U.S. economy

The Christian Supremacists Pact with the Devil

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

Admittedly, my use of the word “Devil,” is sensationalistic but in today’s America, The National Enquirer appears to hold more sway than The New York Times with Trump automatons so this should appeal to their sensibilities?

 

Many of our fellow citizens have clearly fallen under the spell of the Charlatan in Chief & I feel sickened unto my soul at their blindness. And I sympathize with their righteous anger because I too, have been screwed-over countless times in my life—I’m 66 years old—by the government but even more so by the corporate giants which I refer to as the Corporate Cockroaches.

Trump defenders will undoubtedly spin this as proof of the witch-hunt against Trump

 

As far as I’m concerned, the key difference between myself & many, if not most, of Trump’s supporters is the fact that I have been paying serious attention to politics for well-over 30 years & I understand how the 1% who are truly running the world, have duped so many into believing it’s an elite cabal of liberals who are behind our troubles. (though there is an element of truth to this to some extent but the reality is it’s an amalgamation of greedy, self-interested forces, liberal, conservative, & numerous other perspectives)

 

If you’ll just take a brief survey of Western history, you’ll see the horrific history of what happened when the Church & the State worked together i.e. the individual got fucked royally (pun intended). And this is why our Founding Fathers were very clear about the importance of separating Church from State. Sadly, far too many Americans today either never learned the critical lessons of world history re: this matter or they simply don’t give a shit & are willingly ignorant on the subject?

substitute all the amoral/immoral acts of Trump for the word “Satan”

You see, my imaginary reader, when the power of the church i.e. Christian evangelicals & their steady encroachment into the halls of political power on the local, state, & federal levels over the decades, is united with the power of the government in the same spheres of influence & control over our lives, the overwhelming majority of citizen activist groups/organizations are steamrolled over.

 

Moreover, in today’s “connected” world via the power & scope of the Internet & the myriad so-called “social networks,” it’s very easy to spread fear, hate, & lies. And if we won’t, don’t, or can’t take the time to check out the validity of the claims by those trying to sucker us into their web of deceit, we become just more cannon-fodder for the morally bankrupt.

 

Believe it or not my friend, I do wish that I could offer you a simple method or answer to this complex state of affairs but unlike the con-man in the oval office, I won’t insult your intelligence as he does day-in & day-out. Sadly, in this crazy world of ours where the quantity of our “wealth” is just about the only thing that matters when it comes to our public “influence,” I am only wealthy in terms of the amount of time, energy, & love I have expended in my life-long pursuit of knowledge.

 

And yeah, I know that some of you, especially you die-hard Trump fans, will dismiss me as just another elitist & were this not so absurd, it’d be amusing. Yeah, me the elitist? Single parent (my mom), multiple cruel step-dads/mom’s boyfriends, drunkenness & violence throughout, piss-poor public schools, hundreds of Mickey Mouse dead-end jobs in factories, pumping gas, flipping burgers, etc. , standing up to the U.S. Army & refusing to allow them to send me to Vietnam even though they wanted to make me an officer, scoring at the 11th grade, sixth month level in reading when in the sixth grade but never given the opportunity or the encouragement to rise to my intellectual abilities. Yep! Obviously, I am just another one of the elitists that the humble Trump detests.

a dear friend who helped me emotionally weather the storm while AWOL from the U.S. Army

 

So, you decide for yourself, are you going to use your “common sense” which so many of our fellow working-class citizens love to proclaim, or are you going to continue to believe the perhaps billionaire—we’ll never know for sure because he’ll never release his tax returns—or is there the slightest possibility that I could be telling you straight-up?

“Christian” Supremacists new version of Morality & Ethics

 

Sorry if I get side-tracked & veer off course a bit but like our recently anointed Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, I too like beer & I’m drinking beer as I write this. Yeah, there used to be a modicum of decorum, civility, or just simple decency but with the illegal insertion of Trump as the symbolic head of our government, all that has vanished out the window & the bar has been lowered to such an extent, that it’s about as difficult to step-over that “bar” as it’d be to step over the proverbial line in the sand.

 

I mean, seriously people? A president who brags about grabbing women’s pussies & getting away with it & a supreme court judge who was rammed-through the confirmation process under a very dark cloud of not being that different from the commander-in-chief when it comes to matters of morality? To say nothing of the assorted other despicable excuses for human beings that made up the Trump cabinet & keep getting replaced by more of the same.

 

How any of these self-proclaimed “Christian Supremacists,” or politicians or corporate spokesmen, etc. have the audacity to stand-up in front of television cameras on the world stage & defend this cabal of amoral human cockroaches, defies incredulity.

 

I stopped calling myself a Christian when I was about 14 years old. The hypocrisy just became all too obvious & in hindsight, I am glad that I did because I can proudly disassociate myself from all those wolves in sheep’s clothing who kiss Trump’s feet like spineless slugs.

 

In a nutshell my imaginary reader, the powers that be, the power elite, the status quo, or however you may care to refer to them, have used a tried but true strategy of divide & conquer. Yeah, this is a military term & tactic and is very appropriate because they, the 1%, have been conducting class warfare against the rest of us throughout recorded history.

 

Of course, they deny this vehemently & get all bent out of shape, stand up on their hind-legs spitting & foaming at the mouth in self-righteous indignation whenever accused of this. And it doesn’t take much effort to see the three clubs they wield with usual success i.e. God, Guns, & Gays. Trump merely added Mexicans & Muslims to the recipe & roughly a third of our fellow citizens swallowed the poison whole.

 

And even though I gave-up on Christianity as it is preached in most of America’s churches & not practiced in public & certainly not in politics, I can remember my Sunday School lessons like Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” In my agnostic/atheist humble opinion, anyone who has a kind heart can see that the Beatitudes summed Christianity up in a nutshell and oh, so beautifully.

What part don’t you understand?

 

Yet it never ceases to amaze me & depress me at the same time how many of these “Christian” fundamentalists, Dominionists, evangelicals, white supremacists, Klansmen, Neo-Nazis, Alt Right, etc. seem to honestly believe that they are Christians?

 

I’ve never really been that much of a “pot-head,” and in fact, many of my friends over the years have been amused & amazed at how long a quarter ounce of pot can last me i.e. usually a year or longer. But I am proud to identify myself as an old hippie because it was very simple, and yeah, naïve of us but we basically believed in peace, love, & dope (the natural dope such as pot, peyote, mescaline that wasn’t adulterated by greedy & unscrupulous drug dealers).

 

We viewed “drugs” as a tool to help in our enlightenment & we cared about one another, the environment, justice, equality, freedom, truth, etc. —not that different from what our founding fathers believed in & tried to establish in our Constitution & our form of government (and yeah, I am aware of the hypocrisies & contradictions).

 

I for one, would love to see a Renaissance of those idealistic values of the hippies, the student protestors, the dope smokers, the non-conformists, the radicals, the wanderers of the 1960s and I am 100% in favor of the proposed “Green New Deal” that is drawing more & more of us like the Pied Piper of Hamlin towards a Shangri-La, a Paradise Lost. Excuse me, it’s the literature major in me. But what do we have nowadays, if not  our dreams?

 

“Reality T.V.,” which gave us the likes of Trump and the glorification of lie, cheat, steal, backstab, whatever it takes to win. Are these the values of Jesus? And how in the hell can Mike Pence stand up there next to Trump & believe he’s still a Christian? No, it’s as clear as the nose on your face, these faux Christians will & have sold their souls and any semblance of decency they may have had. Why?

 

Because of their lust for power. They are every bit as fanatical as the worst of the “Muslims” who claim to be Muslim but commit terrorist attacks. And like those phony “Muslims,” many of the American Taliban, gladly commit their own versions of domestic terrorism in the name of their god, who more honesty should be acknowledged as the Anti-Christ.

 

Isn’t this a pitiful state of affairs when an avowed non-Christian has to remind you “Christians” that you’re not behaving very Christ-like? I deliberately used the term “devil” in the title of this essay because to me, the words “devil,” “Satan,” “Lucifer,” etc. are really synonyms for evil and evil in my book is all that hurts, denigrates, physically attacks, humiliates, rejects, attempts to silence, shames, judges others, fears, intimidates, discourages, etc.

 

I could go on and on and on but I believe my point is clear? I believe down to the marrow of my bones that all of us who clearly have love for our fellow human beings in our hearts, are the truly righteous. I don’t want to rule over others & I sure as Hell don’t & won’t let anyone rule over me though I do have to appear to play along with this evil system.

 

In conclusion my friend, there is so much more that unites us than divides us. These divisions are grossly exaggerated & are used by the 1% to keep us divided so they can more easily control us. Why? Quite simply, for the wealth of the world. We have been indoctrinated our entire lives—for me, since 1952—into believing that there was a vast conspiracy of evildoers out to enslave us or kill us i.e. the Communists, the international drug cartels, and currently, terrorists.

 

And no, I’m not denying the existence of nor the destructiveness of these forces but, if you’ll do a bit of research, you’ll discover that each of these bogey-men have been used to keep us in line & paying our taxes, and dying or being maimed in the perpetual war system that has existed my whole life. Communist Russia has/had something like seven countries under its “control.” America has over 900 military bases around the world & who knows how many secret bases? Don’t believe me, check out Chalmers Johnson for yourself. America has been financially supporting, training the secret police of dictators, & often sending in our special forces & our regular army to back bloody dictators for decades.

 

Too much to swallow? Check out Major General Smedley F. Butler of the U.S.M.C. (United States Marine Corps) if you think me full of shit and spend just ten minutes reading his quotes re:  his tenure. And here’s probably the most bitter pill for you to swallow? America, manipulated by the transnational corporations that President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address i.e. Beware the Military-Industrial Complex—he wanted to include Congress in this unholy alliance but was persuaded to leave it out.

 

The data, the information, the knowledge, the truth, the wisdom is all available for any who seriously care & are willing to search for it for themselves. I have spent conservatively, 50,000 hours in my pursuit and no, this doesn’t mean that I have the corner on the truth but it does mean, that I am light-years ahead of fuckin’ cold-blooded mercenaries like Trump!

 

Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA (April 19, 2019)

The 1%’s Idea of “Choices”

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

An acquaintance of mine recently brought up the issue of “choices” again & basically said that I am in the situation I’m in because of the “choices” I’ve made in my life. This is my rebuttal, and instead of going into the centuries-old debate of “free will” vs. “determinism” and nature vs. nurture, I’m going to respond in my own, straight-forward manner.

 

I was going to title this essay, “Free Will and the Free Market,” but decided that would be perhaps too pedantic & too complex a topic to explore. Besides, those who claim to believe in the “free market,” have obviously already drunk the Kool-Aid of crony capitalism & its house of cards.

