Author: John
We've got it covered
Run the banks?
On some other blogs I read (obsessively, lately), I’m starting to see people calling for a run on the banks. Go down and take out $700.00. Or or $70. Or $7,000. Whatever you can afford. That’s what they’re saying, not me. The idea is that even though nobody in the country likes this bailout, congress is going to vote for it. Since they won’t listen to our calls, faxes and letters, send a message that they cannot ignore.
Frankly, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me. Sure, it’s like burning down your own house to make a point, but it’s better than just being robbed at gunpoint with no protest at all.
I support the Bernie Sanders Plan
I’ve been doing a fair amount of handwringing over the meltdown on this-ahere blog lately, but now let me offer something positive. I support, 100 %, the plan put forth by Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont. Sanders is asking for citizen co-signers. I signed, you should too.
As for the crappy plans before Congress now, I hate all of them, including Dodd’s. If they go through, I’m not sure I’ll ever file taxes again. If Bush thinks it’s so all-fired important to make Paulson a monarch, then why has he not gone on television to explain why democracy must end now? It’s all baloney. I’m with Bernie on this one.
Help Hank Paulson by helping yourself to the bailout
Add your shit to the shitpile. It’s a patriotic duty; plus, you get lots and lots of free money. Do it today! I did!
Cuddle up baby; cuddle up tight
Over on the Great Orange Satan, sane and smart America-loving people have been providing terrifying and more terrifying and still more terrifying analyses of where we are and how we got here (thanks in no small part to that lying, power-lusting senile tantrum-throwing baby John McCain and the truly monstrous Cheney/Bush junta). It seems to me that the United States of America may be in more danger of falling apart than at any point since 1864. Let me provide a second link to that last-listed item, by Devilstower, with the sublime title Three Times is Enemy Action. Go read it, my friends, and tremble for your country.
Uber neutrino-class wetmechanic Bremser said to me yesterday in private correspondence, (apropos of this poetic flight),
Odd, that’s the second day in a row that Jefferson Airplane was quoted
to me in the context of this meltdown; the first time the lyrics were:
In loyalty to their kind
They cannot tolerate our minds.
In loyalty to our kind
We cannot tolerate their obstruction.You can imagine how we got around to remembering that lyric.
Today it’s a it’s a song by the Stones that I cannot shake.
Bush and Paulson to Nation: “UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKERS!!”
If you’re not reading Atrios as the class war goes into high gear (the money class has the virtual Panzers and hellfires fired from drones and legions of off-the-books Blackwater goons, but to quote the late great tripped-out lizard king himself, ‘you got the guns but we got the numbers’), you really should be. I love this dog bark: Nationalize it all, baby. It’s Kapitalism with a kapital k! Fuck yeah! And don’t forget to bail out Phil Graham’s foreign bank while you’re at it.
This is fun! The Republicanism of the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Norquist era has always been about nihilism, the pure joy of fucking shit up, vandalism, destruction, and setting loose the dogs of war. But until now they’ve pretended it was about other stuff. As the movie comes to its climax, Dracula is showing his fangs: no more pretense of being a misunderstood minor aristocrat from foreign Transylvania. It’s bloodsucking time, suckas, and you sure look tasty to me!
Man, I’ve got to find my old Jefferson Airplane records. There’s a song a need to hear, the perfect soundtrack for this rape and plunder, the New Republican Anthem :
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are, we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves
Up against the wall
Up against the wall, motherfucker
Tear down the walls
Tear down the walls
But please, President Bush, don’t be so totally mean. I mean, don’t bogart that joint, dawg. Everybody needs to get toked up to watch this show, dontcha think?
NPR takes its cue from Howie Carr: Blame it on the Negroes!
The other day I was listening to the exasperating Howie Carr’s talk show. Carr is a Boston-based populist Republican who purports to be an Independent. Like all Republican talk-show hosts, he’s an asshole. However, he does have his good points. For one thing, he took on the corrupt and dangerous Bulger brothers, risking his life to do so (Whitey Bulger is the model for the Jack Nicholson character in The Departed). For another, Carr, who is Catholic, took on the Catholic Church over the child rape scandal and helped drive Cardinal Law from our shores. And finally, he is relentless in exposing corruption and hypocrisy among Democrats in office, especially those in state or city offfices. In a corrupt one-party state like Massachusetts, this is a valuable service.
But he’s basically a Republican shill, and his commentary on the Big Shitpile crisis has been horrible. Last week he was going on and on about how the problem was that so many mortgages had been written for poor people in innner cities (Black people, that is, by obvious implication) who got in over their heads and defaulted, so now banks were failing and Wall Street could collapse, taking our whole way of life with it. And all because of the Negroes! And the Libruls, of course, who forced the banks to make these loans by way of “anti-redlining” laws promoted by Joe Kennedy and his ilk.
And I heard similar stuff on National Public Radio yesterday.
No deal
Ayn Rand in Heaven
Ayn Rand was a muddle-headed thinker who wrote wooden prose, “novels” that were really merely polemics .1 She maintained the beliefs that all wealthy people merited their wealth, that all poor people merited their poverty, that selfishness was a virtue, that the myth of Robin Hood was pernicious because Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Because she did not believe in history (or complexity or nuance), Rand did not count as important that Robin Hood lived during feudal times. In her philosophy, it does not matter to her how wealth and poverty were distributed in feudal times, nor how the wealthy got wealthy. Her fictional world is ahistorical. In her world, government is synonymous with force, but in her worldview, the only legitimate use of force is to take from the poor and give to the rich. She loathes democracy and thinks well of plutocracy. The current Bush/Cheney government of plutocrats would be very much to her liking, I think.
She is a high priestess in the Cult of the Market Gods.
Ayn Rand’s writing is known be esteemed by, among others, Alan Greenspan (“the whore”, as my father calls him), and by impressionable teenage boys with little social success. I don’t know if Dick Cheney is a fan of Rand, but he is the epitome of a Randian hero.
Anyway, Rand is dead, presumably in Heaven. From whence she must be beaming down upon us with great joy at the developments of the past few weeks, when a hundred billion dollars was taken from the treasury and given to the investor class, all in the name of “stabilizing the market” (Market gods angry! Market gods want eat money! Must feed market gods! Paulson! Bernanke! Feed market gods more money! Now!) The wealth transfers of the “Resolution Trust Corporation” bailout of the S&Ls under the Reagan regime, the Bear Stearns and Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac handouts of more recent times were as mere hors d’oeuvres before the meal of the Great Investor Class Bailout of 2008. It’s about time for a Randian beatification or maybe even apotheosis, wouldn’t you say.
UPDATE: I forgot to include a link to this diary entry over on Daily Kos, which got me thinking. I agree with the post 100%.
1. When the woman who is now my wife and I were first dating, we found ourselves talking about Ayn Rand novels one afternoon. I had read Atlas Shrugged and one or maybe two others, but not The Fountainhead. She summarized it for me in one memorable sentence: “In this one he’s an architect.” Really, if you’ve read one of her novels, you’ve read them all.
