Core values

Some of you may wonder why I bang on about what's going on in the USA all the time. Isn't Australia special? Aren't we more innocent, more moral, better? Well we are different. We're more gullible, more trusting — entirely naive in fact. And we are easily impressed. Our Kev goes to see Cool Dude #1 and agrees with everything he says. Or maybe Barack just nods as Kev spins out the syntax and Kev feels a warm glow inside. He's playing with the big kids! Does it get any better than that?

But President Obama is also the #1 Weird Dude. Is he a black version of Ronald Reagan? Doesn't he just play the President beautifully, convincingly? Because what his minions are doing is utterly at odds with his rhetoric (So how does our Kev deal with that disjuncture? Does he even notice?). Anyway, here's a big quote from The Automatic Earth…

Ilargi: Apart from Bernanke's admissions that the financial products division at AIG is holding the mother company hostage, and that the US should have taken the company into receivership a long time ago, -both of which are no small matters at all, they’re in fact stunning since he's known this all along-, I don't see much reason to watch Bernanke and Geithner's appearances in the House, nor Obama's press-op tonight. The reason is that I could write their speeches for them, not because I have intimate knowledge of the material at hand, but because they will avoid to address that material at any and all cost anyway. There are plenty smart writers who are starting to see what's going on, but they're only starting.

No Mish -and thousands with you-, Geithner and Bernanke don't get it all wrong all the time, in fact they get it remarkably right. What makes you think they get it wrong is that you fail to understand their objectives. Which have nothing to do with doing good for average Americans, at least not as a priority. The man in the street is an afterthought. The objective is to save the banks. Whether that is because they honestly feel that the banks need to be rescued at whatever cost to the public purse, or Armageddon will ensue, or whether they fear for their own little power lust comfort zones if they don't, it's hard to say, and in the end it doesn't matter either.

There may be all sorts of ideas of how another $1 trillion of taxpayer funds will free banks of their gambling losses to the point where they will start lending again, but whoever talks about that is just as stuck in their comfort zones as are Tim and Ben and Larry. It will not happen, it can't, America suffers a huge debt overload already, as a nation and individually, and that debt has to be repaid. Taking on more debt will bring no solution, least of all when it's used to bail out the very institutions that are most responsible for the majority of the debt.

And it's the system itself, it's not the institutions that are the core of the problem either, which by the way supplies a brilliantly solid reason to let them all fail tomorrow morning. That is, if as a government you have the best interests of the people in mind. Unfortunately, you're stuck with "leaders" that have either only the interests of the happy few in mind, or who have convinced themselves that to save what's left of the people's welfare, you need to save the happy few first. A very convenient worldview in which only one focus is needed: banks. It's the ultimate, and extremely perverted, version of trickle down economics.

Only, in this case, it’s as if you're watching a cartoon in which there's a pyramid filled with people, with the rich on top and the poor at the bottom, in which there's a mechanism to take away from the impoverished bottom whatever it has left, and reinject it at the top, while telling the poor that taking what's theirs is the only way to save them. Maybe someone with drawing skills can draw that picture for me.

The entire government is made up of people who either don't get it, or who don't care for the interests of the people. I’m sort of sure that Washington has both kinds of people working together, but we can't really tell the difference, because they all have the same priority. Those that don't get it steal from the people to give to the rich, because they see that as the only way to save the people. Those that don't care, steal from the people because they think that's some kind of inherent Darwinian right.

But there are no Robin Hoods out there. And that makes me think the game is pretty much set. The banks can't be saved, but they're the only party the government is attempting to save. There's only one possible outcome from here on in: an imploding society. This $1 trillion that Obama will talk about tonight can only be spent once, and it's being spent on the worst possible target. But that is not a mistake, it's a deliberate move made by the blind, the misguided and the cruel that are, all three of them, coincidentally, the only three categories of candidates who can get themselves elected to office. You need a substantial personality disorder to wind up in Washington, if only simply because you land in a pool of equally distorted minds. And that pool will lead us all into a world full of bitter misery. We're not on a road to nowhere. We will soon wish we were though.

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Do you understand what's happening here? This is a very serious and brutal game. These people are not nice. In fact they are ruthless sociopaths. Kev is a lamb amongst wolves. I wonder how many column inches his visit has got in the US media.

This is class war in its naked form. These people are in for the kill. How long before the victims realise what's happening, wake from their torpor and fight back? How long before blood flows in the streets? How long before the armies of the Empire have to return to the Homeland to crush the revolt within?

Is Kevin Rudd a fool or very cunning? I fear he is the former. He has been intoxicated by his proximity to Power. A naive provincial from the barbarian outlands, at the banquet in the court of the Emperor he has drunk too much and now reels about spouting random platitudes, blind to the deadly game going on about him among the courtiers and sinister lobbyists, which is masked by the bland rhetoric and numb conventionalities of the Washington press. He will rush back to Australia still blinded by the glittering pageant of which he was oh-so-briefly a part (didn't we see all this already with dear little Johny Howard?). He will imitate the Bail-Out, the pillaging of the poor via taxes to prop up the privileges of the rich, not because he's a murderous blood-sucker like the ruling class in America, but because that's what the big kids do!