Get it?

 

Let me start by acknowledging that I don’t delude myself & think that I’m going to persuade any readers of this essay to reject the edifice upon which they’ve built their lives. No, this is merely the voice of a lone wolf howling in the wilderness of this shallow society.

 

You may think it extremely arrogant or audacious of me but I claim to speak for the downtrodden like myself, who’ve been screwed by this rigged-system their whole lives. Yet the 1% have succeeded to an astounding degree in convincing us that we are “losers” (one of Trump’s favorite slurs) because of our own “shortcomings.”

 

Yep! We are supposed to accept full responsibility for everything from losing a perhaps once, decent paying job & the health insurance we once had, our homes because we fell for those predatory lenders’ scams, our life savings because again, we weren’t smart enough to not trust our financial advisers who assured us that our investments were secure & guaranteed, etc.

 

Just poor choices on our parts. Too bad, too sad! But somehow, the rich always seem to come out on top? Yeah, miraculously the 1% seem to usually have the insider knowledge that not only protects their fortunes but even enables them to profit when the rest of us fail? It couldn’t be perhaps that because they have the wealth & power to influence & control the legislators who write the laws, is why they rarely pay for poor “choices,” could it?

 

Of course not! This is a meritocracy, right? Haven’t we been told all the way through our public education that if we work hard, follow the rules, & don’t rock the boat, we too can become rich & successful? Gee? I wonder where such “wisdom” originated? Well, that’s for another essay.

 

Remember! We’re a class-less society i.e. we don’t recognize or rather, we don’t acknowledge that there are different “classes” in America & we’re all equal. But don’t try driving in Beverly Hills, especially if you happen to be Black. Of course, Trump has shown the world what a truly classless person he is & represents the real America behind the veil like in the Wizard of Oz.

Yeah, as spiritually sick as Trump makes me, I’m actually glad that he’s up there on the world’s stage because there’s no hiding or denying just how rotten to the core this neo-liberal assault has been with Trump behind the desk in the oval office. And what has been the 1%’s response to this greedy, self-aggrandizing moron’s words & actions? Mostly mute because the Duck Dynasty’s Klansman has been a godsend to their continued looting of the federal treasury.

 

I may be veering a bit off topic here and could go into the “choices” that brought us this most vile, despicable, & craven mercenary but that too, is another topic for future exploration. You see, my imaginary reader, the concept of “choice” is thrown out by the rich whenever any of us, the peasants, dare to complain about “our lot in life.” This is their armor, their shield when attacked for their greed, selfishness, & the destruction they have wreaked in their blind pursuit of profit i.e. if we are unhappy with our life situations, we only have ourselves to blame for the poor choices we have made along the way.

 

Yep! If we accept this rationale of “choices,” then Trump has clearly made all the right choices in his career i.e. never admit guilt or wrongdoing, cheat/defraud thousands if not tens of thousands of employees, contractors, etc. always attack & never apologize, borrow & not repay banks, bribe city officials for permits for buildings & casinos and not honor the contracts, launder money for mafia figures, beg for loans from Russian mafia i.e. Russian government officials, and build his political career with a vicious fear & hate campaign that he never stops using to manipulate the gullible & willingly ignorant who believe in him.

clearly stuck in adolescence for life

 

But if you happen to be a simple person who believes in doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you, you are a sitting duck for the 1% who have no such moral qualms. Yes, they too made their choices & we see the consequences of their choices in the tabloids yet we continue to ignore these glaring lessons of what befalls the greedy & the heartless?

It’s really quite clear

 

Let me ask you this my friends; Did we who were raised by a single parent, usually our mothers, “choose” this? Or did we who were abused by cruel stepfathers from birth to adolescence have a say? Did we who were forced to attend whatever public school which happened to be nearby, have a choice in the academic curriculum or quality of said curriculum?

 

Did we, who went hungry at times in our childhoods, have a choice regarding whether we wanted to eat or not? Did we have a choice when it came to being brought up in a drunken & violent home? Or whether we had a decent roof over our heads, two loving parents, encouragement, cultural exposure, etc.?

Iconic pic of woman who made “poor choices” during the “Great Depression”

 

Were we free from the psychological as well as the physical harm inflicted upon us by cruel, unloving step-dads & live-in boyfriends of our mothers? Did we have a choice when it came to the fact that we never even met our biological fathers?

 

Did we have a choice when it came to being mocked, ridiculed, & humiliated every time we played sports as we grew up & our eyes crossed and our fellow students were so merciless & cruel?

 

Did we have a choice in being not only the eldest in our families but also amongst all our cousins & being forced to protect them but had no one to protect or defend us? Did we have a choice when it came to enjoying a “normal” childhood or adolescence?

 

Or what about the life or death choice of being in the military during the Vietnam war? Did we have a choice when it came to the lottery & the fact that our birth date set our fate? Did we have a choice of a college deferment when we didn’t even know of such an option? Moreover, was this an option if you didn’t have a rich daddy like the 1% who guaranteed your college tuition?

a dear friend who helped me emotionally weather the storm while AWOL

 

Remember, Donny the Duck’s daddy bribed a doctor to save Donny by claiming he had bone-spurs & now he struts the world-stage like he’s the most patriotic American there ever was. Guess he wasn’t forced into making that choice of serving? Guess the fact that a professor of mine suggested that I should be attending college at Stanford University but the fact that I was having trouble just paying for tuition at California State University at Long Beach, was just another poor choice on my part?

 

Furthermore, the 1% don’t have to worry about making poor choices or dumb mistakes when they work for daddy because they’re not going to be fired. How often are the children of the elite fired from any position they’ve ever held, no matter how briefly? Yeah, so much for meritocracy, equality, level playing field and all the other bullshit propaganda we’ve been spoon-fed our entire lives!

 

Do the children of the elite ever have to suffer the insults, degradation, & daily humiliation inflicted upon them by “superiors” who are clearly inferior in every way? Do they have to make a “choice” between eating or quitting and maintaining some semblance of self-respect? Do the elite have to refrain from the overwhelming desire to smash their supervisors’ faces to a pulp?

 

Has this so-called “power elite” ever been forced to work at jobs they knew were very dangerous i.e. handling toxic chemicals, driving trucks with faulty brakes, etc.  yet when they quit, they were labeled “losers,” unable to hold down a job. Have they ever known what it feels like to have all these pejorative terms applied to them like that crimson A sewn onto Hester Prim’s blouse for life?

 

And more insulting & unbearable than all these personal insults is the fact that I have spent my life in the continual pursuit of knowledge, truth, & wisdom yet am often forced to almost beg for some minimum wage “job.” Does this all stem from a series of poor “choices?” If you still believe that it does, it reveals you for who you are i.e. a member of the corporate cockroach class who should be stamped-out for humanity’s sake as well as for Mother Earth’s well-being.

 

Addendum

 

Isn’t it curious that when questioned about the legitimacy of their wealth, the overwhelming majority of the elite believe they rightfully deserve it because of the family they were born into or that they have “worked” so hard for it? And those of us who “begrudge” them their wealth are just jealous, lazy, not qualified, or have made “poor choices” in life.

Trump’s version of the Palace of Versailles from a Duck Dynasty perspective

 

Yeah, “poor choices” that the rich can relate to like choosing between going hungry & stealing; like quitting a dangerous job where you know you’re risking your life for minimum wage & becoming just another sad statistic or being broke again.

 

Bottom-line, you who have been fucked-over by life, often as the result of the elite’s policies & practices had & have about as much “choice” in terms of what course your lives follow as those sheltered “elite” bastards had in being born with the proverbial silver spoons in their mouths. So, don’t you buy their bullshit argument that it’s your “deficiencies” that are the cause, because if you do, you are only playing into their hands & blaming yourselves (and no, this isn’t to say that some of us aren’t guilty of laziness, etc.) rather than them, the want to be Masters of the Universe.

 

There is one historical fact that gives me hope & some sense of consolation, the French Revolution. Naturally, the powers that be will dismiss my arguments as being that of just another “loser.” Yeah, those of us who dare to stand up on our hind-legs & howl against the horrific injustices of this world are dismissed as “whiners,” apologists, losers, etc. etc. etc. because it requires honest & serious mental effort to refute my accusations.

the “peasants” will only take being fucked for so long, so 1% ers, be aware!

 

This is clearly such an easy cop-out that it is disingenuous at best & reflects a mind that is incapable of fair & logical argument.

 

The sad & cruel irony in today’s America is that Trump has succeeded to such an extent in duping his cult of the Walking Dead into believing the true enemy of the state are his fellow elite, who profit from the government subsidies/protections just as he has but that he is magically separate from it. Yep! Donald the Dick-head, the pussy-grabber, the fraudulent billionaire, the clearly senile & vile creature from the Black Lagoon ruling over the swamp lizards of Congress, has muddied the waters to such an extent that nobody knows what the future holds for America.

 

And like a cheap magician, Trump distracts us by waving his tiny hands, one hand pointed at the “enemy of the state” i.e. the press (because they do their job of informing us to some extent) while his other hand, wreaks havoc on our Constitution and our semblance of a democracy.

The Swine in Chief with his tiny fingers on the nuclear trigger. Yeah, be afraid, be very afraid!

 

Here’s a different perspective on the big picture if you care to expand your understanding? I dissected this book years ago & it gave me great comfort in its reassurance that I wasn’t crazy.  https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/487/em-from-em-br-we-ve-had-a-hundred-years-of-psychotherapy-an

 

—Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA (a couple of weeks before escape from this phony paradise of wanna-be hippies)  April 16, 2019

Yeah, you can dismiss me & my worries with trite comments like; We haven’t blown ourselves up yet but, the simple reality that we have come within seconds of nuclear exchange many times over the course of my life (1952 to the present) shouldn’t give any rational human being any comfort i.e. it’s mostly been due to sheer dumb luck.
 

 

The Business of America is Fraud!

~ cockroachconspiracy
a trio of the top insiders who crashed our economy in 2008

Watch the film; “Inside Job” by Charles Fergusson if you give a shit about fraud at the highest levels. The pic above shows (Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under Bush; Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury under Obama). Of course, we mustn’t forget Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, etc. This film won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary & was narrated by Matt Damon. It is about “the systemic corruption of the U.S. by the Financial Services Industry.”

Yes indeed, the business of America is fraud and the higher up the food chain from small companies to megalithic corporations, the more prevalent fraud is & the less likely they will be held accountable for their crimes.

a world of corporate conglomerates & no more sovereign nations

 

I recently spent three months traveling around the state looking for a place to retire & a home to buy. I was looking for a small, used manufactured home, but unfortunately, they’re almost all in trailer park “communities.” And these “communities” like corporations, are private tyrannies as Chomsky has pointed out. I’m not being facetious, each of these “communities” has its own set of rules & regulations and a number of hurdles one must pass for entrance.

