Load the Rifle

It is interesting to watch the reactions of my fellow citizens to the Congressional wrangling over the capitalist system bailout. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the New York Times letters section for a few days now and what stands out to me is the apparently genuine confusion shown by many writers about the fact that their representatives are going to issue Paulson and the rest of the thieves at Treasury a $700,000,000,000 blank check when polls show the American public squarely against the plan. They profess to be shocked, shocked when their elected officials bend over backwards to save the asses of Wall Street titans but can’t muster enough votes to expand children’s healthcare by an amount less than two days funding of the Iraq war. Is anyone in this sorry excuse for a democracy really so naive as to think that the people in Washington are nothing more than paid lackeys of their corporate masters? How else to explain the intense effort to bail out the crooks on the backs of the middle-class?

And can we please stop calling the bailout socialism? Socialism would be if we took the people’s confiscated labor (that's what taxes are) and widely distributed it to the people in the form of social programs. In the bailout scenario being discussed in Washington we would be taking the people’s money and redistributing it to the upper class. That sounds more like fascism to me.

Even as the economy crumbles around them, the fat cats are still finding a way to hold onto their money while they try to steal yours. The Times story about the take-over of Washington Mutual by the Feds had this little gem of a sentence buried way down deep in paragraph 13: “Mr. Fishman (WAMU’s CEO), who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus.” The audacity! Even as the lobbyists for the banking industry, and by that I mean Congress, haggle over the size of their piece of the bail-out pie in Washington, their masters are still stuffing their pockets with ill gotten lucre.

If the elites on Wall Street and Washington are worried about the people’s reaction to their massive attempt to loot the treasury they aren’t showing it publicly. They may, however, think that some behind-the-scenes preparation might be necessary if things start to get ugly in the heartland. From Glen Greenwald’s blog on Salon: “Several bloggers today have pointed to this obviously disturbing article from Army Times, which announces that "beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the [1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division] will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities. They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control (within the United States)… [W]hat possible rationale is there for permanently deploying the U.S. Army inside the United States -- under the command of the President -- for any purpose, let alone things such as "crowd control." Any guesses? I’ve got a few ideas.

Time to stock up on canned goods and load the rifle kids. Things are looking bleak out there.