As Jon Stewart said the other day, for those of who who have been living under a rock…CONGRATULATIONS We should all be so lucky right now.
Must have been a helluva day at CBS yesterday. Letterman sounded like he was going to walk down to the Evening News set and punch McCain in the snoot on live TV. But the real piece de resistance was Katie Couric’s interview with The Stupidest Woman In Alaska America.
Watch her seriously defend her “I can see Russia from my house” claim to foreign policy experience:
Then read the transcript of the slightly testy exchange over coming up with specific examples of John McCain’s non-existant record of fighting against deregulation:
Couric: You’ve said, quote, “John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business.” Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of his leading the charge for more oversight?
Palin: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two years ago about Fannie and Freddie - that, that’s paramount. That’s more than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.
Couric: But he’s been in Congress for 26 years. He’s been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.
Palin: He’s also known as the maverick though, taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he’s been talking about - the need to reform government.
Couric: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know you’ve said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?
Palin: I can give you examples of things that John McCain has done, that has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that is what America needs today.
Couric: I’m just going to ask you one more time - not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.
Palin: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.
She’s a complete moron! She’s not qualified to be Senior Class President, let alone Vice President of the United States, or even Governor of Alaska…a job she already has! Are people in Alaska in general so fucking stupid that they could choose this woman as competent to run their entire state? Or does it just not matter to them and they were glad to give the job to the babe with the nice rack?
John McCain is a disgrace, but this woman has no business in public life whatsoever. If you vote for these two people in November, you should be ashamed of yourself.
It is a damn good thing that the Bush Administration chose to announce their agreement to pay the $700 billion ransom demand made by Wall Street over the weekend. If this had happened during the work-week, the pressure on Congress to Just.Do.Something. would have been overwhelming, especially after Ben Bernanke used the “nuclear option” on Congress to tell them just how serious this problem is. And, given that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bend over for Geroge Bush more than a Greenwich Village tranny during Fleet Week, they would have gone along in a snap. But the weekend gave every pundit known to humanity a chance to take a deep breath, sort out the details, and come to the conclusion that the bailout plan, as proposed, is FUCKING WACK.
If the Bush bailout plan were put into place without modification, you might as well cancel the November election, because Hank Paulson would be the de facto Ruler Of The Free World. With a blank check, zero accountability, and virtually unlimited authority to do whatever he wants to the American economy, and thus by extension the entire world, he might as well declare himself King Henry the First and be done with it. It was apparently not enough to hand over a trillion dollars to Halliburton, not to mention $9 billion(UPDATED: make that $23 billion)IN CASH to the gang posing as the Iraqi government, but with less than six months remaining in their administration, they needed to make sure that Paulson’s buddies on Wall Street got their welfare checks AND the option to buy up all the failing banks in America at a deep discount.
You know it’s a bad idea when even such Republican lickspittles as William Kristol go on record in the New York Times as calling it a duck. I have been collecting links all morning to the various and sundry politicians, pundits and other bloviating gasbags and here’s the lineup I have so far of people who have said the bailout is a Bad Thing:
Speakng of Kucinich, he has picked up on Krugman’s “Cash For Trash” line, and says he will introduce a counter-proposal to distribute the remaining good assets of the failed banks to each and every American citizen to the tune of the $2,300.00-per-person figure that has been bandied about as the per-capita cost of the bailout.
Meanwhile, Kucinich’s chief economic adviser from his primary campaign, University of Missouri Professor Michael Hudson, spoke about the crisis in this interview last week (pre-bailout announcement) with DemocracyNow.org (video here if you’re interested). He doesn’t even think the AIG bailout is a good idea…and he’s right.
At least Barack Obama isn’t ready to hand over all the money so easily, but he isn’t exactly stepping up to the plate yet either. The Boston Herald reports that he spent some time this weekend meeting with Warren Buffet, Larry Sanders, Paul Volcker and a bunch of other Serious People to get a better handle on the situation and maybe come up with something. But, seriously, Barry, you need to pull something out of your ass that isn’t just some rhetorical flourish on top of a wishy-washy do-nothing plan like the rest of your platform. Somebody tell me again why you think he’s better than McCain, because I still just don’t feel the love for him that you do. Running on “I’m not John McCain” isn’t much of a change, you know.
