01.19.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:03 pm by George Smith
I’d still have only eighty dollars.
“President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address Tuesday night to stake out a populist vision of tax reform and new middle-class benefits [to be paid for by a capital gains tax increase on the wealthy] — and practically dare Republicans to say no,” writes Politico.
Indeed, they have taken that dare & already said “NO!” It’s just theater.
And the President will be booed by half the room, as well he should be, because we voted for the other side a couple months ago and that wasn’t theater. Even though a polling says his popularity is at some kind of high.
So share this song [1] in defense of the swag of wealthy Americans. It never gets old. I even made the lyrics scroll so you can sing along!
1. I know you would never share it. I write it to be irritating. I’m fully aware that me asking someone to share something from here on the Internet is like asking for a new car.
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01.08.15
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:09 pm by George Smith
What you already knew, what I made a sermon and a song about, reported by one of the Culture of Lickspittle’s shoe-shine class poor man’s intellectuals at the Washington Post’s “Wonk blog”:
Most of America’s richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country’s most financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
[And a] quarter of the country … feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don’t work hard enough.
Now go listen to the sermon, Jesus of America, and tell me it’s not better than anything you can read on the matter.
“[He] is not the one who fed the poor loaves and fishes. This is not the Jesus who liked lepers. He found the liberty, the land of liberty and freedom; we told him what to do.
Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor; if you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’re gonna wind up like stray cats, around your door on the floor, begging for loads of kibble and rich food. Everyone knows they’re just selfish animals.
That’s what Jesus said.
And remember, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a poor man to get into the kingdom of Heaven.
Buy a copy of the album, Loud Folk Live, five bucks — cheap. Or review a copy. Or talk about it. Or something. Or not.
The New York Times continues its series, more or less described as Wrestling with the problem of WhiteManistan, in Sunday’s edition entitled, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?”
The answer is “Yes.” But with a deadly qualifier.
It’s cheaper to live in the neo-Confederacy but it’s based on destructive model that ends in national entropy in the collapsed democracy. The economic success of New Dixie, if you can call it that, depends on continually depressed and compressed labor costs coupled with fossil fuel mining booms.
The latter also threatens quicker ruin from global warming.
The Times contributor recognizes this as a serious problem with national, even global, consequences:
But fracking and sprawling your way to growth aren’t a sustainable national economic strategy.
The allure of cheap growth has handed the red states a distinct political advantage. [The red state] economic system may be outmoded and obsolete, but it is strong enough to blight the future. The Democrats may be able to draw on the country’s growing demographic diversity and the liberal leanings of younger voters to win the presidency from time to time, but the real power dynamic is red.
“Despite their longstanding divisions, red state and blue state economies depend crucially on one another,” writes Richard Florida for the newspaper.
Florida seems to imagine there must be a solution. We must somehow learn to go forward.
But you can’t really speak the truth about WhiteManistan in a big newspaper. It’s too depressing.
There is no way forward in my lifetime. The division is permanent. The present is blight. The question is how fast it worsens in the coming years. And how much money one has to be insulated from the consequences.
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12.16.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 11:57 am by George Smith
Another day, another milestone, in WhiteManistan:
A majority of Americans believe that the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified, even as about half the public says the treatment amounted to torture, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
By an almost 2-1 margin, or 59-to-31?percent, those interviewed support the CIA’s brutal methods, with the vast majority of supporters saying they produced valuable intelligence.
In general, 58?percent say the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often??? or “sometimes.???
The only good news is the pool was restricted to a sample size of 1,000.
I have a hard time believing such a small sample provides much meaningful information in a country as segmented and economically riven as the United States.
Many people just can’t be reached on the telephone anymore, for a whole slew of good reasons.
[One man interviewed by the Post] said torturing people during war was appropriate if there was reasonable suspicion the individuals had important information that could aid the United States.
The person was thirteen when we started torturing people. Representative? I’m thinking maybe not so much.
