I have shuddered at the thought that most, if not all, of the individuals to be tried in BushCo's kangaroo court known as the military tribunals would be found guilty. That they would be found guilty on shoddy or non-existing evidence coerced out of them by torture and certainly without any decent representation.

Great gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands has occurred on this topic for me. I want the guilty to be found guilty, but I doubt that even a third of the people still being held in Guantanamo are guilty of anything, even though they are considered 'high value' detainees by the people in charge.

Recently, one of those high-value guys saw the case against him dismissed. The alleged 20th hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani's case came to an abrupt end. The reason? He was tortured and tortured and tortured some more. As Slate's Dahlia Lithwick notes:

The decision not to try him comes from the convening authority for the commissions, Susan Crawford. She didn't give an explanation for halting the prosecution, but, then, we don't really need one.

Lithwick's column states the reason that we might never see any of the 'high value' detainees tried and automatically convicted is because of the military itself. In her and Emily Bazelon's mind, there are honorable men and women involved in the Gitmo military commission hierarchy. While I have no doubt that some of the people involved are honorable and have a conscience, I still don't trust the majority of them to do the 'right thing' and end the Gitmo madness.

Dahlia and Emily start with Charles Swift, the defense lawyer from the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps who was appointed in 2002 to represent Salim Hamdan. Mr. Swift was a good and honorable man, to be sure. He has even publicly voiced his opposition to the military commissions. His opposition most likely cost him his military career.

Next, they lay out the case for Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the tribunals. He is an honorable man only because when it came time for him to actually prosecute detainees, which he had completely backed, he was stunned to learn which cases he was given. Cases without merit, but plenty of torture. From the Slate write up:

He resigned last October and went on an op-ed tear, writing that "full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system" because it "had become deeply politicized." Davis, who still maintains that the charges against Mr. Hamdan are "warranted by the evidence," was called to testify in Hamdan's case last month by the defense because of his indictment of the system.

Keith Allred is a military judge. That is pretty high up the food chain if you ask me. Allred bounced a biggie from Hamdan's trial. Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann has been removed from any further participation in Hamdan's prosecution by Allred because he determined that Hartmann directed prosecutors "to use evidence that the Chief Prosecutor considered tainted and unreliable, or perhaps obtained as the result of torture or coercion." (Allred also made a finding of fact that while interviewing Davis for the chief-prosecutor position, Department of Defense Gen. Jim Haynes told him, "We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions." So now that's the official account. Good to know.).

As I read further, I relax a bit. I realize that all might not be lost, that inherently good, honest people will not throw away their conscience just because their boss tells them to, they believe in the rule of law. The article rattles off four more names of individuals whose conscience trumped their bosses orders in BushCo's kangaroo court in Gitmo:

Four others—Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr, Capt. Carrie Wolf, and Lt. Col. Stuart Couch—have also left, apparently because of micromanagement and the interference of which Davis complained, including the demand that they use what they deemed to be unreliable coerced testimony.

That these individuals have sacrificed their military careers in order to hold onto their belief system makes me feel that much better. It takes a lot for someone who is a career military officer to say screw it and go very public with their opposition to the bs that is the Guantanamo military commissions.

We can only hope more of them are waiting in the wings. Because there is still too much time left before January 21st gets here and the next Democratic President will hopefully put an end to the madness down in Guantanamo by shutting the doors forever.

Crossposted at Its my Right to be Left of the Center

CNN.com is reporting that Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) used the word "bullshit" to describe President Bush's statement before the Israeli Knesset that "some" Democrats want to "appease terrorists" by trying to negotiate with Iran. Senator Biden further coarsened the political dialogue by calling Mr. Bush's accusations "malarkey" and pointing out that both Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have both called for talks with Iran.

In his speech before the Israeli parliament marking the 60th anniversary of the birth of the Jewish State, Bush invoked memories of the military expansion of the Third Reich across Europe, describing those who would sit down with "terrorists" as laboring under "foolish delusion" similar to those who sought negotiations with Adolf Hitler. The remarks were met with substantial applause from the audience of lawmakers of our most subsidized ally, which has threatened to attack Iran if the United States does not do so.

