Multiple Meltdowns Simultaneously

In Iraq, "nervous negotiators" are trying to create an alternative pretext to "justify" the continuing war crime our "leaders" would prefer to describe as "liberation". And the Iraqis have "opened bidding" on contracts to develop the oil fields; these contracts were supposed to have been awarded on a no-bid basis to a handful of big American-multinationals, but the ungrateful Iraqis, still smarting from their liberation, nixed that bit of "political reconciliation".

Meanwhile, the "legal" proceedings at Gitmo have been revealed to be even more of a farce than we ever imagined, as

defense lawyers and human rights advocates charge that the fairness of the most significant proceeding at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is routinely undermined by incompetent interpretation.
...

The lawyers asked the court to order the government to produce an Arabic transcript of each hearing -- a motion military prosecutors are resisting.

And yet another Gitmo prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld, has resigned in protest; saying key evidence was being withheld from the defense. We already knew "incriminating evidence" was being fabricated; so this is no surprise.

On the home front, it appears that yesterday's market upswing was not a harbinger of prosperity returning, but a reaction to Henry Paulson's announcement that the big banks will be allowed to dictate the terms of the agreement by which they steal more of our money than we even have.

And my favorite team is now on six-game losing streak. But at least their meltdown won't affect the future of humanity.

A Bill That Can Never Be Paid

They were gambling on the riskiest of "investments", building worthless portfolios whose values just kept increasing; and lured by the awesome power of greed they forgot the most basic rules of the market: [1] Don't gamble with money you can't afford to lose, and [2] It ain't worth nothin' if you can't sell it.

So they put everything they had into building imaginary wealth, and when the wages of their sin came due, they handed the bill to you. It's a bill that can never be paid.

Instead of admitting that they had done wrong and going to the wall with some semblance of honor, they said to the governments of the world, "Without our cooperation, your society would turn to chaos overnight."

And the governments said, "What do you want?"

And they said, "Buy all these worthless portfolios from us, at the prices we used to imagine they were worth."

"But we don't have that kind of money. Nobody has that kind of money. All the money in the world wouldn't pay that bill."

"But that's not our problem!"

It was terrorism at the most basic level, and now you and your descendants have been saddled with a burden you cannot possibly carry.

And the terrorists are still at large and much more powerful than ever before, and they don't see how anything can stop them from doing it again, as many times as they want to.

And the only questions that remain in my mind are [1] How many times are you going to let them get away with it before you do something that gives them the pretext for gunning you down in the streets? and [2] How long is it going to take for that to happen?

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All You Need To Know

As you know: In the face of public outrage over -- and House rejection of -- the Bush administration's attempt at a $700 billion extortion -- a "gift" of your money to the very same people who have caused a global financial crisis -- administration hacks reacted in predictable fashion, throwing in another $100 billion worth of bribes in a shameless bid to get the bill passed.

Then the Senate approved, by a 3-1 margin, a thrown-together 450-page bill that few of them could have had time to read, much less consider.

Consider? No other options were considered at all, or even deemed worthy of consideration. And suddenly all the pressure was on the House.

The phones were ringing off the hook in the offices of "our" "Representatives", with public sentiment more or less equally divided between "NO!" and "HELL, NO!"

But the House passed the bill anyway.

This tells you all you need to know.

They don't care what you think. They don't have to. You're only a voter. There's a good chance that they can control the way you think, and thus the way you vote. And even if they can't do that, they can still control the way your vote is counted. Ever since they learned how to do these two things -- perception management and election rigging -- they haven't had to care about you one way or the other. Not that they ever did. They never cared about you -- not a bit. The difference now is that they don't even have to pretend anymore.

Meanwhile, very quietly, Congress allocated at least $448 billion (or maybe even $615 billion) of your money for another year of death and destruction -- anywhere, anytime, and preferably by remote control, if the monsters-in-command have their way.

We don't want this. Some of us have never wanted this; others have just recently realized that they've had enough. But our "elected" "representatives" don't care. They don't have to. And they don't even mind if you know it.

