The bullshit cartoon portrayal of the Occupy Wall Street movement (top) and bottom, the way the REAL class war is being fought and what OWS is actually confronting!
Yes, sadly the class warfare continues. Most waged by the wealthy and their lackeys, hacks and backers as well as corporo-media pundits like David Brooks, Karl Rove and Denver putz -radio host, Mike Rosen. To read the screeds from these rascals would make the careless observer believe (a la Glenn Beck) that the rich should fear them because "they will have your rich heads on pikes'. But we are a long long way from any French Revolution, especially because too many of the protestors themselves see nothing wrong in capitalism per se - only that it needs to work more in their favor. Sorry, folks, that will never ever happen! As it is designed, American capitalism (as opposed to Rhine Capitalism which built the welfare states in Germany, Denmark, Sweden etc) is exclusively built to be predatory, not equitable. It'll be a cold day in Hell before any of that changes.
Anyway, on to more examples of how the memetic class war is being conducted by the over-privileged, overpaid and entitled elements of our Wall-street hostage society. One example is shown in a cartoon appearing above: depicting the protestors of the Occupy Wall Street movement as merely the end products in evolution from spoiled brat kids denied their favorite toys. But this sort of cartoonish portrayal is typical of most of the Reich wing media, as well as many in the polluted mainstream media which prides itself on its "objectivity" . (Funny, but you never saw many complaints when the Tea Party assholes, decked out in their funny colonial costumes and carrying 'Do Not Tread on Me' flags were spitting at black Dem congressmen a year ago - over votes on Obama's Patient and Affordable Care Act.
In the other cartoon (below the first) I present its antidote which depicts the real class war on all of us, and the sundry weapons being used. It's time we all woke the fuck up and recognize this for what it is!
Meanwhile in today's Denver Post (p. 5B), columnist Mike Rosen mocks most of the Occupy Wall street movement as "Marxists" and not even original. Indeed, he insists the whole idea and movement was "hatched by 'Adbusters', an anti-consumerist, anticapitalist Vancouver magazine.
Those who wish to learn more about Adbusters, which by the way is a fine and much needed antidote to capitalist-driven excess, despoliation and overconsumption, can check out their site here:
http://www.adbusters.org/
I've known of them since the mid-90s when I posted on the newsgroup alt.politics.economics with a number of them, trying to sow some remote seeds of consciousness to show the capitalist-stoked denizens they were laboring under PR-driven false consciousness and needed to become aware. From those early days we envisaged a mass movement to operate amidst the bastions and high priests of capital to take our respective nations back (The U.S. and Canada).
Anyway, the ever brain befogged Rosen then goes off on a paranoid rant, claiming the OWS protests are actually a designed "strategy shift to retake the offensive via a contrived counterattack diverting attention from the Obama disaster". In other words, he reduces OWS to merely an arm of the Obama government and administration! How nuts is he? Well, only a therp can tell, given that most of the protestors rightly don't wish to align with either party - given both had fed at the trough of...Wall Street!
Rosen then pounds his pen pud further by blurting that "this time the bogeyman isn't George W. Bush but a nebulous and cartoonish characterization of Wall Street, corporations and greed. That's right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook."
Personally, I suspect Rosen's been munching too many funny cookies...or drinking too many odd brewskies. In fact, their characterizations of Wall Street are spot on, as an essentially predatory financial cancer that at once controls the government via corporate largesse and lobbyists, and also controls the defense spending needed to initiate new aggression and wars to advance the cause of global finance capital. Unlike the mealy-mouthed, clueless hack Rosen, these protestors get it!
Meanwhile, another memetic class warrior, a Peter J.Wallison, writing in The Wall Street Journal ('Wall Street's Gullible Occupiers', Oct. 12, p. A23) blames the government for being the real culprit, as opposed to Wall Street. He insists that Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, the largest government lending institutions, were captives of the rules adopted in 1995 via the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which "required banks to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served."
