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| Joey |
quote:
Factory Girl wrote:
That is beautiful tag-team posting.
The Joey-Mooonie Team...or the MoJO Team! 
Factory Girl .................................
You are much loved by Joey
'kins. |
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| Saint Sway |
are all of Starbuck's alias' present and accounted for? |
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| sirmoonie |
So I was out there counting at work today, and drinking heavily, but the score ended up:
2 - guys who wanted to hear that the DLM says George Walker Bush III was responsible for a Minneapolis bridge collapse (Riffy and Levin (whoever he is? ZOG? Shades of ZOG....)
1 - guy who alledgedly said George Walker Bush III was responsible for a Minneapolis bridge collapse (Jack Motherfucking Cafferty - whoever he is?)
T'was the nominal point. I could go on. I WILL go on. I'm on a List now!
Developing..........
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| pdog |
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
are all of Starbuck's alias' present and accounted for?
I'm here... |
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| sirmoonie |
I'm pretty sure I'm going to turn this into the "Insane Love of George Walker Bush III" thread, or something similar. I haven't decided yet. Creative license being what is and all.
Its like its developing and stuff! |
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| pdog |
quote:
sirmoonie wrote:
I'm pretty sure I'm going to turn this into the "Insane Love of George Walker Bush III" thread, or something similar. I haven't decided yet. Creative license being what is and all.
Its like its developing and stuff!
Did you hear the he's been boozing for about a year or so, and his wife moved into a Hotel, she shows up for photo ops and stuff... |
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| sirmoonie |
quote:
pdog wrote:
Did you hear the he's been boozing for about a year or so, and his wife moved into a Hotel, she shows up for photo ops and stuff...
No. And it wouldn't interest me if he or she did.
Anyway, this may get mongacious. Can't promise anything, but all the fat ass "they are all out to get me" faggits who read this thread may want to hug their mommies real hard tonight - "help me, help help me!"
Its still developing...... |
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| Chuck |
The Minnesota bridge collapse: One more indictment of the profit system
By Barry Grey
4 August 2007
WSWS
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/aug2007/minn-a04.shtml
The collapse of the most highly traveled highway bridge in the state of Minnesota has once again revealed some ugly truths about American society. Occurring during the run-up to the second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, the bridge disaster has once more left people in the United States and around the world wondering in shock and horror how it is possible that the richest nation in the world enters the twenty-first century with a social infrastructure that is thoroughly decayed.
As of this writing, five people have been confirmed dead from Wednesday’s collapse of the Interstate 35W highway bridge that traverses the Mississippi River near the center of Minneapolis, a major American metropolis. An unknown number of other victims remain trapped in vehicles that plummeted 60 feet into the swirling currents of the Mississippi, and at least 70 were injured.
Like Katrina, there were ample warnings. Numerous surveys concluded that the bridge was “structurally deficient.” Its steel deck truss design, which provides no margin of safety should any major component fail, was discarded for precisely that reason shortly after the bridge was constructed forty years ago.
There are 756 such bridges in the US, and a total of 77,000, 27 percent of the nation’s spans, that have been designated “structurally deficient.”
Media news anchors, commentators and editorialists have noted that the Minnesota bridge disaster is a symptom of a neglected and rotting infrastructure. Many have pointed to the 2005 report card on America’s infrastructure issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the country a “D” and warned of dire consequences unless a crash program were undertaken to fix the problem. Bridges actually fared comparatively well in the engineers’ report, with a grade of “C.” The country’s aviation system, dams, drinking water, electric power grid and hazardous waste system were deemed even worse, and given a “D.”
But the media reaction to the engineers’ conclusion that it will cost $1.6 trillion over five years to repair the infrastructure is to present such a sum as impossibly high. There is no such questioning of the estimated $450 billion already spent on the war in Iraq or the ongoing weekly outlay of $1.8 billion, not to mention the $533 billion Pentagon budget or the $555 billion in tax cuts for the rich enacted by the Bush administration and Congress in 2001.
What is not broached, let alone discussed, is why the nation’s material and social foundation has been brought to such a state. That is not surprising, because the answers constitute a devastating indictment of the American political and corporate ruling elite and the profit system which they uphold.
Whatever the specific cause of the Minnesota bridge disaster, the underlying reason is the indifference, incompetence and negligence of the government, and the fact that the US is a capitalist society, in which the accumulation of vast personal wealth by a small percentage of the population is deemed more important than the welfare of the people as a whole.
The decay of the material underpinnings of American society has gone hand in hand with a relentless assault on social welfare programs and the jobs and living standards of the working population. It is the product of nearly three decades of uninterrupted social and political reaction.
This has involved a sharp reduction in the federal government’s role in maintaining the nation’s infrastructure. As the Wall Street Journal noted on Friday, “In the 1960s, the federal government and the states paid roughly equal amounts to fund infrastructure projects, but state and local governments bear most of the costs these days, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. ‘The commitment of the federal government has been sharply reduced,’ said Felix Rohatyn, a former Wall Street banker and CSIS trustee...”
