Thursday, April 30, 2009

Swine Flu Update: Quincy 18 Hour Hostage Ordeal, Confronts Cairo, Egypt Swinocide

-FROM THE DESK OF QUINCY-
"Pigs Don't Kill People. People Kill Pigs."

SWINE FLU UPDATE: Quincy Freed After 18 Hour Mexican Hostage Crisis, Escapes to Egypt and Confronts Mass Swinocide

For Immediate Release


CAIRO – After spending the past week in Mexico City in an attempt to route out the Swine Flu “pandemic” perpetrators and explain why the Swine Flu epidemic seems to be much worse in Mexico, Quincy’s plans to return home for a debriefing to California were sidelined after being ambushed and taken hostage by roving Mexican gang members who captured him Wednesday while leaving the Courtyard Marriot’s pool after a late night swim. State Department officials last week tapped the stealth, porcine investigative journalist renown for his high profile reconnaissance missions (See Gay Bomb: Quincy Reports from Baghdad) to infiltrate the Mexican city and determine the exact source of the disease and to rule out that it was Hillary or Obama who brought traces of the deadly disease with them on their visit with President Calderon over the past month.


According to one eye witness, hotel recreation staffer, “Felipe”, Quincy was minding his own business while doing tequila shots in the spa with a few other guests prior to jumping into the pool where he took a quick swim. Upon exiting, he was accosted by a loud and rowdy entourage, wielding guns and “grotesque” tattoos who marched Quincy out the side gate through the parking lot, shoving him into an unmarked SUV. Fearing for his safety, Quincy persuaded the kidnappers to offer himself up for ransom, coaxing the gang to go along with his ingenious plan:

“ Look, muchachas, you’re not really vicious killers. Just like those Somalian pirates, what you actually want is money. So here’s the deal: you call up President Calderon and tell him that you have captured THE PIG responsible for creating and spreading the Swine Flu all over Mexico City. Say to the President: “We’ve got the Pig…If you want to see him alive and become an overnight hero and media star to the Aztec gods, meet us in the alley behind the Courtyard Marriott at sunset with a bag stuffed with 12 trillion pesos and make sure you come alone. No Blackwater detail. You got that?”

The following afternoon, Quincy was successfully rescued by a Mexican SWAT Team and the brazen gang members were taken into custody. Although no official report has been filed, Quincy did provide preliminary details about the suspicious details surrounding the Swine Flu “pandemic”:

“What pandemic? Conflicting reports have the dead numbered anywhere from two to 150, although even these numbers differ based upon who you talk to. Some even say it’s a money making scheme."


Less than 24 hours later, the Swine Flu alert turned into mass swinocide in Cairo, Egypt, and Quincy was met outside Mexico City limits in a dusty airfield by none other than private jet pilot and neighbor, Mr. Crisp, who whisked him off to Cairo to confront the most horrible genocide of the 21st century. Amidst overflowing bags of garbage, Quincy interviewd local resident, Abu Sayed, who raises pigs, chickens, ducks, pigeons and goats on a small muddy plot of land in order to feed and clothe the extended family of 14 with whom he shares a blackened makeshift shack. (Read the article in full for the horrific details.)

Since he doesn’t own a radio or a TV, Sayed was then informed that the Egyptian government decreed on Wednesday that his pigs, along with all 300,000 pigs in the country, had to be slaughtered as a precaution against the spread swine flu; despite the fact that no cases of the H1N1 swine flu virus have been reported here and it is spread by people, not pigs.

A visibly shaken and upset but stoic Quincy wrapped with the expression “People Kill Pigs, Pigs don’t Kill People” and later had this to say:

“Things are not exactly all swine and roses over here, and the wholesale slaughter of innocent Pigs is a tragedy of the highest conceivable order. These backwards monsters in Cairo are murderers and everybody, from Sayed's diabetic mother who will not be able to afford her eye treatments because their family has to kill all the Pigs are needlessly suffering. Where is our President to intervene in Cairo to stop all the killing?”

-2Truthy

La Fuite de la Lune: Farewell, Kathleen

-Bridie's Hill-
Rest in Peace, Kathleen

LA FUITE DE LA LUNE
by: Oscar Wilde


O outer senses there is peace,
A dreamy peace on either hand,
Deep silence in the shadowy land,
Deep silence where the shadows cease.


Save for a cry that echoes shrill
From some lone bird disconsolate;
A corncrake calling to its mate;
The answer from the misty hill.


And suddenly the moon withdraws
Her sickle from the lightening skies,
And to her sombre cavern flies,
Wrapped in a veil of yellow gauze.

My family is from Ireland. I've dual EU/US citizenship and in my lifetime, have seen from the eyes of a child - from my first of many vacations to this beautiful country -- the vast differences between European sensibilities and how they differ from the US when it comes to taking care of their own and looking out for one another. You see, not only is there a premium placed upon the Life of the Mind, but the healthcare system there was built on a shared sense of civility and compassion, of neighborhood and true conversation.

We lost my mom, she died at too young an age here in the States, where she proudly became a US citizen many years ago (I remember her having to study tedious details of US history and civics to pass her test) and her home. She came from a large family where many still reside in Ireland and England. Yes, she had good doctors but sometimes that's never enough.

Her older sister, the matriarh of the family estate, has died this week from inoperable lung cancer which spread rapidly within a short time of the diagnosis, she passed away in her sleep. She was the maverick in the family; her glorious roses, the life of the party, my strong and beautiful aunt with the sharp-tongued wit who defied any and all things pretentious and frustraneous, who my mother did always say yours truly should have been named for. Her ashes will be scattered, being the first in the family to evade the plot, from centuries ago on the hill. But that was her way - always leaping forward, dancing steps beyond the crowd -- never content to hide her individuality and is her way, Out of What Began this alliance with Nature to break the blue, to return in flight.

Bidh mi 'gad fhaicinn
-M.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Red Alert: Citizen Carrie Gone Missing

(Photo credits/special thanks to Outdoorsmen Adventures)

Recent photo of Novi,MI resident Citizen Carrie (above)



Breaking News

We interrupt our daily programming to issue this ALL POINTS BULLETIN (APB) that blogger Citizen Carrie of Carrie’s Nation has gone missing.

News surfaced this morning that upon clicking the link carriesnation.blogspot.com the following ominous message at her home site address appeared:

Blog has been removed.
Sorry, the blog at carriesnation.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.

Like a thief in the night, our beloved blogger and friend, Citizen Carrie, has been taken from us, vanishing without a trace. No note, no nothing. Nada, zip, goose egg. An urgent email attempt has been made earlier this afternoon, with no response as of this writing. Close friend and commenter, Red Oak, also issued notice to LWOH of Citizen Carrie’s MIA, and the hounds have been called in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Carrie’s Nation.