 

I was going to pay cash for the home and then have to pay “rent” for the privilege of living in this “community.” Rent usually includes water, sewer, & garbage and an incredible number of restrictions which, if violated, could get you evicted. Most of these “communities” won’t allow you to have a dog or a cat. The few that do allow pets, often tell you what size dog you can have, what breed of dog you can have, etc. And most of these “communities” won’t allow you to park your RV there but will allow you to park them there if you pay an additional fee. I won’t go into the absurd assorted other rules & regulations but it is truly mind-boggling.

 

I was told that my income must be at least three times the rent amount which was going to be $375 per month. I get Social Security and it is several hundred dollars more than this rent amount but because I have a “bad” credit rating, my application was denied. So, I paid $50 to be rejected by the petty tyrant owners of this “community.” The owners are a husband & wife and I dealt with the wife. She tried to persuade me to pay off the debtors who made claims against me which give me the “bad” credit rating. It was all I could do to refrain from screaming nasty epithets at her over the phone.

 

A few days before this rejection, I was in her office going over my application & the notebook full of rules & regulations. I mentioned that I write about politics & she asked whether I was liberal or conservative. I said I’m definitely liberal & she said they were conservative. I responded with yeah, most business owners are conservatives. I had also mentioned that I started collecting my Social Security early because I feared that the GOP would get their hands on it soon & had been trying to do so for decades. She argued that it was democrats who wanted to tax & spend.

Yep! It’s always those damn tax & spend democrats

This is the non-thinking mantra of the so-called “conservatives,” and they’ve been repeating it ad nauseam for decades as well. I was very tempted to ask her, well, tell me, who was it that started the war in Afghanistan which is the longest war America has ever been in & what have we accomplished there.

why we’ve been in perpetual war since WWII

I also wanted to mention that it was again the republicans who started the war based on a pack of lies, in Iraq and we, the taxpayers have been forced to pay a billion dollars a week for all these years to finance these wars but I knew that I should keep my mouth shut & not antagonize the boss so I kept my mouth shut.

and he’s going to reduce the $21 trillion dollar national deficit? Yeah, right!

 

A little later in this enlightening conversation, this petty tyrant informed me that people on food stamps & government assistance are lazy & dependent and don’t want to get off this assistance. Yep, once again it’s clear that those with all the money & privilege see the rest of us as the unwashed masses intent on stealing their hard-earned wealth. Although I was looking forward to settling down in this area because it’s only a few blocks to the ocean & a nice area in Newport, Oregon where I’ve tried several times in the past to get a foothold, it’s probably for the best that I was turned-down. I can only bite my tongue for so long and sooner or later, I probably would’ve told her just how stupid she is.

 

I use this personal experience to highlight the bigger picture of what’s happening all across America i.e. a return to debtor’s prison. Charles Dickens is revered by many scholars as being on an equal level, if not superior to, William Shakespeare. And I believe he has attained this degree of respect largely because of his vivid portrayals of the down & out in England at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. And this “revolution” has clearly run its course in America and the so-called “First World” nations & has now moved on to the “developing nations.”

King Trump’s economic plan for the 99%

 

Dickens’ own father was imprisoned in a debtor’s prison & this is why his son could write so powerfully about the degrading & devastating effects of this relatively modern phenomenon. I have also experienced the horrors of growing up poor in America because my mom basically raised four children by herself & worked two or three jobs for a good part of her life in her struggle to keep us out of the gutter. This is why I have spent the last 30 years or better teaching myself about politics, economics, history, etc. And this is why my writing is often passionate & full of anger.

and Trump fans just ask that he uses Vaseline before proceeding

 

Don’t worry my friend, I haven’t forgotten what this essay is supposed to be about i.e. fraud & private tyrannies. In our so-called “advanced” society, the corporate cockroaches have only refined their methods of oppressing us & keeping us under their thumbs. As I said, in today’s world & in America, the home of the free, if you want to rent an apartment or a house, etc. you must not only pass a credit check but also a criminal background check. Imagine if they required all politicians and CEOs of corporations to do likewise?

 

And not only does this apply when seeking a roof over your head, it is also becoming the standard when applying for a job & they often require that you pass a drug test as well. The 99% in the United States of America, you know, all us suckers & victims who are forced to pay the taxes that enrich the wealthy or face prison, are trapped in an ever-smaller vicious circle. This circle or cycle is like a noose around a prisoner’s neck that is slowly tightening around their throat & it’s a Catch-22 from which there is little to no way to escape.

 

If you’re part of the 1%, you got there because you’re either a sociopath or a psychopath. But, if you have any semblance of compassion or empathy, you realize that many, if not most of our most vulnerable citizens i.e. the homeless, the working poor, the shrinking middle class, etc. often turn to drugs & alcohol as a means of temporary escape and/or relief from this nightmare we’re engulfed in. I believe pot is the drug of choice for most of us & I believe it’s relatively harmless in the scheme of things. Unfortunately, pot stays in our systems far longer than the more harmful drugs like crack, meth, heroin, etc. I’m not excusing those who commit violent crimes against others but if we truly gave a damn about crime in terms of the devastating personal toll it has on us as individuals, as families, and as a society, we would lock-up most of the corporate CEOs in this country.

the true face of crime in America, the untouchable super bankers

 

Reflect on this if you will, try to name a single, major corporation that hasn’t been guilty of defrauding its customers/consumers at least once? Most of the corporate behemoths have been charged with fraud repeatedly yet they are still allowed to go on doing business as usual. And to rub salt in the wound, they don’t even have to admit guilt in a court of law. They are occasionally required to pay a small fine relative to the amount of profit they made from their fraudulent practices. Yet, if you or I write a “bad check,” because we’re down & out and are just trying to feed our family and we’re out of work, we’re sent to jail or today’s “debtor’s prison.”

The Land of Opportunity for Corporate Cockroaches

 

Speaking of prison, are you aware of how profitable cheap, prison labor has become in this land of the free? Moreover, Walmart which is touted as the largest & most profitable retail business in the world, uses mostly prison labor & a de facto slave labor force from China. I believe that most of us have become desensitized to the fact that advertising, like it’s cousin, public relations (P.R.), a powerful tool of the politicians & the business class, is the art of lying or fraud in all its malevolent glory.

the president who made a career out of fraud

 

So, corporations are freely & legally allowed and encouraged to lie, cheat, steal, & manipulate us. They’re allowed to poison us with their GMO foods, their contamination of our air, water, & land. They’re partners with the politicians who are their high paid whores i.e. Dick Cheney & Halliburton and use their high paid PR whores to dupe us into wars of aggression i.e. Iraq. Our poor & desperate citizens who see no way out of their misery & poverty and fall for the military propaganda, reluctantly join the military & risk their lives and sanity in the never-ending stream of wars. And when they return, often with a limb missing & serious mental issues, they are denied benefits or receive pitiful care, in terms of the quality of assistance available to them. By the way, remember our reverence for the law in this nation based on Law & Order, and our reverence for business? Then why is it that contracts we sign, like the contracts I signed with telecom corporations who defrauded me, are airtight for us and can have such significant impact on our lives as for example in causing me to be denied residence in the trailer court I applied to, but when the military invents their policy of “Stop Gap,” they are free to break the contract you sign when you join a branch of the military? A soldier, whose tour of duty is complete & their spirit is soaring with the anticipation of returning home is told, sorry, we need you & you’re going to do another tour. Some poor souls have been forced to do three or four more tours of duty than they signed up for.

the only escape from the corporate cockroaches

 

For these and oh so many other reasons are why I say that the business of America is fraud. It’s a sad & truly horrifying Brave New World the corporate cockroaches & their lackeys in Washington D.C. have created for us. You may believe that if you play by all their rules & zealously pay all your bills, no matter how many of them are fraudulent, that you may escape the nightmares I describe but you are only deluding yourself. How many horror stories have you heard of people who were obedient & quiet all their lives only to retire & discover their pensions had been stolen by their corporate executives, their health coverage they were guaranteed for life was wiped-out, etc.? I have been spitting in the wind most of my adult life & I know that I’m probably little more than a modern-day Don Quixote but I also believe to the marrow of my bones that it’s better to die standing than to live on my knees!

 

—Rob DeLoss, Newport, Oregon (January 21st, 2015)

 

P.S.  I forgot to point out that because of my “bad credit” rating, I am now forced back into renting an apt. where I must jump through all the same unfair & outrageous requirements and if I disturb a neighbor by playing my music too loud if I’ve had a bit too much to drink for example, I face eviction. We face ever more outrageous rent prices & are de facto prisoners in our own homes. We are de facto all living in debtor’s prisons, it’s just that some have bars on the windows while others don’t. I confess though that I’m seriously considering abandoning ship i.e. leaving America for good and seeking asylum, spiritually speaking, in some other country where there is the possibility of owning my own home & peacefully retiring with fewer fascists dictating when I must shit, go to sleep, etc.

this is the truth behind the “free market” myth

 

Addendum

 

Well it appears that I did lose track of the central point I wanted to make regarding “bad credit.” I did mention this to the petty tyrant who rejected my application for becoming a resident of her luxurious (sarcasm intended) trailer court, though. Charles Ferguson pointed out in the brilliant documentary that he wrote, produced, & directed, “Inside Job,” that just a few days before the world-wide, economic collapse of 2008, the three major credit rating agencies in America gave the “Super Banks,” and many, if not most, of the hedge fund firms, the insurance giant, A.I.G., etc. triple A or at least double A ratings. The petty tyrant’s response when I told her this was “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.” So, in other words she didn’t grasp the connection or the point that I was trying to make i.e. the big boys can tank the economy of the world & cause tens of millions of people to lose their jobs, their homes, & their life savings but you’re going to reject me because I refused to pay my “bill” to a few of the telecoms who defrauded me? This is the world we live in my friends & this is what passes for justice in this corporate cockroach infested society of ours! By the way, my mom worked for AT&T for 36 years but when she died, they kept denying that she had a pension. My aunt was co-executor with me though & she refused to give up and after months of persistent phone calls, my aunt got through to an honest employee there who told us, yeah, there’s $39,000 in a pension account.

Perhaps this is Trump’s “end game” i.e. he, the corporate cockroach master will survive Armageddon?

The Art of Manipulation

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

We are gradually morphing into a fascist society, yep, right here in the land of freedom & democracy. Fear mongering, exaggeration, being an alarmist, you say? A third of the American public believe that Trump is the populist champion of their dreams & he uses these tactics and many more and they believe him yet the majority of them most likely would dismiss my argument here? Okay, for those of you who are still able & willing to read an essay that’ll require 15 minutes of your time, here’s an overview of the subject for you.

