What's that gurgling sound I hear?

Might it be the sound of the US dollar being flushed down the international drain?

The Enronic embezzlement which vaporized billions from pension funds and individual investors was but a pale reflection of the institutionalized thievery of a financial system which sells puffs of wind as gold nuggets.

Bushwhacking the commonweal...

"In 2000, when Bush took office, gold was $273 per ounce, oil was $22 per barrel and the euro was worth $.87 per dollar. Currently, gold is over $700 per ounce, oil is over $80 per barrel, and the euro is nearly $1.40 per dollar. If Bernanke cuts rates, we’re likely to see oil at $125 per barrel by next spring."

Defrauding its Lenders ...

“The US Federal Reserve's cuts of 50 basis points ... sent the greenback into a tailspin, while stocks surged. The cuts also put China, with its massive wad of cash kept as US dollars, in a fix. But the Fed, despite the debasement of its own currency and the defrauding of its lenders, can be expected to keep the party going with more cuts next month.”

Gurgle ... Gurgle ... Gurgle...

Lifeline or hangman's rope?

The Fed cuts the Benchmark Rate by half a point ...

Monkey Slide show from Jill Greenberg, The New Republic

Now...Let's see how much cash can I throw in the pot ...

After Funny Money, the deluge?

The Fed wouldn't let financial prestidigitators squirm while the house crumbles ... would it?

A RATE CUT WITH A SHOESHINE AND A SMILE

"The Fed has already fired off two of its big guns, open market operations and, on August 17, a discount-rate cut, to little avail. The next step is a cut in the Federal Funds target rate, the benchmark overnight interest rate used by big banks to lend one another money."

Answer, tomorrow at 14:15 EST.

Round and Round the Bushie-Merry-Go-Round

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Last night, unashamedly, in front of his TV audience, Mr. Bush relieved himself of another barely disguised "Mission Accomplished" speech.

In a no holds barred refutation of Mr. Bush's delusions, Michael Ware provided, point by point, a more realistic appraisal of the situation in the field:

"The president said that:

If America were to be driven out of Iraq, extremists of all strains would be emboldened.
They are [emboldened] now.

Al Qaeda could gain new recruits and new sanctuaries.
They have that now.

Iran would benefit from the chaos and be encouraged in its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and dominate the region.
It is now.

Iraq would face a humanitarian crisis.
It does now.

That we would leave our children a far more dangerous world.
That's happening now."

***********

"Take that, you fools"

With his usual unbridled hubris, Mr. Bush put the world on notice that imperial America is in Iraq to stay!

"This vision for a reduced American presence also has the support of Iraqi leaders from all communities. At the same time, they understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency."

*************

Saigon yesterdsay, Baghdad while the oil lasts, upheaval tomorrow...

The United States have officially declared military bases in 146 countries strategically located to counter a resurgence of Russian influence and an assured economic and probable military confrontation with China.

While Mr. Bush and the neocons are moving their imperious agenda inspite of any and all warnings of impending disaster, I agree with Morford on the stark reality of our predicament.

"Because the truth is, we are well past the point of salvaging anything noble or honest from Bush's massive, historic debacle. We have only this brutal reality: Iraq is, and forever will be, one of the most extraordinary wastes in all of American history."

The blogosphere and the polls hint at an awakening, a revulsion against Bushism stirring the populace.

And the US Congress wallows in its self-inflicted self-serving political inertia, bound and gagged by its paymasters in the corporate and special interests kingdoms.

Round and round the Bushy-Go-Round.

Sine Qua Non

To read Scott Horton's "No Comment" is to adopt it.

Care to see for yourself?

Click here!
for Horton's brief comment of today on the classical "New World Order":

"Novus Ordo Seclorum...When the American Founding Fathers turn to this classical phrase, they are making a proud claim-that the introduction of democracy in America would mark a new age for mankind-just as the Augustan age saw its law-based state as the natural next step in the evolution of humanity from the Homeric world..."

"War on Humanity" Reality Check ...

"...For water is dry, black is white, skyscrapers fall down for the wrong reasons, the sun revolves around our world formed only six thousand years ago and our stupidity is not burning it up..."

Apology to my grand children

"To you, Gavin, and my still-unborn grandchild, I am sorry that I have failed you.

I have failed you for not, as the wise philosopher once advised, leaving the world a better place than I had found it. When I was younger, stronger and more idealistic, it seemed so much easier to pull off.

Because surely one person can make a difference. Look at George Walker Bush, a man installed rather than elected into the White House. Never mind that three quarters of us did not want him or that he got less votes than the other guy. That is just the way it is, children, and this is the world that I have bequeathed to you.

You were and will be brought into the world into a country that does not care if democracy becomes fascism, cannot rouse itself to action if our government is stolen or even actually support the suspension of constitutional rights given to us by infinitely wiser men than we have today, rights that millions have died protecting so we can shelve them like unwanted Christmas gifts.

Forgive me for not jumping into the breach sooner, an abyss created by the holes burned out of the Constitution by four jetliners, white phosphorous, bombs and mortars and the flame of religious and political bigotry.