In fact, like all class warriors in the media, this is a distortion of the facts. First, the Act required and indeed mandated high standards for lenders, and also that borrowers meet specific criteria. The fact that in the end, 25% of subprime loans were engendered via the CRA was not due to the CRA itself, but to the banks-lenders lowering standards beyond what the CRA itself required, in order to spread the risk of credit default swaps (CDS) and allow speculators overseas to make bets on mortgage failure.
Thus, one needs to note these aspects of the Community Reinvestment Act:
1)The CRA only applied to banks that get federal insurance, which excludes 75% of those that made the sub-prime loans.
2) No clause, provision or code existed anywhere in the Act which required any bank to make a sub-prime loan to any borrower. Indeed, 180 degrees opposite, the Act called on banks in the needy communities to make loans "consistent with the safe and sound operation" of the lending institution.
3) Contrary to other nonsense, a number of studies has shown that the CRA recipients paid their bills on time and ultimately become successful homeowners. Thus, the claim by the Right's blowhards - that the CRA unleashed millions of deadbeats - is pure bollocks.
THIS is the untold side that none of these miscreants disclose. Indeed, they forget or omit the context of history and how malignant decisions made during the Reagan administration have come back to haunt us now. Such as the rescinding “Regulation Q” – for which, as G.P. Brockway notes (‘The End of Economic Man’, pp. 156-57) state usury laws were suspended and banks were allowed to sell money market funds. This along with massive relaxation of restrictions on branch banks, ensured that- by 1984, “the New Deal reforms were in a shambles”. (Brockway, ibid.)
Brockway further points out (p. 157):
“Competition is by no means a universal good and in the case of banking it is almost a universal disaster. Ordinary businesses compete with each other more at the selling end than at the supply end. The competition at the selling end forces them to exert downward pressure on the prices they pay for supplies. In the case of banking, the shape of competition is significantly different – because its supply (money) is different.”
(See also my blogs on the differing definitions of the money supply, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/08/schooling-rick-perry-on-money-supply-1.html
and
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/08/schooling-rick-perry-on-money-supply-2.html
Wallison ignores or forgets the most egregious deregulation of them all, which paved the way for CDS (credit default swaps) to multiply in the first place: the repeal of the Glass –Steagall depression era law that prohibited mixing investment banking with commercial banking. This wasn’t just laissez-faire, but laissez faire on steroids.
With the Glass-Steagall regulation gone the way of the dodo, there was nothing to hold back the flood, a point reaffirmed in the FORTUNE article, ‘The $55 TRILLION Question', October, 2009, p. 135). Quoted in the piece, a University economics professor (Frank Partnoy) and Morgan Stanley derivatives salesman who noted:
"The big problem is there are so many public companies- banks and corporations, and no one really knows how much exposure they have to CDS (credit default swap) contracts."
Since most CDS contracts were made "on the fly" in no formal mode, and often by word of mouth on cell phones (ibid.) no one even knew where all the $55 trillion of this toxic waste was buried. As another hedge fund operator (Chris Wolf) quoted in the article put it:
"This has become essentially the dark matter of the financial universe"
- Comparing it to the dark matter discovered in astrophysics. Finally, and most apropos, as the FORTUNE piece also observed:
“You can guess how Wall Street's cowboys responded to the opportunity to make deals that:
1) can be struck in a minute,
2) require little or no cash upfront and
3) can cover anything.”
Clearly, the blame – 100 percent of it- is on Maul Street’s capitalist cowboys and all the quants they suckered into working for them for filthy lucre!
These toxic human parasites deliberately engineered the most rapacious and predatory form of derivatives they could conceive of, to then bury inside bonds that were given AAA ratings so unknowing innocents would buy them. Those innocents including pension funds, school districts and even foreign governments!
Thus, WALL STREET was the source of the toxic effluent that nearly destroyed this nation! Even as they - today - continue to feed and fuel the manufacture of weapons and the occupation of nations to establish bases for nothing more than global capital transfers.
Finally we come to Karl Rove, who in an article appearing today (WSJ, 'Democrats Court the Wall Street Protestors', A21) claimed:
"The Tea Party is a middle class movement of people who want limited government, less spending, less debt, low taxes and the repeal of Obamacare. Occupy Wall Street isn't a movement. It's a series of events populated by a weird cast of disaffected characters, ranging from anarchists and anti-Semites to socialists and LaRouchies. What they have in common is an amorphous anger at banks, investors, rich people and bourgeois values".