Although no evidence has surfaced to date, speculation over whether this disappearance might be a suicide or direct hit looms large. Why would KAOS silence one of the best voices of fair and balanced, independent reporting? Did she take her own blog life? If so, why? Preliminary investigative reports so far turn up no motive and thus far reveal no signs of suicidal tendencies, as her very last post, yesterday - albeit brief -- touched upon the usual subject matter relating to discrimination in the cache.

A very distraught QUINCY is taking the news of Citizen Carrie’s disappearance especially hard, as he issued this statement from his need-to-know basis whereabouts down in Mexico City as he investigates the perpetrators of the Swine Flu epidemic:

“Please tell me it isn’t so, 2Truthy. Citizen Carrie was my best friend. When everybody else made fun of Pigs she was always there for me, and never stopped believing in my ability to lead a movement against the discrimination of all Pigs, everywhere, in the fight for truth and justice. I hope this is all just some terrible, horrible mistake and that she will come back and I especially hope she hasn’t come down with the Swine Flu because if she did, I will never forgive myself. Can we make a room for her at our place at LWOH? She can have my bed. I’ll sleep on the floor with the beagle, I don’t care. Life in the cruel blogosphere will be an empty sty without Citizen Carrie.” (See her comment here.)”

This senseless disappearance leaves us all with this hard question: What is a blog life? For whom does it matter? To what unspeakeable acts of aggression do we allow the bunions and burrs of the blowhard riddled blog world to choke out what’s left of independent, investigative reporting, a gift that Citizen Carrie gave to each one of us on a regular basis at her ‘A’ Class outpost, Carrie’s Nation?

Voltaire wrote "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong", yet perhaps we may never know the truth behind the sudden disappearance of this once thriving life of the blogosphere.


Any information on the whereabouts of Citizen Carrie is greatly appreciated, and I know that some of her favorite bloggers and commenters including Androcass, Carlini, Democurmudgeon, Dwaffler, Distributorcap, Shortwoman, and Red Oak among the many others all share our prayers for her safe return.

Please check in with LWOH here in the comments section with any news you may have and to share your thoughts on our missing, beloved blogger.

And Carrie – where ever you are -- if you have access to an internet connection and a laptop, can you give us some kind of a sign?

-2Truthy

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Al Gore's Cap'n Trade: Scourge of the Climate Change High Seas

(Photo credits/special thanks to the Daily Mail)

“Climate Change battle is like losing weight.”
-Hillary Clinton

Cap’n Trade: Scourge of the Climate Change High Seas

The buzz this week is Cap and trade. Not unlike some evil Somalian pirate trying to loot a wealthy boatload of tourists on an Italian cruise ship, Cap’n Trade is rapidly becoming the scourge of the climate change high seas.

Global warming activist Al Gore on Friday urged passage this year of a U.S. law to slash greenhouse emissions, saying failure to pass legislation could cause the collapse of world climate negotiations. For the United States, much is at stake here - including billions and trillions of dollars in the emerging green technology sector, one that if successfully executed, could restore work to millions of Americans who have been robbed of their jobs by many of the same political and corporate advocates for imported, cheap foreign labor to replace them.

Even Hillary Clinton, weighed in on the matter, noting that the climate change battle is like trying to lose “x number of pounds but it seems like such a faraway goal.”

A few eyebrows were raised, however, as Gore reportedly “chickened out” after his handlers refused Maggie Thatcher’s former global warming skeptic science advisor, UK’s Lord Christopher Monkton, to testify alongside the former US vice president last Friday in Washington, DC. Calling them “cowards”, Monkton also stated that the “House Democrats don’t want Gore “humiliated.”

Monckton’s opposition slot was instead replaced with Newt Gingrich, who appeared in a Gore sponsored TV ad last year proclaiming his support for climate change action. But now, Newt appears to be against it. Mark Silva at The Swamp reports:

“Gingrich did appear in a commercial sitting beside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) last year financed by Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection. In it, he said that while he doesn't always see eye to eye with Pelosi, "we do agree our country must take action to address climate change."

So what's the irrelevant, big-oil and coal supporting, on his third wife, flip-flopper Newt’s likely answer du jour to global warming?

Let’s see now…

More tax cuts for billionaires? Deregulation for polluting corporations because, after all, these responsible citizens always put people first?


The former U.S. vice president and star of the Oscar-winning documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth," told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that passing a climate law is a "moral imperative" that will affect U.S. standing in the world community. Fair enough. Who doesn’t want to clean up this place by enforcing a few climate laws? More power to Mr. Gore for taking the initiative.

Watch Al here in this Huffington Post piece reprise his famous sigh on Capitol Hill as he explains how he is not entirely in this for the money. (Don't miss the comments.) And do you know what? I believe him. I believe that he is passionate about reducing global warming and I can’t help but find the guy likeable. But as a very wealthy and powerful man, I can not help believe that he is a tool (wittingly or unwittingly) of global elites who could care less about the purging of American citizens at its expense. For example, what specific “climate law” is he pushing? Cap and trade or carbon tax? Both? At what cost to US taxpayers? I’m all for paying taxes that improve our infrastructures and civil services, but I'm equally all for our elected officials to support programs that work for us and not against us. At the rate our bipartisan politicians have been selling out our jobs faster than Somalian pirates can chase cargo and cruise ships, the jury is still out as to their agenda.

As for cap and trade or carbon tax, watch Rep. John Dingell, D-MI, raise the question to Al Gore here. Gore testified that he supports both a carbon tax and cap and trade, with cap and trade being “an essential first step” because it’s “hard to imagine a globalized carbon tax.” Since when did the USA appoint itself Global Cap and Trade Czar? I know. It is in our best interest to lead the green tech revolution and then sell proven climate change solutions to the third world. But for the US, at what cost to taxpayers, who are losing jobs by the millions through this unprecedented economic depression?

There are numerous problems reported with cap and trade, so why would Mr. Gore and President Obama promote it? Robert Shapiro at Roll Call (who served under President Clinton in the Commerce Dept.) describes the problems of cap and trade:

“But here’s the catch. A cap-and-trade system is very unlikely to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions — and more likely to introduce new, trillion-dollar risks for the financial system.”

If it won’t reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and will increase more financial risks, why support it? In addition, Shapiro cites the outcome of the European Trading Scheme (ETS) where cap and trade actually contributed to increased toxic emission levels by as much as 10%:

“According to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, there’s little if any evidence that the ETS has had any effect at all on emissions in Europe. One reason is that major emitters such as Germany simply exempt many of their facilities generating greenhouse gases. Another factor is the “offset” permits that European “transition” economies, themselves exempt from caps, can sell to other ETS members. According to a recent study in Nature, once we set aside those offsets, emissions under the ETS have actually increased by 10 percent.”