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12.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 10:31 am by George Smith
The new Confederacy, much like the old.
Frank at Pine View Farm points to an honest but devastating analysis of the problem of WhiteManistan.
Excerpted from Racial Divide: The Tragedy of America’s first black President, from Der Spiegel:
The American problem has many different facets, but it is accurate to say that it is mostly white men who shoot young African-Americans in the service of the state.
The [Republican Party’s] most radical supporters viewed Obama’s speeches and proposed legislation as nothing more than a black man’s attempt to exact revenge against the country’s white majority. Even if they don’t always say so, Obama’s opponents have always felt that his actions represent a threat to white people, whether he launched a federal investment programs aimed at economic stimulus or proposed making the healthcare system a little fairer.
You’ll notice the map from Der Spiegel showing a majority of African Americans still living in the old Confederacy.
And that is where they have now been virtually completely eliminated from power. They have elected representation but that representation is minority, for practical purposes, banned from legislating or having any say in government in 2014. That’s an apartheid state within the state.
That poison, the toxin of old Dixie is spread throughout the country. No state, not even California, is totally free of it.
What Der Spiegel does not mention is that the party of Abe Lincoln is the party that has inflamed the white tribe against the first African-American president, the agency that has concentrated and focused the belief that it is American white people who have been victimized by the president, that it is they who have been subjected to a systemic racism.
This goes back to the end of the Civil War. The armies of the south were defeated, its territory overrun, its agriculture and trade in ruins. And it engendered a burning resentment, a sense of victimization that could not be erased.
This is well described in this bit from the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
Lincoln was assassinated and Reconstruction slowly failed.
Today, the Republican Party is, whether broadly recognized or not, the party of John Wilkes Booth.
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12.04.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 10:29 am by George Smith
Seriously.
There’s a really long list of people who need a shit ton of reparations, don’t you think?
Predictably, WhiteManistan’s klassic rock kleagle, horrid’s horrid, explains it’s “a scam:”
Only to these off the cliff denial cultists does “Hands up, don’t shoot??? make any sense, even though no one can site [sic — jesus, there’s no limit to the talent] an instance where a black man had his hands up and got shot by a white cop.
In the world of the racist race-baiting industry, no one will ever let facts get in the way of their scam …
And though each and every black life indeed matters to everyone I know, clearly they don’t merit a protest, an inquisition, a grand jury probe or the time of day …
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12.03.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, WhiteManistan at 4:36 pm by George Smith
Hat tip to Steve Aftergood for pointing out the latest and most pathetic accomplishment of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, aka the House Congressional EMP Caucus. (Which was a name the mainstream media could use to get around having to explain that they were, well, electromagnetic pulse crazies.)
Yesterday it was responsible for passing a bill entitled “The Critical Infrastructure and Protection Act,” which — if you took the title seriously — sounded like big stuff.
However, the title was just to mislead. The “act” was simply a request that the Department of Homeland Security begin more research studies on the threat of electromagnetic pulse attack and potential steps for thwarting it.
Deep in the fine print — the bill would have no regulatory power and called for no no new authorizations.
Translated: A feeble attempt to carve out some high-button welfare funding for the same small coterie of right-wing kooks who’ve flogged the menace of electromagnetic pulse for the last fifteen years. And who still appear as representatives of the disbanded “EMP Commission” and assorted related functions, like the lobbying group EMPAct America, in columns and news pieces at fringe right-wing publications.
The best name for the bill, and an honest one, would have been the EMP Crazy Protection Act.
If you want actual names in the cult, simply read through the archives. It’s literally the chronicle of a ton of dog excrement stuffed in a hundred pound bag.
This legislation, like everything else sponsored by EMP Caucus leader Trent Franks of Arizona, will be dead in the Senate. Not going to get to the President.
Indeed, as far as the Cult of EMP Crazy is concerned it has been all down hill stumbling since its leading light, pol emeritus Roscoe Bartlett, was sent into retirement in 2014. (Although he never actually got anything done, either.)
