corporatism sucks (IE transformers 2, IE Crunch)

[Strangelet]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOBWhVe68os

This is a 10 minute video discussing the main points of Rushkoff's book Life Inc. (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Inc-World-Became-Corporation/dp/1400066891/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248479102&sr=8-1) Essentially boiling down to "corporate america sucks." Interestingly enough, you'd think he was libertarian. Not only is he no less against the federal reserve than Ron Paul, he sees the causes of our current crisis in the same light as many a guest on the glenn beck freak show. And yet his perspective is sometimes progressive enough to make moveon.org blush. Recommended read.

[Strangelet]

speaking of the federal reserve, I'm not sure if you guys have been following the Federal Reserve Audit bill, but its gaining a lot of traction with both democrats and republicans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mJBy5hQZDI

This is Democrat Alan Grayson at work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0NYBTkE1yQ

[cacophony]

i don't find a lot of truth in what he says, and i'm totally open to the "the american system is fucked" argument.

his idea that our current system developed because "they" needed to develop consumers back in ye olden days attributes a mastermind-like genius to the people of the time. "they" didn't decide they needed consumers to depend on them and "they" didn't decide to divorce people from their sense of selves. that's ridiculous. people didn't set up a style of doing business in the hopes that in 200 years or 300 years or 400 years everyone would be a corporatized consumer. rather, people did what they've always done and always will do: find ways to make money and accrue power. our present situation isn't the result of diabolical forethought that deliberately and carefully turned us into the ipod-consuming cattle we are. we turned ourselves into that. and by "we" i mean even "they."

and my god, his description of the backyard barbecue phenomenon. "we moved to our own house and suddenly we had to compete to barbecue the best cut of meats and the joy of the barbecue was gone!" yeah, don't you hate that when you're grilling a piece of meat and your neighbor shouts over the fence that his meat is more expensive than yours? anyone ever had that happen? anyone? anyone? crickets chirping? it doesn't happen.

it's a depiction of the other "they." the downtrodden masses that you're sort of a part of, except for the fact that you're smarter than that. "they" don't get that they're unhappily, grimly turning a steak on a grill, furious that the neighbor might have a better cut of meat. you, on the other hand, you get the corruption of the system so you're not as downtrodden as "they" are.

it's a remarkably effective way to spin a conspiracy theory to an unhappy population that's just hoping to see itself as victimized. the republicans bank on that kind of thing. "they" don't want you to have faith. "they" don't want you to have family values. "they" want to shut down your church and force your daughter to have an abortion. the invention of the mythical "they" wins a lot of hearts and minds.

[Strangelet]

his idea that our current system developed because "they" needed to develop consumers back in ye olden days attributes a mastermind-like genius to the people of the time. "they" didn't decide they needed consumers to depend on them and "they" didn't decide to divorce people from their sense of selves. that's ridiculous. people didn't set up a style of doing business in the hopes that in 200 years or 300 years or 400 years everyone would be a corporatized consumer. rather, people did what they've always done and always will do: find ways to make money and accrue power. our present situation isn't the result of diabolical forethought that deliberately and carefully turned us into the ipod-consuming cattle we are. we turned ourselves into that. and by "we" i mean even "they."


You're basically saying he's another Kevin Trudeau, which I guess is a reasonable conclusion based on 10 minutes of clips. In the book its pretty clear from the history of corporations he's laid out that there's no shadowy "they." The american revolution was based largely on economic opression, not oppression of social liberties. The economic oppression came in the form of having to ship cotton raised on american soil back to England only to have it shipped back in the form of clothing because a company chartered by the crown had monopoly on all textile production, to use a single example. Spinning cotton in the colonies could land you in prison. In other words, we weren't so much fighting the crown, but the chartered monopolies that were given the crown's blessings, including the central bank of england.

Fast forward that to now, we are enmeshed in the no-escape system of our own designs. There are computer programs that have been designed that proves mathematically, outside of any shadowy oligarchy, through the continuous process of exchanging money in a certain environment, in the end, the money ends up on a single bucket. That's math, not conspiracy. Read about it here (http://www.amazon.com/Group-Theory-Bedroom-Mathematical-Diversions/dp/0809052172/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248482298&sr=8-1). So really its a combination of people who are out to fuck us, and the system itself.

As far as alienation, that's a omnipresent marxist criticism of capitalism. One of the main beefs the left has with what they consider a "free market" is that it alienates people from their own means of existence. Rushkoff uses, what I think, is an airtight example of how far this process has noticibly gone. The very act of "flipping houses" means you treat the very place you live as a commodity. How fucked up is that?