Apparently Al Gore has astutely taken notes on the downside of cap and trade and now prefers a carbon-based tax system which would create direct incentives to develop and use less carbon-intensive fuels and more energy-efficient technologies.

Despite this, the bill now being crafted in the House of Representatives is based on a cap-and-trade system. This bill would penalize polluters, such as the coal industry, for toxic carbon emissions. This bill, favored by President Barack Obama, to cut U.S. emissions by roughly 15 percent by 2020 -- back to 1990 levels, is ambitious - despite the fact that Obama admitted that a cap and trade system would pass along the costs to US taxpayers, stating in the above youtube video that

“Cap and trade will cause electricity rates to skyrocket.”

In addition, Warren Buffet, who admits that the rich should be taxed at the greatest levels, has also slammed the cap and trade scheme as nothing but a regressive tax on Americans. If politicians were really serious about reducing green house emissions and improving our economy, for starters, why not put the kibosh on the private jet industry and pump every elitist, blowhard business traveler’s carbon based backsides back into the dying commercial airline industry and force them to ride shotgun (that’s code for first class) again? As private jet profits and demand soar, certainly Al Gore could do better than to practice what he preaches?

As China has now officially bypassed the United States as the world’s biggest polluter, the U.S. is still seen as a lead actor in global climate talks. The State Department will host a meeting in Washington next Monday and Tuesday of the 17 countries that emit the most greenhouse gases. These include rich countries like the United States, Japan and members of the European Union, along with such fast-growing, polluting countries like India.

Many unanswered questions surround the proposed cap and trade legislation, such as the specifics as to how many green jobs will be created, what they will pay, and most important, who they are designed for and who will benefit. While on Capitol Hill last week, Gore praised the carbon-capping legislation supported by Obama and crafted in the Energy and Commerce Committee for its plan to rapidly introduce new green technologies that, he claims, will create new jobs. That’ll work.

Let’s create new jobs for Americans to replace all the old ones previous administrations (including support from Obama, too) sold out to the immigration lobby dating back to 1992. Among other questions, will these promised green jobs also be “capped” at blue collar wage levels or do they include a hefty mix of white collar jobs, complete with on the job training and six figure salaries? Oh, and about that health benefits thing? Even Taiwan surpasses the US in its key achievements for health care and infrastructure. Taking a look at their transportation system alone, it looks like there are more serious ways to reduce a country’s dependence on foreign oil and reduce greenhouse emissions by weaning off of cars. Duh. (A tribute to James Howard Kuntsler here:)

“The lack of high-speed rail harms America's efficiencies and international competitiveness because it raises the prices of virtually everything that has a transportation component (food, oil, concrete, raw materials, people, mail, etc.). Trucking all these goods around costs roughly ten times what it costs to move them via rail. It does sell more oil, though, which is probably one of the reasons why rail was abandoned in America in the first place (to appease the powerful oil companies).”

Back to the Obama/Gore climate change legislation. At the very least, they had better not be yanking us about this “new jobs” promise with cap and trade because, as Obama admits, if it’s going to raise our utility bills, citizens will have to have the means to pay them. But this is the same venture capitalist and businessman, Al Gore, who, along with his VC firm colleagues and the India/tech lobby, aggressively supports the major wholesale sell out of American white collar jobs to India.

And what would cap and trade legislation do for Obama’s re-election plans once consumers see their rising energy bills and simultaneously receive no help from the Department of Labor to slow down immigration policies that give away our jobs? For now, cap and trade appears to be a means of raising Joe Taxpayer’s energy costs in an attempt to bankrupt Dirty Coal and subsidize green technology start-up executives and their board members. Indeed, a moral question. After all, Gore was on the board of Google when it went public and made about $30 million exercing his stock options.

Good for Al Gore. Whether climate change is man made or not, so what - the world can’t close its eyes to the byproduct of impending natural (or unnatural) disasters. We need energy supplies, the cleaner and the safer, all the better. Oil is on the decline and it would be really cool if this country spearheads the development of cutting edge, clean and green alternatives – as we did in the technology sector, whose sociopathic leaders then turned around and kicked their rank and file workers to the curb in favor of importing cheap, foreign labor under the banner of age discrimination and H-1B visas.

In the final analysis, when it comes down to how climate change legislation will honestly lift up this country from its swindled, shaken down ashes and benefit American citizens, one can’t factor out the immediate need for true immigration reform.

Will the climate change solutions these politicians advocate be yet another excuse to kick American workers to the curb in exchange for cheap foreign labor? Even as Gore outlined a very promising, 5 step plan last year to create “millions of jobs that can’t be outsourced”, he said nothing at the meeting in Washington last week to ensure that the Obama administration would not insource them.

So the key question surrounding this latest request for more money from the broken taxpaying plebes under the banner of climate change solutions for Al Gore is: Will Obama break ties with the India/tech lobby and finally cap the trade of cheap foreign labor and truly work for Americans by implementing much overdue labor reforms that will promote job growth and put Americans first? As Citizen Carrie reported here in her post entitled No Worker Left Behind, politicians are most profitably successful at ridding American workers of their jobs.

Don’t hold your breath. Although Hillary is very successful brokering American jobs to India, she indicated in her climate change and weight loss analogy that trying to achieve, ehm, certain other “moral” goals may be illusory - but it’s the thought that counts:

"It's kind of like world peace and so therefore why even try? Well, because we are called to try. That's who we are as human beings and that's especially how we think of ourselves as Americans."

The question for Hillary is: What is her specific goal? To offshore/inshore more American jobs? (h/t Citizen Carrie at Carrie’s Nation.) Don’t get me wrong: I’m not giving up hope in our leaders like Obama and Hillary and Gore. After all, hope is for free.

-2Truthy

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Barack Obama's First 100 Days: An Elizabethan Play

His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory,
his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical and his general behavior vain, ridiculous,
and thrasonical.
He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate,
as I may recall it.
-Love’s Labour’s Lost
by
William Shakespeare



Characters
FERDINAND, King of Navarre (Barack Obama, King of America, Inc.)
PRINCESS of France (Carla Bruni, Princess of France)
BEROWNE, LONGAVILLE, DUMAINE, Lords, attending on the King (David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and Larry Summers)
BOYET, MARCADE, Lords, attending on the Princess of France (Nicholas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown)
ROSALINE, MARIA, KATHARINE, Ladies, attending on the Princess (Michelle Obama, Angela Merkel, and Oprah)
DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO, a fantastical Spaniard (Hugo Chavez)
SIR NATHANIEL, a Curate ( Bill Ayers, Rick Warren as understudy)
HOLOFERNES, a Schoolmaster (Arne Duncan)
DULL, a Constable (Leon Panetta)
COSTARD, a Clown (Timothy Geithner)
MOTH, Page to Armado (Dr. Phil)
A Forester (Tom Vilsack)
JAQUENETTA, a country Wench (Hillary Clinton)
Officers and Others, Attendants on the King and Princess (Extras played by secondary school students of Sidwell Friends and Bo, the dog)


Love's Labour's Lost: The First One Hundred Days
by
2Truthy


(Facsimile of the first page of Love's Labour's Lost from the First Folio, published in 1623)
(Special thanks to Wikipedia)

The play opens with the King of America, Inc., Barack Obama, and three noble companions, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and Larry Summers taking an oath to devote themselves to four years of skullduggery and looting of the U.S. middle class by promising not to give in to the company of subversive new media journalists who may know where a few bodies are buried — Summers somewhat more robustly than the others.