We have no money for health care. We have no money for education. We have no money to fix our roads and bridges, and we especially have no money for the people who have lost everything they owned, to hurricanes or predatory lending schemes or medical bills. And yet we have hundreds of billions every year for killing people, and hundreds of billions more for ... for what, exactly?

Except that we don't have the money; we'll be borrowing all that money just to give it away, and paying interest on it forever. It's an enormous "gift" from us and our children and their children, a gift we have been (or will be) forced to "give".

And the rich will get richer, and the poor will get slaughtered, and if you are an American taxpayer, you will pay for it. That's the New American Deal -- the economic setup for the New American Century.

Comparisons have been made between this "financial crisis" and the "terrorist attacks" of 9/11 -- and rightly so, in some cases. But 9/11 was simply the opening move of the GWOT, and this "crisis" is more like 9/11 than like the GWOT itself. In other words, the fallout from this "rescue" will almost certainly make the original crisis look like just another drop in the ocean -- an ocean of blood and pain and death.

The point is: both were inside jobs, perpetrated with full assistance of the national media by people who know exactly what they're doing, and how to exploit all the ignorance and fear that they were creating, and how to do it again -- whenever they want to.

As far as I can tell, we have three choices: get rid of it, get used to it, or get out.

Getting rid of it would require forces which do not currently exist, aligning themselves in ways that would never be permitted. This option is theoretical at this point, and getting more so all the time -- unless I am very wrong, which I once dared to hope I might be.

Getting used to it ... well, people can adapt to a remarkable variety of conditions, if they want to, or if they are forced to.

Getting out: When I was a kid, the people protesting against the war in Vietnam were always taunted with the chant "Love It Or Leave It!" I thought that was pretty good advice at the time, and I still do.

Just coincidentally [?] I've been re-reading "The Selling of the President 1968", by Joe McGinniss. It's an inside look at the advertising campaign that got Richard Nixon elected president, and I will probably write more about it soon. But for now I want to leave you with a conversation between McGinniss and Eugene Jones, the film-maker who was hired to make Nixon look like the answer to America's troubles 40 years ago.

Joe McGinniss:

One night, toward the end of the campaign, as he sat in his office, Gene Jones said, "Look, I get it from my friends, too. I go to a party and the first thing everybody wants to know is, how can you work for that fascist bastard."

He shrugged.

"I'm a professional. This is a professional job. I was neutral towards Nixon when I started. Now I happen to be for him. But that's not the point. The point is, for the money I'd do it for almost anybody."

"My one qualm about Nixon," Gene Jones said, "is that I'm not sure he's got the sensitivity he should. To Appalachia, to the slums, to the poverty and destitution that reside there. I don't know whether as a human being he's actually got that sensitivity.

"I hope he has, because it's really awful, when you think of all the things wrong inside this country now. The hatred, the violence, the cities gone to hell. And the war. All our kids getting killed in that goddamned war."

He stood, ready to go upstairs, to the third-floor production room, to touch up one of the final spots.

"What are you going to do when this is all over?" I said.

"Move out."

"Yes, I know you're leaving this studio, but I mean where are you going to work next, what are you going to do?"

"No, I didn't mean move out of the studio," he said. "I mean move out of the country. I'm not going to live here anymore."

"What?"

"I've bought myself some land in the Caribbean -- on the island of Montsarrat -- and that's where I'm going as soon as this is over."

"Permanently?"

"Yes, permanently," he said. And then he talked about the direct plane service from Montsarrat to New York, Toronto, and London, and how America was no place to bring up kids anymore. And all this against the background of the commercials he had made: with the laughing, playing children and the green green grass and the sunsets and Richard Nixon saying over and over again what wonderful people we all were and what a wonderful place we lived in.

"... I really don't see any choice," Gene Jones said. "I mean, I don't want my kids growing up in an atmosphere like this."

Then he excused himself and went upstairs.

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Wrong Again! Twice! Another Look At Azizabad And Wall Street

I've made a few mistakes lately and it's time to 'fess up. I was wrong about the Azizabad massacre, and I was wrong about the Wall Street bailout, too. Oops.

