Poll: should Wikileaks just release their ''thermonuclear file''?

 Rather than waiting for some judicial or other harm to come Assange and others in the organization, wouldn't the best protection be releasing the thermonuclear file, so everyone's anger is focused on the corruption in their governments and even those tasked with persecuting Wikileaks might realize they would better serve the common good by staying their hand?

If Wikileaks dropped some of their biggest bombs, it could reset our democracy and force Washington to acknowledge what and who is really driving many of our policies instead of insulting our intelligence with childish drivel about chasing terrorists with the most powerful military in the world, which if true would be like swatting at flies with a bazooka.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had real information, so we could make real choices about whether to support wars?

If we could see the internal discussions of the Wall Street bailout from both the Wall Street side and the government side?

That would be democracy. What we have now is an increasing hollow puppet show. Everyone sees that they are puppets, that the script is crappy, and we suspect whose hands are up their asses, but we don't have the definitive evidence to prove it.

Wikileaks could do that, save their own asses, give our democracy back to us, and maybe even give it to some people who never had it before. That's worth more than any game of chess they are playing now.

Why doesn't Wikileaks just release their ''thermonuclear file''?
	Wikileaks should release their thermonuclear file while they can
	Wikileaks should wait only because the information has more impact when it trickles out
	Wikileaks should wait because the damage would be great than the benefit
	other
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Why did Huffington post failed economic advisor Larry "Jabba the Hutt" Summers?

I've long admired Arianna Huffington's writing and frequently visit Huffington Post for political news, opinion, humor, and more, so I was surprised to see a column on her website entitled "Relief for Middle Class Families" by President Obama's economic advisor, Larry Summers. If you know this guy's resume, he cares about the middle class the way Jeffrey Dahmer cared about people he ate.


When he worked for the Clinton administration, he backed or applauded every one of the middle class and even upper middle class killing initiatives of conservatives like deregulating Wall Street, and trade policies that not only managed to decimate our manufacturing base, but actually made people poorer in other countries too.

In the case of backing neo-liberal shock therapy for Russia, that not only made the Russians worse off than they were under communism and shortened their average life expectancy, he made the world a less safe place since Russia has since figured out that we were trying to make them a Third World nation.

And in spite of their economic problems, Russia does still have nukes.

Larry Summers is the lowest form of moral filth.

If a poor person robs a liquor store and kills someone, they might have at least been doing it out of economic desperation or because they were driven by a drug habit. People like Summers coolly and calmly plan the poverty and death of millions and even billions, not to survive themselves and feed their families, but to have bragging rights at the country club, the financial elite's equivalent of whipping it out to see who's is bigger. He and his friends could live comfortably for their rest of their lives on the wealth they have now, and so could their descendants for ten generations before one would have to think of getting a job.

Summers presence in the Obama administration, along with Robert Rubin, and failed regulator Tim Geithner, is an indictment of the failure of our democracy, and undermines the credibility of the Obama and administration and the Democratic congress when they talk about reforming Wall Street and Banking.

We do not fight rapists, child molesters, and serial killers by putting the criminals in charge of writing the laws to punish and prevent those crimes. If we did, we would rightly expect that the law would require the police to deliver their victims to the criminals, clean up the crime scene, and dispose of the bodies for them at taxpayer expense--sort of like what happened with health care reform.

Worse, their presence in the Obama administration and the continuation of much of the same policies makes me wonder if this or any president is actually in charge, or if they are helpless shopkeepers in Wall Street mafia bust out of America.

I am not opposed to Larry Summers expressing his opinions on Huffington Post. But he should pay a price: endure and answer the questions and follow up questions of the toughest critics of the policies he has advocated and the damage they have done to middle class (like Naomi Klein, Greg Palast, Elizabeth Warren, or David Sirota to name a few) and the most important question would be what he has EVER done in the past that would make us think he will protect and advance the interests of the middle class.

Then he submit to a polygraph, forensic accounting, and make restitution for his economic crimes against working and middle class people around the world.

Once all that has occurred, I would like to hear what he has to say about helping the middle class.

Until then, Arianna needs to hold the Obama administration accountable for putting these Wall Street economic terrorists in charge of our economy that they broke instead of giving them a forum to pretend like they care about their victims (while they are still eating our livers prepared by their private chefs).

MODEST PROPOSAL: Pay CEO's with stock they CAN'T sell

Instead of short term bonuses, CEO's should be paid bonuses over ten or twenty years, or even over the rest of their lives with the amount varying according to the current performance of the company, and of course ending if the company goes bankrupt.