Summers reminds the King that the princess and her three ladies are coming to the kingdom to tell Michelle all about the King’s steamy, lust in his heartish mind tryst with the princess while Sarkozy briefly excused himself to the Study where he checked out the value of the guitar Michelle gifted the princess with on eBay during their visit with the Queen of England. Meanwhile, it was suicidal for the King to agree to this inherent threat.

The King hotly denies what Summers says, insisting that the ladies make their camp in the vegetable garden which has now replaced the green, grassy knoll outside of his court, putting him at odds with the CEO of Monsanto, Big AG, not to mention Sarkozy. The King and his men comically fall in love with the princess and her ladies and once Michelle learns of this, all hell breaks loose about the Palace. The King is banished to the Lincoln bedroom which he is soon forced to share on alternate weekends with his mother in-law, Mrs. Robinson.

The main story is assisted by many other humorous sub-plots, one where the Treasury Department recalls all currency. A rather heavy-accented Spanish swordsman, Hugo Chavez, tries and fails to woo a country wench, Hillary Clinton, helped by Dr.Phil, his page, and rivaled by Timothy Geithner, a country idiot.

We are also introduced to two scholars, Bill Ayers and Arne Duncan, and we see them converse with each other in schoolboy Latin, each fitfully trying to outdo the other with poorly executed Desi Arnaz and Ricardo Montablan impersonations. In the final act, the comic characters perform a play to entertain the nobles, an idea conceived by Arne Duncan, where they represent the Nine Worthies. The four Lords — as well as the Ladies' manservant Kal Penn— mock the play, and Chavez and Geithner almost come to blows.

At the end of this 'play' in the play, there is a bitter twist in the story. News arrives that the Princess's father, the tire magnate heir, has died penniless after rowdy peasants burned all the tires left in France and she must return to take the throne. The King and his nobles swear to remain faithful to their ladies, but the ladies, unconvinced by The Gay Swami that their love is strong for the opposite sex, claim that the men must wait a whole year and a day to prove what they say is true.

This is an unusual ending for Shakespeare and Elizabethan comedy.

Happy William Shakespeare Day!

-2Truthy

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

French Revolt Over Job Losses While America Throws Workers Under the Bus

(Photo credits Benoit Tessier /Reuters)


French Revolting Over Job Losses


Breaking News

PARIS - You gotta love the French. They throw lamps while we throw our own citizens under the bus.


Let’s import them.


On Tuesday, French workers from a factory run by German auto parts maker Continental AG “exploded in anger” after a court ruling refused to prevent the company from shutting Continental AG’s site down next year. The French got really pissed off, as they “hurled floor lamps at windows” and stomped on furniture in “despair” over the economic downturn.



In this latest twist on the colossal failure of globalization and the exposure of greedy cheap labor lobbyists, France takes the cake for whipping up a classy anti-corporatist movement. In the Land of Fromage, this splendid country is also renowned for its world-class wineries and a little known, other-worldly and delectably terrifying practice called bossnapping. Compared to our self-loathing, Big Brother enabling American electorate of kumbaya clutching pansies, The French are demonstrating that they indeed have a pair:


“Workers have locked up their bosses. They have blocked production of Toyota Yaris cars and deliveries to key oil terminals. They've burned tires at protests and marched on the capital to ask for government help.”



And what do French government officials do in response? Why, they of course brand such behavior as “unacceptable.” Unacceptable! What exactly is so unacceptable about a bunch of sacked workers displaying this alleged “rare outburst” in protest over job losses?



“They smashed windows at the factory in Clairoix and at a regional administrative office in nearby Compiegne, pulling up lamps and crushing desks and cabinets.”



Mais oui! Bien sur!Certainment…is that camaraderie, or what?



Meanwhile, back in The States, discrimination against American educated white collar workers is rampant by corporate and political elites in cahoots with the Indian/tech lobby who have hijacked this administration to sell out American jobs to Indian citizens. While I reported earlier that Foreign Countries Will Lie To Win American Contracts, this hasn’t stopped president Obama from handing this country’s top CIO and CTO jobs to two highly “prized plants” of the India lobby, as Rob Sanchez reports in his exhaustive, most recent must-read JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 2010 -- 4/22/2009. (Note that as of this writing, said newsletter has yet to be updated/listed on his website.) Sanchez writes:



“In case you haven't heard, Obama appointed Aneesh Chopra to be the nation's Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Now we have two Indian-Americans in two positions that will make decisions about which government jobs are outsourced to India, and which ones are displaced by H-1Bs. The other one of course is Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra, who has been mentioned several times in this newsletter.”



(Recall this earlier report entitled H-1B CEO Busted in Federal Bribery Sting: FBI Raids Obama Appointee’s Office from yours truly about Obama’s CIO appointment of Vivek Kundra here.)



In addition, Rob Oak of NoSlaves.com reported here as he cites in Vivek Wadhwa’s constant promotion of workers who are not U.S. citizens that once again the prejudice against Americans shows:



“…most of all, the wholesale, institutionalized age discrimination that fires workers over the age of 35 and replaces them with a steady stream of cheap young labor from other countries is endorsed.”



But the French - now they really kick ass.



As long as our politicians are hellbent on not disproving their image as a pack of greedy, profiteering crooks in league with international human trafficking, why don’t we just import the French instead? Hey, who wouldn’t want to see more French restaurants open up in all of these abandoned strip malls dotting the country?



Inadmissible behavior by employees. And to prove that the brave French are both intellectually and culturally superior to les tres stupide, One World loving American dupes who line up like idle bowling pins as American corporofascists strike down their jobs and hand them to India, French Socialist Party spokesman Benoit Hamon said the root of France’s worker protest was "inadmissible behavior by employers." When was the last time you read that apt phrase used to describe how profiteering American corporate leaders and their beltway butt-boyz are working 24/7 to take your jobs?



In addition, Communist Party leader Marie-George Buffet also said workers "are obliged to use means that they themselves regret." She said, "When you are in front of a wall, it is despair that speaks out."