Of course, it was Rove who engineered the false basis for the Iraq occupation via an Iraqi source nicknamed "curveball" - who fabricated the whole WMD baloney in order to trigger "regime change" to replace Saddam, oblivious to the human costs. (600,000 Iraqis killed by World Health Organization estimates). So we know from the outset the quality and veracity of the source, and also we know he likely had a hand in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame ( never mind Scooter Libby took the fall like a good lil Samurai).
In fact, analysis of Tea Party demographics shows them to be lower middle class if middle class at all (given most Americans define themselves as such even if unemployed or employed and earning $18,000 a year at Target). We also know: 1) most never finished college, 2) most are racists or espouse racist ideals and have contempt for Obama based on race - which they try to disguise by deflecting their attacks to "Obamacare" etc. Rove's charge of "Anti-semites" among the OWS protestors is both malicious and unsupported by the facts. Indeed, this slander was inserted merely as a memetic equalizer to the fact that we know more than 67% of the Tea Party are racist. So Rove, daft dirty trickster that he is, believes he can just invent OWS "anti-Semites" merely because he can use the word!
Anyway, on to more examples of how the memetic class war is being conducted by the over-privileged, overpaid and entitled elements of our Wall-street hostage society. One example is shown in a cartoon appearing above: depicting the protestors of the Occupy Wall Street movement as merely the end products in evolution from spoiled brat kids denied their favorite toys. But this sort of cartoonish portrayal is typical of most of the Reich wing media, as well as many in the polluted mainstream media which prides itself on its "objectivity" . (Funny, but you never saw many complaints when the Tea Party assholes, decked out in their funny colonial costumes and carrying 'Do Not Tread on Me' flags were spitting at black Dem congressmen a year ago - over votes on Obama's Patient and Affordable Care Act.
In the other cartoon (below the first) I present its antidote which depicts the real class war on all of us, and the sundry weapons being used. It's time we all woke the fuck up and recognize this for what it is!
Meanwhile in today's Denver Post (p. 5B), columnist Mike Rosen mocks most of the Occupy Wall street movement as "Marxists" and not even original. Indeed, he insists the whole idea and movement was "hatched by 'Adbusters', an anti-consumerist, anticapitalist Vancouver magazine.
Those who wish to learn more about Adbusters, which by the way is a fine and much needed antidote to capitalist-driven excess, despoliation and overconsumption, can check out their site here:
http://www.adbusters.org/
I've known of them since the mid-90s when I posted on the newsgroup alt.politics.economics with a number of them, trying to sow some remote seeds of consciousness to show the capitalist-stoked denizens they were laboring under PR-driven false consciousness and needed to become aware. From those early days we envisaged a mass movement to operate amidst the bastions and high priests of capital to take our respective nations back (The U.S. and Canada).
Anyway, the ever brain befogged Rosen then goes off on a paranoid rant, claiming the OWS protests are actually a designed "strategy shift to retake the offensive via a contrived counterattack diverting attention from the Obama disaster". In other words, he reduces OWS to merely an arm of the Obama government and administration! How nuts is he? Well, only a therp can tell, given that most of the protestors rightly don't wish to align with either party - given both had fed at the trough of...Wall Street!
Rosen then pounds his pen pud further by blurting that "this time the bogeyman isn't George W. Bush but a nebulous and cartoonish characterization of Wall Street, corporations and greed. That's right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook."
Personally, I suspect Rosen's been munching too many funny cookies...or drinking too many odd brewskies. In fact, their characterizations of Wall Street are spot on, as an essentially predatory financial cancer that at once controls the government via corporate largesse and lobbyists, and also controls the defense spending needed to initiate new aggression and wars to advance the cause of global finance capital. Unlike the mealy-mouthed, clueless hack Rosen, these protestors get it!