The Azizabad Massacre

On August 22, an American airstrike killed more than 90 innocent people in Afghanistan. Most of them were sleeping children.

At the time, I assumed the Pentagon would write off the victims as "collateral damage" and I wrote a piece to that effect. But that didn't happen; instead our military spokesmen denied the story, saying that the airstrike had killed at least 25 "militants" and that at most five civilians had been killed.

Investigators from Afghanistan and the UN went to the scene, interviewed the survivors, looked at the graves, and confirmed the original reports. But the Pentagon stuck to its story. I wrote a second post on the attack in which I mentioned that the damage to civilians was even worse than what had been reported; I also mentioned that the word was being leaked: the Americans had been deceived. An unidentified spokesman blamed the attack on misinformation that the Americans had been given by the Taliban. But the US still didn't admit killing all those people.

Instead Pentagon spokesmen insisted that the UN and Afghan inspectors had been fooled by the survivors of the attack, who (according to the Pentagon) had made up the story about all their relatives being killed. The US even accused the survivors of fabricating evidence -- dead children in graves, and so on. No American investigator ever visited the scene, no Pentagon representative asked any questions on the ground. Instead they just told us what they wanted us to believe. And it was all a pack of lies, of course.

I say "of course" because this is only the latest in a long series of events in which Americans have killed innocent people on the ground in Afghanistan and then lied about it repeatedly. The civilian casualties and the lies intended to cover them have even caused a strain in the Afghan-US "relationship".

If this strain ever got serious it could jeopardize the entire US occupation of Afghanistan, which would be a very good thing in my opinion because the US has no business occupying Afghanistan. The bombing, invasion and subsequent occupation are war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as our crimes against Iraq have been -- though very few will say so.

But I'll say it: the war in Afghanistan would be entirely unjustified, even if the official story of 9/11 were true, which it obviously isn't.

I was still following the Azizabad story when my computer began to break down, and I didn't get a chance to follow up on my two early stories. But Carlotta Gall, veteran war reporter for the New York Times, traveled to the scene, looked at the evidence, talked to the people, and filed a report that left no doubt that the UN and Afghan investigators had been right all along, and that the Pentagon had been blowing smoke up our backsides once again -- with enormous assistance from the American "news" media.

The Times of London posted a graphic cell-phone video from the scene of the atrocity, and reported:

As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries.

Women are heard wailing in the background. “Oh God, this is just a child,” shouts one villager. Another cries: “My mother, my mother.”

The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war.

These are the images that have forced the Pentagon into a rare U-turn. Until yesterday the US military had insisted that only seven civilians were killed in Nawabad on the night of August 21.

The Times has much more to say, including:

In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.

Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.

That's a C130 in the photo, and for the war-porn shot shown here it was shooting flares. For the sleeping children, they used live ammo.

Chris Floyd picked up on Carlotta Gall's report and wrote an excellent post about it, and Glenn Greenwald read Chris and wrote a good piece about it too. Here Greenwald quotes Floyd:

The mass death visited upon the sleeping, defenseless citizens of Azizabad encapsulates many of the essential elements of this global campaign of "unipolar domination" and war profiteering: the callous application of high-tech weaponry against unarmed civilians; the witless attack that alienates local supporters and empowers an ever-more violent and radical insurgency; and perhaps the most quintessential element of all -- the knowing lies and deliberate deceits that Washington employs to hide the obscene reality of its Terror War.

Greenwald drew attention to the amazing fact that the Pentagon's story had been broadcast into America's living rooms on a daily basis by FOX News, which was featuring reports from an "independent journalist".

It turned out that the "independent journalist" was none other than Oliver North, the convicted serial liar who was a useful tool of evil back in the days of the "Iran/Contra Scandal".

How quaint: a scandal!

To think there could even be one of those in these post-9/11 days. Sigh.

Greenwald also quoted Dan Froomkin quoting George Bush:

"Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths. This has been the case throughout the history of warfare. Our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life. Every grieving family has the sympathy of the American people."

Froomkin's comment:

It's a bit hard to convince people that our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life when we don't even acknowledge them.

He's playing on understatement, of course. It's not "a bit hard". It's impossible.