Less and less makes sense in this world I hand to you like a worn-out heirloom. We have helped fashion a world in which water is dry, black is white, skyscrapers fall down for the wrong reasons, the sun revolves around our world formed only six thousand years ago and gravity doesn’t exist.

This is your world and you must atone for our sins.

And as you sit on my knee with a room-brightening smile on your unblemished face, you are trusting that I am easing you into a world where all faces will always smile at you and voices will always be soothing and everything is soft. And it breaks my heart that I have to disappoint you.

Because, you see, this is a world in which humans kill each other over differences in politics and religion, wars that get babies like you killed without much if any apology.

This is the ugliest of realities, my darling grandchildren, offered in the most perishable of mediums. But for now, I can continue smiling and dandling you on my knee, pretending that all is well and good in the wonderful expanding world. But, God help me, I cannot maintain it for much longer.

For fiction is overtaken by truth. Yet the truth is, the truth has been overtaken by the fiction.

For water is dry, black is white, skyscrapers fall down for the wrong reasons, the sun revolves around our world formed only six thousand years ago and our stupidity is not burning it up."

Let'em eat cakes

On Krugman ...

"Two years ago today, Americans watched in horror as a great city drowned, and wondered what had happened to their country. Where was FEMA? Where was the National Guard? Why wasn't the government of the world's richest, most powerful nation coming to the aid of its own citizens?"

The US government has not come to the aid of its own citizens because the country's governance has been hijacked...by parvenu millionaires wielding the power of imperious Roman senators and by members of that House on the hill filled with social and historical illiterates mired in arguments over the best ways in which to dismember and bury the American democratic experiment…for the greatest profit of a coterie of elitists empowered by the rapine of Enronic thugs.

... The question is whether any of this will change when Mr. Bush leaves office...

The unconstitutional [fascist] powers which Mr. Bush has arrogated at the expense of a supine, self-serving Congress and with the help of a complicit judiciary will remain at the disposal of the next White House puppet.

The real question is : Does not the lesson of the last seven years prove the adage that "GOP power corrupts and Bushist power corrupts absolutely"?

There’s a powerful political faction in this country that’s determined to draw exactly the wrong lesson from the Katrina debacle — namely, that the government always fails when it attempts to help people in need, so it shouldn’t even try [...] And I’m not sure that faction is losing the argument. The thing about conservative governance is that it can succeed by failing: when conservative politicians mess up, they foster a cynicism about government that may actually help their cause."

The job is just about done: the country is industrially, politically, infrastructurally, ethically and internationally bankrupt. While the US is still "banking" on its formidable array of armaments to pillage foreign resources and threaten the planet, an equally formidable assemblage of emerging economic powers and military alliances are poised to remind the American emperor that he really has no clothes...

Hear the Russians ... Chinese ... coming ?

"Katrina and the Raves"

..."Not so much as a syllable of complaint, censure or even constructive criticism from the neoconservative hyenas about 1800 dead, billions in damage and the virtual disappearance and subsequent martial takeover of one of America’s most historic, colorful and vibrant cities.

Not even a joke about “Lake George” or “Row vs. Wade” in twenty foot-high fetid standing floodwater, not a breath mentioned of Bush demoting FEMA from a once-competent cabinet-level agency ably run by Clinton appointee James Lee Witt and made a useless appendage to a bloated and useless host called Homeland Security.

Then again, the results speak for themselves: The poor that have been allowed to come back from the FEMA-run internment camps and formaldehyde-impregnated trailers for which they’ll have to start paying rent next year have been priced out of decent housing, priced out of decent schools for their kids, have seen whatever work they can pick up cleaning up their own city snapped up by Halliburton, that Bush tried to get around the 1931 Bacon Davis prevailing wage act, that their water system’s been privatized and that Bush is now trying to get back $485,000,000, almost a half a billion dollars back, from these still largely jobless and homeless people because, with FEMA, it’s feast or famine.

And the likes of Viguerie don’t hate Karl Rove because he failed as the face-saving Czar of New Orleans’ “reconstruction.”

And they’re not angry at Bush for rolling up record deficits that would bankrupt a dozen Bill Gates with endless tax cuts and that he’s got the chutzpah to hit Congress up for an extra $50,000,000,000 for his bloody oil war and, by doing so, is essentially saying, “Congress is my bitch.”

No, no, no, it’s none of that.

You see, according the real dick-twisters on the Far Right, it’s because, after nearly 75 years, they never actually quite did away with that damnable welfare state that they’d inherited from that evil, wicked liberal FDR, someone whose worth to certain historically-challenged Republicans is solely in leading us to victory in a war that can used to analogize the war on terror.

It’s because the rich, according to Scott Hodge at CPAC, still aren’t rich enough.

They hate Bush for his seeming conciliatory immigration bill, therefore in not keeping America as white as it once was, in not being able to singlehandedly reverse a national trend of Hispanics being the fastest-growing minority in America. They hate Bush because he bloating the government beyond all manageable size in their view disqualifies us from the cherished oligarchy of which they wistfully dream.

