I’m always amused by bomb-throwing economic pundit and talkshow host Max Keiser. His fast-talking, fast-thinking tell it like it is persona is always entertaining, even when I’m not 100% in agreement with what he is saying. (I also like watching his various programs (made for Russia Today, Press TV and BBC) because he produces them using the same suitcase sized production suite that I use for the DM talkshow, the NewTek Tricaster.)
When someone who puts themselves and their opinions out there as forthright as Max Keiser does his, it tends to be a love it or hate it affair. I love the guy, how refreshing is it that someone is saying something like this? Now mind you, he’s saying it on Iran’s PressTV network, but still… he’s right:
Press TV: Is the dollar in a freefall or exactly what is going on?
Kesier: Well what’s going on is you have the banks in the United States committing a financial holocaust. It is probably the worst holocaust in the last 100 years. What there doing is they’re destroying real estate values, jobs, wages and pensions. And they do this by flooding the market with more debt in the form of US dollars. As your package accurately said, the US has no reserves upon which to issue dollars; therefore, by definition every dollar that is issued is debt. This debt holocaust is wiping out the middle class on purpose. Because the rich people in America want to buy those houses. Those millions of houses out there that people are still living in. They want to buy them back for maybe one penny on the dollar. This is a financial holocaust by design. The American bankers are holocaust brokers. They should be in front of a human rights court and taken up on human rights abuses and all hung.
Press TV: Now Max, you’re saying that it’s by design for the benefit of the rich to destroy the middle class. Wouldn’t that in effect destroy the economy as a whole?
Kesier: No, because if you’re a Goldman Sachs banker, you are completely protected from this phenomenon. Plus you’re buying gold, you’re buying silver and you’re buying tangible assets. So you are not taking any risks. It’s okay to simply wipe out the middle class. It’s a holocaust. Just like the holocaust we saw in WWII. In America we are seeing the holocaust of the middle class by a few extraordinary, greedy, corrupt bankers on Wall Street; principally Goldman Sachs, J.P Morgan and the gang.
Press TV: If the US uses the quantitative easing of printing money, do you think they want to get out of this economic downfall or do they want to continue to print the money to basically put the country more into this economic slump to benefit a few? Is that correct?
Kesier: Yes, it’s a domestic terrorist attack on a sub-group; in this case the middle class. If they wanted to bring about a solution, the solution is very easy: Ring fence all the corrupt banks, put all of that bad debt behind a firewall like they did during the savings and loans crises of the 1980s. The Resolution Trust Corruption ring fenced all the debt and they restarted the economy by creating some new banks. And these new banks were able to get loans and they could create inflation, which would have the effect of stimulating the economy. That is clearly the way the solution could be offered. But this is not what’s happening. So clearly we must conclude that the bankers on Wall Street our not doing the obvious solution but the complete opposite of what should be done. They are increasing the debt load by flooding the market destroying houses, jobs, wages and pensions.
Hear, hear! An extraordinary thing to say, I think you’ll agree, but find me the fault in his logic. If the American public was sane (which it’s not) there would be rioting in the streets and vigilante justice all over Wall Street.
Read more: ‘US Financial Elite Destroy the Dollar’ (PressTV)
If you appreciate intelligent political humor, especially when delivered by Brits, you’ll pee your pants for The Bugle, the free weekly Times Online comedy podcast. Daily Show correspondent/writer John Oliver calling in from New York City and fellow Brit comedian Andy Zaltzman in London deliver an excellent 40-minute fake news show, replete with grandiose trumpet fanfare, horribly stretched-out puns, and a lot of schoolgirl-style giggling. Plus zingers like these:
Bush admitted that standing under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished” was a mistake—which is like apologizing for spelling someone’s name wrong on the birthday cake you made them out of shit.
Here’s some highlights from the audio newspaper for a visual world:
After the jump, the Bugle asks an American…
Gigi Gaston, The Black Flower, was a hugely popular and tragic sixties French pop star who in reality never existed. She’s the creation of conceptual artist, and former art director of New York Magazine, Josh Gosfield. He’s done an astonishingly convincing job of documenting a life that never was, through photo-shopped pictures, a mock documentary, a video shot by Jean Luc Godard (not), newsclippings and fictional biographical ephemera.
We see her Gypsy family’s escape from Bulgaria, her affair with her stepbrother, her first guitar, her rise up (and fall down) the charts, the car crashes, funerals, love triangles and the murder trial. All this played out in a garish media spotlight before the insatiable eyes of her public.
I was initially fooled by Gosfield’s elaborate hoax and went looking for information on the French chanteuse, including checking Amazon for cds, only to discover that I’d been had.
Gosfield has included fictional quotes from icons of the era, including this one by Norman Mailer from a nonexistent Esquire article.
As Norman Mailer wrote, in a 1974 Esquire story:
Could this Black Flower with a voice like Piaf have guessed that when she bloomed into a teenage singing idol for post-war European youth, and later became the Continental fashion icon and sexy French pin-up girl on the bedroom walls of the hippest kids, that the future would strangle her dreams of normalcy, like the protagonists in one her romantically fatalistic songs? No, of course not. Because the characters of Greek tragedies are always the last to know their fates.
Here we a have Gosfield’s perfectly realized faux Jean Luc Godard video and the trailer for the documentary.
Check out Josh’s website and be prepared to be amazed by the depth of detail and work that went into creating his pop fantasy.