It Can’t Happen Here, Right???

 

Most people are aware of the fact that Freud was the father of modern psychology but did you know that his nephew, Edward Bernays, was the father of the public relations industry or as we usually refer to it, the PR industry? There’s an old saying, “Advertising is what you pay for & Publicity is what you pray for.” Well Bernays soon became the darling of New York’s elite circle of businessmen because of his skillful use of his uncle’s insights into human behavior in his P.R. campaigns for many, if not most of the major corporations of his time. (by-the-way, Bernays published a book in 1928, its title was “Propaganda.”) 

 

And to give you an example of just how pernicious & powerful the P.R. industry became, let’s take a look at how he helped to make it acceptable for women to smoke cigarettes. Before this PR assault on America, it was considered a social taboo for women to smoke;

 

After WWI, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to start smoking. While men smoked cigarettes, it was not publicly acceptable for women to smoke. Bernays staged a dramatic public display of women smoking during the Easter Day Parade in New York City. He then told the press to expect that women suffragists would light up “torches of freedom” during the parade to show they were equal to men. Like the “You’ve come a long way, baby” ads, this campaign commodified women’s progress and desire to be considered equal to men

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smokin  (by-the-way, Bernays hired dozens of young, beautiful women fashion models to play the part of female rebels defying social conventions).

 

Evidently, Bernays had stumbled upon the golden formula that generated millions in profits for the corporate cockroach class i.e. employing psychological appeals in their advertising & P.R. campaigns. By manipulating peoples’ fears & desires, corporations could sell their products that people didn’t need & condition them to want or desire the products which would serve as symbols of their elevated class status & thereby enhance their self-image. Need I illustrate? Look at all the car ads that show beautiful women flocking around a guy in a fancy sports car for example.

tell me again how different we are from Russia?

 

Well, as the 20th century rolled on, so did the power of corporations until the point we’re at today where these corporations are more powerful (in terms of wealth & influence) than many nations;

Walmart

Exxon Mobil

Royal Dutch Shell

Apple

Samsung

Amazon

Microsoft

Nestle

Google

 

And this is just a partial list. Let this sink in for a minute if you will? Private corporations so rich & powerful that they hire armies of lobbyists to seduce politicians into writing legislation that further increases their profits, protects them from lawsuits, provides them with millions & billions in tax subsidies for research & development, allows them to use the public infrastructure (highways, bridges, ports, airports, etc.) to conduct their business and most of these behemoth corporations pay little to no taxes—some even get back millions & billions in their tax returns.

What did our soldiers die for???

 

If this doesn’t morally outrage you, you are either a member of the corporate cockroach class or are a sociopathic narcissist like Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan. By-the-way, Donny is a great admirer of authoritarians & dictators in case you haven’t noticed; (Saddam Hussein, Putin, Kim Jong Un of N. Korea, Mussolini, Gadhafi, 1980s Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping of China, Duterte of the Philippines, President Erdogan of Turkey, Egyptian President el-Sisi, the Saudis, & Brazil’s new president, Boisonaro. And Trump not only admires these murderous authoritarians & dictators, he envies them & wishes he could be America’s authoritarian like the role he played on The Apprentice “reality” T.V. program. Note; Trump insisted that as part of his contract with the producers of that absurd show that every time his name was mentioned on the show, they had to also say that he was a billionaire. Talk about manipulating his public image, are you beginning to take my point?

So this is defending freedom & democracy?

 

Moreover, speaking of Trump’s admiration of Mussolini, some have credited Mussolini with saying;

 

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”

 

I know how die-hard most of Trump’s “base” is but I am a proudly stubborn (determination undisciplined) Irishman & I don’t give up easily either so here’s a sampling of the mountain of evidence proving Trump a malignant, greedy, megalomaniac:

 

*Trump consistently attacks peoples’ characters when he can’t refute their argument

*he’s a non-stop braggart i.e. I’m the smartest, I’m the best, I’m the greatest negotiator, etc. etc. etc.

*his biggest lie is his wealth & that’s why he will never reveal his tax returns

*he’s intentionally vague so he can deny having said what he’s said because his words are often open to a variety of interpretations

*he’s been exaggerating his wealth, his popularity, his skills, etc. his entire life

*he minimizes others so he can exaggerate his own significance

*he is fond of making false equivalences

*he likes to use the lesser of two evils argument (which is bogus)

*repetition ad nauseam is one of his favorite deceptive tactics i.e. I am the most famous president ever, the most successful real estate developer in New York City, etc. etc. etc.

*Scapegoating was his lead-off in his presidential campaign i.e. Mexicans are rapists, murderers, etc. & he blames everyone except himself for everything that doesn’t go his way

*Emotional Appeals—a favorite tactic used by dictators throughout history i.e. Hitler’s constant claim that the Jews were behind all of Germany’s problems (using fear, guilt, & calls for loyalty to him)

*Bandwagon—everyone else is doing it, so why not me or we

*Black & White/Either-Or; it’s us against the democrats

Burden of Proof—trying to turn the tables & demand his accusers prove their credibility rather than answer a question

*false flattery—try to flatter your opponent to keep them from attacking you

*Incredulity—I am offended that you would even ask me such a question

*labeling—any journalist who criticizes him or disagrees with him is with the “fake press”

*Ridicule/Mocking—his shameful mocking of handicapped guy during one of his rallies

*slippery slope—if we don’t stop the illegal immigrants, we’ll soon be overrun by terrorists, etc.

*Dehumanizing—something Trump has a particular talent for especially when it comes to anyone who dares to say a bad word about him

*Slogans—replacement for serious thought i.e. America, love it or leave it

 

I could easily provide you with hundreds if not thousands of examples of Trump’s manipulative techniques/tactics but I realize that no matter how much proof I provide, Trump supporters aren’t open to logic or rational thought but are ruled by their passions & Trump is a master at pushing peoples’ emotional buttons in order to win them over. So, why should I waste my time talking to the willfully ignorant or rather trying to persuade them to reflect & trust their own judgment rather than the circus master Trump the Vile?

Trump as Jim Jones & the kind of loyalty Trump expects

 

I am providing a public service that some may seriously consider or may pass it on to some of those who haven’t drunk the Jim Jones Kool Aid yet, and that is my only solace. And in that spirit, here are the eight signs of malignant narcissism, and if you dare, see if any of them are accurate reflections of Donald the psychopathic narcissist:

 

  1. Sense of entitlement
  2. Lack of conscience and empathy
  3. Sadistic streak
  4. Egocentrism
  5. Grandiosity (I am the greatest, smartest, richest, etc.)
  6. Paranoia (it’s a witch hunt by the democrats)
  7. Manipulative nature
  8. They project their bad behavior onto others

 

In conclusion and to prove that this isn’t merely a one-sided attack on “republicans,” Obama bears a large part of the responsibility for Trump becoming president. In fact, Obama was so good at his “bait & switch” tactic that he used on us to persuade us that he was going to be the champion of “Hope & Change,” that his campaign for his first term as president won two awards at the Cannes Festival for Advertising:

 

“The campaign that drove Barack Obama to victory in the US presidential election has claimed two top awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards.

The campaign, submitted by Obama for America, has been hailed as a masterful combination of new media, door-to-door and community grass roots campaigning with a clever tactical use of traditional TV advertising.

The campaign won two grands prix in the Titanium and Integrated Lions categories.”

 

Yep! Obama swore up & down and everywhere he went that he was going to enact real changes, be the transparent president, etc. and what did he do within the first few weeks of his presidency? He appointed several of the top Wall St. wolves to the most powerful positions regarding our national economy i.e. Summers, Geitner, Bernanke, etc. And right then & there I knew I had been suckered just like the millions of other Americans. I detested all the racial attacks on him & Trump barely concealed his own racist campaign against Obama with his “birther” issue which he beat the drums for ad nauseam. But Obama’s refusal to prosecute the Wall St. culprits, the “Super Bankers” who were “Too Big to Fail & Too Big to Jail,” his war on Whistleblowers, etc. etc. etc. only fanned the flames of anger in America which should rightfully be directed at the corporate cockroach class because the politicians are merely the willing tools of these creatures who have no loyalty to America whatsoever. Look into how Obama sold out the residents of Flint with stunt pretending the water was safe to drink. Obama the Oreo President!

 

And Trump with his appeal to peoples’ fears and hate using his racism, bigotry, & the other techniques I listed above, managed to slink into the oval office. I recently permanently deleted my Facebook account for several reasons but a significant factor was that every time I criticized Obama, many so-called Progressives came unglued and practically accused me of being a. troll for Trump. Yep! A sad reflection of the myopia on the Left that just like the so-called conservatives who are blind to the crimes of their party, are willfully blind to the crimes & betrayals of the democratic party.

Lastly, what should really worry us all is what my intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky has been warning us about for quite some time now i.e. the catastrophic, perhaps already irreversible destruction of our climate or environment. Exxon Mobil & several of the other oil & natural gas conglomerates have spent millions, perhaps billions pushing their fake news sowing the seeds of doubt about climate change. Of course, Donald Duck is doing his part by claiming it’s all an elaborate Chinese hoax. In this Alice in Wonderland World where Trump is the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, and can start a nuclear war in a childish fit which he is notorious for, we should all be quaking in our boots!

May we persevere!

Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA 1/28/19

 

P.S.  It must be a sign of old age but I forgot some juicy tidbits regarding Trump that I want to include. Trump’s supposed War against the “Fake News Media” would be laughable if it weren’t so destructive of a vital institution in any democracy. Moreover, where would Trump be if it weren’t for all the free media coverage he received in his campaign for the presidency—some estimate over $5 billion while Bernie got a tiny fraction of coverage. Trump learned from his slimy mentor, Roy Cohn, that any media attention i.e. publicity is good whether it’s scandalous or not because it keeps you in the public eye. Cohn’s “wisdom” which Trump assimilated into his very DNA was “to always hit back & never apologize.” You see, Trump’s “brand” is his most prized possession because he sells his brand i.e. logo, all around the world & people pay him millions to use his logo. Sadly, far too many Trump supporters believe that everything that has Trump’s name on it, is owned by him. And once again we witness just how destructive advertising & public relations can be.