But he goes further to show its not the free market, its corporate strongholds. Did you know that marketing theory has largely stopped strategizing ways of marketing to a group? As far as "they" are concerned, human groups don't even exist anymore. Everything is marketed to an isolated individual, now intentionally isolated because they are better consumers. Think about that the next time you see a commercial for jeans with a hunky guy and a hot babe with your spouse. Its clearly not something you're meant to share together. Unless you're swingers.



it's a remarkably effective way to spin a conspiracy theory to an unhappy population that's just hoping to see itself as victimized. the republicans bank on that kind of thing. "they" don't want you to have faith. "they" don't want you to have family values. "they" want to shut down your church and force your daughter to have an abortion. the invention of the mythical "they" wins a lot of hearts and minds.

Its no conspiracy that

1. Americans are the fattest people in the world.
2. Spend the most on health care, the majority on big pharma medication
3. Are the furthest in debt by a vaast margin
4. work the longest hours and have the less amount of free time

[cacophony]

no, none of those things are a conspiracy. but i guess i don't see how it's relevant to that 10 minute clip.

[Strangelet]

no, none of those things are a conspiracy. but i guess i don't see how it's relevant to that 10 minute clip.


hmmm. i'm sorry to hear that. I guess reading the book makes it a lot more interesting than otherwise. anyway, cracking read. don't agree with all of it, but its something that I've been thinking about for a while now, so I just wanted to share.

[cacophony]

and by the way, i'm totally not disagreeing that there's a fucked up corporatism that rules our lives now. i just think he sort of shot himself in the foot with his ridiculous argument in that clip.

i mean, the next time you go grocery shopping really really pay attention to the products you see. like, take the produce section. say you want lettuce. you're going to be able to get iceberg and romane. and if you're lucky there might be a small section with a few heads of bibb and red leaf. if you want a tomato you're going to be able to get globe, roma, and..... well you used to be able to get plum tomatoes but i haven't seen those since romas showed up. maybe some specialty types like heirloom and grape tomatoes but you're going to pay a premium for those. now go look for mushrooms. white button mushrooms. maybe portobello. want anything else and you're going to pay through the nose for a teeny couple of ounces.

now look for things like butternut squash and poblano peppers and turnips and parsnips. the sections dedicated to these items are getting smaller and smaller until in many cases they're just aren't even carried anymore. i went to our local kroger a couple of weeks ago because i make all of my own babyfood (yeah, THAT kind of hippie bullshit) and i was looking for lentils. this great big store and guess what? no lentils. i asked them why and they said "well... we have split peas." i asked them to show me the split peas. you know where they were stocked? the one-case wide micro section labeled "kosher foods."

every producer is trying to get us to be happy with less variety so they can simplify their production lines and lower their per-unit price and maximize profit. which means after a while if you want cheese your options are going to be cheddar and mozzarella and THAT'S FUCKIN' IT. if you want canned stewed tomatoes your options are diced or whole. FUCK YOU IF YOU WANT CRUSHED. making a cream-of type soup and want to use light cream? good luck. it's heavy whipping cream, half and half or NOTHING.

it's been a slow evolution but if you're paying attention you can see this ledge we're teetering on where basic food staples are starting to disappear because they're not profitable. wait, that's not exactly it. it's not that they're not profitable, it's that there's greater profit to be made if we're slowly convinced that no one eats turnips anymore. and if we're convinced no one eats turnips anymore then there's no reason to buy them and if there's no reason to buy them, then no one has to grow them, and that means that much more farmland for the same 5 fucking vegetables they're pushing on us: lettuce, green peppers, potatoes, carrots and corn.

the only true "variety" at this point is in the fabricated foods, where they take a truckload of oats and put it through a press and make flake cereal, and then pump it through a jet puffer and make puffed cereal, and put it through a grinder and make hot cereal. if you want lentils, buy the preservative laden, oversalted prepackaged "taste of india" stuff in your grocery store's "ethnic" section. but don't actually look for a bag of jasmine rice. fuck that, your options are white, brown, or wild.

so i'm not saying i disagree with the concept. we're totally being herded like cattle into a chute where the inevitable outcome is about 3 different food staples made available to us, processed into a "variety" of a thousand different prepackaged health disasters. and we're willingly going along with it, never thinking about the fact that we haven't seen fresh kale in the produce section in longer than we can remember.

rant done.

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

You're right, there is no such thing as "they". It's them.