They hate Karl Rove for failing the party, for interrupting his string of consecutive successful thrown elections, for not fulfilling on his open promise of a 4th Reich of a thousand years that barely lasted four, because George couldn’t quite pull off opening up that string of McMocracies across the Middle East packed with right wing ideological puppets and got, instead, an unshaved version of George W. Bush in Nouri al-Maliki.

They hate Alberto Gonzales for not firing enough US attorneys, for not being able to help pack the Justice Department with 93 solidly and certifiably insane Liberty Law School grads and turning the DOJ into the Democrat-hunting pogrom that they needed. They hate him for looking like a flannel-tongued fool on Quaaludes testifying to the Senate about the once-secret NSA wiretapping program and for bumbling into John Ashcroft’s ICU room in front of witnesses.

They are all traitors to the cause, every one of them.

But the 1800 that Katrina killed, the hundreds of thousands that she’d displaced? Well, they don’t seem to have a problem with that."

Thank God some powerful people still have their priorities in order.

Gleaned from:
Welcome to Pottersville: Katrina and the Raves

Behold your new endless money supply ...

Funny money

Friday, 27 August 07

Securities used by institutional borrowers to obtain loans and leverage more Enronic rapine of pension funds are being exposed daily as worthless chits ... but don't worry, the Fed is here to rescue fearless and lawless financial adventurers.

As the Fed cut discount rates today, breathless borrowers hanging at the end of their margin will get a brief respite in looser credit ... while the foundations of their trust in the viability of the system are disolving underfoot.

Billions of funny money injected into the system last week and coffin nails provided today in a desperate last move to prevent the inevitable.

Another kind of Surge before the Fall

"Endless War

"...under the new dispensation when the netherworld has become the main show and the compensatory human rights rhetoric an ever more strident exercise in hypocrisy, legitimacy seems to come from impunity.

And the American political class has no more patience with divergent interests, claims of independent judgment, or "decent respect for the opinion of mankind".

Pelosi has met her Georgerloo ...

By all accounts, president George Bush has violated his oath to the Constitution by declaring himself and his administration neither answerable nor accountable to anyone he does not sanction.

Madame Pelosi, first woman to occupy the powerful post of Speaker of the House, will also be the first sworn constitutional officer to witness and disregard a blatant rape of our Constitution.

One may reasonable assume that madame Pelosi is more concerned with political gaming than with saving this rapidly crumbling democracy.

Nancy Pelosi embedded in not so funny Bushiness

Anyone else hear the barbarians laughing at her from the Supreme White House?

Ahmadinejad vs George Dubious Bush

A few more atrocities, anyone?

Let's face it. If you combined the intellectual quotient of a Bush, a Rumsfeld and of all those imperious neocons who bask in their predatory delusions , you could not begin to solve the conundrum irremediably contrived by America's enronic corporate and political elites.

They and they alone have dragged this nation into the maelstrom of dead-end régime changes; they, alone, are recreating today's drug dealing Afghanistan; they, alone are feeding the cause of fundamentalist extremism in blood-soaked Iraq; and these aberrations are but hypnotic distractions.

These would-be conquerors now have their sclerotic vision fixed on Iran.

Roped into a tug of war with emerging power blocs who compete ever more aggressively for the planet's diminishing oil supplies, stripped of the international legitimacy which the USA once briefly claimed as a world leader, juggling with an exhausted military manpower, the Bushist neocons can neither abandon the oil fields of the Middle-East nor remain embroiled in the suicidal politico-religious Islamic confrontation which its military industrial profiteers have provoked.

Don't be surprised if these international thugs now resort to nuclear weaponry in order to try and delay their inevitable rout.

Given the Bushists's penchant for illicit, illegitimate and illegal expedients, nuclear atrocities may well be the next escalation in depravity to which they resort in a frantic search for a way out of their own contrived nightmare.

China Rampant

Uneasy shuffling among the imperious ranks

Chinese submarines lurk in Japanese territorial waters, Sino-Japanese dispute rights to offshore gas fields, the European Union formally declares China a "strategic partner".

Great Balls of Smoke!

"Bonhomie is officially back in transatlantic relations after George Bush's fence-mending trip to Europe - but a fresh divisive crisis could be looming over the EU's determination to lift its 14-year arms embargo on China."

Ooops !

"China's growing domestic defence manufacturing capability has rendered the EU's arms embargo meaningless".

Wrinkled Mirrors

"While Japan's Middle Eastern oil supplies are shipped through the Taiwan Straits, US concerns about Chinese rising power causes "deep concern" about any "change in the balance of relations between China and Taiwan".

The US Treasury would go belly-up if either Japan or China decide to call in their markers!

Hubris Major

"The US could retaliate by curbing technology exchanges with the European Union"
Watch Old Europe retaliate and stop exporting their Einsteins and Von Brauns.

Neoconism oblige

The U.K.'s Gordon Brown, touting for business in Beijing and Shanghai while Mr Bush is in Brussels...

Round and round the Bushy-Go-Round...