The photo of the injured Afghan boy comes to us courtesy of the AP via Froomkin's post at Nieman Watchdog.

Now I'm thinking back to the Bush quote:

Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths.

He didn't actually use the term "collateral damage" but he said virtually the same thing. So maybe I wasn't entirely wrong after all. But all those people are still dead.

And, unless I am much mistaken, they're dead because Americans called in an airstrike based on a tip they got from the "enemy". It's utterly preposterous, and despicable, and much worse than I originally thought it could be. Fool me once ...

The Wall Street Bailout

... fool me twice!

I was also wrong about the Wall Street bailout. On Sunday, I wrote a brief post congratulating my fellow citizens on our purchase of "toxic waste" "worth" $700 billion, and now it turns out that the purchase is off, or at least it has been delayed, after the House of Representatives refused to pass a bill backed by the President and the House leaders of both parties.

The vote was 228 to 205 against the bill, and the bipartisan breakdown is instructive: 65 Republicans and 140 Democrats voted for the bailout, while 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted against it.

In other words, more than 67% of the Republicans voted against the measure, while nearly 60% of the Democrats voted for it.

The Republicans have usually voted together, especially when the twice-unelected president has expressed firm views. And Bush has made his support of this bailout proposal very clear.

So there's no question that the president has been rebuffed by his own party on this matter. But -- as Chris Floyd points out -- this is not news; last month the big elephants didn't even let the little chimp speak at their convention.

Meanwhile, the donkey house leadership -- exemplified by Miss Impeachment-Is-Off-The-Table, Nancy Pelosi -- despite their best efforts, could only muster 60% of their "colleagues" in support of this obviously criminal president. So Pelosi has not only shown her truly treasonous colors once again; she's been rebuffed by a significant portion of her own party as well.

Nonetheless, House leaders and presidential mouthpieces say, they will try again to get this bill passed, perhaps later in the week. So the deal is not undone yet, and my reporting may have been more "premature" than "wrong".

Or it could be that, like the Azizabad story, the reality is much worse than my early reports indicated.

As it was becoming evident that the congress would not pass the bailout measure, the Federal Reserve announced that it

will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system...

There's no congressional vote on that, my friends, and we're not getting any toxic waste in return. It's just the first of many donations that will be made in rapid succession, unless I am very wrong.

The purpose of this particular transfusion is to

settle the funding markets down, and allow trust to slowly be restored between borrowers and lenders

as Bloomberg helpfully explains.

And that's the end of reality as a motive force, as far as I can tell.

The best way to restore trust between borrowers and lenders would be to resume the enforcement of laws against predatory lending practices, and to let the firms that have made too many bad investments disappear.

Arthur Silber, who has been digging very deeply into this story lately, reports that "the crisis" may cost as much as $5 trillion before they stop throwing money at it. Of course, by that time, things will be much worse than they are now.

And there's the rub.

The bailout is not a solution to the problem. It could never be a solution and it could never be taken seriously as a potential solution, for the simple reason that the problem is insoluble.

It's not even one problem. It's a tangled mess of problems, some of which were almost certainly created deliberately by our government and its best friends, primarily in order to separate us from our money.

The problems include: an insane level of military spending; repeated cuts to the funding of our social systems and physical infrastructure; excessive tax cuts, especially for the excessively rich; extreme deregulation, especially of the financial "industry"; the movement of formerly American industries to foreign countries; increasing global population; limited global resources; increasing destruction of our natural environment; and the strain of committing multiple war crimes simultaneously. All these forces acting together mean that things are getting more expensive, and that we are becoming less able to afford them.

We can't change any of this by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks that have done the worst job of managing their investments, no matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars we give them.

Thus the "solution" cannot work; it doesn't even begin to address the problem; its only possible purpose is to steal your money and give it to some of the people who are most responsible for the mess we're in today.

So why would we do it?

Gimme an "F". Gimme an "E". Gimme an "A". Gimme an "R". What's that spell?

