The Rape of America

If you're like me, you sorta do and you sorta don't understand why Wall Street and significant parts of corporate America are implicated in the destruction of the American middle class. You sorta get what all these high-level finance shell games have to do with unemployment, home foreclosures, closed schools and hospitals, but you couldn't really point to anything to explain it. Well, rejoice. Voila la explanation.

This should clarify a few things, and scare the hell out of you.

(Shortly after reading it, I sent $25 to Alternet for its fall fundraising campaign. Reason why? I don't recall seeing this story in the NY Times or the WS Journal or the Washington Post. And it occurs to me--again--that our ignorance is corporate America's bliss. I beg you to go and do likewise or better.)


It starts here, with cheap money (Greenspan's trademark low-interest policies):

In 2006, Pilgrim's Pride, then the second-largest chicken processor in the world, made a huge gamble that will seem familiar to anyone who's been following the financial crash: the company borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars, leveraging itself well beyond its means, in order to acquire a rival company and become the nation's No. 1 chicken processor, slaughtering 45 million chickens per week.

That might have given the executives a nice, big hard-on, but it also meant they would have to come up with more money to pay for all that debt. So the company did do what every post-Reagan company has done and gotten away with: it made the workforce pay for the executives' bonuses.

That meant squeezing lower-middle-class workers for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim's case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim's Pride accusing it of grossly undercompensating its employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim's Pride employees launched a class-action lawsuit demanding compensation for their work.

The damage extended well beyond Pilgrim's Pride's plants. With bankruptcy came huge unpaid local tax bills, leading to further layoffs and reduced services for the already-beleaguered locals

But don't stop there. This is just the beginning.

The tale told here is straight out of The Shock Doctrine: political corruption, deregulation, leveraged debt, corporate bankruptcy, foreign ownership, and plant closings, all driven by insane greed--enable corporate and finance elites and a few billionaire families to plunder ordinary people to the point of destitution.

Only, guess what. The buzzard has come home to roost. This is in America, not Chile, or Venezuela, or the Pacific Rim.

This is a blow-by-blow script for how Pilgrim's Pride and Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and Gold Kist and Merrill Lynch others executed a scorched earth profiteering scheme that has made Armageddon of two Alabama counties (see also AR and LA), and made billionaires of Bo Pilgrim and others like him.

Read it for your own survival. It's a true story about the rape of America, and it's coming to a town near you.

Economy Can't Stand Massive Layoffs?

No kidding!

Could the White House have thought of that before inviting the fat cats to plunder and pillage it? (Plunder and pillage? What else do you call "de-regulation"?)

I no longer believe anything this White House or this Congress tell me about bailouts.

I mean, do I really know that the economy "can't stand" massive layoffs? No, I don't. I thought the economy couldn't stand the failure of Wall Street investment banks, too, but apparently they weren't facing ruin after all. The evidence is that they just wanted fatter bonuses. Pure Shock Doctrine at a neighborhood near you.

So now, I want those who testify before Congress to testify under oath and under penalty of perjury, racketeering, fraud, and extortion. And THEN I want their signatures on contracts stipulating restructuring for a challenged environment, prudent industrial and manufacturing reinvestments, new green jobs, fair pay checks for the workers, and their commitment to partner with the government to create and support universal health care.

This isn't about union wages. This is about the unfettered costs of health care. Get that money off the backs of US companies and families facing foreclosures (that's all of us) and our economy will be fine.

What's Bush's Plan B Win?

This is the strangest political week I've ever seen.

If nothing you know adequately explains what you're being told, then it's something else, right?

Item: McCain's suspending his campaign today makes no sense on its face. He needs to campaign even harder now that he's sliding in the polls. Besides, he, like Obama, can do what he needs to in the Senate by phone and by public statement. His presence in DC is not needed unless the vote is perilously close--and it won't be. Both parties are desperate to fully share responsibility for this vote.

So what's going on? Is he setting up some kind of October Surprise, either for himself or for Palin, or is he simply exhausted? It would seem so. The mistakes are raining down. Is he using the financial crisis as a cover for suspending so that he can rest? Or does he need to pow-wow about what the hell to do with Palin, who looks more like an albatross every day? Or. . .what?

Item: Is this whole financial catastrophe perhaps not what it seems to be at all? I myself do not really believe that all of Wall Street and all the banks in the USA will be in all tha big a hurry to shoot each other and die, regardless of what we're told. In fact, the more Bush says so, the LESS I believe it. Besides, I know there are other alternatives for handling the crisis than the $1 Trillion give-away.

