100 DAYS COUNTDOWN!
FIRE SALE! BLUE MURDER! GLOBAL WARMING! EVERYTHING MUST GO!
“The fundamental question I, will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy? I will be, but until I’m the president, it’s going to be hard for me to verify that I think I’ll be more effective.” – George W. Bush, Wayne, Michigan, 28 June 2000.
How’s your share portfolio faring? asks Xenox News raving reporter Max Gross
Got a lousy temp job, the family wagon’s on the fritz and your home is being repossessed by the very bank that’s begging for a government rescue package but has just snapped up another failing bank for 2 billion bucks, cash down?
No worries, mate, drink up, according to the mental giants in the Oval Orifice we’re winning the War on Terrorism!
The what? WOT?! WOT the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!
As the last 100 days of the corrupt Bush/Cheney administration count down along with the global economy and US dominance, Amerikkkan forces continue the Evil Empire’s policy of division, torment and death inflicted upon the long-suffering people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
This year, Afghanistan has experienced its worst violence with about 3000 killed and illicit opium crops have leapt to be about 50% of Afghanistan's economy since the US invasion in 2001.
In Iraq, Dubya’s “cakewalk” has so far cost an estimated $US700 billion and rising (does that figure sound eerily familiar?). Before the invasion in 2003, the White House gave Congress a cost estimate of $60 billion to $100 billion for the whole war. Oops!
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, people wish the Yankees would just go home. But Bush/Cheney’s greedy corporate meat-grinder continues its killing for the US military-industrial complex that we were warned of 47 years ago by outgoing US President Ike Eisenhower in his farewell address to that boondoggled, navel-gazing nation.
Face it, peeps: the US economy was founded on blood money. Just ask a black man.
And today, around the world, civilian bystanders continue to be blown away by overwhelming U.S. firepower – mainly from the air - demonstrating Amerikkka’s prodigious gift for shock, awe and utter disdain for other values, other cultures, other lives, consigning God, Allah and Satan to irrelevance.
The clash of nutless fanatics and rapacious corporate criminals goes on. And on. And on…
Meanwhile, back on the farm, who is watching the store?
No-one.
Under the god-fearing, wire-tapping, child-killing Bush/Cheney regime, the store's doors were taken off their hinges, the cash register left wide open, and intimidated staff were out in the back lane giving blowjobs to management hacks.
And now for the ultimate fire sale.
Now, in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, we gape gob-smacked or giggling as struggling taxpayers are forced into funding the so-called bailout of the crooks responsible for Wall Street’s reckless profligacy and the Bush regime’s war profiteers. Dwindling but essential government services will be further sacrifed as budget surpluses vanish and deficits surge and the global economy plummets down a deep dark hole where neither adventurous Alices or time-challenged white rabbits dare go.
And Iceland is sinking but not because of global warming. For a third of the population, who owned shares in the nation's three major banks, savings have been expunged in one week by events thousands of kilometres away.
Yep, folks, core banks around the world invested in the same shitty, funny-money Amerikkkan “mortgage products” behind the collapse of the US economy and are going down, down, down.
And who has the venomous Bush/Cheney hydra placed in charge of resuscitating the cannibalistic US economy - ultimately based as it is on short-term speculation in paper bullshit rather than long-term investment in real people and real infrastructure - from itself?
The financial wizard Bush has put in charge is the current Secretary of the US Treasury, Mr Henry M. Paulson Jr, former head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, a company with a financial stake in the bailout, has been blessed by lame-duck Presidense Bush to “oversee” the nationalisation program.
And it gets better.
Not only do YOU get to pay for it all but also Paulson has picked a certain Neel Kashkari to run the bailout program. What a coincidence! Kashkari is assistant treasury secretary AND a former Goldman Sachs buddy, with about six years of total work experience since graduating! Praise Allah and Job, we are saved!
And the only reason this rotten bill got the approval of Congress this time round is because an extra 150 billion dollars was added to coax (i.e. bribe) more lawmakers to vote for it, mostly in the form of tax breaks and programmes for lawmakers' home districts.
Special interests? You betcha, as the Repug’s creepy and stupid vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin would say!
And it’s working a treat!
Xenox News readers will not be surprised to hear that the US Federal Reserve showered an additional $US37.8 billion cash “infusion” into crippled insurance giant AIG, which has been exposed for bankrolling a lavish spa retreat for its corporate flunkies AFTER its rescue by the government – that is to say, US taxpayers – poured an initial $US85 billion into the turkey.
