Jackasses of the Week Awards

by: Libby Shaw

Sat Mar 07, 2009 at 22:42:33 PM CST

Jackasses of the Week Awards

Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.  

First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought.  A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others.  In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.  

A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:

The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.

This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.

Finally, a jackass is one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.

The Taxpayer Blues: Bailing out the Fat Cats

by: Libby Shaw

Mon Sep 22, 2008 at 22:00:59 PM CDT

I felt it was high time for me to pay a call to our esteemed U.S. Senators to inquire about the recent financial melt down on Wall St. Since as a taxpayer I will be expected to step up and bail out a bunch of corrupted greed mongers I believe I deserve an explanation from those who got us into this unbelievable mess in the first place.

Dear Senator,

In the past two weeks I feel as if I have been hit by two devastating hurricanes.  Many residents in the Houston and Galveston areas are still without power and most continue to struggle with Ike's aftermath. The nation's fourth largest city and its surrounding areas have taken a tremendous beating.  

Just when we were beginning to think we could see the light at the end of Ike's tunnel we now find ourselves suddenly blindsided by another hurricane.  This one did not sweep in from the Gulf. This unexpected monster came hurdling down from Wall St. and its aftermath could prove far more cataclysmic than Ike.

What is this business about a financial bailout using the taxpayer's money?  It seems to me that a group of greedy and corrupted fat cats on Wall St., with the blessings of their supporters and cheerleaders in Congress, raped and pillaged the United States and now taxpayers are being asked to pay for the carnage.  And we're supposed to turn over nearly $1 trillion and say "we trust you to clean up after yourselves."

Please.

See what Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine has to say about the Wall Street debacle.