Meanwhile, another memetic class warrior, a Peter J.Wallison, writing in The Wall Street Journal ('Wall Street's Gullible Occupiers', Oct. 12, p. A23) blames the government for being the real culprit, as opposed to Wall Street. He insists that Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, the largest government lending institutions, were captives of the rules adopted in 1995 via the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which "required banks to make a certain number of loans to borrowers who were at or below 80% of the median income in the areas they served."
In fact, like all class warriors in the media, this is a distortion of the facts. First, the Act required and indeed mandated high standards for lenders, and also that borrowers meet specific criteria. The fact that in the end, 25% of subprime loans were engendered via the CRA was not due to the CRA itself, but to the banks-lenders lowering standards beyond what the CRA itself required, in order to spread the risk of credit default swaps (CDS) and allow speculators overseas to make bets on mortgage failure.
Thus, one needs to note these aspects of the Community Reinvestment Act:
1)The CRA only applied to banks that get federal insurance, which excludes 75% of those that made the sub-prime loans.
2) No clause, provision or code existed anywhere in the Act which required any bank to make a sub-prime loan to any borrower. Indeed, 180 degrees opposite, the Act called on banks in the needy communities to make loans "consistent with the safe and sound operation" of the lending institution.
3) Contrary to other nonsense, a number of studies has shown that the CRA recipients paid their bills on time and ultimately become successful homeowners. Thus, the claim by the Right's blowhards - that the CRA unleashed millions of deadbeats - is pure bollocks.
THIS is the untold side that none of these miscreants disclose. Indeed, they forget or omit the context of history and how malignant decisions made during the Reagan administration have come back to haunt us now. Such as the rescinding “Regulation Q” – for which, as G.P. Brockway notes (‘The End of Economic Man’, pp. 156-57) state usury laws were suspended and banks were allowed to sell money market funds. This along with massive relaxation of restrictions on branch banks, ensured that- by 1984, “the New Deal reforms were in a shambles”. (Brockway, ibid.)
Brockway further points out (p. 157):
“Competition is by no means a universal good and in the case of banking it is almost a universal disaster. Ordinary businesses compete with each other more at the selling end than at the supply end. The competition at the selling end forces them to exert downward pressure on the prices they pay for supplies. In the case of banking, the shape of competition is significantly different – because its supply (money) is different.”
(See also my blogs on the differing definitions of the money supply, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/08/schooling-rick-perry-on-money-supply-1.html
and
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/08/schooling-rick-perry-on-money-supply-2.html
Wallison ignores or forgets the most egregious deregulation of them all, which paved the way for CDS (credit default swaps) to multiply in the first place: the repeal of the Glass –Steagall depression era law that prohibited mixing investment banking with commercial banking. This wasn’t just laissez-faire, but laissez faire on steroids.
With the Glass-Steagall regulation gone the way of the dodo, there was nothing to hold back the flood, a point reaffirmed in the FORTUNE article, ‘The $55 TRILLION Question', October, 2009, p. 135). Quoted in the piece, a University economics professor (Frank Partnoy) and Morgan Stanley derivatives salesman who noted:
"The big problem is there are so many public companies- banks and corporations, and no one really knows how much exposure they have to CDS (credit default swap) contracts."
Since most CDS contracts were made "on the fly" in no formal mode, and often by word of mouth on cell phones (ibid.) no one even knew where all the $55 trillion of this toxic waste was buried. As another hedge fund operator (Chris Wolf) quoted in the article put it:
"This has become essentially the dark matter of the financial universe"
- Comparing it to the dark matter discovered in astrophysics. Finally, and most apropos, as the FORTUNE piece also observed:
“You can guess how Wall Street's cowboys responded to the opportunity to make deals that:
1) can be struck in a minute,
2) require little or no cash upfront and
3) can cover anything.”
Clearly, the blame – 100 percent of it- is on Maul Street’s capitalist cowboys and all the quants they suckered into working for them for filthy lucre!
These toxic human parasites deliberately engineered the most rapacious and predatory form of derivatives they could conceive of, to then bury inside bonds that were given AAA ratings so unknowing innocents would buy them. Those innocents including pension funds, school districts and even foreign governments!
