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.
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:
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…)
1. Pancho Montana’s maiden dispatch from deep inside Mexico’s drug war about neighborhood drug stores called “tienditas.” They’re sort of like your local Rite Aid, but they don’t carry any Tylenol. (more…)
This article was first published in The eXile on December 2, 2005.
Everything about Russia in the 90s was cool. We mean everything.
America in the 90s, on the other hand, offers plenty to hate to the spleen-endowed eXhole. Problem is, you’re probably one of the reasons why the 90s were so bad. (more…)
Now that we stomped the dust monkeys, our only casualty being that helicopter wheel that the Taliban danced around while firing their AKs in the air, I have to say, I’m damn glad I was behind President Bush from the get-go. I toldja so! I knew we’d thrash those pathetic primitives! I told everyone, but nooooo, they wouldn’t listen! (more…)
Your humble eXiled Online correspondent Mark Ames was invited onto Dylan Ratigan’s “Morning Meeting” show this week to talk about the corporate communists who are dragging America down into the Second World trash heap. Ratigan was recently awarded an honorary eXiled ”Iron X” medal for his recent takedown of one of the most toxic of all the corporate communists, Betsy McCaughey, “the woman who killed health care.” This is something we’ve been waiting a long time for: a TV personality who brawls, rather than just more smirking. (more…)
Can someone get me my beta blockers? You have to have a bottle of something close by if you dare to read the financial news on any given day. Like, oh, say, Monday, the Day of Atonement: Businessweek reports that over in the rigid class-based United Kingdom, even they have the guts to reign in the banker class, with new plans to ban annual banker bonuses: (more…)
There was another workplace rampage killing last week, just outside of Fresno, California, leaving two company employees dead and the other employees grateful to be alive.
Fresno, like so much of unofficial America, is still in a state of shock these days, after suffering from a non-stop barrage of tragic events and trends, of subprime devastation and a three-year drought, and political corruption and machinations that seem to be accelerating with every month. So unlike workplace shootings in the past, this one was quickly pushed off the front pages and almost forgotten, just a couple of days after it happened.
There was a leak yesterday to Bloomberg that the Fed is making plans to “drain” $1 trillion from the US economy. Because supposedly our economy is overheating with too much money—not that anyone you or I know has seen a penny of it. It doesn’t seem to make any sense to suck money out of a cash-strapped country when the economy’s in ruins: unemployment is reaching Third World levels, foreclosures are hitting new record highs, and lending is still contracting at an alarming rate not seen since, yep, the Great Depression. So why would the Fed talk about pulling $1 trillion out of the economy, as if that’s the medicine it needs?
It is all about taking care the already-mega-rich Wall Street bankers and foreign investors who want to protect the value of all the money they plundered from America. They want to ensure that the trillions they were handed by Paulson and Bernanke and Summers are still worth the same trillions next year…and to do that, they’re going to apply a simple law of supply and demand: drain out $1 trillion from us, and the value of their trillions holds its value.
We got this letter today from reader Jack Reynolds, who suggested this VIP health care reform since after all it’s the super-wealthy who are driving the entire townhall mob anyway:
After much soul-searching, I’ve come up with a public option that Republicans can get behind. It’s called the Platinum Public Program (PPP), and it provides 100% coverage for the top 0.5% of income earners.
Though they can already afford the best healthcare in the world, that simply isn’t good enough. For instance, take your average $2M/yr hedge fund manager. Suppose he notices a tightening of his sinuses. If he went to the ER - as he Ought to - to try to head off any detrimentally costly sick days, you’ll be surprised to find out that even though he’s one of the lynchpins of our financial system, he’d still have to languish behind homeless people, brick-layers, cooks, and crying fucking babies. And all the while, other hedge fund managers are making the money that he should be making. He’s simply not there to help make the market perfect, and the market - nee, the World! - suffers.
After a brief lull, workplace shootings are back with today’s murder rampage near Fresno, California. Apparently the killer, identified as James Bascadi Badasci was recently laid off after 10 years from the company he attacked this morning—Fresno Equipment Company, a dealer for John Deere equipment. Early reports say that Badasci showed up at 9:00am with a shotgun, killed a person whom he allegedly “targeted,” then fired several more shots into the equipment before eventually turning the gun on himself. SWAT teams arrived after the damage was done–they always have an uncanny way of showing up after the killing’s over and the murderer’s already “comma-self”‘d. (more…)