Some of the details in this NYT piece could be classified under "blackmail" ... or "extortion" ... or "terrorism". Like this:

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., appearing at the White House late Monday afternoon, warned that the failure of the rescue plan could dry up credit for businesses big and small, making them unable to make payrolls or buy inventory. Vowing to continue working with Congress to revive the rescue plan, Mr. Paulson said it was “much too important to simply let fail.”

Supporters of the bill had argued that it was necessary to avoid a collapse of the economic system, a calamity that would drag down not just Wall Street investment houses but possibly the savings and portfolios of millions of Americans. Moreover, supporters argued, a lingering crisis in America could choke off business and consumer loans to a degree that could prompt bank failures in Europe and slow down the global economy.

And this:

Stock markets plunged as it appeared that the measure would go down to defeat, and kept slumping into the afternoon when that appearance became a reality. By late afternoon the Dow industrials had fallen more than 5 percent, and other indexes even more sharply. Oil prices fell steeply on fears of a global recession; investors bid up prices of Treasury securities and gold in a flight to safety. [...]

House leaders pushing for the package kept the voting period open for some 40 minutes past the allotted time at mid-day, trying to convert “no” votes by pointing to damage being done to the markets, but to no avail.

and this:

The United States Chamber of Commerce vowed to exert pressure, warning in a letter to members of Congress that it would keep track of who votes how. “Make no mistake,” the letter said. “When the aftermath of Congressional inaction becomes clear, Americans will not tolerate those who stood by and let the calamity happen.”

I've got news for you: The calamity is already happening, Americans have stood by and watched it develop for years without doing anything about it, and it's going to continue regardless of whether or not the federal government gives a few criminal banks more of our money than anyone can possibly imagine.

I've got more news for you: a scoop before its time, if you will...

Electing John McCain won't solve the problem.

Electing Barack Obama won't solve it either.

Now What?

I can't shake the feeling that these two stories are tied together in ways that transcend the obvious "WP was wrong".

For instance, I wonder whether a nation which tolerates -- not to say thrives on -- deliberate lies about the people it has killed, could possibly deserve anything other than a full-spectrum economic meltdown.

The USA has been attacking defenseless countries for generations.

What goes around, comes around.

And it's been a long time coming.

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Congratulations! We Just Spent $700B On Toxic Waste

Congressional leaders and the Bush administration reached a tentative agreement early Sunday on what may become the largest financial bailout in American history, authorizing the Treasury to purchase $700 billion in troubled debt from ailing firms in an extraordinary intervention to prevent widespread economic collapse.

Thus reports the New York Times, along with a photo (reproduced here) of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Henry Paulson delivering the news to the world. The NYT continues:

Officials said that Congressional staff members would work through the night to finalize the language of the agreement and draft a bill, and that the bill would be brought to the House floor for a vote on Monday.

Presumably the Congressional leaders now believe they have the votes to pass it.

Well, congratulations, America. We are now the proud owners of $700 billion worth of toxic waste, none of which we need and none of which we can afford to pay for.

If you read the mainstream media, you will learn that the bipartisan bailout effort was hampered by political bickering. This is politically acceptable code for the fact that the swindle was opposed by people taking firm, principled stands, on both left and right.

From the right, the bailout is seen as a case of government interference in a private sector issue. From the left it is seen as another instance of the government robbing from the poor to give to the rich. Both points of view are valid, and the combination tells a tale: the bailout is in fact a case of government interfering in the private sector to rob from the poor to give to the rich.

And that's why, to the extent that it was supported at all, the support for the bailout has been generated through the manipulation of fear, and fear, and more fear, and the dissemination of lies, and lies, and more lies.