One way to do this is to give them stock with no-options: no option to sell, especially to pump and dump with insider trading.

This would encourage them to build the company for long term success and even to withstand incompetent management after they leave.

Whatever the problems are with this, it would be far superior to the current system where bonuses are given out regardless of performance, with execs acting more like parasites draining blood from their host until it's dead instead of nurturing it's real (not paper) growth and stability.

Someone will say that you can't force them to keep stock, but that is essentially what they do to employees with pensions. Then when they fuck up by giving too much money to their cronies or not hiding their bookkeeping sleight of hand well enough, their employees are left eating dog food when they retire.

The only real problem I see with this is there aren't enough MBA's who don't actually know how to make things and provide services.

These sociopathic trust fund babies didn't rake leaves and flip burgers as kids like the rest of us, but instead stole money from their mummy's purse to spend on coke and whores. Now they just steal from their shareholders and employees.

It could be that in the long run, this would restore something like a meritocracy to our financial elite that would replace the current clusterfuck of country club Caligulas.

ROOT OF RAGE: Is our democracy Wall Street's bitch?

The public anger over the bailouts and bonuses taken from bailouts and economic appointees whose loyalties clearly lie more with the corporate criminals than with us boils down to that one question: is our democracy Wall Street's bitch?

We have woken up to find that we are a lowly streetwalker with a particularly powerful and conscienceless pimp.

He demands more and more of our money, and when we tell him the little he let's us keep isn't enough to take our baby to the doctor or send our older kid to college, he says, "That aint my problem, bitch. Who told you to have kids? Besides, Daddy gotta pay off this new pimp tooth," as he shows you a diamond encrusted crown on his bicuspid. Then he beats us with his ivory pimp cane almost to death.

This shouldn't have surprised you since he has been nagging you to get your grandma to sign over her Social Security checks to him too, which you and grandma have fought off since that would leave her to die penniless in the gutter.

One day, the neighborhood cop pulls you aside. He says your pimp has gotten into some horrible gambling debts and will be killed if he can't pay them off. Your first thought is, "Good, I hope he is killed and I'll be free," but the cop says if he can't pay, the people he owes money too will kill all his girls and their children too, so you better work harder, dig up the money you've hidden from the pimp, and make your kids start walking the street too.

This is just too much to bear. You have wanted to stop walking the streets, but you didn't know how since you've worked for the same pimp your whole life as did your mother and grandmother. But this is too much. You get the other girls together, go to the police station, and tell the captain that his cop in your neighborhood is dirty and making threats on behalf of the pimp.

To your surprise and delight, he agrees, and appoints a new clean-cut cop to the beat. The first day you see him, you stop to ask him what he he is going to do about the pimp. He tells you he has given him a stern talking to and told him to cut back on gold pimp teeth, pinky rings, and velvet suits--but in the meantime, you better give him all your money or you and your children will be killed.

While you are still in shocked silence, the cop takes the roll of bills from your bra and turns to deliver it to the pimp.

You snap out of your stupor and follow him to the pimp club, where the pimp takes the money, and instead of paying someone back while cowering in fear, he laughs and buys a round of drinks for the other pimps, the new cop, and the old one.

The cop had a gun and the pimps had none. He could have arrested all the pimps or even shot them dead. He did not, which means he either works for the pimps or aspires to be one.

Up until the Bush administration, we all thought we lived in a democracy. Then when we saw our most cherished constitutional rights and democratic processes trampled all to make it easier for the rich to steal from us and other countries like Iraq, we wondered if we were losing it. Just as it we thought we were digging our way out, the rich put a gun to our head and say they want $700 billion dollars or they will destroy the world economy.

It was no surprise that the Bush administration did so.

What was surprising was that the incoming Obama administration appointed an economic team from the same criminals who extorted us and wrote the rules making it easier for them to extort, and now that they are in government again, they continue to do so.

As Eliot Spitzer pointed out, Obama's Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, as well as others moving back and forth between government and Wall Street, may have collude to funnel even more money to a handful of banks and investment companies.

It is clear that the goals of Obama's economic team are to make the pimp whole and placate the streetwalkers just enough so they get back to work.

That is not enough.

Obama needs to clean the pimps out of his administration, pick a couple of the biggest ones working the streets and give them a beating they will never forget. Strip their pinky rings, take their canes, and knock out the pimp teeth. Even strip them naked of their pimp clothes. Then either throw them in jail or make them get an honest job and pay restitution to their girls (us).

Then he must kill, jail, or beat all the remaining pimps until they get out of the business.

