This is one of the clearest and most painful “going postal” rampage massacres I’ve studied, and I’ve looked at a lot of them. The reason is that the murderer, George Sodini, left behind a diary that makes everything as clear as can be–so clear, in fact, that the media is doing everything it can to avoid looking at what it really says. Because this massacre is really about the desperation and hate so common in America. You can’t understand yesterday’s health club massacre in Pennsylvania, leaving 3 women dead, 10 injured, and the male gunman with his brains blown out, without recognizing this misery and hate. Most Americans’ lives have grown worse over the past three decades: today, average American male workers earn less than they did in 1979 in inflation-adjusted dollars, while the top 400 richest Americans own more than the bottom 150 million Americans, a wealth gap only found in tinpot Third World kleptocracies, and not seen here since 1928. That alone is reason enough to hate.

Even Warren Buffet admitted it in a interview with the New York Times: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” For some reason, only the rich have the courage to talk about it.

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America’s collapse into a Third World banana republic is accelerating: Alabama’s most populous county, Jefferson County, is so broke it’s closing down courthouses and laying off so many cops that it’s now planning to call in the National Guard to maintain order:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The sheriff in Alabama’s most populous county may call for the National Guard to help maintain order, a spokesman said Tuesday, after a judge cleared the way for cuts in the sheriff’s budget and hopes dimmed for a quick end to a budget crisis.

It’s all too fitting that the county is going broke because it can’t pay the $3.2 billion in sewer bonds that the county borrowed, on bad advice from what’s now the biggest bailed-out bank in the land. They sold Americans shit, and now Jefferson County is literally eating that shit. (more…)

Tim Geithner got really, really mad the other day. So mad over problems with financial regulations, that he even swore and raised his voice during a meeting last week, and his PR handlers want the world to know that Tim Geithner ain’t foolin’ around no more. (more…)

If I was an oligarch and I wanted to buy my spoiled little shit of a son a toy that would make him laugh and laugh for hours, I’d buy him a middle-class American. Because Americans are funny the way all dupes and chumps are funny. You can trick today’s Americans time and again, and they always fall for it. And when you trick them, they stomp around dramatically and make a lot of blustery noise about “the people” who allegedly “aren’t going to stand much more of this” because “our founding forefathers bla bla bla” and of course the ol’ “you can fool some of the people some of the time, buttcha can’t fool bla bla bla…” Basically, if you’ve seen your Elmer Fudd, then you’ve seen your American sucker in all of his cartoon comic-foil glory: a sentimental buffoon, a harmless chump whose guns don’t fool anyone but himself. (more…)

Is Larry Summers taking kickbacks from the banks he’s bailing out?

Last month, a little-known company where Summers served on the board of directors received a $42 million investment from a group of investors, including three banks that Summers, Obama’s effective “economy czar,” has been doling out billions in bailout money to: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. The banks invested into the small startup company, Revolution Money, right at the time when Summers was administering the “stress test” to these same banks. (more…)

Last week, Obama moved another step closer to creating the ultimate retro-70s Middelbrow-ocracy when he appointed a loathsome overachieving hamburger-head named Cass Sunstein to a little-known but highly-powerful government post: director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—otherwise known as the “Regulation Czar.” Before the financial crash, we wouldn’t have thought much of how powerful a post like this is, and how it can shape our lives and help decide whether we have retirement money, a home mortgage, and a plutocracy-led society.

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In this week’s radio segment, Mark Ames explains how Georgia’s autocratic leader bashes democracy activist skulls with one hand, and writes out checks to the new Democratic Party power-elite with the other…and how Fred Hiatt’s continuing battle with pork tapeworms eating his brain is hurting the Washington Post.  (more…)