[Strangelet]

rant done.

Quality rant. And yes that is exactly the type of shit I'm talking about. Let me jump on that one. If you haven't already, see Food Inc (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqQVll-MP3I). Its awesome and was done by the same guy who wrote fast food nation. I mean no its not awesome, because now that I've seen it, i'm a disgruntled vegetarian. Now that I know a typical big mac comprises parts from 3,000 different cows, along with an amonia mixed paste to curb e coli poisoning.

It makes the exact arguments you made about oats, but with corn. Corn is a subsidized crop, which means the government comes in and pays farmers to plant largely over other crops, because you don't have the real cost of production with corn. The subsidies come from corporate government collusion, which takes the corn and puts through a lab where things like high fructose corn syrup comes out and gives us all diabetes. Ever drink a coke in Europe? they still use real sugar. It tastes awesome.

The corn is also pushed out to feed the cattle industry, which isn't their natural diet and is the reason why new pathogens like e coli are now killing us even from things like spinach. Which goes back to the amonia paste.

So in comes organics, right? Small farms to save the day. Not. (http://www.ajc.com/news/do-foods-live-100312.html) The new food safety bill will basically kill any chance small farms and orchards will be able to afford getting the fda to get its kellogs inc. staffed ass down and approve their organic label.

The wife sometimes writes for food magazines and one article she did was on small businesses that deliver local food. The point was that somebody actually has to work full time to figure out what food is actually organic and local, because the current system allows loop hole after loop hole. For instance, a grocer can say tomatoes were grown in the USA if they were picked in argentina and then sat in a warehouse ripening in california for a few weeks.

[Strangelet]

......annnnnd back to the federal reserve.

the fuck-you-fed movement is becoming more and more mainstream. Now on msnbc

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/24/dylan-ratigan-eliot-spitz_n_244617.html


"This is a Ponzi scheme, an inside job. It is outrageous. It is time for the Congress to say 'Enough of this,'" added Spitzer.
Ratigan later added: "I feel as if the American has suffered the greatest theft and cover-up ever."




Why all this fuss about the federal reserve? Because they are a "they" if there is a "they". But its no conspiracy that the fed's monetary policy is a program of debt. The longer they control the money supply the further in debt the nation gets. The only offset is further economic expansion. This is because of one fact: the fed loans us our own money with interest. But where does the extra money from the interest come from? It doesn't exist. That means there's more money to pay back to them what was handed out. That means some people are left holding the bag. Which spurs an economy of cut throat competition.



We didn't have a federal reserve for the first 130 years. We've seen the biggest depressions and periods of inflation since its inception. Which is why *any* reasonable person should question their excuse that they exist to stabilize the economy through monopolistic control of monetary policy, IE our cash.

[mmm skyscraper]

I love the fact that Life Inc. is published by Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann AG, a transnational media corporation.

[Strangelet]

I love the fact that Life Inc. is published by Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann AG, a transnational media corporation.

Yeah, you know what? that just refutes everything. lets go to the mall.

Ok yes, on some level, it is just another meme to push, another book to sell off the new nonfiction table at barnes and nobel, and most of the time people who push against corporatism using corporatism just end up looking ridiculous or make things even worse. An anarchist protesting the imf while wearing nikes comes to mind.

But then Rushkoff is not out to get rid of corporations. Even if it were possible, which he thinks it isn't. Education, refocusing efforts to community and local environment, learning to rely on other people, giving grass roots economic systems a fighting chance to be a viable alternative is the point. removing government/business collusion, regulation hijacking, freer markets.... Basically putting human happiness as a more central measure of a company's success, a little bit at a time.

My personal interest just not to live in a beige box sprawl, getting poisoned, and numbered, wondering if I'm the consumer or the thing being consumed.

[Strangelet]

Urban planning.

Incidentally I didn't buy this book in barnes and nobel, i bought it at Pages, an independent bookstore in toronto. it was one of the only new book they stocked. They aren't buying more books because they have to move because they can no longer afford the rent. Their location, queen street, used to be a haven for artists and their independent stores. That means yuppies wanted to live near there to be hip. But with the yuppies comes the chain box stores to support their consumer habits. All of a sudden, real estate rises in value, forcing the artists who were just renting to move out. the same thing is happening in brooklyn and god knows where.

Jane Jacobs is a house hold name in Canada. Her ideas have been bundled up into a system called new urbanism. which basically means making urban planning around multi use, work and living is combined. the idea is to design things such that people are forced to interact with each other.