Summarized from that article, the decade-spanning nature of the whole unpleasant movement:
[The] paranoid and steeped-in-authoritarianism mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom was turned into a highly-professionalized and tenacious industry, built on the exploitation of a thick seam of WhiteManistan kook-ism and its love of end-times stories in which the virtuous are saved and the sinners destroyed. It’s a profitable business.
That niche business is “prepper” survivalism.
It’s the selling of property off the grid where one’s family can ride out the collapse of American civilization, the peddling of the equivalent of heroic romance novels on said calamity, and the taking of the show on the road and getting the ticket punched at Tea Party gatherings in red states where the cult can indulge the fantasy of electromagnetic pulse doom as a states’ rights issue.
Running parallel with “The National Infrastructure Protection Act” was sister House legislation making Social Security safe from Nazis.
All four of them.
No, I am not making it up.
Wrote someone at the New York Times:
This is what our elected leaders are doing? At a time when Congress is ignoring immigration reform, stumbling and bumbling over a whole pack of wars, threatening to shut down the government once again, failing to provide adequate living wages to working Americans and adequate unemployment benefits to non-working Americans, letting the bridges and highways fall apart, and so many other things?
Yes.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 3:35 pm by George Smith
Every week, the country flirts more and more with massive breakdown in the trust of police forces, justice and fairness. Real bedrock stuff.
Good people everywhere are appalled. Yet nothing is allowed to change. Systemic paralysis reigns. The body is poisoned, its ideologies and beliefs corrupt, but the rotting status quo is maintained.
The President knows it and said so. Count on WhiteManistan, once again, to do virtually everything wrong in the next few days.
From Reuters, on the lack of indictment of a black man choked to death in New York, for the crime of being black and selling cheap cigarettes on the sidewalk:
A New York City grand jury has decided not to charge a police officer who killed an unarmed black man with a chokehold while trying to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes, the local district attorney said on Wednesday …
Staten Island resident Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, died on July 17 after police officers tackled him and put him in a chokehold. The city’s medical examiner ruled the death a homicide.
New York City police prepared on Wednesday for protests that could potentially paralyze major roads and tunnels in the city.
Daniel Skelton, a black 40-year-old banker, told the news service: “A black man’s life just don’t matter in this country.”
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11.25.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 2:56 pm by George Smith
Not this month. Probably not in the next few years. But it will come.
This country can’t survive not dealing with its original sin.
If you saw the President asking there be no violence in Ferguson immediately after the grand jury result was announced, you could tell he knew there would be rioting. And he knows there’s not much he can do anymore to ameliorate that which is deathly wrong with the United States of America.
Violence was inevitable. White America is a culture that allows the police and many others to gun down black people without consequence.
From the New York Times:
For the black community of Ferguson, the killing of Michael Brown was the last straw in a long train of abuses that they have suffered daily at the hands of the local police. News accounts have strongly suggested, for example, that the police in St. Louis County’s many municipalities systematically target poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops — partly to generate fines — which has the effect of both bankrupting and criminalizing whole communities.
In this context, the police are justifiably seen as an alien, occupying force that is synonymous with state-sponsored abuse …
President Barack Obama was on the mark last night when he said, “We need to recognize that this is not just an issue for Ferguson, this is an issue for America.??? The rioting that scarred the streets of St. Louis County — and the outrage that continues to reverberate across the country — underlines this inescapable point. It shows once again that distrust of law enforcement presents a grave danger to the civic fabric of the United States.
“[The] police in St. Louis County’s many municipalities systematically target poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops — partly to generate fines — which has the effect of both bankrupting and criminalizing whole communities,” it reads, again.
This piece, by WaPost reporter Radley Balko, is what it refers to.
It’s a savage indictment in its documentation of how the white power structure in and around St. Louis employs the police to prey on and loot African Americans in the community.