But when American workers are thrown under the bus, leave it to the clueless and “I Got Mine” India lobby loving pedestrians to look the other way. Divide and Conquer is working.


The USA? “Land of the Free” Jobs to India Giveaway. “Home of the knave.”



Vive la France!



-2Truthy




Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Bill Gates Needs Your Help to Build Bridge

(Special thanks to Robin Trower)
(Photo credits/very special thanks to Life in the Shadows)

Billionaire Bill Gates Needs a Handout: Help Him Build This Bridge to Buttf*#k

Did you know that poor billionaire Bill Gates needs help from underemployed and sacked American taxpayers to pay for a bridge he wants to build? The Economic Populist explains:

“Microsoft is grabbing economic stimulus money to build an infrustructure project -- the connection of separate M$ "campuses" through construction of a tax-payer funded bridge. I'd call this a massive misappropriation of tax-payer money clearly illustrating how the public good is subverted and redefined to serve that which is good for corporations.”

(You really, really do have to give credit to the Obama administration for doling out record billions and trillions of American taxpayer stimulus bill loot to corporate welfare queens who replace American white collar professionals with imported cheap labor. )

But as the Gay Swami intones

"where there is a welfare queen and a stimulus package, there is an even more stimulating H-1B behind them."


What a racket. Here’s the formula: American taxpayers subsidize a few wealthy corporate CEOs and their lieutenants to invent privacy invasive technology (see below CNN News story) that does nothing to provide much needed healthcare to our citizens. Then, these same corporations turn around and continue their extermination plan of firing American professionals so they can import workers from India via all sorts of backroom lobbyist deals. After all, the Obama administration is flanked by no shortage of team members like Vivek Kundra with scandalous ties to India, and like Larry Summers who has been paid lucrative “speaking fees” by Indian outsourcing companies. As key Obama official Larry Summers received $255,000 from outsourcing companies RIL and TCS, are we surprised?

For a primer on “speaker fees”, see Elaine Meinel Supkis’s excellent article “Speaking Fees Are Bribes.”

Oddly, “progressive” collective outrage about our jobs being sold off to India is MIA. You know, the really fun and cool outrage, like the kind Paul Hipp or Matt Taibbi dug into about AIG… So it’s OK and hip to rip bankers a new one but the sacred, Cash Cow of Indian Outsourcing must remain a dirty little secret?


Meanwhile, are you tired of all this corruption and cronyism yet? Let’s go back to privacy invasive technology. Do you want your patient records on the internet or do you want access to healthcare? Why shouldn’t the corporations, who are pro-outsourcing, pay for their development? As a taxpayer footing the bill, shouldn’t you have a vote? Oh right. We did that already. The country voted for a president who was supposed to stand up for the people’s welfare and not corporate welfare. Check.

Despite privacy concerns among millions of Americans, CNET News reports today in “Taking your health records online” that American taxpayer dollars under the stimulus bill are being spent for corporations like Dell, Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and others to develop electronic health records (EHRs).These are the same corporations who have chosen to replace American jobs with foreign workers from India. Although figures for EHR spending have darted around, this recent NextGov article reveals they may not have such a clear, precise reading on the exact amount of billions we will spend on providing jobs to a majority of foreign imported workers:

“On its face, the economic stimulus package provided $17 billion to broaden adoption of electronic medical records, but a top Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society official says the ultimate amount spent could be as much as $39 billion. The difference would depend on e-records adoption rates, said Dave Roberts, HIMSS vice president for government relations.”


This MarketWatch report “High-tech layoffs climb first quarter” reveals today that despite this country’s economic depression, many of these corporations are firing Americans anyway. The big problem is, this is YOUR taxpayer money allowing these corporations to replace your jobs, at your expense. In addition, these billions of taxpayer dollars ostensibly applied to privacy invasion technology do nothing to provide medical care for the almost fifty millions of American citizens (and growing) without affordable access to healthcare. The report cites one trade group, TechAmerica, that claimed:

“Sales of software and related services have boosted employment in that segment of the industry. As a result, the tech sector actually added a net 77,000 jobs in 2008, the trade group calculated.”

But then TechAmerica (whose ominous tag line reads “Where The Future Begins") said the group was unwilling to predict a net gain in 2009, however, given the current state of the economy.

"New hiring is certainly on hold," David Thomas, TechAmerica's representative in Silicon Valley, said last week.


Why would it be “on hold”? Are these corporations who are firing American workers, which TechAmerica represents, waiting patiently for all of the newly minted, H-1B visa holders to arrive? (ht/t Rob Sanchez at jobdestruction.com):


“The USCIS has now announced that it has received enough H-1B petitions to meet the allotment of visas for 2010. Out of the 163,000 petitions that were received the first five days of filing, 65,000 will be chosen by lottery tobe issued visas. In addition another 20,000 will be accepted under the"advanced degree" exemption limit which brings the total up to 85,000. Today the USCIS will conduct an H-1B visa lottery to determine who the lucky winners are that get visas from the huge pile of petitions. Numbers for other exemptions to the cap were not announced. Last year that total combined with the cap was about 122,000 visas. Meanwhile, during the first three months of 2009 the high-tech sector in the U.S. suffered its deepest layoffs in seven years, according to a firm that tracks the jobs market. Today the USCIS will conduct an H-1B visa lottery to determine who the lucky winners are that get visas from the huge pile of petitions.”

As yours truly reported here, the U.S. Stimulus Bill Pushes E-Health Records as a means for technology corporate executive management to profit by outsourcing the development to the same corporations who are kicking American technologists to the curb by replacing them with cheap foreign labor. No wonder they call taxpayer money TARP- take a look at what your tax dollars are getting you, as Tommi Avicolli-Mecca reports in today’s Beyond Chron article “Evicting the Homeless."

Life in America. Under a tarp. Have and Have Nots.

Party on, plebes!

-2Truthy

Mel Toast's Manifesto

Mel Toast’s Manifesto: Rise Up Against Corporate and Political Crooks Selling Our Jobs

2Truthy’s slogan says it all: It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. It’s YOUR JOB.

Distracted U.S. citizens, despite this economic depression - continue to do nothing to stop this war on America’s middle class jobs. Instead of taking to the streets and to their local corporations and council members en masse, they mindlessly lust to be like the amoral, corporate and political crooks responsible for killing the socio-economic fabric of our society and our livelihoods. Bullying corporations, with the help of their scheming law firms and political whores who, without conscience, profit handsomely from this crime against the people of this nation --our society---lock arms as they persist in spreading the lie that educated Americans, from our finest universities – are lazy and unskilled while they broker our jobs for exorbitant profit to Indian citizens.