During the heat waves of 95 in chicago, it was discovered that two neighborhoods, each with the same number of elderly, had drastically different rates of mortality. Jacobs cites the reason is that one neighborhood was more socially connected than the other. So people knew who the elderly were and had no problems checking on them.

[Strangelet]

mmm skyscraper, you might find this interesting.

from life inc, page 218


Besides, no matter how critical of corporatism some entertainers and journalists might be, the impact of their arguments is undercut by their dependence on corporatized media for dissemination. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewert work for Viacom. Naomi Klein writes for a division of the german publisher Verlagsgruppe, and this book is published by a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. We all have mortages to pay even the most progressive journalism - just the like the kind that emerged in the early 1900's- tend to frighten and isolate the middle classes rather than bering them out of their homes to improve their communities....

The problem with fighting the "Big Blank" on its own turf and terms is that it has more money, more access to the government and media through which the battle takes place, better command of the symbols and semantics tha sway public sentiment, and more time to spend waiting for the results it wants. Real people working against it, on the other hand, need to keep alive, employed, and motivated. We need to steer clear of actionable copyright violation and libel, shield ourselves from the emotional damage caused by Internet "trolls" paid to insult or lie about us online, and still manage to maintain an audience willing to listen to what we have to say and then to actually do something about it instead of just nodding, passing on a link, and closing the computer for the night.
Well I'm going to do something, goddammit. I'm going to Hot Topic and buy a "che" shirt.

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

Are you sure you're not gay?

[Strangelet]

Are you sure you're not gay?

ask your mom...

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

She said, "Oh, all the way gay".

[cacophony]

the infrastructure that develops around economies of scale destroys any chance for true capitalism to flourish.

[jOHN rODRIGUEZ]

Not with "they" or "them":

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1911796,00.html

Oh, and this too. Would it not be lovely if New Jersey was the only place runnning shit like this?:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1912761,00.html

Oh, BTW, no one EVER changes teams now, do they? More shit be told, or, maybe not, with this random scam.

[Strangelet]

Health Care Reform or, Ask Your Doctor if pillofdeath Is Right for you

Big Pharma spends twice as much on advertisement as they do on research and development.


according to a study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, contrary to the industry’s claim.


http://www.zmescience.com/big-pharma-spends-more-on-advertising-than-research

Big Pharma creates new diseases to repackage old drugs. Example being PPMD which is basically PMS in new packaging. Women, are you sure your bloating and irritability isn't something more menacing? Better err on the side of caution and take Sarafem (TM). (it's fucking prozac, but costing three times as much)


So that it can jump-start sales and distinguish the PMS therapy from the antidepressant, Lilly will not call the PMS product Prozac, but rename the identical compound Sarafem.
How's that for feminine-sounding? I can see the TV ads: earth tones, Martha Stewart (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/04/11/martha/index.html)-style scenery, close-up of doting but obviously preoccupied mother (Joan Lunden lookalike) with child (girl) in designer kitchen (sub-zero refrigerator, Corian countertops, GE Profile stovetop), voice-over of caring doctor (female) gently hawking Sarafem ("for those times of the month when women need something extra") and a fade to twin smiles while kneeling and removing steaming cake from oven.



http://www.salon.com/health/feature/2000/07/18/pms/


The reason they do that is maintain a new patent, as the horizon on existing patents come to term. Only 14% of emerging drugs given FDA approval between 1998-2004 can be scientifically considered to be new and improving an existing drug. And only 8% more can be considered an demonstrably enhanced version of an existing drug. 78% are "me too" drugs that are existing compounds. Its dramatically cheaper to market existing drugs than create new ones.

[the mongoose]

Max Keiser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSwWy4E6I04



Matt Taibbi
part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB69QxOcVFE

part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tQRrEUaHt0


&

The Young Turks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaIzrZg5cV8


&

The Obama Deception - (yall should watch the whole thing before you knee-jerk hate on it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw

[the mongoose]

These HUGE companies with their legal teams, consulting firms, and "global" connections have reworked the entire system to suck money (such as TARP and tax breaks) from the government..... and the fucked up thing is that Obama and the federal government has helped them do it by giving them "bank holding status":



Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. is one of the largest private equity investment firms in the United States. Former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle has been a prominent Cerberus spokesperson and works for Cerberus as Chairman of Global Investments.

