The American “going postal” virus just spread to the U.S. territories in the South Pacific, after a gunman killed 4 people and wounded at least 8, including a group of South Korean tourists, before blowing his brains out at the edge of a cliff. Saipan is in the American-controlled Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, located between Hawaii and the Philippines. (more…)

The Tea Party blogosphere is all abuzz with whiny articles about how they’re being oppressed by “violent liberals,” and they’re using this video (which deserves a laugh track and Benny Hill theme song accompaniment) as proof of the Liberal Tyranny. I thought “liberal violence” was an oxymoron, a punchline in a Simpson’s episode. But maybe it’s finally coming true again, the rise of the gutsy leftie willing to fight after 40 years of leftwing slumbering in the face of relentless rightwing assaults. (more…)

How about this for a plan for sprucing up our nation’s crumbling housing projects: ship lazy black folks out to the subprime suburbs, privatize their apartment buildings and hand them over to real estate developers. That’s what T.A. Frank, a New America Foundation think tank shill, thinks Los Angeles needs to do with Jordan Downs, a notoriously dilapidated and crime-wracked project in Watts: (more…)

I don’t want to go too deep down the Fort Hood Rabbit Hole Of Weirdness, so I’m just going to get off my chest some of the incredibly weird shit that’s being thrown around in the media to confuse us or throw us off. It’s looking pretty clearly like there’s a cover-up in progress, and not a very professional cover-up either. But the sad thing is that all the confusion and bullshit thrown our way will probably succeed in its goal of steering the public away from whatever it is the military doesn’t want us to find out about the shooting massacre.

Anyway, here’s my list of The Top Twelve Disinformation Tales to keep an eye on:

(more…)

This article was first published in Alternet.

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all the time, it’s just that we’re a nation of amnesiacs who forget all the unpleasantries, and refuse to learn the valuable lessons. [Just this morning, another "going postal" office massacre in Orlando, leaving at least 2 dead and 17 wounded. Early reports say the shooter was an employee.]  (more…)

Ames emailed me a New York Times blog post from last February by one Casey B. Mulligan–which may sound like a fictional baseball player’s name, but no, he’s real all right, just another in a long line of insane econ professors from the University of Chicago. In the blog post, Mulligan cheerfully announced that when it comes to commercial real estate, we’ve got nothing at all to worry about. There’s no danger of a CRE  crash, like the one we’ve experienced in the residential market, so we can all go back to being happy free market beneficiaries.

No CRE crash? Ha-ha! I just love these Chicago School alchemy frauds! It is truly a joy to see them make such fools of themselves on the permanent public record. And not surprisingly, although Mulligan struck out, he’s still at the plate, batting out barely comprehensible economic fatwahs for the New York Times like nothing ever happened—that’s the kind of free market a real Chicago School economist likes. (more…)

“Polidori once asked Byron what, besides scribble verses, he could do better than Polidori himself. Byron icily replied: ‘Three things. First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.’”

OK, somebody go find a black goat somewhere, sharpen me a steak knife, and buy us some spray paint for a pentagram, ’cause we’re gonna resurrect us a champion who can kick the necessary ignorant Protestant ass and make it look easy. (more…)

Antiwar.com Radio’s Scott Horton takes time out from global issues to talk with Mark Ames on the battle on the home front: the American economy. Horton is a Libertarian and Ames definitely isn’t, so some sparks fly before the two find agreement on a few points: Ayn Rand is a fucking idiot, the billionaire parasites have to go, and the Fed needs to be bound, gagged, and locked in a box in the cellar. (more…)

Mark Ames talks with Ian Masters of Los Angeles radio station KPFK 90.7 about the billionaires who are plundering Alabama and the rest of America, and what can be done to stop it. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on June 8, 2000, issue 92.

How can we best promote world peace? As always, Thomas Friedman has a stunningly original answer: by building more McDonald’s. Here’s Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” from his new book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: (more…)

This article was first published in Alternet.

Editor’s Note: The shocking transfer of public wealth to Wall Street’s pockets is illustrated vividly in Mark Ames’ article below, which covers some very disturbing recent events in Alabama, where billionaires and banks are squeezing the locals so hard that they’re literally going bankrupt just for flushing their toilets, where violence and the threat of violence are reaching a boiling point and where even the Posse Comitatus Act is under threat. (more…)

Just when you thought you’d seen all the health-insurance evil possible, now comes another shocker: a UnitedHealth subsidiary in Colorado denied coverage to Peggy Robertson, mother of two, because she wasn’t sterilized after her caesarian-section delivery procedure, according to a letter made public. Almost 1/3 of all deliveries are done by c-section–meaning that in Colorado and likely elsewhere, fertile women are regularly denied coverage unless they agree to sterilize their wombs. This comes after reports that a health insurance company considered rape to also be a “pre-existing condition.” The meaning is clear: America’s health insurance industry hates us all, and they hate fertile women most of all, if only because they represent two detestable Americans in one body.  (more…)

This article was first published in the New York Press.

HE WEARS A black hoodie to protect himself from the cold rain. The baby-faced guy is Dominican, probably in his early twenties. He rushes by me at the Graham Avenue L train entrance, pauses and asks, “Matt?” I nod. He leads me down the stairs, examines me silently. Once he’s satisfied that I’m not a threat, he takes $30 from my left hand and pushes a sealed bag of Cheez Doodles into my right jacket pocket. Without another word, he splits for the opposite staircase and races back above ground. I check my watch. It’s 6:30 on a Saturday night under a busy Williamsburg intersection, and I’ve just scored three bags of “Nike” heroin, all hidden inside a re-sealed bag of chips. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on June 22, 2000.

Reading Bobos in Paradise, I realized that it’s not so hard to make money by writing: all you have to do is suck and swallow several million people at once. It’s certainly worked for David Brooks, who sucks like a Black Hole, and could give Linda Lovelace swallowing lessons. He’s making a fortune from this book, which is nothing more than fellatio in print. (more…)

Gen. Walker in Mississippi trawling for pro-segregationist cock

While wasting time yesterday I looked up that bizarro rightwing “patriot” General Edwin A. Walker, who was fired by Kennedy for insubordination, and who was later allegedly nearly shot by Oswald in Texas, and who was tied to the notorious “JFK Wanted For Treason” flyer distributed in Dallas on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. (I posted that flyer in my last entry on the JFK-Obama Repeat scenario.)

(more…)