In any other country it would be reason enough for a joint military intervention or installation of a UN peace-keeping force and subsequent removal of the entire civilian government.
There is no justice in Ferguson. But consequence will eventually be delivered to us all for it.
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11.19.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund, WhiteManistan at 3:49 pm by George Smith
I don’t see Stephen Colbert much anymore except in clips like these. I’m long past the idea that the best journalism, via satire, is done at Comedy Central because the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do things the enfeebled mainstream media can’t.
Big whoop. It’s journalism or comedy for what’s left of the middle and upper middle classes, the servants of the top who haven’t yet had their heads put on the chopping block.
In other words, entertainment for the people who did nothing a couple weeks ago. Yeah, laugh, laugh, Colbert is sooo funny. But he and Jon Stewart haven’t changed a damn thing after a decade of broadcast. Instead, we got the lowest voter turnout in my lifetime and the installation of even more old Purity Party fascists from WhiteManistan.
In the linked segment Colbert goes on in his usual way about “salvage markets” where you can buy expired food at cut-rate prices. (I had it as an embed and it autoplays, another reason Colbert & Co. deserve to be hit in the face with bricks. See the line on bull-whipping below.)
I suppose it would be almost funny if I haven’t used one of Pasadena’s city food banks bread programs. Much of what is laid out on the couple of tables is expired product from the local chains. Differing from the “salvage stores??? shown above, it’s FREE.
No one makes a profit from it. In fact, all the local food banks in Pasadena are free, as you are tipped to when you arrive at the point.
What does expired bread taste like? It’s as you think, often hard almost to a rock-like state, or stale. Of course, you can always put it in the microwave with a little water to humidify the stuff.
Yes, you can use your limited SNAP dollars to buy “expired food??? as opposed to the fresh food it’s supposed to buy in the supermarket. Stretch the account.
But how about a law that prevents the local businesses from profiteering on it by disallowing diversion of expired food to markets set up for the purpose of selling it? Or requiring business that do such a thing to send 150 percent of an equivalent of unexpired food to a free food bank or conduct sale of it to SNAP card holders within their own business at 50 percent off?
Nah, of course not.
The awkward awfulness of Stephen Colbert is that he gets his million dollar salary off mock yucks of this nature.
Yes, isn’t it great that horrid predatory behavior in the corporate dictatorship provides great journalism and laughter for Comedy Central! They deserve a bull-whipping.
I don’t see any people laughing at the 99 cent store when I’m there.
H/t to Frank at Pine View Farm, where first I saw it. (In other words, this is a comment rescue/reprint operation.)
You can also get some laughs on life in the corporate dictatorship from Loud Folk Live. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Stephen Colbert, orders of magnitude so and it’s not patronizing. It’s also not for Colbert or Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central audience of white-bread nothings and evening pearl-clutchers, which just about all alone makes it entirely worthy of attention.
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11.17.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 1:05 pm by George Smith
The discredited governor of one of the shires of WhiteManistan declares a state of emergency and orders his police force and part of the WhiteManistan National Guard to prepare to put down a rebellion. This is called “protecting the civil rights” of non-WhiteManistan citizens in the affected area.
From the Washington Post:
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) declared a state of emergency Monday in anticipation of possible unrest following the announcement of findings of two separate criminal investigations into the death of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by a Ferguson, Mo. police officer …
Nixon said in the order he directed the Missouri State Highway Patrol, St. Louis County Police Department, and St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to “operate as a Unified Command to protect civil rights??? and put the St. Louis County Police Department in charge of security in Ferguson related to protest areas and demonstrations.
He also said the adjutant general of the Missouri could “call and order into active service such portions of the organized militia as he deems necessary to protect life and property.???
Nothing inspires confidence more than deployment of the troops and replenishment of tear gas and pepper spray.
In related news, the ultimate good boy and sincere pearl-clutcher, Nicholas Kristof continues his rhetorical wrestling match with the problems of WhiteManistan.
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