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The Tattlesnake – Red Tails in the Sunset Edition
Wall Street Will Soon Become Insignificant to Our Financial Future
“The reality is that the American overclass has just been on the most amazing feeding frenzy for three decades now, to the extent that they’ve simply lost any sense of proportion, whatsoever. The sense of predatory entitlement has become what water is to fish. It is so much a part of their world view that they no longer even have consciousness of it, or any alternative to it, any more than a tuna ever wonders what it might be like to walk on two legs and breathe air.”
– David Michael Green, “Barack Obama and the Altar of Greed,” Common Dreams, March 20, 2009.
With a large majority of the public in the mood to Merrill Lynch the whole obtuse gaggle of scoundrels on Wall Street, current marquee malefactor AIG (American International Group, Inc.) dispatched its ineffectual new Dollar-A-Year CEO Edward Liddy to Washington last week, apparently just to prove he’s vastly overpaid.
While assuring the Congressional committee that he was there solely to serve virtuous honesty and glassine transparency, he found cause to do a Connecticut Yankee’s imitation of a Mafia kingpin by consulting his attorney before responding to certain questions, no doubt to strike just the right tone of forthright candor.
Liddy’s presentation was comically anemic when it wasn’t blandly soporific. He noted he had kindly asked the ruthless dark dead things who inhabit the senior slots at AIG – the Servants of Hades that designed the complicated ‘credit swap’ shell game that caused the firm’s collapse – to please voluntarily return half of the bonuses they ‘earned’ for turning AIG into a smoking ruin that had to be bailed out by Uncle Sucker. (Yes, that’s right – a Million-Dollar Baby would have to pout with a mere $500K to mollify any hurt feelings after burning down the house by playing with matches. In giddy Liddyland, this passes for sanity.)
The new CEO only displayed human emotion when asked to reveal the names of his employees who insouciantly demanded a hefty tip for giving the customer food poisoning that nearly killed him. Breaking a polite patrician sweat, Liddy seemed most concerned that his fellow well-dressed vermin might be hounded by angry rabble with pitchforks, or, worse, subjected to an interview with Jon Stewart, should their identities be known. He even dolefully cited a missive that had come to his attention wherein the author threatened to garrote with piano wire all the top executives at AIG, which undoubtedly struck foreclosed homeowners and those who have real jobs as extreme only in its leniency.
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The Tattlesnake – Rushing to the Bottom-Feeders Edition
Who Else is There Left for Limbaugh to Influence?
Rush Limbaugh is a phenomenon of the ’80s and ’90s when he still retained some ability to shock, and the entire regressive Republican agenda he insistently trumpeted daily, which fundamentally amounted to electing Republicans to throw money at the rich and permitting corporations and Wall Street to act without regulation, had yet to be proven by events, such as our present Great Depression redux, to be the recipe for mass disaster it has historically been.
Limbaugh had quite a time back then kicking around FDR’s liberalism that had brought the nation out of the last Republican-generated economic crisis of the 1930s, and counted on the uneducated knuckledraggers, attention-deficit cretins, McCarthyite jingoists, terrified shut-ins, imperial chickenhawks and outright cases of brain damage that populate his audience to trust his hooey-fied history lessons and giggle at his class-clown racism and sexism.
Rush often claims his talent is on loan from God but, since he’s never clear as to the identity of his personal deity, it might very well be one with two horns and a scaly tail who causes young girls to prodigiously vomit pea soup. (A reaction Rush is no doubt accustomed to from women by now.) Conservatism has often been used as a respectable ideological shield for the darker aspects of the human character such as greed, selfishness and cruelty, and Limbaugh evinces all of these flaws is his daily three-hour howlings at the moon.
What does this spoiled self-serving multi-millionaire mostly gripe about on his show? Those in the upper-10 percent tax bracket such as himself paying higher taxes. He makes $50 million a year and he’s complaining bitterly over paying a few percentage points more in taxes to help his country out of the mess caused by the Republican ‘principles’ he’s ardently promoted of deregulating markets, banks, investment firms, real estate, and unfettered corporate expansion, while lowering taxes for the rich and running enormous deficits. Instead of taking responsibility for what he’s advocated, Rush blames it on Obama and the Democrats. What a mighty good man.
Before confusing Limbaugh’s brand of patriotism with the dictionary definition of that word, it’s instructive to heed the underlying message of his broadcasts: Money before country — particularly Rush’s own sacrosanct bankroll.
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