USA FOLLOWS SAUDI REFORM LEAD!
MAX GROSS REPORTS...
Across the Middle East common folk continue to demonstrate their outrage against generations of tyranny imposed by entrenched and unaccountable power cliques supported by U.S. interests.
Gaddafi is on the run and will no doubt retire in the style to which he is accustomed, if not on the French Riviera or Donald Trump's front lawn, then certainly somewhere in the Saudi wonderland where, acknowledging the historic Arab Spring, King Abdullah has just announced he is giving women the right to vote and stand in municipal elections.
But they may be stoned to death or beheaded for adultary. Or origami. God is great, Allah is the man, yada-yada-yada. Progress!
In Syria - the U.S. Black Ops "rendition" port of choice - Spring is a little late.
In ongoing protests against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad there were at least another nine deaths last Friday.
So-fukcing-what, as they say in the U.S. State Department, the Pentagoon, and the Whore House.
Anyhoo, Amnesty International has reported an 18-year-old girl's grisly death in Syrian state custody.
Zainab al-Hosni's mutilated body was found in a mortuary last week, two months after her arrest. Her body had been decapitated and her arms and skin removed. Progress!
Happily, the democratic light on the hill blazes brightly on the streets of New York where this weekend police blithely used pepper spray against harmless protesters, arresting even bystanders and hauling away about a hundred people for daring to voice their outrage against the kleptocrats who have used the Global Financial Crisis to hijack U.S. democracy and reinforce the scams that entrench their limitless avarice and lust for power.
OFFICER BOLOGNA
Four people were reportedly arrested "for wearing ski masks" and one arrested for “impeding pedestrian traffic.”
Others were arrested for writing in chalk on the sidewalk. The charge: vandalism.
Progress!
Tellingly, those who were maced were not arrested. Nor did cops offer medical assistance.
More detail available here: http://www.uslaw.com/us_law_blawgs.php?action=page&page=occupywallstreet
Home of the brave, land of the... Well, I guess its worse in Yemen, right?
Peaceful protesters have gathered in (privately-owned!) Zuccotti Park since last weekend, attempting to draw attention to a bastardised economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the minority mega-rich at the expense (literally) of the majority of struggling "ordinary" Americans.
And yes, I do like quotation marks.
In a people's action named Occupy Wall Street that started on September 17, thousands of Americans with functioning brains have headed for Lower Manhattan to voice their outrage against the crony-corporate domination of U.S. politics in that addled, butt-fucked nation.
The protests continue, with demonstrators camping out on the Financial District's Liberty Street in support of genuine U.S. democracy, the very thing old George Washington waged a terrorist campaign against old King George for (No relation).
US COPS VS US CITZLiberty Street, state-sanctioned thugs and pepper spray. Somehow, the irony doesn't amuse.
But you wouldn't know it from the corporate media sprewkers and Rupert Murder's omnipresent, omnimoronic Fux News.
Lamestream media reporting of the event was almost non-existent.
Misreporting (i.e. lying) was common, e.g. citing meagre attendance, with preference given to Tea Party rallies mostly comprising of 49 parachuted retirees, a hot-dog stand and a mutt wearing a stars'n'stripes hat.
Not so much a grass roots thing as just plain old rooted.
Ah yes, Amerikkka, home of the brave and land of the free where, according to the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, in the past decade the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.
Where, thanks to the Shrub's tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (and disgracefully continued by Barack Obama), taxation of the stinking rich, in Obama's own words, "is at its lowest level in half a century".
Where for every dollar Washingtoon gets in taxes from individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes from business (At the end of WW2, for every dollar Washingtoon raised in taxes from individuals, it raised $1.50 on business profits. Progress!).
Where over the past decade the income tax rate on the richest pricks plunged from 91% to the current 35%.
Where 46 million Americans live below the official poverty line, and where inequality is greater now than at any time since 1929.
Where buggered Obama, who swept into the Oval Orifice on a genuine wave of genuine hope for genuine democratic reform, has trashed his own brand to appease the unappeasable Repuglican extremists, corporate robber-barons and deranged 'Tea Party" ideologues who - like Australia's very own barking mad Br'er Abbott - take great pride in masturbating in the mayo, vomiting at the dinner table and squeezing out wet ones in the swimming pool. In front of the children!
Where voters are so stupid that they oppose the establishment of a universal health care system and apparently prefer to sell their homes in order to pay for an appendix operation and their kid's asthma medication.
Where Americans apparently demand the right to smack themselves in the face with a phone book and die in a gutter rather than receive taxpayer-funded social services that we in Australia take for granted (And that are under threat by both the Labor and so-called "Liberal" parties).
Where, according to Richard D. Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at MassU, "the tax structure imposed by Washington on the US over the last half-century has seen a massive double shift of the burden of taxation: from corporations to individuals and from the richest individuals to everyone else".
Where the Repugs have grown more and more extreme, intransigent, belligerent and utterly indifferent to the public good and the nation as a whole.
The nation... as a hole? Progress?
Where billionaire brothers Dave and Chuck Koch, who run "the biggest company you've never heard of" and sit on a $US43bn golden turd, created Americans for Prosperity, the organisation behind the so-called "grass roots" Tea Party movement.
You know: grass roots, the common folk, just like you and me, plain old mortgage butt-fukced mug punters.
Yeah right: Forbes magazine listed the Koch bros as the nation's fifth-richest cnuts with Koch Industries, a vast conglomerate of oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals companies, forming the largest single "donor" to members of the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee, "contributing" $US279,500 to 22 of the committee's 31 Republicans, and $US32,000 to five Democrats.
I think over there they call that universal suffrage.
And the Koch's aims?
Well, apart from sabotaging efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for implementing greenhouse gas regulations, what the fukc do you reckon! Lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry; the end of collective workplace bargaining; no healthcare reform and no accountability or government oversight of rapacious banks and financial speculators.
"How can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation's economic security, gets to dictate policy?" bleats economist Paul Krugman in The New York Times.
Well, mate, it doesn't work.
And only the misinformed, the gullible and amoral, filthy rich bastards would claim it does. With luck, maybe democratic reform will get a better run elsewhere. Hello, President Putin!!! Progress!
But make no mistake, dear reader, the USA is in danger, not from Islamicististicist terroristiscists but from the corporate crooks who hold the entire nation - and thereby the world - to ransom.
GOLLUM SACHS RULES THE WORLDAmericans, you are betrayed! Treason wallows in Wall Street.
Tell THAT to the poor U.S. Army fodder getting fragged in Afghanistan to protect oil and heroin deals.
One, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a fukc, I'm bleeding in a NYPD truck.
Meanwhile, in Tripoli, the corporate feeding frenzy has already begun. French, British, German, Italian, Russian and U.S. firms and their local fixers are buzzing like blowflies on a dead dingo.
And the shooting's not over yet.
And Libyans haven't even voted for a new government.
This was Max Gross, reporting for Xenox News, Australia's ONLY fair dinkum news blog...
And now it's dark, the breeze warm and comforting, the beach and sky wide open and waiting and that's where I'm heading to listen to the waves and watch the stars wink and chuckle at our bloody-minded idiocy, with chilled spritzers to go!
With luck, I'll doze in the sand and dream weird dreams of the mad, mythical planet Earth.
Occupy Wall Street? Meh!
ERADICATE WALL STREET!
Progress!
Cheers, fellow transients!