Americans are not lazy. Nor are white collar professionals “unskilled.”We won World War II with blood and ingenuity. We went to the moon. We, “the conquerors,” rebuilt Europe and helped Japan become the giant that it is. We have given billions in aid all over the world. We host the UN. We are a virtual clearinghouse of self-criticism. We Americans are not bad. We are not lazy or unskilled. But we have become cowed. After decades of trying to lift all boats around the third world under the banner of globalization, we have failed, while our corrupt politicians work out deals to sell every last job we have in order for them and their corporate cronies to profit. It is NOW time for everyone in this country to admit this.

Once upon a time, we spoke our minds. Once, once we willingly pitched in to help our neighbors, to strengthen our communities. Now we ask with hubris and arrogance and envy “who are you?” and “what’s in it for me?”

Forget about Left and Right. This has come to pass not because of Democrat OR Republican or Liberal or Conservative. It has come to pass because of money. Lots and lots of it.

If there’s money to be made selling our grandmothers to appear in a Romanian porno flick, let the Will of Money be done. There is no honor, integrity or shame. Those are for mugs. We have allowed ourselves to be sold to the highest bidder. (Have you seen the California girl, Natlalie Dylan, who is selling her “virginity”? It’s a sign of the times.) I don’t know what level of education she has or hasn’t reached, but I do know this: Our government is in full swing with India to sell out every last meaningful job that you and your neighbors would have, and for her to capitalize on selling her body is to expose the death knell for American civil society, no less empire.

You used to see that in India or Thailand or the Philippines or in Japan right after World War II and not even flinch. But now, it’s happening right here in America. The sad thing is, this girl perhaps senses that, in the previous generation, she could have worked a “regular” job to put herself through college. Easy. Instead, has she chosen the lazy way out or is this all that Americans have left to ‘support themselves’ in this Fascist society of have and have nots? To sell her body for a hand full of silver. A shabby, but bankable proposition. (What she fails to understand is that men will be willing to pay millions not to take her virginity as she assumes, but to humiliate her. This is something she does not understand.)

American men and women in this country used to work hard. They used to work an honest day for an honest day’s pay. But someone, the globalization fiends if you will, told us that, hey, you guys are stupid. You don’t have to work so hard. Mexicans will do it for you. Or, better still, Indians in warehouses stacked like bags of curry in cities like Bangalore or Hyderabad can work for a fraction of your pay –never mind your hundreds of thousands of dollars of educational investment in our top universities.


To the rest of the world, the United States is a laughing stock, a country that loathes quality and integrity. Today it’s all about the bottom line. Not necessarily what’s BEST but what’s CHEAP. What’s the old saw? GOOD, FAST, CHEAP. Pick two. That’s capitalism. Once upon a time, we didn’t have to worry about competition from India or China or Bangladesh. We sent them hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money and hoped they’d be able to just feed themselves. Well, they’ve done far, far better than that. They are after much more than just a bowl of rice these days. They are after our jobs, our homes and our Way of Life.

The Obama administration is working tirelessly to ensure the demise of America’s white collar middle class and what does its citizens do? They distract themselves with the spoon fed wedge issues, moaning about too-much or not enough religion, relying upon Fascist rags like the Huffington Post for “news” as they cry in their diet-cokes over missing an episode of Dancing With The Stars – all the while ignoring the supposed ‘Democratic’ leadership that is robbing them and doing nothing to reverse it. After eight years of Bush, this Congress and president have every opportunity to lift our middle class by protecting their jobs but instead this administration chooses to sell them for personal profit. This is criminal.

And they won’t have to take our jobs and freedoms with guns. Rich “American” bankers and businessmen and women will exterminate them in the form of H-1B and other visas. And when that won’t work any longer, they will set up factories and offices where these foreigners can work online and write our newspapers, teach our classes and take our Big Mac orders without ever leaving the comforts of the Orient.

I spent 20 years in the Middle East and the Far East. There is no diversity training in China. There is no social security in India. It is social Darwinism. Survival NOT ONLY of the smartest, but of the toughest, meanest and most selfish men—and I do mean MEN—on the block.

This is where we are headed. And we must stop. NOW. India must learn how to take care of its own. The citizens of the Unites States are NOT India’s keepers. It needs to raise or adjust its own standard of living as does China and Mexico and Paraguay and Nepal. Without our help any longer. For we have neglected our own for far too long.

Who ARE these “good neighbors” in our Congress and the White House who are killing jobs for the people of this country? We have been betrayed by our own people in this country. Vicious, mean-spirited and ‘brilliant’ bankers and businessmen who have squandered the treasure and the labor of honest Americans.

We must—somewhat, I fear like the old Soviet Union—stop treating economic crime in this country as if it were a badge of honor. We need to see the Millikens and the Madoffs and the Fulds and the Greenspans of the world hanging from a few lampposts.

That said, Ayn Rand, has more to say about human nature than Marx and Lenin ever will.
But that is a discussion for another day. Right now we need to nip this outsourcing menace in the bud.

No more American jobs overseas, or “in-shoring” over here.

We will hang those at the top who steal from us. And we shall turn our backs on those at the bottom who have spurned society’s efforts—time after time after time—to help them become something other than blind consumers led by hip-hop pied pipers to the promised land of pleasure. This goes equally for the wealthy, prescription drug-abusing housewife who cheats on her husband with her daughter’s boyfriend, and the double-wide denizens who snort crystal meth, wave the flag, and rob liquor stores.

Bread and Circuses. Juvenal. Satire X. Read it. That is what our government is trying to do to us. Seduce us with stuff. Shut us up. And keep us entertained. It was working in Europe, but witness the French: they need jobs and are taking to the streets; Germany understands that handing over jobs to cheap foreign labor hurts their people, themselves, their community; But “they”—those gourmands of globalization—are longing for it to go unchecked here.

Let’s make sure these corrupt U.S. politicians who are literally selling out our jobs to India are taken down, along with their greedy corporate BFFs. Long live jobs in America. E pluribus unum. From many, one.

Let us live again—honestly, and for one another.

Cordially,

Mel Toast

Monday, April 6, 2009

Resist or Become Serfs: Chris Hedges Calls for Change that WE Can Use

Watch more New York videos on AOL Video


(Very special thanks to Lou Reed)

"Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it. That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them then we are into feudalism. We are into private police, gated communities and serfs with a 21st century nomenclature."
-Ralph Nader

Imagine if you could put all the lawyers (no empty seats), greedy corporate overlords and their political enablers on a big, fat bus (I know, it’s a big bus) headed for a cliff and told them that they weren’t getting off it until they came up with a plan to stop the legalized looting of America’s middle class? For all of the millions of immigration attorneys who profit from teaching corporations how to not hire American workers and handing American jobs to imported workers that has contributed to the demise of our economy and America’s educated middle class, imagine the positive, corrective value this segment alone could make toward restoring and rebuilding the economy and broken society? Maybe some like Cohen & Grigsby could even do it pro bono as a form of retribution to the American public.

