It’s that time of the year again when AIG’s executive bonuses are announced…and as every American raised on sitcoms knows, this means it’s that time in the show when the plot-twist causes the audience to gasp, and the camera cuts to a close-up of [NAME OF HORMONALLY-CAPABLE ACTOR-OF-COLOR] who delivers the viewer-pleasing catchphrase: “It’s outraaaaageous!” (more…)

Listen to this radio interview as Mark Ames talks to Antiwar.com radio host Scott Horton about Russia, the fuckups in the White House, how Larry Summers screwed the entire world up, and what Libertarians and the Left have in common. (more…)

Mark Ames appeared on the great Chuck Mertz radio program “This Is Hell” straight out of Chicago. They discuss blood-sucking bankers, the plusses and minuses of inhaling nitrogen gas, and why it’s all so fucking hopeless that we may as well join hedge funds ourselves. (more…)

Now I know what they mean when the media uses that word “outrage.” I saw it with my own eyes, during yesterday’s Congressional hearings with Tim Geithner. Turns out “outrage” refers to a ritual whereby Congressmen in Washington put on a kind of talent show on the TV to see who can play the role of Americans best. Then it’s all judged by the pundits, those connoisseurs of “Main Street’s outrage,” sort of like American Idol except that this is American Outrage. It’s really a lot of fun for everyone involved, and it’s useful too because this way, representatives can connect with us by actually pretending to act like they’re us–”outraged Americans”–which we’re told we are, and in fact, we are.  (The winning prize is more campaign money from the billionaires who are always on the lookout for talented politician-actors.) (more…)

If President Obama wants to really understand why he got his ass handed to him in the Massachusetts Senate race—a defeat as shocking and strange as if Joe Lieberman was elected president of Iran—he might want to read one of the thousands of economic horror stories happening around the country every day, stories that have put most Americans in a very foul, desperate mood. Like this story out of a small town in northern Indiana, where a casket maker was forced to close down operations and lay off its 50 employees because Americans can no longer afford bury their loved ones, and instead they’re cremating their bodies to save money.

Even the dead are suffering in today’s economy. (more…)

It’s fashionable to dismiss The Simpsons, to claim never to watch it anymore because its best days are long gone. It’s been fashionable to do this for ages. I remember when the show was about five years old and staggeringly great, I was informed by a pompous grad student, nicknamed “Astroboy” for his huge horn-rimmed glasses and abstracted air, that he didn’t watch The Simpsons anymore because its best days were long gone. “It’s lost its purity,” he said. “Homer is a little less Homer now, Lisa is a little less Lisa.”

And yet you are never less Astroboy, I thought, no matter how hard we pray.

But I didn’t say that aloud. I merely said, “Them’s fightin’ words,” and he seemed baffled and went away.

On The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! On Ice!, they had come up with a ready response to Astroboy and all his kind who clog internet sites with their fascinating observation that they don’t watch the show anymore because its best days are long gone: “I think the internet postings were a lot funnier ten years ago. I’ve kinda stopped reading the new posts.”

So fuck all y’all!
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OK, so after taking some time off, courtesy of me moving back to the fucking stone age to a house with no internet or cable, I’m going to try and write on a little more regular basis. This time, I’m not going to tell you about narco-trafficking activities in some far-away Mexican city, but something a little more personal and close-to-home for some of my American readers.

So I give you: the immigration rant. (more…)

I was in Detroit to visit my girlfriend’s family for Thanksgiving and decided to take a look around. Knowing my tastes, locals told me to head for a burnt-out slum called Highland Park, HP for short, as it’s hands-down the worst neighborhood in the city. And that’s saying a lot because in Detroit, beyond the bunker that is the revitalized downtown, the whole world’s a ghetto.

If you want directions to see what happened to the American Dream in the age of globalization, go north on Woodward Avenue. When the empty sidewalks and spiffed-up ghosts of department stores give way to miles of vacant lots, piles of arsonists’ ash and ruined factories, you’ve hit your destination: Highland Park. A beaten-down man in a black vinyl coat was there to greet me. Waving his hands furiously while I drove by, the crack-addicted hustler shouted, “Right here! I got that shit right here!” (more…)

This article first appeared in The eXile on February 21, 2008.

FRESNO, CA — OK, let’s talk hardware for once. I love the hardware, always have; the reason I don’t talk much about it is that what we’ve got is mostly useless, and what we really do need is always getting slammed. I’ll give you two examples: the F/A-18 and the V-22. (more…)

This article was first published in The eXile on November 13, 2003.

Reading the Western press accounts of the Khodorkovsky arrest has at times been as unpleasant as one of my famous giardia attacks. I’m not sure which version is more ridiculous: the mainstream line which portrays the YUKOS oligarch as some kind of billionaire Aung San Suu Kyi, a martyr to corporate good governance and liberal politics…or the simplistic flip-flop, which argues that Khodorkovsky was once a brutal thief, and therefore he’s getting his just desserts. (more…)

This article was first published on Alternet.org

A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they’ve pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without any real public outrage. The amount of power and control they wield over California’s most precious resource, water, should shock and frighten us — and it would, if more people were aware of it. But here is the scary thing: They are plotting to gain an even larger share of California’s increasingly-scarce, over-tapped water supply, which will surely lead to shortages, higher prices and untold destruction to California’s environment. (more…)

Sometimes you just want to see a lot of people die, but if you did anything about it in real life, you’d get entangled in a lot of red tape. So you head off to the cinema instead and watch stuff like 2012, which is really funny, in spots. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s nice line about the death of sweet, saintly Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, one of the great tearjerkers of the 19th century:

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

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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:

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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…)