J. Ezra Merkin is a partner in Cerberus. Merkin invested his funds into Cerberus and its portfolio companies. His Gabriel fund invested $79 million in Chrysler, $66 million in GMAC and $67 million in Cerberus partnerships, according to year-end statements. The Gabriel Fund was a feeder fund for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.
On April 6, 2009, Merkin was charged with civil fraud by the State of New York, for "secretly steering $2.4 billion in client money into Bernard Madoff's Ponzi fraud without their permission."

Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a Cerberus client.




Okay now that you know how high up and "dirty" this company goes, lets look at how they turned Chrysler into a very profitable trust fund for themselves, and how they got the government to give them tax-payer TARP funds to replace & insure their initial investments.......





Chrysler
In 2007, Cerberus and about 100 other investors purchased an 80% stake in Chrysler for $7.4 billion,promising to bolster the auto maker’s performance by operating as an independent company. In 2008, the plan collapsed due to an unprecedented slowdown in the U.S. auto industry and a lack of capital. In response to questioning at a hearing before the House committee on December 5, 2008 by Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, Chrysler President and CEO Robert Nardelli said that Cerberus' fiduciary obligations to its other investors and investments prohibited it from injecting capital.

On March 30, 2009, it was announced that Cerberus Capital Management will lose its equity stake and ownership in Chrysler as a condition of the Treasury Department’s bailout deal, but Cerberus will maintain a controlling stake in Chrysler’s financing arm, Chrysler Financial. Cerberus will utilize the first $2 billion in proceeds from its Chrysler Financial holding to backstop a $4 billion December 2008 Treasury Department loan given to Chrysler. In exchange for obtaining that loan, it promised many concessions including surrendering equity, foregoing profits, and giving up board seats:

"In order to achieve that goal Cerberus has advised the Treasury that it would contribute its equity in Chrysler automotive to labor and creditors as currency to facilitate the accommodations necessary to affect [sic] the restructuring."

Chrysler Financial refused to take $750 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) government bailout aid because executives didn't want to abide by executive-pay limits, and because the firm doesn't necessarily need the money.

On April 30, 2009, Chrysler declared bankruptcy protection and announced that GMAC will become the financing source for new wholesale and retail Chrysler cars.


GMAC
Cerberus acquired 51 percent of GMAC, General Motors' finance arm, in 2006 for $7.4 billion. It appointed Merkin as nonexecutive Chairman.

As of October 15, 2008, GMAC had $173 billion of debt against $140 billion of income-producing assets (loans and leases), some which are almost worthless, in addition to GMAC Bank’s $17 billion in deposits (a liability). Even if GMAC liquidated the loans and leases, it could not pay back all of its debt.

On December 10, 2008, GMAC said, "GMAC LLC, the auto and home lender seeking federal aid, hasn’t obtained enough capital to become a bank holding company and may abandon the effort, casting new doubt on the firm’s ability to survive. A $38 billion debt exchange by GMAC and its Residential Capital LLC mortgage unit to reduce the company's outstanding debt and raise capital hasn’t attracted enough participation." This was due in part because Cerberus had raised the credit requirements for car loans so high, virtually eliminating leasing, that they have been responsible for a sizable chunk of lost sales at GM due to customers inability to secure financing, in order to pressure GM into selling or trading their remaining stake in GMAC. GM stands to write-off over a billion dollars in lost residuals – which they paid up front to GMAC. GMAC's exposure to the gap in residual values is around $3.5 billion.

In December 2008, Cerberus subsequently informed GMAC’s bondholders that the financial services company may have to file for bankruptcy if a bond-exchange plan is not approved. The company had previously said it may fail in its quest to become a bank holding company because it lacks adequate capital.

In January 2009, Merkin resigned from his chairmanship as a condition by the U.S. government. Five days earlier, the Federal Reserve granted GMAC bank holding company status, so it could get access to the bailout money. On December 29, 2008, the U.S. Treasury gave GMAC $5 billion from its $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Cerberus's investments in Chrysler and GMAC totaled about 7 percent of its assets under management.

At the end of May, 2009, Cerberus scaled back their ownership as a condition of the lender becoming a bank-holding company, when the bulk of GM's existing ownership stake in GMAC was placed into a trust, overseen by a trustee appointed by the Treasury, to be gradually dispersed. Cerberus distributed the majority of its stake in GMAC to its investors. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) gave GMAC access to the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program that allows companies to borrow money at lower interest rates. The initiative was created in October, 2008 to help banks borrow money by promising to repay investors if the banks defaulted. The U.S. Government also waived a rule that would restrict the amount of loans that GMAC could make to Chrysler's customers and dealers because both firms are owned in part by Cerberus Capital Management.

