La madre degli idioti è sempre incinta*

Far more people are now

being arrested for protesting

Wall Street's mortgage fraud crimes

than have been charged for

committing and presiding over them.

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*The mother of idiots is always pregnant.

But Land Does Not Beget

Man begets, but land does not beget.
--Cecil Rhodes

Untitled

Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding---fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with get killed. Now the politicians are saying, oh, "Send in the marines to secure the area" because they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot, just like it wasn't them when their number got called, because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there, taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from, and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, because he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price, and of course the oil companies use the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices---a cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, maybe they even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fucking play slalom with the icebergs. It ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's outta work, he can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fucking job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids, and meanwhile he's starving because every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holding out for something better. I figure fuck it, while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.
--from Good Will Hunting (1997)

The Best Way to Rob A Bank Is To Own One

The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. She was seen one day sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who were just out of her reach. She was telling them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw; but the sparrows kept their distance.
--George Orwell

some thoughts on the kleptocracy from Bill Black

What Happens In Vegas

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip---the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs.
--Hunter S. Thompson
from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

A Few Words From Elizabeth Warren

more here ...

Panic of the Plutocrats

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.

--Paul Krugman
from Panic of the Plutocrats