I think that we're not being told the truth at all, and I think Congress thinks so, too. I can tell because Bush's lips are moving. I can tell because tonight he looked EXACTLY like he looked when he was explaining that Saddam had WMD, only older. He had that wooden Howdy Doody in a Suit look, his eyes like black beads starting out of his head as he read his teleprompter.

The only problem with that theory is Bernacke. But then, on the other hand, I don't have any reason to believe he can't be co-opted.

So where we are now is in a wait-and-see. If the bailout (it's a bailout, not a rescue)takes more time than BushCo says we can afford to take and yet the world doesn't end afer all, what would that mean? What will happen if Congress calls Bush's bluff?

Might a counter-move on Congress' part become -- or have been strategized all along as -- the rationale that Bush will use to suspend the national election?

It's an extreme supposition. But to be fair to myself, plenty of wiser people have observed Bush's massive encroachments on the Constitution and the separation of powers over his terms in the White House and speculated that he and Cheney are not likely to turn the massive powers he's grabbed for the Executive over to a Democrat. But in order to pull off the last move in a collosal shock doctrine coup, he would require a huge, huge crisis. And since evidently he couldn't nuke Iran in time, are the money problems of his rich Wall Street friends a sufficiently plausible disaster whether they are real or conjured?

I don't know, but something isn't right. I still haven't heard a plausible explanation for why the Bushies waited until the 11th hour to declare a crisis, when they knew a long time ago that it was coming. I think it was to stampede Congress, but for that to make full sense, the Bushies would have to have a Plan B in mind, an an alernative "win" in case Congress balked. So what's that alternative win?

That's what we're waiting to find out, isn't it?

Incalculable Fraud, Incalculable Wealth Transfer

Isn’t Bush's proposed radical new economic plan simply a massive wealth transfer from you and yours truly to the super-wealthy?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing Naomi Wolfe warned us about in The Shock Doctrine—minus the fighter jets and tanks (at least so far)?

Shouldn’t every American be in the streets demanding that the CEOs, boards, and senior officers of these failed companies forfeit ANY profit?

Shouldn’t we demand that the taxpayer be repaid with vigorous interest and levy a penalty fee?

Shouldn’t there be immediate prohibitions against these guys just dumping the bad loans on Fannie and Freddy (us) and skimming the goods ones at bargain-basement rates?

This is an incalculable fraud on all who invested in these outfits, and an incalculable wealth transfer, and it’s all being pulled off with perfect insouciance. I’m speechless.

Oh Say Can You See?

Some gleanings from The Shock Doctrine. I trust some of this will ring a bell?

Having staged his coup d'etat in Chile, which involved cutting government spending on domestic programs by 37% in two years, the loss of about 180,000 industrial jobs, an unemployment rate of 20%, and a new "living wage" for the people of which 74% went simply to buying bread (not bread and milk; just bread), Pinochet proceeded to phase 2.

He replaced the public school system with charter schools and a voucher program. That is, he privatized them.

He created a pay-as-you-go healthcare system. That is, he made it for-profit.

He privatized the kindergartens and cemeteries. Like we're privatizing schools and nursing homes.

And he privatized the Chilean social security system. Where've we heard that before?

All of this was part of Milton Friedman's prized totally free free-market system. "George W. Bush is usually credited with pioneering 'the ownership society," but in fact it was Pinochet's government, thirty years earlier, that first introduced the idea of "a nation of owners."

What he created was Enron-style "piranhas"--wildcat speculators--an obscenely wealthy top 10% of the population, and 45% of the population below the poverty line.

"Jakarta is Coming!" For a preview, watch Burma!

I tell you right now, myself: This post will sound lunatic unless you've read the most important history book since Hannah Arendt: Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. If you read nothing else in your life, read this, and the sooner the better.

I’m now 75 pages into The Shock Doctrine and I’m ready to scrawl on the walls, “Jakarta is coming!”

Building on other strategies that got us here, discussed elsewhere on this blog, I've started to ruminate about things going on around us as I write. For instance, just suppose that the increasingly violent anti-liberal rhetoric of the last 30 years has been a strategy to make the minds of conservative Americans not just amenable to cheating at the polls, but amenable actually to our removal.

In that scenario, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, the whole Faux apparatus in fact, and Clear Channel, and those who trashed the Dixie Chix and others are psychological storm troopers, a secular advance guard paralleling Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye on the religious side. The tactic is not new. Goebbels perfected it on the Jews.