We need a marshall like Kurt Russel in Tombstone who policed the outlaw Cowboy Gang like this:

Wyatt Earp: All right, Clanton... you called down the thunder, well now you've got it! You see that?
[pulls open his coat, revealing a badge]
Wyatt Earp: It says United States Marshal!
Ike Clanton: [terrified, pleading] Wyatt, please, I...
Wyatt Earp: [referring to Stilwell, laying dead] Take a good look at him, Ike... 'cause that's how you're gonna end up!
[shoves Ike down roughly with his boot]
Wyatt Earp: The Cowboys are finished, you understand? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearin' it!
[lets Ike up to run for his life]
Wyatt Earp: So run, you cur... RUN! Tell all the other curs the law's comin'!
[shouts]
Wyatt Earp: You tell 'em I'M coming... and hell's coming with me, you hear?...
[louder]
Wyatt Earp: Hell's coming with me!

For the Obama adminstration, this means taking down the heads of Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Chase, JPMorgan, AIG, and any other firm that is used to telling our government what to do.

They need to be frog-marched in orange jumpsuits, taken to jail, held without bail and stripped of their assets, given a trial, then serve the rest of their natural lives in prison, to be beaten and raped like anyone else.

Then he must methodically dismember their businesses into a million pieces, so they can never treat America and our democracy like their bitch again.

The longer he waits to do this, the greater the hell he will have to rain down on them, or risk being replaced by a marshal who will.

Gov't reaction to Wall Street meltdown like ''punishment'' of Prescott Bush for hiding Nazi money

If an ordinary citizen gave aid and comfort to our arch-enemy in World War II, they would have at minimum expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison or more likely, ended up like the Rosenbergs, executed for helping the Soviets.

Prescott Bush's bank was managing assets of a Nazi financier, including a steel plant that made heavy use of concentration camp labor. Far from being unaware of this, Bush mentioned it in correspondence and was concerned that his bank's ''interests be protected.'' The government found this activity troubling enough that they seized the banks assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Bush's punishment for his involvement?

You would think he would have at least ended up like John Walker Lind, stripped naked, blind-folded, and held in solitary until the trial that put him in prison for life (or shortened his life).

Instead, the whole business was hushed up and he later won a Senate seat.

It seems that something similar is going on with Wall Street today. Can anyone doubt that Wall Street's concerted effort to get themselves deregulated, their Rube Goldberg maze of shell corporations and off-shore accounts, and intentional defrauding of ordinary investors, mortgage holders, and retirees has done more damage to our economy than Tim McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and all the other terrorists to ever blow up anything in the US combined?

And in fact, the connection to terrorism is not just by analogy, but literal. To the degree that we face a legitimate terrorist threat, it is because business interests demand to be put ahead of human rights, democracy, and even the national security of the United States.

The foremost example of this is how we treated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to transition to a European-style social democracy, but the investor class and banks wanted a Russia that was easy to plunder of their natural resources and industry. The result was the standard of living and even life expectancy in Russia DROPPED after the fall of communism, and Putin succeeds partly because he is trying to reclaim their dignity by standing up to us. Oil companies interest in stripping Russia of their oil, gas, and pipeline income further antagonizes a Russia that we now no longer have an ideological beef with. In effect, for the sake of corporate profits, we are reigniting a Cold War with an enemy with thousands of nuclear weapons.

Worse, business is a direct cause of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administrations failure to bring a quick conclusion to the War on Terror. Those in the Islamic world do not hate us for our freedom, but because we take theirs away to ensure that our oil companies have compliant governments to deal with, from overthrowing the democratically elected secular government of Iran in the 1950s to backing the oppressive Saudi government for decades. Oddly, even though the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found direct involvement of the Saudi government in the attacks nothing was done about it. Whether this was done because we didn't want to jeopardize business ties with Saudis or because the Saudis were doing the Bush administration a favor with the attack, neither is acceptable.

And yet, the punishment of the wealthy who endanger and loot us like this will be much like Prescott Bush's. The public will use our taxpayer dollars to clean up their mess, and they will continue to live lives of leisure and be free exercise their power as ''masters of the universe'' even though they are masters of nothing but moving our money into their pockets.

I have no problem with capitalism in theory, but in practice, we can no longer afford a financial elite that not only ignores the law, but buys our politicians and makes the indefensible legal.

Any solution to this current problem has to involve putting the fear of God or at least fear of the wrath of the American people into these spoiled sociopathic trust fund babies, the likes of which no financial elite has felt since the Russian or even French Revolution.

