Bigger Fatter Politics: Umpqua College Masacre

Bigger Fatter Politics: Umpqua College Masacre

God Rewards Bad People

An Orgy of Thieves

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR - ALEXANDER COCKBURN

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All through the 1980s and 1990s, professorial mountebanks like James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray grew plump from best sellers about the criminal, probably innate, propensities of the “underclass,” about the pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility of teen moms.

There was indeed a vast criminal class coming to full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. The class comes in the form of our corporate elite.

Given a green light in the late 1970s by the deregulatory binge urged by corporate-funded think tanks and launched legislatively by Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, by the 1990s, America’s corporate leadership had evolved a simple strategy for criminal self-enrichment.

First, lie about your performance, in a manner calculated to deceive investors. This was engineered by the production of a “pro forma” balance sheet freighted with accounting chicanery of every stripe and hue, willingly supplied by Arthur Andersen and others. Losses were labeled “capital expenditures”; losing assets were “sold” to co-conspirators in the large banks for the relevant accounting period.

Later, using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, slightly more realistic balance sheets would be presented to the SEC and the IRS.

Flaunting the “pro forma” numbers, corporations would issue more stock, borrow more money from some co-conspiratorial bank, buy back the stock for the chief executives, who would further inflate its value by dint of bogus accountancy, sell the stock to the chumps and bail out with their millions before the roof fell in, leaving pension funds like CalPERS holding the bag. The fortunes amassed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are vivid illustrations of the technique.

The scale of looting? Prodigious. This orgy of thievery, without parallel in the history of capitalism, was condoned and abetted year after year by the archbishop of the economy, Alan Greenspan, a man with a finely honed sense of distinction between the scale of reproof merited by the very rich and those less powerful. When Ron Carey led the Teamsters to victory way back in 1997, Greenspan rushed to denounce the “inflationary” potential of modestly improved wage packets. Even though declared innocent by a jury of his peers, Carey was forbidden ever to run in a union election again. And so it goes now with the drumbeats about raising the minimum wage.

Where were the sermons from Greenspan or his successor Ben Bernanke about the inflationary potential of stock-option fortunes lofted on the hot air of crooked accountancy and kindred conspiracies?

Let someone die in a gang-banger crossfire in South Central, and William Bennett will rush to indict an entire generation, an entire race. Where are the sermons from Bennett, Murray and the Sunday Show moralists about the CEOs scuttling off with their swag, leaving their employees to flounder amid wrecked pensions and destroyed prospects? A street kid in Oakland is in the computer by the time he’s 10. No “criminal propensity” profiles for grads of the Wharton or Harvard business schools.

You have to go back to Marx and Balzac to get a truly vivid sense of the rich as a criminal elites. But these giants did bequeath a tradition of joyful dissection of the morals and ethics of the rich, carried on by Veblen, John Moody, C. Wright Mills, William Domhoff, and others. But by the mid-1960s, disruptive political science was not a paying proposition if you were aiming for tenure. A student studying Mills would be working nights at the soda fountain while the kid flourishing Robert Dahl and writing rubbish about pluralism would get a grad fellowship.

Back in the 1950s, people were reading stuff about the moral vacuum in affluent suburbia by writers like Vance Packard and David Riesman. Presumably, inner loneliness soon became inner joy. There was nothing wrong about putting one’s boot on a colleague’s neck and cashing in. Where are the books now about these proving grounds for the great corporate criminal cohort of the 2000s, who came of age in the Reagan years?

In fact, it’s nearly impossible to locate books that examine the class of corporate executives through the lens of cool, scientific contempt. Much of the current writing on CEO culture is published in magazines like Fortune, Businessweek or Forbes. And though there are a few authors — like Robert Monks (Power and Accountability) — who focus their attention on executive culture, nowhere will you find empirical studies on the sociobiological roots of the criminal tendencies of the executive class.

Why? The rich bought out the opposition. Back in the mists of antiquity, you had communists and socialists and populists who’d read Marx, and who had a pretty fair notion of what the rich were up to. Even Democrats had a grasp of the true situation. Then came the witchhunts and the buyouts, hand in hand. Result, a Goldman Sachs trader could come to maturity without ever once hearing an admonitory word about it being wrong to lie, cheat and steal, sell out your co-workers, defraud your customers.

The finest schools in America educated a criminal elite that stole the store in less than a decade. Was it all the fault of Ayn Rand, of the Chicago School, of Hollywood, of God’s demise?