[Strangelet]

Max Keiser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSwWy4E6I04


i posted this video earlier in this thread. i have a lot of respect for both keiser and taibbi, taibbi especially.


The Obama Deception - (yall should watch the whole thing before you knee-jerk hate on it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw

Haha mongoose. i knew it... I've seen all of it. Honestly all I remember is Alex Jones using his campfire ghost story voice over music from the x files to explain how obama is the usher of global dictatorship, while showing stock footage of the president answering questions about social security. I don't remember a single bit of solid information ever being conveyed. Only hard and fast assertions. Its an embarrassment.

this article is pretty much the exact same experience.

http://www.infowars.com/obamas-plan-to-indoctrinate-students-hits-speed-bump/

Mongoose, Alex Jones and his religious devotees, generally speaking, are psychopaths who are inflicting more damage to their causes than good.

Suppose there is a "banking elite" who are trying to take over the world. Now what? What's the best way to solve the problem?

Hearts and minds who are both informed and outraged would be a precious commodity, right? They would be the ones "awake" amidst all the "sheep" right? So you wouldn't want to squander them, right? So maybe the best thing to do would be to form broad coalitions to fight the problem, right? As opposed to smugly condescending anyone on the news or anyone on the progressive left as *socialist* and tools of the NWO, including the president, right? Not when they themselves criticize the federal reserve and argue for reigning in of corporate government collusion and regulator capturing, right?

If you were to claim that Goldman Sachs, Morgan-Stanley, Citigroup, Inc, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co were among the top 20 contributors to Obama's presidential bid, that's informative, useful, allows people to make their own conclusions. And its happily verifiable!

On the other hand if you were to claim the banking elite want to set up a world dictatorship, using Obama as a manchurian candidate, that Obama is to America what Stalin was to Russia and what Hitler was to Germany, that his intent is to brainwash our youth in similar fashions in order to create a similar political environment as communist russia or nazi germany, that's fucking useless, mate. You are honestly causing less damage living your life as a corporate whore for the bankers and voting for every one of their supposed puppet leaders than standing up and spewing such washed out sixties apocalyptic cult fantasies.

If you want to actually improve the situation, turn off infowars for a week. (hard, I know!), Go over and read progressive left news sources. Amy Goodman and democracy now! is a *great* start. Ask questions. be meta-critical. make friends. convince your new progressive friends that ron paul and his followers, are in fact, not nut jobs, any more than von mises and hayek are nutjobs. help integrate the progressives with the libertarians, shore up a third party of the fringed. That's how something will get done.

If Alex Jones were ever put in power, he would make Robespierre look even handed. Him and his righteously ignorant sheep would waste no time starting the deluge. And that's exactly how their whole stupid website reads.

fucking baaaaaaaaah, mongoose.

[the mongoose]

I've seen all of it. Honestly all I remember is........

Well then you weren't paying good attention to some of the facts. It lists the Bilderberg, Tri-Lateral, and Foreign Council membership of the US elite, clearly lists many specific Bills and initiatives that have been passed and/or retained from the Bush era (Patriot Act, Glass-Spiegal Act, etc), and all of the other Wall Street whoring of the Federal Reserve that's gone on such as Turks and Taibbi have outlined.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck..............oh nevermind. If I made an inference without any proof and said it WAS a duck that wouldn't make any sense to you unless you've got some actual duck DNA in your hands to back (or is it "quack") the assertions up, huh?

OJ Simpson is innocent as a baby too, go be a cheerleader for him and Michael Jackson while your at it....:D

[Strangelet]

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck..............oh nevermind. If I made an inference without any proof and said it WAS a duck that wouldn't make any sense to you unless you've got some actual duck DNA in your hands to back (or is it "quack") the assertions up, huh?


Guilty as charged. Call me old fashioned I like facts and political views based on facts. not facts cherry picked by political views and dressed up like a whore playing the role of the madonna in a religious procession.

but by all means, watch out for the shadowy bilderbergers, grab your bullhorn and shout at a bunch of passing limosines because in the end, its going to be about taking photos of their secret handshake and proving that its origins are in bavarian masonic lodges. That's really going to make the difference, isn't it? As opposed to, say, picking a particular problem, like the banking lobby's influence in the treasury department. That's for suckas.

[the mongoose]

Great (but looooooooooong) video from the 90's that does a great job of explaining how it all went wrong throughout history. Lot's of facts and stuff.... ;)

The Money Masters:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#