Another Gin Mill

As the MIC overlords try and gin up a case to attack Iran, it’s worth remembering these salient facts:

• The CIA as recently as 2007 “assessed with fair confidence that Iran has no nuclear weapons research program.”
• Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday (Oct. 3, 2009) that Iran could not produce nuclear weapons at Natanz.
• Iran’s military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Yes, Virginia, that’s ~3% of the AIG bailout.
• Demonizing people by calling them unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. Iran has not started any wars.
• Israel, Pakistan and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they refused to sign the NPT and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing at all has been done to any of them by the UNSC.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq because- well, I’m not sure I remember why but then who does (oh wait, that’s right, it was a pretext, a ruse). I do recall the case was made with official lies, photo-shopped evidence, and artifacts of prurient neo-con fantasy (mobile chem/bio weapon labs? C’mon, 50% of them don’t even have indoor plumbing).

There was no threat to us from either country at that time, as any clear-headed person with half a brain could sort out facts from bullshit. However… never, ever count out the pure pussified panic antics of terror-fied Merkins and their dear leaders desire to exploit this for personal, private gain. If it wasn’t for Merkin’s traditionally misplaced trust in their dark overlords oligarchy elected leaders then perhaps the neo-con pincer movement to be deployed by the Clueless One ™ and Darth Cheney et al (MIC) would have been seen for the schoolboy taunt that it was.

Merkins have to be the most gullible electorate on the planet.

Ladies and germs, we all should know this by now (folks, C’mon). When the MIC sees an opening to secure a low-cost source of oil (which they will then bilk you over even after all your help securing strategic targets, thank you Gomer Pyle), then it’s simply time for our host to throw the cards over, and announce ‘ladies and sperm donors, we have a loser.’

So people ask me why I say Merkins are on the whole are such relentlessly stupid mother-fuckers. I simply point out they re-elected the Clueless One after his totally inept response to 9-11, and if they have even an ounce of shame they hang their heads and cry.

The top ten things you didn’t know about Iran Juan Cole, Salon

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“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.” —Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye, 1982

A peak behind the curtain

[ H/T ] [ Prof. Anthony Sutton ]

Forging George Orwell

[ H/T ]

Full Spectrum Dominance

Part I

Part II

Background.

In USSA Banks Rob You!

… with help from their getaway driver, Wall Street; crime boss the Fed., Inc.;  and lookout, Treasury.

Armed and extremely dangerous!

The Safecracker

Treasury Announces $1 Trillion Plan to Buy Banks’ Bad Debt [BB]

Wall Street Applauds Plan to Soak Up Bad Bank Assets [AP]

International Organization of Securities Commissions To Assure Stocks Always Go Up [DB]

How to game TALF 2.0 [declineandfallofwesterncivilization] Of course they will!

Banks with taxpayer guarantees dumping properties far below market price [BO] [Mish]

Financial Coup d’etat: The Big Takeover [Matt Taibbi]

Argentina Downgraded to Kazakhstan on Foreign Fund Restrictions [BB] A glimpse into the future USSA

Geithner’s Plan, a Gigantic Confidence Game [Mish]

Geithner: Banking Stooge [Market Ticker]

Here’s a Scary Thought to Keep You Up Late at Night: Neither Fed., Inc. or Treasury have an Exit Strategy (Slaps forehead)  [Yves Smith]

Is it Better to be Lucky than Smart [exurbannation]

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“Do you realize that we have already given more to AIG than we spent on the entire S&L fiasco?” -IrvineRenter

A ‘fraud’ bigger than Madoff?

Senior US soldiers investigated over missing Iraq reconstruction billions

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.

“I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.

[The Independent]

[Hat tip]

Manipulating the great unwashed

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.

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[TruthDig]

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BONUS!
Principles of the American Cargo Cult

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“Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.” -Y.B. Yeats

Corporate welfare state of America

Just like bank and Wall Street executives, gummint contractors also win when they fuck up:

Gummint bureaucrat hard at work

U.S. Senator Kit Bond shifted in his chair at a 2005 congressional hearing, poised with a question on national security. He turned to Treasury Secretary John Snow, who was seated at a witness table.

Was Snow sure, asked Bond, a Missouri Republican, that a Treasury Department computer on order for $8.9 million would help detect terrorist money laundering?

“Yes, absolutely,” Snow said.

A year later, in July 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department abandoned the project. The computer didn’t work. The department had spent $14.7 million — a 65 percent increase above the original budget — for nothing.

As the federal government’s $700 billion bailout of banks sputters, there’s an object lesson for the new administration of President Barack Obama: Federal departments, including Treasury itself, routinely squander tens of billions of dollars a year in taxpayer money as they farm out public business to private corporations. [Bloomie]

OPM to finance war? WTF?

What else would you expect from the land that brought you the infomercial, how to get rich without effort (because you friggin’ you deserve it!), wealth built on defrauding your fellow Americans, and sweet rides purchased using the 2/28 refi plan?

Hey people, your leaders have taken out jumbo non-conforming loans in your name, generously paid their friends (who toil selflessly at the various military industrial entities) with the proceeds, and left you (and me), the taxpayer-borrower, holding the bag.

Are we made of straw here or what?

Think we’ll ever be able to pay it off? When the bill comes due, China et al might just have to foreclose on our ass:

The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money, according to a study released on Wednesday.

Prepare your children to say bye bye to U.S.A., and hello to slave labor camp! It not so bad!

I hope you LOOOOVED the 70’s!

Tis dangerous times.

The dollar and the loony haven’t seen parity since 19 friggin’ 76. Think about that. The English pound is holding steady at over $2. The Euro is at it’s highest ever. Gold is heading to 800, maybe 900, and oil… well, $100/bbl doesn’t seem so far-fetched now, does it?

We could see a return of the 70’s style economy. What do you think about that? Stagflation! WIN! 15% inflation! Afro’s! Bell bottoms! Gabardine! Pantsuits! Sideburns! Chevy Vega! Ford Pinto!

What’s different this time? Besides China’s major role?

How about the people in charge are frickin’ fucktards meticulously carving their particular pieces of eight, insuring their nests are generously feathered, that their (and their buds) options are covered, and they’ve purchased 1,000’s of acres in Paraguay (Bush bought up a heckuva lot of land near the planet’s largest underground aquifer) to retire to when this all blows up.

Is bringing this nation down to it’s knees intentional? Is it intentional that the chief doofus, a no-nothing of supreme incompetence, was allowed to fuck it all up royally? Whose orders was as he following anyway?

And Americans just rolled over and took it up the love canal with nary a peep. Jesus Christ.

Looky here, we have had downturn’s before- but there was always confidence underlying the hope that some unknown hand of competence surely must exist in the government somewhere that would see us right. It’s starting to look like those “people” are retired, dead, or killed off and replaced by mannequins. And the attitude that we were the once great nation was possibly recognized as unsustainable, and the people in charge (differentiated from the people we elect) decided it was best to cut out the best parts for themselves and leave the rest of us holding the (empty) bag.

How paranoid is that!