This article was first published in Alternet.

Why are the hoppin’-mad Teabaggers so oddly quiet these days, ever since the BP oil disaster? That’s what Thomas Frank, author of What’s The Matter With Kansas? asked last week in his column, “Laissez-faire Meets The Oil Spill.” Ideologically, it’s painfully obvious why the Teabaggers are now the Teagaggers: their free-market gospel got mugged by oil-drenched reality — a reality so horrific that even pollster Frank Luntz couldn’t spin the BP disaster as the government’s fault. Best to just shut up when you’re that wrong.

But there’s another, more concrete reason why the Tea Party revolutionaries melted back into their suburbs as soon as the enormity of the Gulf spill disaster hit: The Tea Party evolved out of the pro-offshore drilling astroturf movement in 2008. They even share some of the same organizers and front groups, from PR operative like Eric Odom, to advocacy groups like FreedomWorks, whose combined efforts on the “Drill Here! Drill now!” astroturf campaign succeeded in opening up all of America’s coastlines and waters to offshore drilling, overturning a 27-year ban thanks to threats of “a Boston-style Tea Party,” as one Republican put it in the summer of 2008. (more…)

We’re desperate for a laugh these days. Life was bad enough already without oil-covered seabirds. So naturally some gits arranged to provide us with oil-covered seabirds, really glopping the oil on them so they’re clearly immobile in the photos except for their terrified eyes, and they’re bound to die there in the muck, slowly and horribly, if someone doesn’t come and rescue them right after the photo is snapped. Which someone does, of course, of course someone rescues them, the photographer himself maybe, pulling them out of the clotted Gulf, careful not to hurt their wings, and cleans them all off till they’re white again and puts them in a nice airy room to dry, and then transports them to a beautiful safe estuary somewhere, where they live happily ever after. The End.

This desperation for a laugh may make Get Him to the Greek seem funnier than it actually is, but we don’t care about that right now. There are some definite laughs in it. Good enough. It’s from the Judd Apatow comedy factory, so we know exactly what to expect, the guy-love, the women-hating, the raunch, the bizarre moralizing everyone calls “sweetness,” the scenes that work and the draggy interludes in between, and either Seth Rogen or Jonah Hill or both, to represent supposedly cuddly porcine men everywhere. Fine!
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This article was first published in Alternet

What happens when Americans plunder America and leave it broken, destitute and seething mad? Where do these fabulously wealthy Americans go with their loot, if America isn’t a safe, secure, or even desirable place to spend their riches? What if they lose faith in their gated communities, because those plush gated communities are surrounded by millions of pissed-off Americans stripped of their entitlements, and who now want in?

We finally have the answer, and you’re not going to like it: a new fleet of castles that float in the oceans. The super-wealthy are already building their first floating castle, a billion-dollar-plus luxury liner that offers permanent multimillion-dollar housing with the best protection of all: moats made of oceans, keeping the land-based Americans they’ve plundered at a safe distance. (more…)

Black rat snake in Washington Times newsroom.

This article is reprinted from Consortium News

As an investigative journalist, I’m not much for catchy political metaphors, but the revelation that snakes and rodents are infesting the Washington Times building as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s newspaper sinks into a financial swamp does have some poetic justice about it.

After all, for 28 years, the right-wing Washington Times has sent disinformation slithering through the U.S. political system while creating a nest for propagandists who have befouled American democracy with irrationality and dirty tricks.

Indeed, one could say that Moon’s newspaper pioneered the modern style of deceptive “journalism” that is the daily fare on Fox News, angry talk radio and right-wing blogs. (more…)

This article first appeared in The New York Press.

There was a strange moment last week during President Obama’s speech at Cooper Union. There he was, groveling before a cast of Wall Street villains including Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, begging them to “Look into your heart!” like John Turturro’s character in Miller’s Crossing…when out of the blue, the POTUS dropped this bombshell: “The only people who ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we’re proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny.”

The Big Secret, of course, is that every living creature within a 100-mile radius of Cooper Union would fail “this scrutiny”—or that scrutiny, or any scrutiny, period. Not just in a 100-mile radius, but wherever there are still signs of economic life beating in these 50 United States, the mere whiff of scrutiny would work like nerve gas on what’s left of the economy. Because in the 21st century, fraud is as American as baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet Volts—fraud’s all we got left, Doc. Scare off the fraud with Obama’s “scrutiny,” and the entire pyramid scheme collapses in a heap of smoldering savings accounts.