This essay is adapted and updated from an article in the November 2000 edition of The New Statesman.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Grand Theft Pentagon and Born Under a Bad Sky. His latest book is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.

More articles by:JEFFREY ST. CLAIR – ALEXANDER COCKBURN

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The Cannons of Christianity -Phil Ochs-

Lyrics:
Christian cannons have fired at my days
With the warning beneath the holy blaze
And bow to our authority
Say the cannons of Christianity


Oh the children will be sent to schools
Minds of clay are molded to their rules
Learn to fear all of eternity
Warn the cannons of Christianity


Holy hands will count the money raised
Like a king the Lord is richly praised
On a cross of diamond majesty
Say the cannons of Christianity

Missionaries will travel on crusades
The word is given, the heathen souls are saved
Conversions to our morality
Sigh the cannons of Christianity

Come the wars and turn the rules around
To bend your soul on the battle ground
And the Lord will march beside me
Drone the cannons of Christianity

Cathedral walls will glitter with their gold
And the sermons speak through silver robes
Building castles amidst the poverty
Say the cannons of Christianity





Worship now and wash your sins away
Drop the coins, fall to your knees and pray
Cleanse the world of all hypocrisy
Smile the cannons of Christianity

Christian cannons have fired at my days
With the warning beneath the holy blaze
And bow to our authority
Say the cannons of Christianity

The chords are: D A D Bm G C D

The Iraq Peace Deal and the 7th Beatitude of Jesus

Based on the 7th Beatitude Jesus spoke during the Sermon on the Mount: Maybe the Republican government hating Bible bangers should spend a little more time reading the Bible than stuffing their gluttonous pig faces at church socials. This will give them more constipation than a pound of cheese and a stuck butt plug.

Iran has many reasons not to trust the US: 

1. The coup in 1953 when we replaced their democratically elected government with the Shah so that we could steal their oil.

2. The chemical weapon we gave to Iraq that our man Saddam to used on them. 

3. Shooting down one of their passenger planes.

4. Asshole John McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran".

5. Bush's axis of evil bullshit.

Mike Huckabee Fat

We all know that Huckabee is a charlatan but his brain dead ignorant base is too stupid to know that fact but they do believe the Bible in spite of the fact that they have never actually read it.

Huckabee is quite judgmental when it comes to same sex couples but he ignores his own sins and the sins of his base, most of whom are swag bellied gluttons like Mike. Give those judgmental hypocrites a dose of Proverbs 23:2 and let them know what the Bible says about gluttony and then tell them to pray to Jesus to give them the strength to stop their sinful eating. When they fail and Jesus let's them down their blubber will make the fires of hell burn hotter. 

I love using their own twisted logic against them. We attack leaders of these vile cults but we need to realize that they derive their power from their corrupt and depraved base. When I was younger was I naive and Pollyanna or did the people in this world get a whole lot meaner and uglier? Maybe their invective will grow so hard and ossified that it will die and collapse under the weight of it's own hateful depravity. Shine the sanitizing light on it. 

Proverbs 23:2 "Put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony."

The fattest and nastiest people on earth are fundamentalist Christians.

Religious Liberty

Picture an asshole with flames coming out of it. It would probably look a lot like Mike Huckabee. Christians and their evil god simply love ruining things for everyone as they run their vile and ignorant mouths. It's sickening.

Ass Americans we need to stop giving religious fuck wads a pass. Evil begets evil and the situation in the Middle East is another clear example of that. The US and Britain fucked with a democratic Iran in 1953 and overthrew their democratically elected government and installed the Shah of Iran simply so that BP could steal oil. The Iranian revolution got rid of the Shah and Iran became a brutal theocracy. The God of Abraham works in cruel and diabolical ways and his followers are nearly as bad.

Mike Huckabee is indeed a flaming asshole and his supporters are worse. The hypocrisy of God's ass kissers astounds. Anyone who supports Kim Davis and her lawless tyranny are even more evil than the likes of Mike Huckabee. You Bible banging fuckers had better hope that if there is a god and if that god is fair, decent, sane and just you assholes are going to be in very deep shit.

When you dumb fuck gay hating Christards play the persecution card it make me want to slap you lying mouths and knock all your teeth down your lying throats. The ones doing the persecuting are not non Christians and non believers. The persecutors are you brain dead hypocrites who spend their lives suck-holing Jesus for fear that he will send you to hell for not properly tonguing his ass.

Face it, God is Evil

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. —Isaiah 45:7

Would you do this to a child? God does things like this to children.

If you had the power to repair this child would you? God has the power and he won't.