Speaking of lies, how much does it matter that the firms about to be bailed out are under investigation by the FBI for securities fraud? None at all, apparently; and this is reality reversal at its finest. In normal cases of securities fraud, the government confiscates the ill-gotten gains from the criminals. But this time the criminals have been holding the entire country for ransom.

~~~

On a related point: I think I can clear up some of the confusion occasioned by Larisa Alexandrovna's article at Huffington Post, "Welcome to the final stages of the coup..." (which you should read, if you haven't already). In response to her plea to keep the government out of the market, she's been called a communist, a socialist, and a Russian, among other things. Larisa thinks these name-calling attacks have shown the ignorance of the people attacking her, since (as she says) she is not from Russia but from the Ukraine, she's not communist but pointedly anti-communist, and the position she espouses is not socialism or communism, but classic capitalism. Or at least it used to be.

On the other hand, these descriptions of Larisa could very well indicate that her critics know exactly what they're talking about.

Prior to 9/11 -- during the Cold War, for instance -- we were taught that communism was a system in which the government controlled the markets, and for this reason we strongly opposed not only communism but its close relative, socialism. And we were taught to despise and fear the Russians, whose major crime was having been forced to live under such a system.

Meanwhile, half a world away, Russians were taught that capitalism was a system in which the markets control the government. And since we could never deny that, we simply ignored it. We were taught (by example, if nothing else) not to mention capitalism; we call it "democracy" instead. And we were taught that in a democracy, the market was "free", meaning "free of government interference". That was never true, but it's what we were taught -- back in the day.

But that was then, this is now, and the lines have been blurred by decades of propaganda. Now George Bush is America, his policies are American, and anyone who dares to oppose them (from whatever viewpoint, for whatever reason) is anti-American.

And, thanks to our rich Cold War experiences, we have a number of synonyms for "anti-American". These include "communist", "socialist" and "Russian", as well as "liberal" and "leftist".

Not to put too fine a point on it, but: Reality is lost. Words no longer have any meaning.

As Bush so famously stated: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

So in the post-9/11 world there are only two possible political positions. If you're not "with Bush" then you're "with the terrorists", and that makes you "Russian", "communist", "socialist", "liberal", "leftist" and many other derogatory terms too -- all of which now mean exactly the same thing.

But there's no longer any need to be so divisive. Now, with this forced national purchase of "toxic waste", we can unite around a common bond once again.

Left or right; communist or capitalist; liberal or conservative; donkey or elephant or maybe even sentient being; if you look under the thick layer of toxic waste, you can see that we're all Americans again -- all proud owners of a national disaster.

Congratulations, America! We are now well and truly screwed.

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Is Our "Financial Crisis" A New 9/11? Chumps Think So, And I Do Too

I've seen a remarkable number of mentions of 9/11 in connection with the current so-called "financial crisis". Most of them have come from people who seem to have no knowledge of or interest in what actually happened on 9/11. And yet they all seem to "get" the parallel. How odd. Or maybe not.

The most prominent common features, in my view, between the so-called "terrorist attacks" of 2001 and the so-called "financial crisis" of 2008 are:

It's an inside job -- a terrorist attack of unprecedented scope and scale -- enabled by statements from politicians and the media which are chock-full of lies and spin.

There was nothing sudden about it; it was forseen by many and could have been prevented if the government had wanted to prevent it.

Instead it has been encouraged, and facilitated, by the very people who claim to be keeping you safe. But you can see that they don't want you to feel safe. They want you to be afraid, very afraid.

Arthur Silber highlights this nugget:

At Wednesday's House hearing, Rep. Steve LaTourette cut to the chase, summing up the frustration of members who think their constituents aren't getting the gravity of the situation from the dispassionate Bernanke and Paulson show.

LaTourette began talking about "my guy on the couch" back home in his district who was hassled by his boss and angered about doubts he'll be able to get a new car, keep his job, retain his credit card and save for his daughter's education.

"He's scared because he's the first generation who can't pass on the American dream to his daughter," said the Ohio Republican -- adding, "In order to accept this plan...he needs to be more scared."

Paulson obliged.

“He should be angry and he should be scared – and I think right now he’s angrier than he is scared,” said Paulson “And it puts us in a difficult position—no one likes to be painting an overly dire picture and scaring people, but the fact is that if the financial markets are not stabilized the situation can be very severe as it relates not just to his current situation – but keeping his job… this is a serious situation and one he should be concerned about.”

Your fear will be managed and amplified and used as a weapon with which to rob you of your future income and personal security. In the larger picture, millions of lives will be destroyed and a very few will be enriched.

The administration that was elected on a promise of "small government" is using this situation to attempt another enormous power grab, trying to increase the powers of appointed officials while bypassing the courts.

And congress is working overtime -- even as I type -- to write new legislation enabling this outrageous abuse of government to continue.