The ruling elite has been engaged in a systematic drive to dismantle the very limited elements of social infrastructure and a social safety net left over from the New Deal programs of the 1930s. These were implemented under Franklin Roosevelt in the face of the greatest social and economic crisis of the twentieth century, which included not only the financial collapse known as the Great Depression, but also the environmental disaster that produced the Dust Bowl across the Great Plains. The New Deal established regulatory agencies that placed certain legal restrictions on big business and created public works such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built dams and levees to curb flooding and provide electrical power.
Despite the howls of protest from Roosevelt’s opponents within the ruling elite, these were not socialist measures; rather, they were reforms instituted to forestall a social revolution from below that would threaten the profit system as a whole.
From the 1970s on, as the crisis of American capitalism deepened, the US ruling elite has repudiated the entire concept of social reform and dismantled, under the banner of “deregulation,” the previously enacted restrictions on corporate activities. The result has been a nonstop plundering of society that has produced an unprecedented concentration of wealth at the apex of society and a level of social inequality greater than in the days of the Robber Barons at the beginning of the last century. Fraud, the worst forms of speculation and outright criminality have become pervasive in the upper echelons of American society.
The president, George W. Bush, personifies the incompetence, stupidity and inhumanity that characterize so much of America’s money-crazed corporate elite. On Thursday, Bush spoke of the bridge collapse, saying, “We in the federal government must respond and respond robustly to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge, gets rebuilt as quickly as possible.”
Who could not but be repulsed by these empty phrases, two years after Bush promised to rebuild New Orleans and then turned the “reconstruction” into a profit bonanza for unscrupulous corporate cronies, with the result that the worst-hit poor and working class sections of the city remain abandoned and derelict, and tens of thousands of families permanently displaced?
The American political system is dominated by a drive to destroy all barriers to the accumulation of the personal wealth of a financial oligarchy. Taxes are virtually nonexistent on the principle sources of income of the super-rich, such as capital gains and other forms of speculation. No matter how dire the state of the population—health care, education, pensions, housing—and how decrepit the physical infrastructure, it is virtually taboo to even propose increasing taxes on the rich in order to address social problems.
And it is not just the selfish greed of the rich that is responsible for the decay of the social infrastructure. The mass character of modern society, its international interconnectedness and its complexity stand in violent contradiction to the inherently unplanned and anarchic character of capitalism. The rational and humane development of the material and social environment is incompatible with a system in which each capitalist is engaged in a bitter struggle to obtain the largest possible share of the profits generated by the exploitation of human labor.
Hundreds of millions of people in the US rely on complex social systems to provide the essentials of life: food, water, electricity, transportation, health care, education. The failure of these systems reduces the population to conditions of barbarism, as was seen on a mass scale in the Gulf Coast two years ago.
Working people perform the labor that keeps these systems going, but they have no say in their operation. These systems are for the most part owned and controlled by giant corporations, for whom profit, not human need, is the decisive criterion. Those systems that are nominally controlled by the government, such as roads and bridges, are likewise subordinated to profit interests, through the control of the political system by the wealthy elite.
In the case of America’s bridges, the anarchy and irrationality are palpable. There is no national plan for the maintenance of the system. Decisions on repair and construction of vital economic and social lifelines are left to the states and localities, and oversight is divided between all three levels of government.
The most salient and noxious expression of the irrational and socially destructive character of the profit system is the massive concentration of wealth at the very top of society. According to a recent study, in 2005 the top one-tenth of one percent of the US population (some 300,000 people) had nearly as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans.
That the wealth exists to pay the $1.6 trillion which the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates is needed to upgrade the country’s infrastructure—and more—is demonstrated by a few facts. Forbes magazine reported earlier this year that there are 946 billionaires around the world, with a combined wealth of $3.5 trillion. Last December, Christmas bonuses paid to Wall Street executives topped $100 billion. That figure alone is more than twice the annual federal allocation of $40 billion for the country’s roads and bridges.
And in 2006, the 25 highest paid hedge fund managers in the US had an average income of $540 million, for a total of $13.5 billion. The total subordination of the two major US parties to the financial oligarchy is demonstrated by the unwillingness of the Democratic Congress to end the existing tax windfall for hedge fund and private equity operators, who pay at the 15 percent capital gains rates instead of the 35 percent top income tax rate.
Events like the collapse of the Minnesota bridge are exposing the bankruptcy of the political establishment and the corporate elite, along with their insistence that the unchecked operations of capitalism are the solution to all of society’s problems.
This poses the most fundamental questions before the working class. What are the priorities of society to be: the social interests of the many or the accumulation of personal wealth by the privileged few? It is not a matter of pressuring the ruling elite, or replacing one section of that elite with another. The working class must organize itself as a political force and make itself the master of society. This requires the creation of a new political party of the working class, independent of and opposed to the Democrats and Republicans, and based on a socialist program.
