stop it, you guys, seriously

[solarbird]

Comments that feed from and back to these sorts of stories below are the kinds of things that have been bothering me:

* Fox News wargames the coming American civil war. Even Little Green Footballs looks a bit askance at Fox's Glenn Beck: "Is it irresponsible for Fox News to be airing this over the top, creepy alarmist stuff during a financial crisis? Well, yeah, I think so."

* Alan Keyes: "Obama is a radical communist, and I think it's becoming clear... and now everybody realises it's true. He's going to destroy this country. We're either going to stop him, or the United States of America is going to cease to exist... the man is an abomination" - video here. There's more, of course.

I've been hearing ugly things out of Europe, too. Scary levels of anti-immigrant and even old-school Roma h8. SETTLE DOWN, PEOPLE.

BTW, reports say the Feds are going to buy up to 40% of Citibank common stock. (More here.) Expect volatility tomorrow, certainly upwards - at least, at first - unless this gets denied early and hard. (Futures are higher across the board.) Dollar's down a bit on the news, tho' not enough to care - I think some of that was a spooky set of bad prints on March dollar-index futures showing people offering contracts at 81. (But they were bad prints, not real. Relax.)

eta: Mish is Not Pleased about the reported Citigroup plans, saying, "Geithner is attempting to bail out his banking buddies, no more, no less, and he does not give a damn what it costs taxpayers to do so... Citigroup is struggling to remain independent even as it knows full well, that without still more government intervention, it is worthless. In fact, Citigroup is less than worthless because without more taxpayer cash infusions it cannot survive."

Comments

[oh6.livejournal.com]

I think you mean that whoever it is at Little Green Footballs is looking askance at Glenn Beck at Fox.

[solarbird]

I am dum. Fixed, thanks.

[emrecom.livejournal.com]

Murdoch likes Obama. So the pressure's on for his freak show heads to locate an audience. So it's probably gonna get WAY crazier.

Thing is, will the extreme, lunatic, spittle-mouthed right big enough to attract big label advertisers. I mean, it gets to a point where it's just not in a company's interest to be associated with people advocating, I dunno, lynching gays or whatever Beck has in mind next.

And every day Obama is president without gay stormstroopers stealing viewers kids is problematic for the Fox loonies.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

CNN actually had a Bunch of Nobel Prize Winning Economists on today, talking intelligently about what Obama is doing and mostly praising him. I nearly fainted. :D
And Maria must be twisting Arnie's arm again, because even the Governator has been civil about Obama. I do like his "All take any bailout money the other Republican Governors don't want." He is a pragmatist. Which beats the ideologues that are currently in charge of the party.
Obama should not have let Geithner stay. He is going to make things much worse before they get better.

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Even George Will is on board with bank nationalization, when is the Obama administration going to catch up?

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

My mom is seriously afraid that folks are paving the way for some loonballs to decide it's perfectly OK to assassinate Obama. :-(

[silussa.livejournal.com]

If there was any doubt, we're now seeing a hard political division between left and right. The idea of "our country" is being buried beneath an avalanche of "we must save our country from the (fill in the blank)"...and no middle ground.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is accurate at all. The polarization is completely one way. There is no radical or even cohesive left in this country, and the mainstream center left (i.e. the Democratic Party) has been very accommodating toward the Republican Party. Obama in particular built his campaign around a sense of inclusive patriotic unity. The problem we have in this country right now is that we have a right wing movement that is increasingly out of touch with mainstream Americans and prone to paranoia and violence.

[silussa.livejournal.com]

Having had a roommate at one time who was an editor with the local paper, I have to disagree. While there may not be a cohesive left in this country, there most certainly are those who consider everything from the conservative side to be terrible, an attempt to steal civil rights, etc.

On the flip side of that, however, I am reading through "Conservatives without Conscience".

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

Do you really think the people should "settle down"? Quite the contrary, I'd like to see a little more backbone...

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

You do realize, of course, that you're openly endorsing fascism, right?

[solarbird]

You might read some of my back-posts, particularly w.r.t. politics. Backbone would be excellent. But I'd like to avoid the shootin' war that a variety of people seem awfully eager to contemplate.

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Mentioning George Will or nationalizing banks.

If a bank is insolvent there are essentially three choices -

1) Let the bank fail and have the FDIC take them over
2) Give the bank money and get appropriate equity for that money
3) Give that bank money and don't get appropriate equity for that money

Bank of America has a market cap of $1 billion, how can you recapitalize that bank without taking it over?

Why is it facist to take over a failing bank right before it fails, but not facist to take it over after it fails?

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

What do you think fascism entails?

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

You honestly think we can get from A to B without bloodshed?

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Facism is an authoritarian political system, taking one particular attribute of facist countries not does not a facist country make.

This sounds like in the old days when the right-wingers would pull out some list of "22 Communist goals" from some USSR document and say "Look, Social Security/Medicare/Unemployment Insurance will make us a communist country!!"

[solarbird]

Depends upon what you're talking about with Point B. (Also Point A, for that matter, but I'll assume A is here.)

But for nontrivial cases - fuck, I dunno. But I hope so. Unlike many, I don't romanticise war.

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

You seem to have adopted a flawed understanding of fascism as a political ideology. That's not surprising, given general trends of social indoctrination and the "deliberate dumbing down (http://www.amazon.com/deliberate-dumbing-down-america-Chronological/dp/0966707109)" of society.

Fascism underwent a massive PR face-lift post-WWII, and was very successfully rebranded.

As a political ideology, fascism entails the co-mingling of political, economic and military interests to further the "ideal" of the State; moreover, individual liberties are sublimated beneath the "needs" of the State.

As a psychological tendency, fascist governance is actively pursued by most of society. Wilhelm Reich's classic The Mass Psychology of Fascism (info (http://www.amazon.com/Mass-Psychology-Fascism-Wilhelm-Reich/dp/0374508844)) is certainly a good place to begin exploring this tendency.

Obama's ideology is explicitly fascist. Your endorsement of the bailouts is likewise an endorsement of fascism, whether you realize it or not.


From Reich's Listen, Little Man! (link (http://www.listenlittleman.com/))

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

As a veteran, I certainly don't romanticize war, but I'm not so naive as to think peaceful means will be sufficient for reversing trends in a fundamentally corrupt civilization.

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

OK, now I understand. If we can just use the stimulus package to build enough Orgone boxes we should be good!

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

Do specious retorts usually win you much sympathy?

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

The fact is your worldview is rooted in nonsense and there's no point in attempting to have a serious discussion with someone who, just a guess here, took the Illuminatus Trilogy a lot more seriously than it was intended.

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

I've yet to begin discussing my "worldview". Non sequitur, ad hominem and specious rebuttals. Perhaps I overestimated the relevance in engaging you.