Three Cheers for the War that Ends the Country

It's either today or this is the five year anniversary of the War in Iraq -- thus surpassing World War Two, and bringing us to a Vietnam War timeframe.

And, as always, there is no end in sight. Why?

Because Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Pentagon brass that was ineptly running shit when the war started really had no plan other than to take out Saddam Hussein. Think about it, nothing else but do that and it's costing half a trillion dollars at this point, if not more.

One of the biggest goddamn mistakes was dismantling the Iraqi army -- with its 350,000 troop strength -- and not replacing that figure with American and other "Coalition of the Willing" soldiers. It is expected as invaders -- throughout the history of civilization -- that the purpose of the state, the reason why bands of people form larger groups that then turn into nations and the prime directive of the state is to protect its citizens... with an army. So when W, Shrub and Tricky Dick Cheney approved the policy of dismantling the Iraqi army they obviously inadvertently pushed the country into a style of chaos perhaps unprecedented.

Armies keep the public in check, hence the advent of martial law. When shit gets bad, the army goes in to quell the public outcry. It happened in the US during the 60s Civil Rights combustions, it happened in the aftermath of Katrina, because civilization broke down and the duty of the State is to maintain order. And if you think about, the people don't cry foul when the army comes in WHEN CHAOS RULES THE DAY. Now, how long has Chaos Ruled The Day in Iraq?

Also, when Prescott's Grandson put 350,000 men out of work, those people immediately became enemies of the state, because the US became the de facto state -- even though that kind of Nation Building was objected to by Shrub and his ilk. Uh... you dump a country's army with your army it is now your responsibility to be the new army or raise a new one. And the US did neither, hence the sad sad sad state of affairs in Iraq.

Of course Shrub and his duplicitous so-called managers weren't thinking about the history of geopolitics when they said, "let's go get this sucker. He tried to kill my Dad, so he's gotta pay!"

So raise your glasses to the War, because it'll continue well into the next president's second term. Get used to the fact that money that could be used to fix almost any social ailment that you can think of is being spent refusing to acknowledge that G.I. Joe and crew are the new Iraqi army, yet behaving as if that's the fact with a supremely undermanned force.


Don't think the 350K uneumployed disgruntled sand niggers are responsible for more than 2/3 of all the deaths in Iraq. Of course there's no way to verify this fact, and the Pentagon would deny it anyway.

So say we all!

Oil Barons Rape Us... and we like It!!

The World's Lifeblood - SUCKED DRY, BITCHES!
Originally uploaded by Phalanx.

So Oil has breached $110 a muthafuckin’ barrel!!! God damn! And to think, I was tripping out when it was inching near $80… in SoCal that means over $4/gal EASILY come April 15th. Especially if you happen to be on the Westside of Los Angeles, where they rape you even more… part of the price of living in the so-called “nice part of town.”

On LA’s premiere radio station KCRW they run these ads for something called Flex Your Power, which is basically a website listing ways and means to cut your overall energy consumption, stuff like getting motion sensors on your lights and using CF light bulbs, because lighting is about 25% of your monthly bill, and you can cut it by 50% by using this little tips. There are video ads on the site as well about what’s up with our kids and their future; it’s interesting.

I see know reason why all this power stuff is intriguing because we have to do something about getting away from oil as our primary means of powering our go-go economies. Business will solve the problems of transpo and power with different technology, business has to because the potential money to be made is outrageous – the power boom will be like the early 80s tech boom, in terms of creating lots and lots of wealth, and even creating manufacturing jobs here in the US.

However, it doesn’t solve the issue that we use fossil fuel, i.e. petroleum/black gold, in manufacturing of all sorts of shit in the global economy. The true scientific technological break-thru will be on how to reclaim and cycle plastics, Styrofoam and other chemical products that once junked have a half-life of like a few hundred thousand years. Imagine a company with the ability to reclaim and recycle expending plastics? Said company can roll up to any landfill on the planet (and there are too fucking many, so that’s a big market) and start unearthing and sifting around to reclaim the junked plastic for future use.

Of course no one really knows what kind of toxic soup is in a landfill and even the most impregnable hazardous materials suits might not be able to protect these new workers from culling what they need from those zones.

Will companies like Applied Materials, BP and Shell (with their GTL technology, see the film on their website shell.com) be able to create the kinds of technology necessary to get us away for oil for energy needs? All the big ass muthafuckin’ bank that these companies have been making since the War in Iraq started, and they aren’t dumping huge swaths in the R&D for alternative fuels and green technology? Sure, they’re being asked to fuel the potential competition, but… BUT what’s the alternative? Don’t think oil can’t reach $150/barrel this year (as some have predicted). ‘cause it will by the time the election rolls around – and Barak, Hillary and Johnny POW won’t be able to do shit about it.