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| Chuck |
Even in Minnesota: When Domes Attack
By Dave Zirin
Minneapolis-Saint Paul is the last place on earth I would have expected a "structurally deficient bridge" to collapse, but it happened. As sure as the levees broke in New Orleans, the bridge is no more. Now the state of Minnesota is living a nightmare where people I speak with are alternately devastated and furious: two parts tears, one part rage, with the ratio shifting by the hour.
I went to college in the Twin Cities, a refugee from the scowling confines of New Yawk. Minnesota was like another planet, a place I almost bolted after the first day when I was carded for trying to buy a lighter. But the people easily won me over. How could you not love a place that gave us Prince, Hulk Hogan, and cheese curds? The combination of fried dairy products, pro wrestling, and funk was just too much to resist. It's the kind of place where my buddy John would choose to relocate and raise a family despite having roots in La Jolla, California. La Jolla is breathtaking: an oil painting come to life. But Minneapolis-St. Paul has something far more precious than sand and surf. The people of the Twin Cities always seem to have one eye on the greater good. It's a place where Democrats proudly call themselves the 'Democratic Farmer Labor Party', where Republicans go by the name 'Independent Republicans', and where a coffee shop calls itself Dunne Brothers, in tribute to the leaders of the 1934 strike that shut down the city.
It was also a place, with its social democratic traditions, that constantly frustrated the ambitions of a man named Carl Pohlad. Pohlad is the
92-year-old multi-billionaire owner of the Minnesota Twins. He has spent the last two decades of his life trying to get the taxpayers of his home state to give him 500 million dollars for a state of the art mega dome. The people in numerous referendums were polite and firm that the Pohlad way was not the Minnesota way. But Pohlad would not be deterred.
As Rudolph Giuliani once said, the problem with stadium referendums is that people won't vote for them. Pohlad took the Giuliani gospel to heart. He slunk behind the scenes, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians in both parties - eventually making a mockery of the Labor label on the Democrats and the Independence of the Republicans.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who has vetoed every effort to raise taxes to refurbish the state's infrastructure, became a born-again stadium supporter. Others as well "got religion" and began to worship at the altar of "revenue streams, "naming rights," and "luxury boxes."
As the Minnesota City Pages put it, "After a long string of public relations disasters that have entrenched his reputation as a miserly, something-for-nothing businessman, Carl Pohlad - the richest owner in major league baseball - has finally learned his political lesson. This time all the hardball haggling occurred behind closed doors."
Groundbreaking for the Pohlad's monument to corporate greed and political graft was supposed to be on Thursday, August 2nd, but the plans were hastily scuttled. The irony was simply too much for even these assorted scoundrels to bear. To celebrate the fleecing of the public to the tune of half a billion dollars - over 300 dollars out of the pockets of every man woman and child - while bodies have still yet to be recovered from the fallen bridge, would have been monstrous.
But this monster is already long loose and rampaging the countryside. It's difficult to not recall Hurricane Katrina and the way the Superdome became the homeless shelter from hell for 30,000 of the city's poorest residents. The Superdome, also funded by the public dime, became completely unfit for humanity in a few short hours. At the time, many - particularly in the Northern liberal media - cluck clucked at New Orleans and their "priorities." But even in Minnesota, the Pohlad Dome has been given more thought, planning, and consideration than the very bridges families assume will remain upright. Even in Minnesota, as Nick Coleman of the Star Tribune wrote, "Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics." Even in Minnesota. That might be the most frightening epitaph of all. Even in Minnesota the Dome came first and the people last. Every community needs to take this to heart and tell politicians we will no longer worship false idols. Its time to tear down the Domes.
[Dave Zirin is the author of the new book "Welcome to the Terrordome:" with an intro by Chuck D)
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| pdog |
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| Joey |
quote:
pdog wrote:
Did you hear the he's been boozing for about a year or so, and his wife moved into a Hotel, she shows up for photo ops and stuff...
Are you teasing us ..... ?!
I like the fact that he has started to booze ( If it is true ) .
" Joey spent all last evening / morning in a ' Boozy Haze ' Ronnie ! "
Boozy ! |
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| sirmoonie |
Lock and Piss, all the Bush Geeks feel the pain for their transgressions against America, its coming.....
[Edited by sirmoonie] |
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| Joey |
" The president, George W. Bush, personifies the incompetence, stupidity and inhumanity that characterize so much of America’s money-crazed corporate elite. On Thursday, Bush spoke of the bridge collapse, saying, “We in the federal government must respond and respond robustly to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity, that bridge, gets rebuilt as quickly as possible.”
Who could not but be repulsed by these empty phrases, two years after Bush promised to rebuild New Orleans and then turned the “reconstruction” into a profit bonanza for unscrupulous corporate cronies, with the result that the worst-hit poor and working class sections of the city remain abandoned and derelict, and tens of thousands of families permanently displaced? "
A - FRIGGIN - MEN !!!!!!
J . " Snuggles " Fly !
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