Anything less than that leaves America and the world at risk from more attacks by these economic terrorists who make 9/11 look like a toddler's temper tantrum.

VIDEO: Student loan debt crushing students & grads on Democracy Now!

As the Obama administration continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the nations banking system, a growing movement is calling on the government to do more to help students struggling to pay for college.

These are some of their stories.

click pic to see flick

Transcript & links

If teachers got merit pay like Wall Street...

if the same standard were used for giving out ''merit pay'' to teachers as Washington just did for Wall Street, then the teachers would have to make a third of their class stupider, kill a third, and not be able to account for the whereabouts of the last third. And they'd get millions of dollars in "merit pay" for doing it.

War Profiteers angry over Wall Street Bailout

No bid contract recipients, mercenaries, and those who profited from the Bush/Cheney War on Terror and invasion of Iraq were silent last fall when the Wall Street bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars was rushed through Congress, but now they are speaking out.

"We didn't want to say anything before the election when there was still a chance that McCain might win, or before the inauguration when there was still a chance a 'national emergency' might prevent the inauguration of this new president," said Griffin Thorpe, spokesman for the Defense & Rebuilding Industries lobby, "but now we simply cannot hide the sense of betrayal we felt and continue to feel."

Thorpe said his various member corporations appreciated the no-bid contracts, lack of oversight, and various cost-inflation tricks allowed in "cost-plus" contracts like setting trucks on fire that got flat tires so they could call the whole truck a loss. But he says the money they got actually required some token amount of work unlike the Wall Street bailout.

"Arms manufacturers may overcharge for their products, but they do work hard to make depleted uranium shells that melt tank armor like butter, white phosphorus shells that burn people from the inside out and outside in at the same time, and cluster bombs that keep on working for years after they are dropped, as kids mistake unexploded submunitions for toys," said Thorpe.

One rebuilding contractor sent Thorpe a tearful letter saying that if he knew Washington was going to give Wall Street money for absolutely nothing, he would have done an even shoddier job of building a hospital in Iraq, so he could have kept more of the money for himself. His letter said, "Sure, the floor of our operating room was cracked so ants could get in, and when the toilets flushed, sewage rained down on the maternity ward, but we could have made so much more money if we just put in a dirt floor and no plumbing at all."

Thorpe arranged for me to meet some of his clients at L'Auberge Provencale outside of Washington.

A burly mercenary contractor CEO's eyes welled up with tears as he stared at his sauteed escargot. "Bush & Cheney made me rich, but it cost me something. Sometimes the mothers of one of our dead mercs will show up at our office or some damn reporter will catch me at the mall and ask why my guys throw grenades in every daycare center they see. You can't imagine the torment I feel until one of my guys cuts their brake lines or smothers them with their own pillow in their sleep. It puts me and my company at a legal risk that we never have to face overseas."

The mercenary executive said he is having his men trade in their body armor and AK-47s for Armani suits and briefcases, and converting his company to a hedge fund.

"I didn't get this rich to put up with actually working when I don't have to," he said.

Most upset was an unexpected guest: an oil company executive. He said Cheney made his industry go through elaborate secret meetings to plan the invasion of Iraq and install a puppet government that would in turn give American companies most of the tens of trillions of dollars in profits from pumping their oil. "All that work has pretty much fallen apart and we're not going to end up with a much better deal than we would have with Saddam. Sure WE didn't pay for the war, but we had to wait and wait for the Iraqis to pass the oil law that would show us the money, and now they probably never will. "

Even without the deals on their terms, oil companies are still reaping the greatest profits of any corporations in history, but the executive was despondent nonetheless.

"To think of all those years looking for oil in the burning sand, bribing dictators, snuffing democratically elected leaders, dealing with the goddamn environmentalists, and telling the Congress which tax breaks and subsidies to give us," he said. "We could have made more if we just opened an investment bank on Wall Street, fucked up everything we touched, then asked Washington for a handout."

Bush was a lot like Wall Street

When George W. Bush first became president, I thought it was the financial elite saying "fuck you" to the rest of us by humiliating us by appointing the dregs of their gene pool as the public leader of America.

After seeing the Wall Street collapse and demand for bail outs, I now realize that Bush is probably not the dregs but a representative specimen with perhaps bad manners and a grammar impairment.

Like Wall Street, he created nothing, only scammed, destroyed, shuffled money to his friends and gave working people the check for repairs in the form of more debt.

We would probably be better off if both were neutered.

More deep thoughts on Wall Street