NASA and the Military have been fucking up by not doing the hard science research required to lick this problem (that’s a W-ism, BTW).

The Brink of Collapse...

$20 Stacks
Originally uploaded by Phalanx.

So the Fed offers up to Wall Street US Treasuries to open up the credit markets? Is Bernanke insane? How can he and the rest of the Fed Governors even entertain that the Big Banks can use their troubled mortgage-backed securities as collateral? How does this make sense? When:


a) the whole mess with the credit markets is rooted in the mortgage-backed securities market?


b) no one YET knows how to value the mortgage-backed securities, and since the default rate is climbing by the hour, there’s no way to measure the risk of these investments?


c) you know damn well that they are going to use their most difficult, sub-prime securities as collateral, so effectively this is a bail out at the general welfare of the country’s expense;


d) this type of extreme horsetrading the reason why the credit markets are in freefall in the first place.


e) the Fed traditionally refused to accept private label securities for collateral – and with good reason, if the Wall Street Warriors can trick even their shrewdest competitors be sure they can trick the Fed and the SEC long enough for their to be cataclysmic damage committed.



Look at the Credit Derivatives market, it’s predicting that Citibank has a 17% of defaulting on its obligations in the next 5 years!!! That’s a whopping, if not astronomical number. And since no Sovereign Wealth Fund has bought into Citi (and I suspect none will), they might be in some trouble. So that 17% might not be as outrageous as it seems…



And what’s up with Carlyle Group? They’re just about to go under and smash the industry again. They’re about to lose their Triple A-rated mortgage-backed securities to cover their massive debt; this will no doubt flood the market with AAA securities, therefore driving the price down on this top grade shit and just think what it’s going to do to the value of the bottom-of-the-barrel crapola that’s the root cause of the market meltdown?

Treasury Secretary Paulson was issuing edicts to have more supervision and greater controls so this type of bursting of the bubble doesn’t happen again… well at least anytime soon, because those sons of bitches on Wall Street make the big bucks because they figure out ways to jook the system, and they sidestep any kind of serious fallout – no one goes to jail or is seriously fined. Secretary Paulson’s biggest hurdle is going to be getting the Ratings Companies (i.e. Moody’s and Standard & Poor) to act in the best interest of shareholders and the general market – not the investment banks who had the game rigged, whereby they would demand a rating from say Moody’s (usually a high one) and pay for their rating of an investment issue AFTER that’s right I said, after the investment bank sold the security to bamboozled investors!

The thing is no matter what Bernanke or Paulson do, there is no Silver Bullet for the killing the GREED PRINCIPLE, which fuels all the excesses in capital markets that we’ve seen since the 1987 Crash – and their have been a few: internet, real estate, financials, commodities (oh wait that crash hasn’t happened again yet), Asian Tigers, etc from recurring – again and again and again. All those Wall Street and Fed Economic Gurus never foresee the raping of the system until the System has been ransacked much like Rome when the Germanic Barbarians where invading, and it’s too late to save it as the Centurions scratch their heads wondering why didn’t we stop this when we saw it coming?

Taking It Up The Ass and other musing…

Bush with Clean Hands
Originally uploaded by Phalanx.

This post is part one of a series tentatively called - The Aftermath of The Great Decider’s Time In The Oval Office

The one moment in Dubya’s time in office that is a precursor to what’s really happening in our future as country is the devastating natural disaster known as Hurricane Katrina, and how the US government dealt with it or rather failed to. New Orleans’ African-Americans were stand-ins for the world’s billions of people of color living hand-to-mouth, while the top 1% owns 50% of all the world’s wealth. The pitiful response of the government controlled by a GOP administration – i.e. one run by corporate lobbyist, er friendly fascists, -- so caught up in its phony way in Iraq that it could not handle the war-like devastation in New Orleans.

The belief that additional national GOP leadership is the answer to renewed stewardship of the country and the country’s image and influence around the globe is absolute nonsense, if not utterly ridiculous.

John McCain is a good man, a good Senator, in fact one of the better Senators we’ve had in recent memory, but he’ll be beholden the greed mongering cutthroat bandits that –- in the end -- run his party. Not to mention that he’d fill the corridors of power with more of the odious political cronies, who have a great affinity to the same old Fuck Shit that Dubya Bush has been force-feeding us than a Democratic Commander-in-Chief would.