~~~

I've studied enough economics to know that the entire "science" is manure. It's not a science at all; it's a bogus belief system built on invisible premises that just happen to be false.

The primary false belief behind the "science" of economics is that things that can be bought and sold have value (as reflected in their prices) and things that can not be bought or sold have none (as reflected in their lack of prices).

For economists, their entire world-view depends on this obvious lie. And yet they build intricate simulations and prediction systems on it, and they get frustrated when "the people" don't act according to "the model".

Because of this all-encompassing reliance on the lie and the model rather than reality, nobody trained in "economics" can possibly tell the truth. They can't even see the truth. And that's why I ran away from this so-called discipline as fast as I could, as soon as I realized what it was.

The people who are looking for a handout in this so-called crisis are the scum of the earth, in my opinion. Their request for government money is the epitome of greed gone wild. But it's exactly what we can always expect from the parasites who suck the blood of the system.

Market speculators -- in currency and real estate especially -- add no value to anything; they only add to the prices of things. Rather than designing and building products, or serving the needs of society in some other way, they spend their lives building extensive portfolios of imaginary money which they consider "wealth".

This "wealth" exists only insofar as other people are willing to pay for the elements of their portfolios, and as long as nobody else knows that a portfolio is essentially worthless, the owner of worthless garbage can consider himself "successful", and even "wealthy".

So, in real estate, for instance, speculators buy and sell and flip and flip again, and all this action drives up the price of housing -- which for most people is an essential commodity. Because of the speculation in the housing market, values are artificially inflated to the point where people can't afford the houses, but in the meantime the houses are deteriorating and their actual values are falling.

And eventually it becomes clear to all who will look that the incessant flipping is driving an increase in homelessness, but do the speculators care? NO! They're just busy keepin' up with the other portfolio-builders in their high and mighty society. Or at least they were.

But now they want hundreds of billions of your dollars because it turns out that they can no longer hide the fact that they've been spending way too much for way too little.

What should the government tell them? That they should go out and get jobs like everybody else. That they should create products, or provide services, and earn an honest living for a change -- if they can!

But instead the government wants you to buy the portfolios the speculators can't sell to anyone else.

We hear all the time about how the economy will never survive unless the speculators with the worthless portfolios are bailed out. But -- just like the case in 9/11 -- the fact of the matter is quite the opposite from the official story.

The market will survive -- if it survives at all -- just like a sick body heals itself: by purging itself of toxins, and of the parasites that produce them.

This is how a free market is supposed to work; as the Republicans try to tell us all the time, it's the ownership society and you are responsible for your decisions. If you've bought a portfolio of garbage, you're stuck with it, chump. Caveat emptor, baby, and you have no right to foist your mistakes off on anybody else.

But that's exactly what this bailout is: the government buying worthless securities at highly inflated prices from people who never should have bought them in the first place.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman describes the portfolios in question as "toxic waste" and claims the "grown-up" thing for the government to do is to force the taxpayers to buy all of it. As if we need any more toxic waste.

My five-year-old son uses the word "grown-up". My eight-year-old says "adult". In this context Krugman's vocabulary reminds me of a six-year-old. And so does his reasoning.

Perhaps we cannot expect Paul Krugman -- who was trained as an economist, after all -- to see the truth of the matter. And we certainly cannot expect the NYT to print the truth even if they had somebody on staff willing and able to write it. But the adult thing to do would be to let market rid itself of the parasites and the toxins, just the way it's supposed to work.

The programs endorsed by Krugman and every other bailout proponent amount to robbing from the poor and innocent to give to the rich and guilty, under cover of extreme fear deliberately induced by our own government and media.

And guess what? It's just like 9/11 all over again, and from an administration whose only claim to success was that it supposedly protected us from such things.

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I'm just ranting here of course but there's much more to be said, and you may as well start with Chris Floyd's most recent, "The Resurrectionists: Beltway's Big Money Cultists Bail Out the Dead".

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