After years of chronic voting, actively working for and financially supporting what I viewed as candidates most likely to support true democracy, writing letters to the editor, marching in the streets, slapping on bumper stickers and buttons and putting up yard signs, and now posting myriad comments online, I'm about three centimeters from giving up.

Join the club.

When a man is running from his boss
Who hold a gun that fires "cost",
And people die from being cold
Or left alone because they're old,
And bombs are dropped on fighting cats
And children's dreams are run with rats
If you complain you disappear
Just like the lesbians and queers . . .
No one can love without the grace
Of some unseen and distant face.
And you get beaten up by blacks
Who though they worked still got the sack,
And when your soul tells you to hide
Your very right to die's denied
And in the battle on the streets
You fight computers and receipts.

And when a man is trying to change
But only causes further pain ...

When you realize that all along
There's something in us going wrong

You stop dancing.

From all appearances, our political system is so hard wired into big money that fighting for and fighting back are fast becoming acts of quaint futility.

So long as you haven't quit
They haven't won.

GM is not increasing anyone's standard of living except its employees.

Plus the employees of suppliers, plus the employees of other economic actors, upstream and downstream. The US transportation manufacturing industry in all, until recently, supported about 14% of the real US economy, 9% of the financial economy, and constituted a major share of US comparative advantage and export income.

But it's a small price for the country to pay to help bail out the banksters, however indirectly. Everybody has to do their part, after all. If entire industries have to be sacrificed, even if they were lucrative for the country only a couple of years ago, so be it.

Welcome to the wonderful world of socialism

Massive fraud perpetrated by banksters is capitalist, not socialist. Unless you'd like to argue that banksters are somehow socialists.

Not even a good try, pub.

runfastandwin

I can only hope President Obama is able to stem the tide.

I hate to be the one to break the bad news to you, but Obama is very much in on the scam.

Obama is quite as engaged as Bush was when it comes to giveaways to corporate campaign contributors, and has adopted Bush's policies on military imperialism, torture, and worker rights besides, differing only on environmental policy - so far. That's not good enough.

What the US has done is replace a brutally ugly and incompetent neoconservative with an attractive and well-spoken neoconservative. Bush's crony corporatism, illegal wars, and war crimes are now Obama's crony corporatism, illegal wars, and war crimes, most of which is still in place. Obama has adopted them as his own.

No change so far. At least, none you can really believe in.

Meanwhile, America's debts are coming due, and those are staggering. Rather than restoring the US economy to cope with the load Obama is instead liquidating the real economy to make good on the bankster's fake paper losses.

America has been had, I'm afraid.

They've accepted your contract for the commercial use of your phone, so bill them. If they don't pay, sue for payment.

Capitalism does have a certain symmetry to it. You just have to know how the processes function.

Next.

We're heading into what Gerald Celente has termed "The Greatest Depression".

http://tinyurl.com/p3tqgd

As a result, the world will devolve into chaos and WWIII.

What comes out the other side is anyone's guess.

It's believed the end result has already been determined:

For the last two and one half centuries wealth and power have been concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer men and women. This wealth is now being used to construct and maintain the World Empire that is in the last stages of development. The World Empire is partly visible and partly invisible today.

The chief architects of this new World Empire are planning another war—World War III—to eliminate any vestiges of political, economic or religious freedom from the face of the earth. They will then completely control the earth. and its natural resources. The people will be completely enslaved just as the people were in the ancient Roman Empire. While the above may sound like fiction, I can assure you that it is true. I wish it was fiction, but it is not, it is reality.

Michael L. Chadwick

Introduction to Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time New York: The Macmillan Company (1966)

A billion in China have already been enslaved. More billions are already effectively enslaved in other countries, and the US is well on course to bankrupting its middle class, wage slaves and/or debt slaves all. Once Europe has fully capitulated the others will follow easily.

Obviously, the US hasn't arranged for a massive military empire and for trillions in giveaways to the global banking cartel for the benefit of the US.

This scenario is naturally dismissed as a "conspiracy theory", even though other distinguished authors have said the same, and even though we're watching it happen.

Plus outright corruption by monied interests.

All of America's most serious problems, from slavery to war to poverty to you name it, are the result of the corruption of federal, state, and local governments by moneyed interests, as well as the corruption of American society generally. The country is going down, and is going down hard, because it's people have failed to resist that corruption and have instead mostly bought the con job.

You cannot say that nobody told you,
How to unfold you love
Don't you yet know that someone controls you?
They bought and sold you too.

You surely suspect that you were diverted.
You were perverted too.
You need to learn how you were inverted.
I am alerting you.