Jesu ovo Americhki socijalisti?

[vbo man]

Triumph of the Money Party | The Smirking Chimp

   The bailed out Wall Street failures are paying back just enough of their loans to the Treasury Department to allow a new round of huge bonuses. At the same time, they continue to get tons of cash through the Federal Reserve. Pay back a few billion, get seven trillion dollars in credit. Not a bad deal.

   Congress failed to pass a bill to help with foreclosures. We're at eight million so far since 2008 with another four million predicted for 2010. The beat goes on.

   The Justice Department and Congress failed to seriously investigate massive mortgage fraud from the very top on down to loan officers during the real estate bubble.

   The White House and Congress forgot to include a cap on credit card rates in its credit card bill of rights. How unfortunate since the credit card companies jacked rates way up shortly after the bill passed.

   The official unemployment rate of 10% is far below the true unemployment rate of about 17% or higher. Why? Because it might upset us to know that we're at Great Depression levels of unemployment.

   Poverty is rising at a rapid rate with no end in sight but you'd never know it for all the attention it gets. Let the markets take care of it.

   The people who made the financial mess on Wall Street are now running the U.S. Treasury. Key players, Secretary of the Treasury Geithner and insider extraordinaire Larry Summers, were appointed right after the inauguration.

   The constitutional rights stolen by the previous administration are still missing in action with no real effort underway to restore them. The Patriot Act is alive and well. The feds can still tap your phone and email. They can get at any of your financial data they want and it's all done in secret. But we still haven't had a real investigation of 911.

   Congress is about to consider an international treaty of copyright that will turn anyone with a public blog or web site into a cop required to enforce the new laws or face prosecution.

   Throughout it all, not one member of Congress or the financial elite will miss a meal, worry about their health care, lose their house, or ever face prosecution for destroying the economy of the United States.

   Their Ponzi scheme is literally too big to fail. If there were ever the least bit of concentrated scrutiny on the various wars and financial rip offs over just the past decade, it would be the end of all of them.

   But The Money Party is a permanent fixture in our lives. It dominates politics, the media, and the economy. It's a self fulfilling prophecy that is always accurate. Rig the game so only those with money can run for office. Hold elections with invisible ballots on electronic voting machines that nobody really understands. Allow all sorts of legal bribes for legislators. And never allow the term election fraud to be mentioned anywhere but on a few internet web sites.

   Marginalize the poor, ethnic groups, immigrants, and anyone who protests the system. Kill the unions. Then intimidate those who have the courage to show up and protest with SWAT Teams decked out for a serious beat down.

   Take all you can from the middle class to support the big casino in banking and on Wall Street. Make husbands and wives work two jobs and be grateful for the opportunity. Provide children a lousy education that costs more every year while you talk about how much you love education.

   Create false issues that pit one group against another --race against race, class against class -- so that the great horror is never realized -- a unified public movement to demand freedom, dignity, and respect in our personal and public lives and a chance to earn a decent living in return for our hard work.

   The Money Party has no ideals or goals other than to take as much as they can, at every turn, all the time and never let up.

[vbo man]

Since the economic collapse of 2008, the controversial novelist and philosopher has emerged as a leading intellectual on the right - and she's been dead for nearly 30 years.

Rush Limbaugh touts Rand as a prophet of sorts. "Ayn Rand, she wrote `Atlas Shrugged,' " he told his listeners. "The sequel, `Atlas Puked,' we're in the middle of it." At the tea parties that swept the nation last spring, protesters waved signs claiming "Ayn Rand was right" and warning "Read `Atlas Shrugged' before it happens."

The fresh appeal of 'Atlas Shrugged'

Consider this: "Atlas Shrugged," Rand's most famous novel, is set in a dystopian future America, where a socialist government has brought the country to the brink of ruin. Fleeing punitive regulations and crushing taxation, the country's top industrialists and executives have gone on strike, virtually shutting down the economy.