Addendum

 

Oh yeah, another minor little detail i.e. our government launches P.R. campaigns to “motivate” us to go into wars. The Iraq War is one of the most blatant campaigns of lies to date. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al spent weeks & months going on the Sunday morning talk shows warning us what a threat to our freedom & democracy the Iraqis were, how they had weapons of mass destruction, etc. and it was all proven to be a grand conspiracy of lies afterwards but not a single one of these war criminals was held accountable. In fact, Cheney got rich off the war because his stock in Halliburton went through the roof because they just “coincidentally” were awarded the lion’s shares of the contracts for supplying our troops & rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure but neglected to do most of what they got paid for. And oh yeah, billions of dollars went missing, but what the hell? Moreover, the New York Times, the supposed bastion of liberal thought in America, beat the war drums every bit as loudly as FOX “News.” So, to some extent, Trump is right about the fake news of several of our “news outlets” but he clearly uses this label in his pathetic attempts to silence all his critics. Let’s see, officially we lost 4,486 military personnel & 32,226 casualties but if you dig deeper you’ll discover that our casualties are much closer to half a million if you count PTSD, depression, heart & breathing problems, etc. etc. etc.

 

And can you tell me again why we’ve been in Afghanistan now longer than any other war in U.S. history? Well, as Calvin Coolidge said, “the business of America is business.” Or to put it more bluntly, Welcome to Amerika, where the Corporate Cockroaches Rule!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Corporate Cockroach Conspiracy

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

…is to keep the 99.9% of us scared of one another and therefore hating each other. By keeping us focused on hating our fellow victims, their (the transnational corporations) crimes aren’t discussed or delved into. These corporations instigate one war after another & we are in a state of perpetual war as Gore Vidal called it. These wars are about stealing the resources of other nations & these corporations pay no taxes & are subsidized by us, the taxpayers. But if we don’t pay our taxes, we are sent to prison, a thriving industry in today’s America. This is all part & parcel of how the corporate cockroaches maintain their control or power over us. 

 

Why do I call them “corporate cockroaches?” Because like cockroaches, these human vermin hide in the dark & run away when we turn the spotlight on them. And like cockroaches, they spread disease but the disease they spread is fear & hate. Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating? Then how else do you explain the utter depravity of the Nazis? Or that virus of hatred so virulent that inspired their ingenious methods of killing, torturing, maiming, experimenting, etc. on Jews, intellectuals, artists, homosexuals, gypsies, etc.

Trump distracts while McConnell & Ryan destroy our Democracy

 

Orwell said; “Those who control the present control the past & those who control the past control the future.” Trump is the master distractor, he has done this all his life in business & now he’s doing it for the corporate cockroach masters hiding in the shadows.

 

We have become Fortress America & perhaps Trump’s “wall,” isn’t so much about keeping the oppressed out as it is about keeping our oppressed trapped & controlling us from within? Manufacturing has all but completely abandoned America & we have lost most of our value as “consumers,” so about the only way they can make money off us now is to lock us up.

 

A common thread amongst all authoritarians, tyrants, & dictators is their goal of silencing their critics & that is why they attempt to silence the press. They strive to create a “reality” where the only “truth” is what comes from them. Trump has repeatedly told his followers, “Don’t believe what you see or what you read, only “believe me.”

from the 1950s to 1990s Tobacco lobby lied re: nicotine as addictive

 

People are fleeing the drug lords, the vicious gangs, the police, the military, floods, famine, lack of clean water, etc., not because they’re violent, greedy thieves but because of our natural human instinct to seek to survive & protect the lives of our children. Americans’ general level of historical ignorance is truly depressing & is a significant factor in why we are in this sad state of affairs. I wish more people were aware of Major General Smedley D. Butler of the USMC for example or were familiar with a few of his amazingly honest quotes;

 

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

 

And speaking of conspiracies, several of America’s largest corporations tried to enlist the general as leader in their plot to overthrow F.D.R. because they despised his “New Deal,” program to help America’s oppressed suffering from the Great Depression. Check it out for yourself if you doubt me.(It’s critically important that you don’t dismiss this as just another Alex Jones crackpot conspiracy—I despise Jones personally for all the fear, hatred, & harm he has caused; you can check the Congressional Record, etc. to verify Major General Smedley D. Butler’s testimony before Congress)

I don’t believe it’s much of an exaggeration to claim that the overwhelming majority of humanity’s problems stem from these corporate behemoths who have more power than most of the nations around the globe. So, when it becomes just as desperate here in America as it is in so many parts of the world as it is right now, we too will attempt to escape but where will we escape to? Answer: Nowhere! Climate destruction threatens our very existence as a species;

I know how overwhelming & depressing this all can be but if you bury your head in the sand, that won’t save your children & grandchildren from what we, as humans, have allowed to happen. We are still reeling from the world-wide economic collapse of 2008 & Trump’s corporate cockroach masters of Wall St. have continued their corrupt practices under Obama & Trump has given them the green light as well. What’s coming could make 2008 look like a walk in the park?
If Trump & his masters win in their propaganda war against reason, facts, & empathy, we may find ourselves locked in this vast, open-air prison we call the land of freedom and democracy?

 

—Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA Nov. 22, 2018 (Jeri’s B-day & Thanksgiving)

Why We’re Losing

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

Because technology has enslaved us! Yep! Everything from our “smart phones” to our “social media” platforms like Facebook to our entertainment world of television, movies, & the Internet. I’m going to limit the scope of this essay to just these forms of technology for the sake of brevity, especially in this day & age when the average attention span is eight seconds, a second less than a goldfish’s attention span. How’s that for a depressing statistic?

A “friend’s” betrayal

 

Some of you may wonder how we got to this sad state of affairs & probably even fewer of you may actually even care. Of course we didn’t become enslaved by these forms of technology overnight, no, it was a gradual decaying of our intellectual abilities and a good part of the blame rests with our public education system & the forces behind it i.e. politicians & their puppet masters, the corporate cockroaches.

A poignant & insightful critique

 

Moreover, the corporate media which is now in control of something like 90% of the media in America, bears a large part of the responsibility for the dumbing down of the U.S. public. Naturally, they don’t want a well-educated citizenry because they’d lose a lot of the profits they derive from a mind-numb population of consumers.

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984

 

Public relations & advertising are two huge industries and corporations don’t spend tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising & public relations campaigns because they have nothing better to do with their money. Well, this opens a whole other can of worms so let me get back to the specifics of this essay.

 

Facebook is clearly the largest “social media” platform in America and around the globe & if you think I’m exaggerating any of what I’m about to tell you, check out the PBS “Frontline” special that was aired last week, October 29 & 30 of 2018 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/  I have been a critic of Facebook for quite some time and yeah, I too was suckered into its shallow world for several years & was blind to its pernicious aspects for most of that time. In fact, I was celebrating my birthday last week at a local pub & tried to tell this guy about Facebook’s business model & he clung to the “fact” that it wasn’t costing him anything. I felt like I was arguing with a tree stump or something & the last thing I asked him was; If it’s free, why is Zuckerberg worth anywhere from $60 billion to $84 billion dollars? My “friend” couldn’t answer & changed the subject. But poor Zuckerberg’s wealth dropped by $18.8 billion recently because fortunately, not all Facebook users are part of the Walking Dead.

The “free market” & “free elections”

 

Why the drop in its stock value? In brief because of their allowing the company, Cambridge Analytica to basically steal the election for Trump with its army of trolls planting fake news posts on Facebook. Of course Zuckerberg has plead ignorance & innocence because to do otherwise would be the end of his empire. But I call Bull-shit! He became so obscenely wealthy precisely because of his total lack of concern about ethical business practices.

 

And this brings us right back to Facebook’s “business model” which simply means, the more time they can get people to spend on Facebook, the greater the ad revenues they collect. Remember advertising is what keeps the whole charade of business in America going i.e. the business of America & the world is FRAUD! Yes fraud, deliberate, outright lying, deception, you name it. Anything to enrich themselves and fuck the consumers, fuck the environment, fuck everything but protect the holy profits which allows them to live the Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.

The Cult of Personality that gave us Trump via Mark’s technology & greed

 

Lest you think I’ve completely forgotten my original & key point i.e. our enslavement, Edward Snowden is a fugitive for life because he cares deeply about our freedom whether we do or not. He warned us that these “social platforms” are selling & giving every bit of our personal data which we so gullibly posted on Facebook & the rest of them, with the government. In a nutshell, by collecting & storing all our personal data, the government & the private tyrannies we call corporations, can manipulate us both as consumers & as citizens to vote the way they want us to, and if we become a nuisance, they can assemble the evidence from our personal files to frame us as a terrorist or whatever they want. https://theconversation.com/your-life-is-facebooks-business-model-like-it-or-not-35841 

 

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. (Benjamin Franklin)

Snowden warned us to be aware of Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Google, You Tube, etc. by telling us that they were all voluntarily giving our information to the government and if this doesn’t make it clear that these high tech companies are aiding in our enslavement, you may as well go back to your bowl of Fruit Loops & FOX “News.” You have been warned!

 

Okay, onward & upward or perhaps I should say, downward? As for the ubiquitous “smart phones,” they are actually making people dumber, not smarter. Yeah I know, at this point you’re probably tempted to dismiss me as just another old Luddite & yes I’m old i.e. I just turned 66 last week but I’ve been severely critical of these phones since they came out. Why? Because any technology that has so completely taken over people’s lives that they walk down the street eyes glued to their phones & some people have actually walked into traffic because of them, is far too dangerous.

Furthermore, it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad that these phones which the advertising proclaims will bring us closer to our friends & help us make new friends with the apps they offer, etc. are more accurately anti-social. I’ve seen it time & time again, a group of young people walk into a bar or café or wherever together but they hardly speak to one another because they’re all on their “smart phones,” sharing pictures of their food, discussing the latest soap opera, checking how many likes they’ve gotten on Facebook and the assortment of other shallow, time-wasting platforms, apps., etc.

Who’s in control, the technology or humans?

 

I used to write paragraphs on the serious posts that came across on my feed on Facebook and only very rarely did someone write a sentence or even a phrase in reply. And now it’s emoticons which have supplanted even a phrase let alone a sentence.  This clearly is enhancing the dumbing-down of people already short-changed by a public education system that is about controlling us, not freeing us.  To expect someone to take five minutes to read something you’ve poured serious intellectual energy into, let alone write a sentence or two in response, is a joke in these peoples’ worlds.

The key to empowerment, justice, & freedom!

 

You tell me how in the hell we’re going to save our planet or ourselves when people can’t find the time to relate to one another as human beings except via these artificial electronic devices designed to keep us distracted & spending ever greater parts of our days on them? I forget the exact statistics but it’s truly depressing how many Americans haven’t read a single book in the past year.