Standard Bush/Cheney modus operandi: shifting buggered assets from speculators’ books to taxpayers absolves the reckless greedy bastards responsible for the whole damned mess. And not to mention heaps of golden parachutes for stampeding CEOs , courtesy of the “bailout” with its myriad loopholes regarding executive pay restriction and legislation which directs the Treasury Secretary to "require that the financial institution meet appropriate standards for executive compensation."
And who defines what is "appropriate"? Why, none other than Wall Street’s Paulson, naturally!
Soo-ey! Here piggy, piggy, piggy! Come and get it!
Astute XN readers will recall that it was Paulson, as chairman of Goldman Sachs, along with the leaders of the five big investment banks, who duped the US Securities and Exchange Commission into scrapping the rules on capital requirements which started this wildfire.
Despite the so-called bailout, “it's clear the economy is going into a deep recession," according to Robert E. Scott, senior international economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
And according to Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, “The same reckless leadership that gave us expensive wars based on false premises has now concocted an expensive bailout that does not address the problem, which will fester and become worse”.
That most insidious of global institutions, the International Monetary fund, reckons global financial markets face their most dangerous shock since the 1930s.
But
my favourite quote is from the head of the Sandinista congressional bloc in Nicaragua, Edwin Castro, who reckons “Bush has just implemented communism for the rich”.The clueless, careless Bush/Cheney regime is responsible for the greatest economic shock that has happened to capitalism.Probably not the best time to fuck around in Georgia and provoke a war with Russia. And Iran
Ah, capitalism! Where the beer flows like wine, trickling kindly down from the groaning, overloaded dining tables of our wise and powerful captains of commerce, finance and gluttony. Don’t we just love it? After all, it conquered communism, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
Well, no, it didn’t.
The mighty Soviet Union crumbled over time because of despotism, entrenched cronyism and internal corruption at the highest levels of government and a ridiculously huge budget expenditure on its military.
And an expensive, toxic, unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
Remind you of something or other, Br’er Rabbit?
Ah, but then there’s a little something extra for the good ol’ US of A with George’s Iraq adventure, a doddle at $US12 billion a month and rising. And when long-term health care for mangled veterans and interest are factored in the figure is closer to $25 billion a month.
Let’s hear that again: $25 billion gushing down the bloody drain in an Amerikkkan war without end.
Think about it, brothers and sisters: in less than 8 years under Bush/Cheney, financial sector debt in the US tripled, mortgage debt doubled and financial borrowing rose 75 per cent.
Now… show me the money!
Aussies with nouse recall that in August 2006, outgoing Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane warned that Australia faced a recession within the next seven years.
Neither the iniquitous Howard government then nor the Rudd government now has acknowledged the extent to which Australia’s economic growth over the past dozen years has been financed by foreign debt.
And earlier this year the nation’s ballooning foreign debt topped $1 trillion for the very first time.
Now, as Wall Street decomposes and the stench of its canker engulfs the world, here Down Under there’s lots of chatter about “challenges” and “guarantees” and “confidence building” and “co-ordinated” responses. PM Rudd is telling us the system remains strong, “fundamentally sound”. But, um, much of that hinges on the Chinese buying the stuff we dig out of the ground.
Australia's prosperity has been underwritten by the extraordinary growth of China and its demand for raw materials.
Recession in the US will effect Chinese economic growth. And alarm bells are already ringing within the mining sector at signs that China is about to cut its once insatiable demand for our iron ore.
And wasn’t it just last month that George W. Bush was telling how “fundamentally sound” the US financial sector was?
And why wouldn’t he? The US government, predatory politicians, bureaucrats and their greedy friends have supported the interests of the business classes against those of common men and women throughout the nation's history.
And so, dear Xenox News reader, as the shit comes down, as the eggs hatch and the COWS come home, the Bush/Cheney legacy festers in the hearts of millions of neglected victims of the blood-soaked ‘Bush Doctrine”. Mission accomplished!
Registered voters of America, the rest is up to you, so no doubt the world is stuffed!
Call it collateral damage.
An d just one last comment.
I bumped into old Shoeless Barry this week. Don’t usually see him much through winter but as the weather warms up he emerges from the rotten humpy he calls home up here in the hills.
He smelled bad and had a plastic baggy full of bruised apples donated by a local grower, so he was happy. I asked him about the global economic crisis.
“Crisis?” he said, scratching his beard with dirty fingernails. “What crisis?”
Let the midnight special shine a light on you, on me and the debris.
This was Max Gross for Xenox News, waiting for the sky to fall, for the pole to melt and for the vodka to chill.