More photos of The Black Flower and the documentary trailer after the jump…
There aren’t too many people who I’d be really that impressed to meet. To be perfectly honest/obnoxious I’ve already met most of the people who I ever wanted to meet, or else they’re dead. Just three people come to mind who I’d be humbled to find myself face to face with and all are women: Oprah Winfrey, Patti Smith and Rachel Maddow.
In the above clip, Rachel Maddow shows why she’s such an important, even necessary, figure in the American media. Although David Letterman is obviously throwing her well-intentioned, and respectful softballs, she says here what more sane and responsible people who have an audience should be saying about Fox News, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart: “Scaring white people is good politics on the conservative side of the spectrum.” Bravo, Ms. Maddow, keep it up!!
“…Disturbing images of Holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity.” These are the elements cited by the Motion Picture Association of America in giving an R-rating to Israeli director Yael Hersonski’s intense-looking documentary, A Film Unfinished, which opens widely this month.
Produced and distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, A Film Unfinished centers around the making of the unearthed last reel of Ghetto, a Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto and proffered as a document of life there. The reel contains multiple takes of staged, exoticized footage of Jewish life, including a fictionalized depiction of the contrast between “rich” and poor ghetto dwellers.
The R-rating ensures that the film can’t be shown in public school classrooms, a situation ludicrous enough to be called out by Oscilloscope owner and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch a.k.a. MCA. From what I understand, the “graphic nudity” that the MPAA cites refers to female ghetto dwellers entering a mikvah, or Jewish ritual bath. As for the atrocities, well, kids seem to be exposed to plenty of gratuitous and stupid violence on TV, movies and video games. Maybe it would be worth whatever trauma they may go through watching and discussing A Film Unfinished to not only viscerally understand genocide, but also get a classic lesson in media manipulation.
Nice work, MPAA.
Oscilloscope Laboratories will also release the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl and the doc William S. Burroughs: A Man Within this fall.
Dr. John Clarke stars in a public service video he produced called “The Gap Rap.”
Apparently there’s a problem at Long Island Railroad stations with people falling into the gap between the train and the platform. So, Dr. Clarke decided to create his ‘health hop’ video.
Dr. Clarke, who captured wide media attention for his H1N1 Flu Rap,was enthusiastic about his new video, “I recognize that gap accidents are quite preventable. I knew that Health-Hop would be a perfect way to spread the message and make an impact.”
Upcoming ‘health hop’ projects for Dr. Clarke : Aids, Global Warming and Lindsay Lohan.
In case you missed it, America’s best political writer, Matt Taibbi weighed in on L’affair Breitbart on the Rolling Stone blog:
I’ve decided it isn’t even necessary to have the debate over whether or not the Tea Partiers are racists. It’s enough to point out that the Tea Party and its sympathizers contain too many people like Andrew Breitbart (the idiot blogger from the Big Government website who originally posted the Sherrod video), Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, all of whom popped huge public woodies the moment the Sherrod video surfaced.
It’s just not necessary to say whether or not these people are racists. All that needs to be pointed out is that when they get a chance to gape at a video purporting to show a black Obama official confessing to having mistreated a white farmer (it turned out to be the opposite of that, of course), or a tape of Black Panther King Shamir talking about “killing cracker babies,” the word that best describes the emotions they display at these times is glee.
They enjoy these morbid stories about offenses to white dignity way too much. I caught Glenn Beck talking about some case involving a Black Panther who was intimidating people at a voting booth back in 2008—the guy had this pervy smile on his face that made him look exactly like one of those creepy dudes sitting hunched over at the edge of the bed playing the cuckold in cheating-wife porn videos. Over the Black Panthers! Who the hell has even seen a Black Panther since the seventies? The whole thing reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about Native Americans—“When was the last time you saw two Indians?”
I love how he ends the piece by asking “Is anyone else dreading 2012?”
I feel ya, dude. It’s going to be an all out brawl. 2012 might be the year the American republic ends up so frayed as to be ungovernable. The rightwing has backed itself so far into a corner that there is almost no way that they can still walk it back anymore. People are going to die during the next national election cycle. 2008 was merely the opening act. It’s already fucking fucked up. The rhetoric is so mean and hateful that the next step is easy to predict: Violence.
Looked at from one point of view, the whole Axis of Idiocy (Fox News, tea baggers, conservative Christians) thing we’re seeing in this country is nothing short of a mass mobilization of some of the meanest and stupidest people to publicly present themselves that I have witnessed in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, I consider most of these sad, deluded fools to be people whose time will somewhat quickly come to an end. The Tea party is a manifestation, by and large, of cranky old white people. They’ll be dying soon enough and their grandchildren will not be replenishing their ranks. It’s just not going to work that way. the demographics all but prohibit it from happening. Still, even if, historically speaking, it’ll be temporary, what happens in the meantime is going to make for a really trying couple of decades, ‘cause there is a mean genie that’s gotten out of the bottle and he ain’t going back in anytime soon.
The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant (Rolling Stone)
Brilliant! Lays out the contents of Andrew Breitbart’s mind with surgical precision. This really will come in handy for people unfortunate enough to find themselves on the same TV show as Breitbart. I’m sure he’s seen this, can you imagine how infuriated he got? His looney debate technique must’ve taken years to develop and this fucks it all up!
Another great clip from conor64.