 

Again, lest you think me a nut-case, there’s a young man name of Tristan Harris who worked for Google & was high up on the food chain in the corporation so-to-speak. And in a nutshell, he shows that these smart phones are like slot machines in casinos purposely designed to give people a quick fix and keep on playing. Moreover, it’s a lot more serious than that but again, I don’t want to bore you or take up too much of your attention span so here’s a good link if you give a damn?

https://youtu.be/C74amJRp730

 

I’m going to just touch briefly on television & movies because I’m sure that I have already gone on for far too long. Television has been perhaps one of the most pernicious technological tools over the course of my life but with the advent of the Internet, television has now taken a back seat to the “Net.” This is perhaps just a refresher course or remedial learning if you get my drift? But T.V., as Noam Chomsky has reminded us is just “filler” i.e. the stuff we tune it to watch and the truly important stuff is the advertising because obviously that’s where they get their money. And again I assert that the “filler” is almost entirely drivel & enfeebling rather than enlightening.

 

When the phenomenon dubbed “Reality T.V.” was born, I was dumbfounded. This was over 20 years ago roughly & the first one of these farces I watched was called “Survivor” I believe? It was a group of people supposedly stranded on a desert island & their goal was to form alliances & basically do whatever it took to win. I watched maybe two or three episodes & said to my dear, departed wife, Jeri, this is crap! Think about it, what are they telling us & what are they teaching young, impressionable minds? I’ll tell you what, they’re glorifying lying, cheating, stealing, back-stabbing, etc. in other words, doing whatever it takes to win and the hell with fair play, ethics, etc.

Treasonous
Russian
Un-American
Moronic
Pussy Grabber (What does that spell? Yep! TRUMP)

 

You might care to note that the “reality” t.v. show, “The Apprentice” is our current dunce in residence in the oval office’s claim to fame. And when I hear that shows like “The Walking Dead” are hugely popular, my heart sinks for America again. I could only handle maybe 15 minutes of one episode and had to change the channel. It’s like a regular t.v. series of a slasher movie. I could go on and on but I won’t.

 

Please don’t think I’m one of those phony “Christian” fundamentalists, far from it. They are equally responsible for the installation of Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan as “our” president. But I do share in their revulsion when it comes to a lot of what passes for entertainment in America. But where I definitely disagree with them, is on the subject of “pornography.” You see, in their feeble, twisted minds & spirits, nudity and sex are Satan’s temptations & are far more harmful than all the blood & violence in the movies. Could it be that because there is so much violence in the Old Testament in particular, that they’re comfortable with it in t.v. & movies or at least they’re not nearly so outraged about it as they are about sex & nudity?

Trump’s Christian base turn a blind-eye to his “shortcomings”

 

You see, I’m proud to consider myself an old hippie and I remember fondly the idealism of the tumultuous 60s and free love, equality, truth, no war, etc. In short, I believe the true pornography is violence, not love, nudity, & sex! And don’t misinterpret this as a blanket acceptance of the rampant, gross bondage & other sick shit in the world gone amok porno world. No, anything that degrades & demeans others in that industry sickens me but to label all nudity & free love between mutually consenting adults as Satanic or evil,  is just another version of McCarthyism or the Salem witch trials.

The consumption of pork in any form is forbidden by several Orthodox religions, including Judaism, the Seventh-Day Adventists, Islam and the Ethiopian Orthodox church. For followers, the pig is considered to be an “unclean” animal. This classification for “uncleanliness” is based on the pig’s outward appearance and behaviors.

 

In conclusion, the steady assault on our freedoms whether by the “Christian” fundamentalists, the corporate cockroaches, or whoever, is an attempt to dominate & control us & implicitly says that the “authorities” doing so, are superior to us & know what’s best for us i.e. we shouldn’t trust our own judgment but should remain children looking to their loving guidance as if we are all ignorant children dependent on their benevolent guidance.  Need I remind you of how many televangelists were eventually revealed for their “immoral” acts with prostitutes, etc.?

 

Last, but certainly not least, Hollywood movies. Again, I won’t bore you with a thorough review of this sad aspect of our social conditioning but will simply point out the first example that comes to mind i.e. “Blackhawk Down.” (and no, I don’t apologize for my condescending tone in this essay because there is more than ample evidence to support such a tone) This movie which, by-the-way, I enjoyed, like the thousands of others that came before it, always seem to glorify America’s position in each & every conflict around the world & paint the “other” as evil incarnate. Well even if you do a brief, cursory review of our illustrious history, you will often find that our behavior was shall I say? Less than honorable?

 

In summary, these factors and so many others, have all contributed to our enslavement whether we have the courage & honesty to acknowledge it or not. And as they say in so many self-help groups, recognition of a problem is the first & the most important step in solving that problem!

Ironically, these corporate cockroaches, the “Super-bankers” too big to jail, are at the top of the food chain

 

Namaste!

—Rob DeLoss, Nov. 5, 2018

Our future after Trump???

 

 

Addendum

Perhaps it’s more of a male problem due to our overly competitive natures or conditioning but movies, video games, etc. must be non-stop action in order to keep our attention & this parasitic state of being is a sort of closed, doom-loop system. In other words, the more we participate in this constant flux of meaningless & violent action, the less we are able to disengage from it & contemplate the much bigger reality, the much more serious issues that are a threat to all of humanity i.e. the possibilities for nuclear war & the destruction of the world through climate change & the continuing death of our precious ecosystems.

my book available on Amazon

Trump Telling it Like it Isn’t!

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

I was watching a video clip recently of Michael Moore being interviewed about his new film, “Fahrenheit 11/9” and a couple of things he said, really hit home with me. He said that he had interviewed the notorious S.O.B. (my description) Steve Bannon, the hatchet guy who was probably the key factor in saving Trump’s failing presidential campaign near the end?

 

And when Moore asked Bannon why the republicans just keep kicking the democrats asses (my paraphrasing), Bannon replied; “We go for the head-shot & the democrats are having pillow fights.” And it struck me like it did Michael Moore that here it is in a nutshell, the raw, ugly, painful truth. 

 

So, that being said, I’m notifying you here & now, this essay is going to hit hard, maybe even below the belt so-to-speak at times. I’m sick to death of being advised to play nice, be civil, etc. and especially now that we have such a vile, crude, corrupt, greedy, habitual liar & braggart in the White House.

 

Just how fuckin’ stupid are all of you who believe in this con-man who has lied & bullied his way to the top of a house of cards? In the last few days, it’s been “revealed” that Trump isn’t the great success he keeps telling the world that he is & this cracks me up because it’s long been known by those who have been paying attention that this is perhaps his most outrageous claim & boldest lie!

and this is only a fraction of his failures!

 

If your pussy-grabbing low-life is so successful, why has he always refused to reveal his tax returns? Is this your idea of “telling it like it is?” If he is such an honest, “tell it like it is” guy, why did he have the White House refuse to release something like 90,000 pages of Kavanaugh’s record when he was working for George W. Bush? If he’s such a successful businessman, why did he file for bankruptcy four times because he failed at the casino business which is an amazing feat in itself? Why have so many of his business ventures failed? 

 

You know, it just dawned on me, he should market Trump Kool Aid because his base has definitely drunk long & deep from this well of swamp juice. Here’s just a few of his failures which he just glosses over when they fail, like the lawsuits he loses but still claims victory in. Trump airlines, Trump beverages, Trump: the Game, Trump Casinos (even when daddy bailed him out), Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump steaks, Trump’s travel site, Trump’s comms company, Trump Tower Tampa, Trump University, & Trump vodka to name just a few of his many failures.

 

Sadly, what so many of you Trump-aholics haven’t caught on to is the fact that the vast majority of what appear to be his real estate properties aren’t in fact owned by him, no, those who own them pay him for the use of his name. And his name is everything to him & is why he gets so defensive & aggressive to all who cast aspersions on his “good name,” i.e. his brand. This is why he can’t ever stop singing his own praises, even as president of the U.S., he’s a constant pitch-man, con-man, hustler trying to convince the public that he’s a success when he’s an utter failure on every level. 

 

For those of you who pride yourself on having “common sense,” doesn’t it occur to you that the age-old wisdom/maxim that those who are truly talented at something, don’t go around bragging about it because they know that people who know them & their work, already know it. The braggarts are always those who are the most insecure & almost always full of shit! 

 

Tragically for America & the rest of the world because of the damage Trump has already done & God knows how much more, Trump’s true success is his ability to lie, exaggerate, deny, confuse, & never apologize. He learned this from his mentor, Roy Cohn, one of the slimiest creatures to ever crawl out of that swamp that Trump swore to drain but has actually restocked. And another mentor of Trump’s is the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who followed a simple formula i.e. lie & never stop lying, repeat the lie ad nauseam and gradually, the public will accept it as truth or fact. And the bigger the lie, the easier it is to get away with it.

Roy Cohn, taught Donald deny, lie, attack ad infinitum!

 

And this is why the recent revelations that one of Trump’s most treasured lies i.e. that daddy only loaned him a mere million dollars and that he paid him back with interest won’t matter either because the Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan fan club won’t believe that daddy actually gave him over $400,000,000 and that they both defrauded the government of hundreds of millions of dollars in a wide variety of tax scams. Of course, this is all part of the plan and why Donny Duck continuously attempts to discredit the media, especially the New York Times newspaper, because they print the ugly facts that could wake people up but which don’t matter if you’re from zombie-land.

Steve Benson / Creators Syndicate

 

And again for you simpletons who probably didn’t even graduate from high school, because your Fuhrer tells you to ignore everything you read, see, & hear except what he says, is an age-old technique of authoritarians, fascists, & tyrants. And you claim that you’re proud Americans? What do you think your fathers & grandfathers fought WWII for?

 

It’s truly frightening and depressing that a blatant fraud such as the girly-man Donny has duped so many of you into believing his bullshit! The Duck’s “success” such as it is, has been almost entirely dependent on Daddy War-bucks & the assistance of the Italian American mafia in New York & New Jersey whom his mentor, Roy Cohn, introduced him to and his new benefactors, the Russian mafia & their boss, Putin, who have bought/invested hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of Donny’s “real estate holdings.”

 

This duplicitous would be tin-can dictator has retained a small army of lawyers throughout the course of his “business career,” because he is constantly being sued for fraud, failure to pay workers, sub-contractors, etc. etc. etc. and you actually believe this guy is your champion? Jesus fuckin’ Christ! I believe he has had something like 4,000 law suits filed against him. Yep, clearly a guy who “tells it like it is.”

 

Here’s a specific example of your leader’s business integrity, he hired several hundred “illegal” (though I hate the term) Polish construction workers to do the demolition of a building he was going to turn into one of his casinos. The workers were so poor that they lived on the construction (deconstruction site) and they were promised a whopping $4 an hour for their work but the Donald cheated them out of even that paltry wage. How would you like to be fucked like that? Would you still sing the Dick-head’s praises?

