unraveling and protect those who were instrumental in the swindle and instrumental in the war - leading right up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Needless to mention the usual caveat: I’d be happy to be dead wrong about all of this. But I think we need to put these scenarios on the table since so many very bad things are already happening and several more are in the offing.
And vigilance supposedly was always the price of freedom, right?
Categories: Contemporary Americana · Dubya · Economics · Foreign affairs · Politics as Usual · The Empire's Wars