I’m now 75 pages into The Shock Doctrine and I’m ready to scrawl on the walls, “Jakarta is coming!”

The master that Bush and Cheney serve is Milton Friedman. The model that they follow is Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile. The local trial balloon was New Orleans.

The enemy is the peaceful and prosperous New Deal society. Its crime was Keynesian/Galbraithian economics, ensuring that wealth produced by many is returned in some measure to many. That is called “redistribution,” or worse, “transfer,” as if the profit of a corporation were realized entirely by the men in the executive suite, without the labor of the employees, and as if the raw materials of which the wealth was created had always belonged to them and not to the commonwealth itself.

The objective is to make of the world—soon to be starring the great prize itself, the former constitutionally democratic USA—a completely unregulated economy—-without product safety or quality regulations, or workplace health and safety regulations, or humane labor requirements, or minimum wage requirements, or environmental protections, or tariffs, or any other form of restraint on “free trade.”

The infrastructure is in place. The jobs are being outsourced, the unions dismantled, and the trade agreements written apace. The plans have been written, tested, and perfected. The engineers are at their posts. The media has been harnessed, the military propagandized, the people divided, the domestic intelligence and torture apparatus made fully legal and acceptable, and erected, the detention centers have been built, the CIA has been brought to heel, the equation of protest with treason firmly established, the voting machines and voting laws in key states have been fixed, the Justice department is blocking investigations into fraud, corruption, and patently impeachable crimes, the high Court is pretty much rigged, and Congress has been neutralized. The presidency is unitary. Read, the president is a dictator. But he doesn't want us to know that, so he is denouncing what's happening now in Burma. Denouncing, but not actually doing anything to stop that, or Darfur, or Iraq. No, he's got bigger fish to fry.

The missing piece, according to the pattern previously tested successfully in Jakara, Santiago, and New Orleans, is the next big shock, analogous in effect to Katrina or to 9-11, if not much worse. Something big enough to stun the population long enough so that life as we know it can come to an end overnight.

As our Dictator President knows, the way to get that next shock is by bombing Iran. Either in the event itself or in the aftermath of retaliation, anyone who stands in the way of a declaration of martial law will be forcibly detained and tortured until everyone understands that there’s a new game in the USA, and it is called “disaster capitalism.” What’s yours is theirs, what’s ours is theirs, and what’s theirs is theirs--constitution rights, homes, bank accounts, savings, the land and our liberty itself. The end.

What’s going on now in Myanmar (Burma) is a miniature version of what will soon be coming to a theatre near you—that’s if any American has the grit to protest, I mean.

None other than Daniel Ellsberg just warned in a speech at American University that if we go to war with Iran, we will be a police state. Read all about it on the Consortium website.

Again: If you read nothing else in your life, read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. The veil will fall from your eyes.

Stop Calling Bush "Delusional"

He may be pathological, but whatever he is, he's a traitor, a liar, and a thief. He has raped the Constitution he swore to uphold, protect, and defend. He has repeatedly lied, and lied, and lied, to us and to the world. And the sole purpose of the war and his domestic policy is to enrich himself and his cronies.

If, after the last six years and all the accumulated evidence readily available to you, you still have doubts, then let me say this, as nicely as I can: There are smelts who are smarter than you.

Start calling him, his administration, and the party that enables him what they are: traitors, liars, and thieves. War profiteers, shock-doctrine storm troopers, neo-Nazi racists, thugs, and mass-murderers. War criminals, defrauders of the American people and the commonwealth, global environmental toxins, and world rapers.

Pray for peace at this weekend's Washington protest. Pray for guidance on how to end this march of travesty. Pray for courage and clarity and the will to restore our values, our country, and our planet.

Must Read: Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine excerpted by The Guardian. Read it, and then get thee to Amazon.com .


Naomi Klein's "explosive new book exposes the lie that free markets thrive on freedom. In our first exclusive extract, the No Logo author reveals the business of exploiting disaster," in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Synopsis on the fly: This is food-chain capitalism, and we're guppies. Only, it's worse. Disasters, like 9-11, the Tsunami, and Katrina, the Pinochet coup d'etat, provide an opportunity for radical social experimentation, for rapidly dismantling accepted systems and mores while the citizens are in shock. Public schools are closed down and voucherized, government is privatized for the benefit of the megawealthy, and the assets of average people are re-routed for megadevelopment.

No wonder Bush isn't doing anything about global warming.

Thanks, Milton Friedman and George Bush, you vermin-spawned MFs.