 

And speaking of “deconstruction,” how appropriate because that is precisely what this Creature from the Black Lagoon is doing to America i.e. he’s deconstructing our entire government, all the checks & balances, every program that was established to help those of us not born with a silver spoon in our mouths, and he’s eliminating even more of the regulations on the financial services companies that brought us to the brink of total economic collapse & which I contend we are still suffering from, and the complete elimination of all environmental regulations so the oil spill that did so much for the south part of the U.S. with the billions, if not trillions of gallons of oil that contaminated the Caribbean for decades if not centuries to come, etc. etc. etc. So, if you think the crash of 2008 wasn’t so bad, just wait until the next one. Yeah, it’s going to be great fun & you’d better get your sleeping bags ready because you’ll soon be joining those poor souls living on the margins of this so-called society & civilization. The super banks, “too big to fail,” have gotten even bigger & continue to give themselves obscene levels of bonuses as they suck the blood out of our economy.

 

Yeah, just keep burying your head in the FOX “News” bubble and when your children, your wives, your husbands, all your loved ones die slow, excruciating deaths & have no health insurance thanks to the Duck Dynasty, you can sleep comfortably knowing that you supported the dictator who made it possible. When he takes away your food stamps, your social security, your Medicare, Don’t worry, be happy, Donny made America great again, but the great is for the 1% who pay no taxes, ship the decent paying jobs overseas where they can pay workers $2.00 per day and don’t have to worry about health, environmental, pollution, etc. regulations, not you or I you simpletons! Yeah, this is your American Idol, the moron who flip-flops constantly even within the same sentence he turns around and denies having said what he just said, even though it’s on tape. Yes,  it’s all an elaborate Democratic conspiracy against him. And when you wear your “maga” hat in public, you’re in fact wearing a dunce cap for all the world to see.

 

Well, sorry to disturb your “common sense” again but, if the democrats were capable of such complex conspiracies, why aren’t they the ones in power? I hate to break it to you—No, not really!—but probably the overwhelming majority of you Trump Walking Dead are FOX “News” watchers. And the fact that they have been allowed to get away with this charade or façade of being a “news” organization for over 20 years proves how truly stupid we are as a nation. Moreover, FOX isn’t even the worst of it, Donny Darko is a fan of Alex Jones, you know, the guy who claims that the horrific murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School was all a hoax. And Donald Duck also believes in The National Enquirer, that rag that anyone with more than a third grade education has always known is only good for one thing i.e. to line the bottom of your bird’s cage.

For those of you who haven’t completely abandoned concern for the truth or facts, and no, not Kellyanne Conway’s “alternate facts,” and if you can spare the time away from your Kardashians soap operas, etc., you might look up what used to be called Russia’s main newspaper, Pravda. It literally means “truth” in Russian. You see, FOX “News” is America’s Pravda i.e. state propaganda voice. It was crystal clear during the George W. Bush administration & FOX leader, Roger Ailes, you know, your friendly sexual predator just like Donny Duck, Kavanaugh, etc. etc. etc. sent the White House their daily talking points i.e. the propaganda outline for the day to just repeat ad nauseam to the mindless viewers who took it as gospel truth.

And sadly, I have to admit here that The New York Times, you know, the bastion of “liberal thought & opinion” in America was equally guilty of beating the war drums for the invasion of Iraq and we, even you, should all be well aware by now of how great that turned out i.e. the creation of Isis & just one bloody mess after another guaranteeing that we’ll never run out of terrorists to go after.

 

Yeah, I know, terrible me, I’ve been so nasty, mean, etc. well, tough fuckin’ shit! We’re circling the drain and I’m sick & tired of playing nice-nice with all these corporate cockroaches and all the morons who kiss their asses even as they’re being kicked to the curb by the same cockroaches.

 

Take an honest look at the vast wasteland that stretches across America in between the East coast & the West coast, the towns that are now ghost towns. The rust belt as they call it. Yep! The wonders of the “free market” where the rich are free to fuck us all, commit fraud via their corporations as standard business practice but if you or I write a bad check, we go to jail. And they, every great once in awhile when busted, don’t even have to admit guilt and it isn’t even on their record, they pay a relatively small fine when compared to the profits they made committing their crimes and they return to doing the same shit.

 

We’re fast becoming one of those “third world” nations we’re so fond of looking down on & we blame the immigrants because the Duckmeister tells you it’s their fault. No, you morons, the fault is the corporate cockroaches at the highest levels of true power who don’t give a fuck about America or its citizens but pretend to so you’ll go or you’ll allow your children to go fight & die in their constant wars to make themselves ever richer. What a bunch of suckers!

 

So for every one of you ignorant fuckin’ assholes who proudly defend Trump, don’t come crying to me when you join the ranks of America’s ever expanding homeless who are treated like ghosts & garbage in this shallow, hollow land we proclaim as the land of freedom & democracy, because I won’t and don’t have one ounce of sympathy & it was your willful ignorance that allowed this to come about!

The girly-man has duped his base into believing he’s fighting for them i.e. the giant tax break that goes to the uber rich & has inflated the national deficit which they will use to defend their need to cut food stamps, health care, Social Security, etc. for us, the 99%. Mark my words, you’ve been suckered by a snake-oil, con-man. The corporate cockroaches love Donny boy!

–Rob DeLoss, October 6, 2018   (Trinidad, CA)

 

P.S.  And for those of you who still claim that Trump is telling it like it is, you are clearly brain-dead & belong in an Alzheimer’s unit because you might wander into traffic & dent somebody’s car with your blockhead. Jim Jones would’ve loved having you as a member of Jonestown.

 

 

Fake News and a Fake President

~ cockroachconspiracy

Fake News and a Fake President

         If it weren’t so deadly serious in terms of the harms already done & yet to come from this fake & shameless blowhard or as I prefer to call him, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan, it’d be hilarious. And the fact that he has the audacity to act as if he’s some paragon of an honest & honorable person is mind-boggling to all of us who haven’t drank the FOX “News” Kool Aid regarding the dunce president.

         Admittedly, there is a kernel of truth to the girly-man’s accusations regarding the news & this is true in all forms of effective propaganda. And that’s the only fact that I’ll concede when it comes to this national embarrassment I.e. we have a world class moron as our president. So, for those of you who haven’t entirely shut down the higher functioning areas of your brains, ponder these facts if you will?

         Do you remember when John Kerry was running for president? If so, do you recall a tag he was labeled with called “flip-flopper?” Well the Trumpster has the unique ability to flip-flop sometimes within the same sentence, usually not more than two or three sentences later. In other words, Donny contradicts himself or outright lies consistently & frequently. How in the Hell can people think this is “telling it like it is?” Which of course is the mantra just about everybody who supports the Duck repeats within the first few minutes you start a conversation about him.

         Could it be that what people mean when they say they admire him for “telling it like it is,” are saying is they like his racism, fear mongering, & hate generating speech? Yeah, he is consistent in that but not in anything else. If one spends even a modicum of time researching authoritarians & dictators, it soon becomes evident that the above characteristics which the Klansman who would be king exhibits, is the common thread.

         Clearly, the Donald or his P.R. team realized that because so many millions of Americans are out of work or working two or three minimum wage jobs, have lost their homes to illegal foreclosures, had their pensions stolen, etc. they could tap into the fear & anger of all these people. And by distracting the public by scapegoating immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, homosexuals, etc., thereby giving the public a focus for their anger, he could ride that wave of rage into the White House.

         You see, my friend, the rich have long known that as long as they can divide & distract the public with various scapegoats, the public won’t wake-up to the fact that it’s the rich who should be the focus of our anger. They are the ones who write the laws that coincidentally benefit them but screw the rest of us. For example, the recent tax break for the rich, the biggest in history, is overwhelmingly going to benefit the super-rich & hurt the rest of us, the 99% who have to pay the taxes that go to the true elite, while that same class, pay a minuscule, if any taxes.

         Why do you think your buddy won’t release his tax records? Could it be that it’d show that he’s one of them, not the defender of the working class as you’ve been suckered into believing? And here’s a bit of common sense for you, you may have noticed—-if your blinders aren’t totally in place—-that Donny boy loves to brag about himself, he usually can’t go more than a few sentences without pointing out how wonderful he is. And he’s been telling us for years of how fabulously wealthy he is, right? Well, I would think that he’d jump at the chance to prove to the world how stinking rich he is by showing us his tax records. Doesn’t that make sense?

         Might it also be that by revealing his tax records, it’d be clear to all that he’s not the brilliant businessman he’s always claimed to be? He’s filed for bankruptcy four times due to his poor management of the casinos he had his name on. After his last bankruptcy, none of the major banks would loan him money so he went to foreign banks, and got a life-line in terms of financial help from his Russian mafia friends. (Doesn’t it strike you as odd that he’s so enamored of Putin?) By-the-way, I’ll share another little secret hiding in plain sight, the overwhelming majority of properties with the Trump name on them, aren’t owned by Donny, the true owners pay him for his “brand” or logo which he has been obsessively protecting as if it were his daughter’s virginity, for decades.

         The spinmeister knows only too well how important image is & he can’t stop promoting his image for more than two minutes at a time. And this connects with his pseudo war on the media. The Duck has been a media whore his entire life & his mentor in this regard was Roy Cohn, the cold-blooded lawyer for the East coast mafia & right-hand man for Joseph McCarthy in the true witch-hunt that Joe waged in the 50s that ruined so many good peoples’ lives & was thoroughly anti-democratic & anti-American.

         Roy drilled home to his young, Richie Rich protege the fact that any media attention, whether good or bad, was beneficial in terms of keeping your name in the public mind. Moreover, we can thank the so-called “fake media” for being a major factor in the girly-man’s becoming president because they gave him billions of dollars of free advertising during his campaign.

         Perhaps you prefer to cling to your conspiratorial belief that the press is the enemy of the people? By-the-way, common sense again tells us that when anybody, and especially someone as powerful as the president of the most powerful nation on earth, tells us that we shouldn’t believe anyone who criticizes us, you should be afraid, VERY AFRAID!

         So, Daddy Donald will protect us against all the evil doers in the world yet he clearly flunked junior high school history. Just about every time he opens his mouth, he reveals how mind-bogglingly ignorant he is. Don’t believe me, do a little fact checking on your own if that isn’t against your religion?

         Obviously, the Duck Dynasty Dunce isn’t living in the common reality that most of us are. I mean, when his haggard & homely witch spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway told us straight-faced, “Well, there are alternate facts,” that should’ve been a major wake-up call to all of us. And this is a key point my friends, what Donald & his handlers are hoping is that they can convince the third of Americans who loyally support him, that facts and opinions are one & the same. Sorry to break it to you but no, they’re not. Facts are established by Science & the scientific method I.e. hypothesis, test your hypothesis repeatedly, and the more it yields the same observable results, it eventually becomes a theory, & after quite a long time of consistent findings, it eventually is referred to as a law I.e. the law of gravity, etc.