That’s how an acquaintance of mine, a partner in a private equity firm, put it: “Whoever pops this fraud bubble is going to have to escape on the next flight out, faster than the Bin Laden Bunch fled Kentucky in their chartered jets after 9/11.” (more…)

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Press

Ever since I got kicked out of Russia and forced back home, I’ve been collecting all kinds of news articles about fraud, in a document file titled “America Is Russia.” Here’s a little taste of the wonderful world of American Fraud:

1). Accounting Fraud: Last year, America’s leading banks were insolvent. They had tens or hundreds of billions in losses on their books, and the only way to wipe those losses out would be to either a) own up to the mess, raise enormous amounts of money on top of all the bailout money; or b) get out a big fat eraser, and wipe those losses off the books as if they never existed. (more…)

I had just moved into a house in the northern suburbs of Colorado Springs, and was getting to know one of my new roommates, a very attractive female in her mid 20’s. This was promising. At some point though, the conversation turned to politics. She asked me, “You’re not another one of those liberals are you?” There she was, a thin 5’6 or so brunette in tight jeans and an expensive blouse: beautiful, well-spoken, well dressed, and educated. And conservative as hell.  This kind of girl is ubiquitous in Colorado Springs. Not exactly what you think of when you see the, without a better way to put it, interesting looking types who attend the Tea Party rallys. In fact, my previous experiences were the exact opposite: the liberal girls more likely to be attractive, and the hardcore conservatives, um, not so much. I quickly found out that my old way of thinking would not work here. This evil flip of my traditional paradigm is God’s way of fucking with me, telling my non-believing ass, “You’re in the wrong place, pal. You don’t belong here. This is my country.” Every thing is different in the country’s most ultra-conservative city. (more…)

I didn’t plan on posting anything today, but then I made the  mistake of clicking open today’s piece by everyone’s favorite bearded-liberal, Paul Krugman, titled “You’re So Vain.” In just a few short paragraphs, Krugman unintentionally reveals why liberals are still getting their asses handed to them in every serious battle with the Republican Right: the liberal establishment is still convinced it’s competing in a middle-school civics class debate, which is why Krugman and his staff of middlebrow field marshalls like Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann are still whining about the same-old riddle that’s paralyzed them for 30 straight years: “Why don’t Republicans debate fairly and honestly?!” And their answer comes down to the same feeble: “It’s because Republicans aren’t as good as we liberals are.” Here’s Krugman: (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…)

This article was first published in The eXile on June 23, 2003.

As Russians openly strive to become elitny, America’s dominant oligarchs and feeble intellectuals live in a state of grotesque denial about their elitism. Billionaires act like hicks and get away with it. Liberal intellectuals try to suckup by learning sports metaphors. The smoke and mirrors works well for the billionaires but not for the nearly-extinct Left. So why are Americans still in the elitist closet? (more…)

This story was first published on AlterNet.

What happened to all the initial reports that accused Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Hasan snapped because he was distraught over the Army’s refusal to grant him either a discharge or an exemption from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, wars which the Muslim psychiatrist abhorred — and how it was this callous Army refusal to accommodate Maj. Hasan that led to his downward spiral into despondency, rage and mass murder?

We heard quite a bit about this in the first couple of days, and then — poof! That part of the Fort Hood story disappeared so neatly that I almost started to wonder if I’d imagined it — such is the power of media bombardment versus a mere soap bubble like the human memory. I might have forgotten too and gone along with the reality-scrub, the way all of Official America has gone, but thanks to all the news archives, it was possible to check the record as it was first reported on November 5, and trace how a key part of the Nidal Hasan story was airbrushed away from reality. (more…)

Here’s yet another depressing area in which Victorville excels: According to the latest Housing Hall of Misery stats released by the National Association of Realtors, the greater San Bernardino metropolitan area came in 3rd place in the race to the bottom of the biggest collapse in last quarter’s home prices. And while it’s not #1, the area did manage to edge out some pretty fast-crashing competition from the likes of Phoenix, Reno, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. (more…)

This story first appeared on Alternet.org

It was immediately obvious wandering through Berlin last weekend that the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall were in trouble.

In Alexanderplatz subway station, the main eastern transport hub, wall-sized billboards advertising the Fest der Freiheit — Festival of Freedom — were side by side with huge Burger King ads for a new grilled cheese snack. The tag line: “The Cheese Revolution.” (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:

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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.)

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