Much has been made of this e-mail from an unnamed Democratic congressman who isn’t too happy with the events of the last few days. He’s ready to vote for anything that “…would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling… That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me. I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them. I think he’s on the right track myself, but over at MetaFilter the user named “Pastabagel” has a very salient reminder about spreading the blame for all this around. While I feel the Congress-critter’s pain, Pastabagel has a very valid point: we gave the Democrats back the majority to take care of this bullshit and they have let us down immensely. Republicans and Democrats alike need to be thoroughly beaten with sharp and pointy objects for their complicity in this clusterfuck.
And the general public? Well, we’ve been enjoying our bread and circuses, of course. The Pew Research Center’s weekly analysis of news content says that in the week of September 8-14, which is the week before the market tanked and people started to get nervous, 42% of all news coverage was devoted to some aspect of Sarah Palin, with nearly 25% of that coverage being about the “lipstick on a pig” comment, while the crumbling economy got 4% of the newsmedia’s attention. Forty-two fucking percent of their seemingly limitless time thrown away on some white-trash “hockey mom” who can “see Russia from her house”, while the millionaires line up for their bags of money taken directly from our pockets. We, the people of this country, also deserve a full measure of blame for this. And we’re going to get it. Soon.
Do I even have to say it at this point? The unfettered hand of capitalism, in this case manifested as the deregulated financial industry, reveals itself once again to have no compunction about destroying anything, including itself, in its juggernaut quest for profit. With the gaze of federal regulators turned away by formal deregulation and overall loose constraint on the part of the administration, the financiers destroyed themselves by chasing after profit to the exclusion of sensible management of debt. And now that the true rewards of such rapaciousness have come home to roost, those free-market warriors have forced said administration into a corner and demanded to be bailed out. And, as usual, it is the pocket of the average person, not the super-wealthy who benefitted most from those years of unscrupulous and unbridled greed, being picked to make sure those billionaires aren’t reduced to mere millionaires.
Times of London financial editor Anatole Kaletsky recognizes the end game of the global capitalist system when he sees it. He’s almost livid about the U.S.government’s overnight absorption of AIG, and echoes the financial world’s public mourning of its own demise. But despite the inevitable economic hardship these events are about to unleash on the population of the world, I am more in agreement with some of the sentiments aired by Douglas Rushkoff. We are at the tipping point of the post-capitalist era because the capitalists can’t bleed us for any more wealth and are beginning to cannibalize one another. The true value of “money” is revealed for its actual self: absolutely nothing. That will be a profound leveller of society and redirect our economic focus back to “real” assets: goods, some services, infrastructure, etc. The parasites who reduce everything to widgets and skim the profits will be choked of their blood supply, hopefully long enough to kill them, but at least long enough to displace them. Sadly, the way to that future will consist of a great deal of adjustment and displacement for a great many people. Our society’s short-term focus and relaince on instant gratification will not hold up well. Dark days await us all.
Considering that we just barely finished installing our own meat puppet as the new President, that ought to give you some indication of just how much daily leadership control of the country the army still has there. It also demonstrates just how tightly we had the vise on Musharraf’s nuts to get him to go along with our demands and generally overlook the American military raids in the countryside for the last four or five years. With Mushy out of office, we’ve apparently lost our throttle over the rest of the military leadership, and our ability to install a “sympathetic” figurehead doesn’t amount to anything.
Since it doesn’t look like the Bush Administration is going to get its wish to start a war with Iran (which has also been fending off these border strikes for a couple of years), it must be making all the little neocons clap paws with glee to extend their Eternal War somewhere. Tom Englehardt, who blogs for The Nation, sets up some background information for you and offers an excerpt from Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali’s new book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. If the assertions here are valid, we aren’t going to NEED a war with Iran, because we’ll have our hands full fucking up Pakistan (which, BTW, actually DOES have nuclear weapons and may be willing to use them).
And before the Democrats get too smug here, keep in mind that Barack Obama supports the raids into Pakistan as part of his “plan” to “fight al Quaeda”, just as he continues to support the war in Afghanistan. In other words, don’t expect either candidate to bring about any CHANGE as far as the war-mongering goes, regardless of which one wins. We are only getting started, it seems.