         And yes, everybody has a right to their own opinion but not to their own facts. And some opinions are far worthier than others I.e. if a guy is a great mechanic, his opinions about mechanical matters are more worthy or valuable than someone like me, whose close to being a moron regarding mechanical knowledge. The closest we can come to “truth” on any subject requires two things; 1) check out their credentials, 2) check out what other experts in the field they’re claiming expertise in, have to say about their opinion, theory, etc.

         Socrates taught us this more than 2,500 years ago in Athens, the birthplace of Western democracy. And he pissed off a lot of people because he proved that just because a guy was say, a master shipbuilder, he got a swelled head & then thought he was a master on many matters totally unrelated I.e. how to raise a child, etc. Unfortunately, in this rapid-fire world of ours with technology jumping ahead with leaps & bounds, people have become so intellectually lazy & dependent on their “smart phones,” etc. that they won’t take the time to do a little research on the serious issues facing us i.e. Donald’s dangerous ignorance & alienating of our former allies & cozying up to one dictator after another. His launching of trade wars because of his perceived insults from other nation’s leaders. And most frightening, his wholesale deregulation of every federal agency established to protect us from greedy corporate cockroaches & the protection of our environment. If this goes on unabated, who’s going to want to go on vacation anywhere? The forests will all be chopped down, the ocean will be one huge toilet bowl, & we’ll all need to wear gas masks. Note how bad the air is in a lot of China due to its reckless plundering of its natural resources with no environmental protections.

         I almost forgot another minor detail of Donald’s giving free rein to corporate America I.e. the continued & expanding deregulation of Wall St., the too big to fail handful of super banks, the hedge fund managers, etc. Did you enjoy the world-wide economic crash of 2008? Wasn’t that fun watching tens of millions of people around the globe lose their jobs, pensions, homes, health insurance, etc. Well, you’ll love the crash that’s coming because Donald Duck loves Wall St. —-he’s been kissing their asses for decades —-and he & the 1% are busy hiding their wealth in so-called safe havens where they think they’ll be safe from all the ravages that all the rest of us will experience. And for the record, I voted for Obama the first time around but within a few weeks when he appointed Summers, Geithner, Bernanke, etc. I knew he’d sold us out and it was all a lie I.e. “Change,” (his mantra as he was campaigning for the presidency.

         In conclusion, I’m again going to try to insert some “common sense” you know, that quality that us eggheads aren’t supposed to have any of. How can the free press, Donny’s “enemy of the American people,” be accurate whenever they repeat things about King Donald that stroke his ego but the second they say something “critical” I.e. negative, they’re “fake news?” Fake to me is pretty much the same as Fraud & Donald the Dick-head has been committing fraud for decades, that’s why he’s fought hundreds, if not thousands of lawsuits & continues to be in legal jeopardy. He defrauded many people who worked for him over the decades from Polish, illegal immigrants, he hired to do the demolition on a building he wanted to turn into Trump Towers, to bankers, etc. etc. etc. Don’t forget Trump University, which he quietly paid something like $25 million for in the judgment against him. Yep! He’s like a modern-day Wizard of Oz but not the kindly, old guy from the movie. And as P.T. Barnum warned us decades ago, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” If it sounds too good to be true, you can bet it is! You’ve been warned and my conscience is clear.

Addendum

         George Orwell in his prescient novel “1984,” laid out a nightmare vision of a dystopian future & the older I get, the more that fictional nightmare seems to be our present “reality.”

 “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”

“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power”

“In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance—meaning, in effect, war and police espionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”

       And for the record, your darling duck conservatively received over $2 billion in free media time. Bernie received a tiny fraction of media time. Why? Because the Klansman has been manipulating the media for decades and knows how to shock people so he’ll get attention. But don’t forget, the media is the enemy of the people!

       —-Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA August 19, 2018

P.S.  It just dawned on me that I’ve forgotten the most glaring piece of evidence—-probably because I’ve known it for so long—that I’ve internalized & I forget that unfortunately, far too many Americans still haven’t caught on i.e. FOX “News” is “The” most fake news corporation in America! And as Joseph Goebbels knew only too well, the longer the lie has been repeated, the more people begin to accept it as a truth. And appropriately, FOX is de facto, America’s answer (copy) to Russia’s Pravda —their main newspaper & “Pravda” means truth in Russian. It’s common knowledge that Trump watches hours of FOX “News” every day so, this is where he gets his “knowledge” of current affairs from. And while I’m not a gambling man, I bet you that Trump’s “base” is overwhelmingly made up of FOX “News” viewers. Do a little research on your own as to what journalism is & you, like me, will be amazed that FOX has gotten away with posing as a news organization for these past 20 years. And I hold our mainstream as well as our alternative news sites partially responsible because, they have been reinforcing this delusion every time they repeat the phrase “FOX News.” I’ve been putting it in quotation marks for several years.

The Big Short

~ cockroachconspiracy

The Big Short….

is a movie based on the reality of what caused the collapse of the world economy in 2007. In the financial “services” sector of the U.S. economy, a “short” is to bet against something.

The financial “elite” bet that they could get away with defrauding the American public indefinitely by purposely selling mortgages they knew were shit to one another & the audacity to then bet that they could bundle them together in vast quantities & hide their worthlessness. And the “credit rating” agencies upon which everything is valued & holds god-like power over us, stamped them with triple A ratings i.e. the best rating you can get. And these wealthy whores knew full well what they were doing & didn’t give a fuck because they knew the federal government would bail them out & that they wouldn’t see a single day in prison.

They were right & they duped the gullible public by shifting the blame to the poor & the immigrants as they have done throughout history. How? By labeling them greedy for thinking they could buy a home they obviously couldn’t afford. Of course they hid the true facts regarding their predatory lending practices i.e. if you were breathing, you qualified for their deceitful mortgages with the hidden balloon payments, etc.

“Masters of the Universe” (world-class thieves)

The cold, hard facts are that the economic meltdown was the fault of the insatiable greed of the “Super Banks” & many of their Wall St. cronies like hedge fund managers, the mortgage lending giants, the credit rating agencies that sanctioned the tens of millions of shitty loans, the real estate industry, the world’s largest insurance corporation—A.I.G., & all the corrupt politicians who looked the other way because of the campaign donations, etc. they received from the corporate cockroaches.

Hitler rose to power by blaming the Jews primarily for Germany’s economic depression between WWI & WWII. And once he became Germany’s most powerful man, he shored-up his power by first accusing, then beating up & jailing anyone who dared to challenge his authority. And when that didn’t work, he had them killed i.e. intellectuals, artists, writers, teachers, professors, homosexuals, immigrants, etc.

Does this sound at all familiar? Trump rose to the highest position in America, the presidency, by attacking & blaming Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks, gays, the Obama administration, Wall St., and the media. I fear that we may come to a new form of fascism, an American fascism & we may very well begin the mass incarceration then the extermination of all the Muslims living in America that the “intelligence” agencies, the military, & the police that are resembling military occupation forces more & more.

However, it will be much easier for the tin-pot would be dictator Trump than it was for Hitler because today, “our” government—what a farce—and the corporate cockroaches, especially the “social media” platforms like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, You Tube, AOL, Skype, & Apple to name just the major culprits. Consider the fact that tens of millions if not billions of people—mostly young people—around the globe are addicted to their “Smart” phones to the point that they interact less & less with their friends in the old fashioned sense i.e. talking face to face, going out together, offering true human sympathy/empathy when their friends are troubled, etc. instead, they have developed insatiable appetites for collecting fake friends they’ve never met & the more “likes,” etc. they collect, the more popular they feel.

So, these so-called “Smart phones,” are de facto making us a much more atomized or isolated people, helping to “dumb us down,” and freely providing the government & the corporate cockroaches all our personal data by illegally & immorally all our e-mails, phone calls, physical locations which they can monitor & track, text messages, web searches, websites you visit, our purchases, what we read & write, etc. all with the friendly help of the “social media” platforms or websites & “services.”

Will we sleepwalk our way to our death & a horrific future more terrifying than any of the zombie or vampire cult movies & television programs the public is enthralled with? A large percentage of Germany’s Jewish population stood by in disbelief as Hitler’s gestapo & SS escalated their violence against them as well. And the so-called, “Good Germans” stood silently by as the evil spread like a virus among their countrymen.

Reflect if you will on the illiteracy of the American public i.e. just scan through your T.V. guide & yeah, we have hundreds of choices but it’s clearly not much of a choice if you’re at all concerned or value true intellectual stimulation. Movies are a steady stream of comic book heroes, monsters, ridiculous “Romance stories,” absurd science fiction (Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke are the rare exceptions), gratuitous violence, or pure pablum. The reading habits of Americans are the laughing stock of the world, and when is the last time you enjoyed a serious political discussion with your friends or even strangers? And lastly but certainly not least, the fact that we have the most illiterate & proudly anti-intellectual president in U.S. history, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan is gutting every government agency established to protect the environment and us from the corporate predators & threatening a nuclear war with N. Korea, etc., should scare the Hell out of you! But hey, Hell may not be such a shock when it comes because we’re already acclimated thanks to Trump & the corporate cockroaches who are speeding-up Global Warming?

In conclusion, we’re all being shorted or bet against. The corporate cockroach conspiracy is that we’ll be too preoccupied with our smart phones & other distracting toys to notice that they’re fucking us yet again. Yep! They—the financial “wizards” which should rightfully be called the war profiteers & whores who rob us blind—were supposedly bailed-out to save our economy & offer loans to people to start new businesses, prevent bankruptcy, etc. but Paulson, Geitner, Bernanke, Summers, etc. were afraid to put it in writing for fear they might not accept the billions from our Treasury. And lo & behold, they refused to help us, the peasants who just pay all the taxes they used to bail out the Wall St. wolves & millions of Americans had their homes illegally foreclosed on.

And surprise! They’re at it again & Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan just gave the super-rich yet another giant, tax break (give away) which they’ll pocket & proclaim they must now cut more social welfare programs. P.T. Barnum is famous for having said, “There’s a Sucker born every minute.” How right he was, perhaps we should change our nation’s name to the United States of Suckers?

As the saying goes in Vegas, you drive into town in a cadillac & you leave on a Greyhound bus. You’ve been warned!

P.S.  I almost forgot to mention that those billions that were handed to the “Super Bankers” (Super Predators) helped the big boys to reward themselves with bonuses in the millions for having tanked our economy & sparked a world-wide, economic collapse. Pretty good work if you can get it, eh?

before you laugh, the joke is on us!