Thus, WALL STREET was the source of the toxic effluent that nearly destroyed this nation! Even as they - today - continue to feed and fuel the manufacture of weapons and the occupation of nations to establish bases for nothing more than global capital transfers.
Finally we come to Karl Rove, who in an article appearing today (WSJ, 'Democrats Court the Wall Street Protestors', A21) claimed:
"The Tea Party is a middle class movement of people who want limited government, less spending, less debt, low taxes and the repeal of Obamacare. Occupy Wall Street isn't a movement. It's a series of events populated by a weird cast of disaffected characters, ranging from anarchists and anti-Semites to socialists and LaRouchies. What they have in common is an amorphous anger at banks, investors, rich people and bourgeois values".
Of course, it was Rove who engineered the false basis for the Iraq occupation via an Iraqi source nicknamed "curveball" - who fabricated the whole WMD baloney in order to trigger "regime change" to replace Saddam, oblivious to the human costs. (600,000 Iraqis killed by World Health Organization estimates). So we know from the outset the quality and veracity of the source, and also we know he likely had a hand in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame ( never mind Scooter Libby took the fall like a good lil Samurai).
In fact, analysis of Tea Party demographics shows them to be lower middle class if middle class at all (given most Americans define themselves as such even if unemployed or employed and earning $18,000 a year at Target). We also know: 1) most never finished college, 2) most are racists or espouse racist ideals and have contempt for Obama based on race - which they try to disguise by deflecting their attacks to "Obamacare" etc. Rove's charge of "Anti-semites" among the OWS protestors is both malicious and unsupported by the facts. Indeed, this slander was inserted merely as a memetic equalizer to the fact that we know more than 67% of the Tea Party are racist. So Rove, daft dirty trickster that he is, believes he can just invent OWS "anti-Semites" merely because he can use the word!
And (3), most of them are the unknowing dupes of puppet masters who are funding them to destroy what's left of the middle class (chief among the funders, the Koch bros.) In effect, the Tea Baggers parroting of "low taxes" , "less spending", "limited government" etc. aren't ideas originating in their own thoughts or analyses, but rather derived from what the Puppet masters have insinuated into their tiny crania. They are then, merely spouting the pabulum of the Koch brothers, Peter G. Peterson or whoever else amongst the high powered wealthy who want these things.
By contrast, the OWS protestors, have experienced first hand the brutalization and diminution of their lives and life quality at the rapacious hands of Wall Street's predators. They have seen their jobs farmed off to Bangalore or China, even as their own homes were foreclosed because the jobs sent off paid more than ten times those of the service jobs left. They have also beheld their own kids going to bed hungry each night, even as the 1 percenters wine and dine themselves and pleasure their senses with special "chocolate sugar scrubs' and "rose wine wraps" at elite luxury resorts - as they gorge on foie de Gras and magnums of champagne.
In other words, these Occupy Wall Street protestors are indeed a movement, and more importantly one initiated from moral consciousness and not false consciousness! That is, indeed, how all powerful movements began, from Women's Voting rights to Black civil rights. Rove and others, enamored as they are of the hucksters and faux citizens, would do well to realize Occupy Wall Street is here to stay, until at least most of this nation is re-occupied and taken back from Wall Street!
By contrast, the OWS protestors, have experienced first hand the brutalization and diminution of their lives and life quality at the rapacious hands of Wall Street's predators. They have seen their jobs farmed off to Bangalore or China, even as their own homes were foreclosed because the jobs sent off paid more than ten times those of the service jobs left. They have also beheld their own kids going to bed hungry each night, even as the 1 percenters wine and dine themselves and pleasure their senses with special "chocolate sugar scrubs' and "rose wine wraps" at elite luxury resorts - as they gorge on foie de Gras and magnums of champagne.
In other words, these Occupy Wall Street protestors are indeed a movement, and more importantly one initiated from moral consciousness and not false consciousness! That is, indeed, how all powerful movements began, from Women's Voting rights to Black civil rights. Rove and others, enamored as they are of the hucksters and faux citizens, would do well to realize Occupy Wall Street is here to stay, until at least most of this nation is re-occupied and taken back from Wall Street!
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