But for all of the much needed remedies to rebuild our economy and heal our society at the hands of these greedsters, America needs, among other things, a national put an attorney to good works program. And a busload of faith to get by.

In his article Resist or Become Serfs, Chris Hedges writes about how the bank and corporate bailouts are intended to make the wealthy wealthier and loot the middle class. He describes how this administration is lying to us about job statistics, and by now only cretins and Groupthinkers would ignore the fact that our government officials have made it JOB ONE to sell off American white collar jobs to the third world. With greedy American corporatists pining to become feudal slave lords, America’s casino culture of corruption has got to stop. Hedges quotes Ralph Nader, who observes that the trillions of dollars in bailout money is being woefully misspent:

“The Justice Department is overwhelmed. It doesn't have a tenth of the prosecutors, the investigators, the auditors, the attorneys needed to deal with the previous corporate crime wave before the bailout started last September.

So, if the DOJ is understaffed, why not take some of that bailout money and instead define a program that recruits highly skilled American lawyers to defend the employment rights of discriminated against citizens against lawyers who train American corporations how not to hire Americans? Where is the bailout money to benefit American citizens who, as Hedges points out, are the victims? Why not take some of that bailout money and apply it instead towards compensating highly skilled lawyers to throw these corrupt bankers, politicians and corporate crooks in the slammer? Why not? The way I see it, as long as we’re going to have a corporatocracy, surely, there are a few lawyers out there who would be willing to step up to the plate and redefine their business models for the greater good of our society? Remember, It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. It’s YOUR JOB.

Hedges reaffirms what we are witnessing, how America’s “anemic democracy” is devolving into a third-world nation as its idle citizenry does nothing to “immediately halt our elite's rapacious looting of the public treasury” while our government rapidly transforms into a police state as the direct result of “unchecked corporate capitalism.” After all, the stimulus and bailout plans were and are, after all, not designed to save the citizens of this country:

“The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.”

As trillions of dollars are budgeted for bank and corporate bailouts without oversight or public approval, Chris Hedges notes that the Obama administration, rather than chart a new course, is intent on re-inflating the bubble that will complete the wealth redistribution trickling-up scheme designed to rob America’s middle class:

“The trillions of dollars of government funds being spent to sustain these corrupt corporations could have renovated our economy. We could have saved tens of millions of Americans from poverty. The government could have, as consumer activist Ralph Nader has pointed out, started 10 new banks with $35 billion each and a 10-to-1 leverage to open credit markets. Vast, unimaginable sums are being placed into these dirty corporate hands without oversight. And they will use this money as they always have-to enrich themselves at our expense.”

Hedges cites how the U.S. has been in a steady economic decline for decades, and how previous administrations have resorted to lies in order to enable their corporatist, feudal lord paymasters:

“Our actual unemployment rate, when you include those who have stopped looking for work and those who can only find part-time jobs, is not 8.5 percent but 15 percent. A sixth of the country is now effectively unemployed. And we are shedding jobs at a faster rate than in the months after the 1929 crash.”

Solutions, solutions…The Institute for Policy Studies came out with a twelve step program to end Plutocracy here, well worth reading. And for all of the corruption and greed that needs to go, Hedges is right. Americans must “resist” the Neo-Frat Boy corporate state. How and what to specifically do?

TARP schmarp. If American taxpayers are footing the bill, let’s get some bang for our dwindling bucks. “Bailing out” the bankers and corporate crooks by looting middle class taxpayers without demanding our labor rights reforms to get our jobs back is the stupidest thing Americans could allow. No wonder the world, particularly the third world - disrespects and laughs at us, because America has slid into third world status and the plebes STILL allow the politicians to steal our jobs for personal profit.

As I have said before, economic depressions can be survived as long as people have jobs to afford them, and the stealing of American jobs by these corrupt corporate overlords and politicians so that they can profit has got to end by halting The Cash Cow of Indian Outsourcing, the importation of cheap, third world labor.

-2Truthy

Friday, April 3, 2009

Matt Taibbi Is A Mean Man!

(Very special thanks to Rosemary Watson)

After reading this horribly insensitive screed by Matt Taibbi below, I practically broke a nail typing the rest of this post.


In AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right, Matt dropkicks an AIG executive's ass for asking us to "chill out about his poor overworked employees" over at AIG.


Obviously, Matt doesn't understand what it costs these days for a girl to fly to Dubai for a weekend of Gucci shopping.

Well click on the above video and take a look at what one poor AIG wife of Ted, Gina, has to say about hanging on to all that cabbage...


Happy Friday, Loserettes!

-2Truthy

Tom Friedman Blows Green Smoke Up Joe Taxpayer's Pantlegs


The Price of Supporting American Job Outsourcing and In-shoring


It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Elitist champion of American job outsourcing/in-shoring, flat, hot, smelly and overcrowded Flat One Worlder, Tom Friedman, writes in this NY Times article entitled “The Price Is Not Right” that he doesn’t expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, and wishes “the leaders of the world's 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting — call it "Market to Mother Nature" accounting.”

Hmm. Does anyone hear another disastrous sales pitch in the offing? Why yes! Carbon taxation is Tom Friedman’s latest mantra!

Yours truly completely believes that solid green energy products and technologies have the potential to be better both for our environment and to stimulate our economy by providing American jobs at all levels. Certainly, no one can accuse champions like Al Gore of not being passionate about the challenges that climate change present. So why would anyone listen to Tom Friedman, who gets it wrong every time – he supported the Iraq War, he supports handing over American white collar jobs to India -- and now he is hustling yet another get Joe Taxpayer to cough up more dough scheme to once again benefit his crony insiders on our dwindling dime? Ben Smith’s blog at Politico offers a few insights here into the ehm, crony conflict of interest details in Friedman’s latest sales pitch on carbon taxes and cap and trade schemes.


To better understand the conflict of interest details, here is a background refresher on this administration’s few elites (also proponents of outsourcing or human trafficking) with beltway ties can capitalize on man-made global warming, which some investigative journalists have exposed as “a money-generating hoax,” with “Obama working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.”


In Friedman’s latest promotion piece to further disregard the growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed taxpaying Americans who will not profit from said carbon taxes, (who have also just come off of eight disastrous Bush years of subsidizing Halliburton & Co. in their murderous war on Iraq combined with the sociopathic push to hand American white collar jobs to India) corporate welfare mouthpiece-salesman, Tom runs a fast hustle by equating the financial system “meltdown” with what he refers to as “the climate system meltdown.”


Got that? Financial meltdown = climate system meltdown.

How is that? Because Tom Friedman said so.


