The headline that topped the Drudge Report Tuesday morning had frightening news for its millions of readers: yet another credit ratings agency downgraded America’s debt, this time to “C”—at or near “junk” status in the letter-rating scales used by the big three ratings agencies, Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch. Clicking on the link takes the reader to a CNBC article [1] headlined, “US Debt Rating Should Be ‘C’: Independent Agency.” (more…)
Mark Ames goes on the Amy Goodman Show on Democracy Now! to talk about the Koch brothers’ shocking election mailer to their workers, the subject of Ames’ latest cover story feature for The Nation magazine co-authored with labor journalist Mike Elk.
Amy Goodman discusses with Ames and Elk how the Kochs are taking the workplace back a century, to a time before labor laws protected American workers–and how they’re transforming America’s democracy into a Third World, Russia-style oligarchy.
Mark Ames talks with Dylan Ratigan about his investigative article in The Nation magazine, co-authored with labor journalist Mike Elk, exposing the scary and bizarre propaganda and elections influencing that Koch Industries now forces on its employees.
It’s all about making tough choices fer our granchirren’
To all my fellow under-55-ers: If you want to know why we have to fund the over-55-ers’ full Medicare and Social Security benefits, leaving nothing for the rest of us, here’s your answer: All those taxes have to pay for today’s Tea Partiers to ride around on these Hoverounds. That’s right, if there’s one thing Boomers can’t stand, it’s not being able to chase us around the house while hectoring us about fiscal responsibility. Thanks to the Hoveround, there’s no way we can escape from their narcissistic deficit-hawk blather.
Here it is: You can run…you can walk…you can crawl even. But you can’t hide from the Hoveround:
Some huckster in Israel claims to have found two old, corroded nails that were used to pin Jesus Christ on the crucifix 2,000 years ago. The huckster, a documentary filmmaker named Simcha Jacobovici, is using his “discovery” of Jesus’ nails to promote a “documentary” he’s putting out that targets the huge, highly gullible Christian Zionist demographic–a demographic whose insatiable demand for religious hoaxes is never matched by the hoax supply side of the curve–especially not hoaxes as clever as this one:
Does anyone here in this house speak goldbug-babble? Anyone who can make sense of Dr. Paul’s logic in the clip below, I’m curious what the fuck this man is trying to hawk to his 1988 C-SPAN viewers. I mean I know it’s snake-oil, but even snake-oil pitches have a logic to them. This one just sounds like bat-shit blather.
As far as I can tell, the reason why the Koch brothers hire tools to promote the gold standard is the same reason that robber barons of the 19th century loved the gold standard so much: Gold locks in the power and wealth of those who have all the power and wealth; and gold locks out everyone else who’s not so lucky, condemning them to serfdom. Which leads to Populist uprisings, labor unrest, and all that century-old misery. That would explain why Koch fronts like Ron Paul hustle the gold standard to us suckers as the equivalent to “freedom”–just like coal companies pitching the public the lie about “clean coal”–you want the suckers to believe that a gold standard will offer them the very opposite of the misery it delivers.
That part of the scam I get. Fair enough. But this 1988 gold standard pitch? Makes no sense.
Update: MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan makes it official: Mark Ames & Yasha Levine “are the two journalists who broke the story about these brothers and the Tea Party in 2009 before anyone believed them.” Watch the episode here and here.
It’s been sort of strange watching America’s sudden, belated discovery of the billionaire Koch brothers, and the shock realization about just how much they’ve been manipulating and managing–and ruining–our country and our lives.
It’s been a long time coming. As eXiled readers know, Yasha Levine and I first broke the story about the Kochs inventing the Tea Party as an Astroturf movement way back in February, 2009, on the eve of the very first Tea Party protests. Readers also will recall how the Kochs—using their tools in the mainstream media—waged a campaign to discredit our article. I’m talking of course about Megan McArdle of the Atlantic Monthly, who led the campaign to discredit our investigative piece, which first ran in Playboy. (more…)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