Two stated problems: “financial” and “climate.” Huh? Matt Taibbi wrote a terrific article here in his hilarious assessment about how this corporate welfare megaphone makes it up as he goes along… how this


“porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.”


After proclaiming the two stated problems, Friedman then calls in and quotes a couple of experts, at least one whose expertise just so happens to be in the lofty, flat-worldish field known as outsourcing or human trafficking. (See below).


Never mind the fact that a NY Times Op-Ed propagandist (oops journalist) like Tom Friedman also said we should just all go shopping, which really means “should all go to hell” to save the economy - despite the fact that Tom supports importing Indians to take our jobs -- and this hate-thy-neighbor, sociopathic example of what America offers for journalism is a slap in the face to every citizen in this country as Friedman channels his inner man-crush by quoting an executive from one of the biggest human traffickers, Infosys, responsible for America’s disappearing jobs:

"When the balance sheet of a company does not capture the true costs and risks of its business activities," and when that company is too big to fail, "you end up with them privatizing their gains and socializing their losses," Nandan Nilekani, the co-chairman of the Indian technology company Infosys, remarked to me.”


Splendid! Who knew that the self-appointed climate expert could learn all about the financial crisis from an Indian outsourcer?


In addition to this “financial meltdown”, expert Tom also proclaims there is a simultaneous “climate” meltdown and hints that somebody (in the U.S.) has to foot the bill for both orchestrated problems so hey, why not devise a solution to a couple of problems that were cooked up by a few elitist insiders to line their pockets with taxpayer dough and then really, really stick it to these sorry-assed American taxpayers?


Quoth the expert protagonist of American Job Killing:

…"the reason we're experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas — producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet.”

And, right as rain, Frank, the kind of “toxic air” Friedman is blowing amounts to more smoke up the gre$n pants legs of a few well connected insiders chomping at the bit to make a fast return on the stated carbon problem that Tom equates with the AIG mess:


“Just as AIG sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and risks of massive defaults, oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference).”


Then, Friedman continues to profess that if products are “mispriced” and do not reflect “the real costs and risks” associated with their usage, people go to excess. “And that is what happened in the financial marketplace and in the energy/environmental marketplace during the credit bubble."


Bubbles? Oh really, Tom? You want to start talking bubbles? How about the dot.com bubble where your pals assigned themselves boatloads of tech stock options in all kinds of dogs of startups and made a clean sweep at the trough? Think the same thing can’t happen all over again with the same Chicago Climate Exchange cronies promoting a public rip-off funded by Obama before he was even POTUS?


Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, many investigative journalists report that Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress, and who better than Friedman to wind up throwing out this corporate sales pitch? While our nation’s “financial” problem can be tempered by employing our own citizens so they can start spending again, Obama his Economic Advisors have pledged to keep handing over American jobs to India anyway, and no amount of carbon taxation is going to stop the bleeding of our jobs which is eroding our economy and our society. But guys like Friedman don’t care about human beings, only human trafficking.
And does Friedman actually expect anyone to believe that by taxing carbon offenders, they won’t find loopholes, i.e., more business as usual?


“Our biggest financial-services companies, some of which came to be seen as too big to fail, engaged in complex financial trading schemes that did not adequately price in the costs and risks of a market reversal. And our biggest energy companies, utilities and auto companies became dependent on cheap hydrocarbons that spin off climate-changing greenhouse gases, and we clearly have not forced them, through a carbon tax, to price in the true risks and costs to society from these climate-changing fuels.”


Re: above – large and small corporations know how to work tax cuts and loopholes, so carbon taxing is still “taxing” a bunch of lawyered-up insiders who will exploit those loopholes, the same way that Friedman’s outsourcing pals exploit human beings in the form of labor. Read Citizen Carrie’s post here about Wachovia employees being forced to train their foreign replacements.


Case in point: Forget the word “carbon” for a moment, and take the case of an outsourcing shop “headquartered” in North Carolina, Synechron, that specializes in the outsourcing or human trafficking of cheap, imported labor to the U.S. from India to take jobs away from Americans.


Rather than Tom taking his puffed up journalistic backside down to North Carolina to interview the fired locals from Wachovia who have lost their jobs because of the legalized, Indian cheap labor lobby that Friedman triumphs, he instead is content to dispense quotes from officials at companies like Infosys who are complicit in this war on America’s white collar middle class.
Friedman goes on to proclaim that we need new banking regulations that reins in the leverage and speculative trading that big banks and insurance companies can undertake. Fair enough. But THEN he displays his salesy, bag-of burning rats in a meth lab, pseudo analysis here:


“And this is ALSO why we need a tax on carbon — so we and our power utilities don't become permanently addicted to cheap coal that makes for lower electricity prices today but spits out toxic greenhouse gases that have to be paid for by future generations tomorrow.”


Huh? Coal is bad. Check. Let’s tax all those American hillbillies who rely on coal to heat their dreadful shanties. Check. Let’s tax Utility companies that don’t do business with businessman Al Gore’s portfolio companies. Check. Let’s tax every effing body in this country, while we’re at it – to subsidize all of that other gre$n stuff that Gore’s VC firm is pushing. Check!


And just when I thought I would never, ever agree with anything this guy has to say, Friedman ejects this gem:


“This capitalist engine doesn't need to be discarded; it needs some fixes. For starters, we need to get back to basics — accountable lending, prudent saving, reasonable leverage and, most important, more engineering of goods than just financial products.”


Yay, Tom! I couldn’t agree with you more. I also want to see our capitalist system restored with some good, old-fashioned, non-sociopathic regulation and a stop to selling American jobs to India to end this human trafficking once and for all.


But wait…he resorts AGAIN to more pap by quoting a tank of hot air, finding another ‘expert’ on this mind-blowing, newly plucked from the nether region, stealth term called “destructive creation”:


“Some of our biggest financial firms got away from their original purpose — to fund innovation and to finance the process of "creative destruction," whereby new technologies that improve people's lives replace old ones, said Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in an interview in The American Interest. Instead, he added, too many banks got involved in exotic and incomprehensible financial innovations — to simply make money out of money — which ended up as "destructive creation."


Gee whillackers, Mr. Hooper... By now, just about every Joe Blow on the street knows that “to simply make money out of money” has kind of put us in deep doo-doo, but I suppose Tom needed to quote an expert anyway…

“Destructive creation”, indeed. For this complicated, exotic term, to guys like Tom, in the end, translates to ‘kill American jobs by handing them to Indians AND get American taxpayers to support us greedy elites in every scheme we can pull out of our patooties and get these deplorable American plebes to subsidize.’


By now, it is plain to see that Thomas L. Friedman is every corporate welfare queen’s biggest proponent of the Cash Cow of Indian Outsourcing and mega-propagandist in this war on America’s educated middle class destructively created by them.


-2Truthy