Although the White House is publicly denying that the comments were aimed at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has called for negotiations with Iran, aides to the President privately acknowledge that Bush was taking direct aim at the man who is appears likely to be the Dem nominee.

At the end of the article CNN.com published about Sen. Biden's response to President Bush's remarks, readers were invited to comment on the story. As I have done with previous articles at CNN.com, I did so, although none have ever been subsequently presented anywhere at the CNN.com Website. To diminish the importance of CNN's disinterest in publishing my response, below is the comment I submitted.

Yes, what Mr. Bush said is, indeed, bovine by-product.

It is, however, also the sign of a desperate man, one who uses incendiary, false assertions to buttress the flagging ramparts of a unitary executive for whom defiance of the rule of law offered no protection from the lessons of history. To the same extent that he has crafted from the whole cloth of delusion the claim that the economic crises now looming are somehow the fault of the Democrats, he now erects his ludicrous monument of self-exoneration for the utter collapse of our foreign policy into miserable, useless, lost wars that have debilitated our military to the point where genuine threats to our security, threats that will loom larger and larger in the coming decades, face no clear, present, and viable long-term deterrence from what was once a credible war machine in the United States. Instead, Mr. Bush has squandered our future security on a Global War on Terror that is nothing more than a staggeringly expensive exercise in chasing a handful of bearded religious maniacs around the world while imposing greater and greater degradations of personal privacy at home.

Mr. Bush will soon be at the end of the time in which his incompetence can blight the American experience. Although he will likely be replaced by one fool or another from one party or another, at the very least we shall be relieved of the tiring nonsense of a unitary executive without a clue.

The other bright note, of course, is that the likes of mainstream news media outlets like CNN, along with The New York Times, the Washington Post, and far too many others, will be able to claim to an ever-gullible public that they were not really every bit a part of the madness of these first eight years of the 21st Century in America.

The great news is thus: the more the mainstream media cry their lack of culpability, the more they will sound just like the President who disclaims his own failure.

History will be most unkind both to Mr. Bush and to his propagandists. That's what makes history so much more fun to those who read about it than to those who must live through it.

The Dark Wraith still cannot imagine why CNN did not publish this erudite reply to one of its articles about President Bush.

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The YouTube video below is a capture of the CNNMoney interview of February 28, 2008, with economist John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, a site that keeps track of key economic data, including figures no longer published by the federal government, as well as data for which government calculation methods have been altered over the years, often with the effect of casting economic conditions in a better light than would have been the case under previous methods. Among the crucial numbers Williams reports is the year-over-year growth rate of the broadest measure of money, M3, a key economic indicator on which the Federal Reserve stopped publishing information in early 2006 under various pretenses, none of which can be characterized as anything other than disingenuous and self-serving. In my two-part series, "The Federal Reserve under Fire," I set forth the importance of the growth rate of the money supply and, in particular, the growth rate of the broadest aggregate, M3, which is critical to an understanding of the direction of the economy insofar as inflation is concerned. Previously, in my series "The Economics of Wreckage," particularly in Part Two and in Part Three, I laid out the neo-Keynesian theory and policy of aggregate demand management and how it had gone awry on several occasions prior to the current era, illustrating why the policies that have been pursued by the Bush Administration and its rubber-stamp Federal Reserve, first under the addled Alan Greenspan and then under the obsequious Ben Bernanke, are predictably and inexorably leading the nation to the brink of hyperinflation coupled with deep recession.



The above-mentioned articles at The Dark Wraith Forums incorporate by reference links to a number of other published articles I have written over the past nearly three-and-a-half years forewarning of the coming economic catastrophe. In my January 2005 article, "Prologue to the Book of Consequences," I wrote the following:

The calculus of where the economy is headed is quite simple. Mainstream news media outlets bend over backward to avoid appearing biased, so they avoid describing the future consequences of current political actions, even though the consequences are governed by rock-solid principles of economics and finance that are not open to disagreement among the learnéd. Unfortunately, the neo-conservatives have made a craft of disputing the indisputable, giving observers an impression of debate where none exists.

At that time, I still had hope that the Federal Reserve, which had begun to clamp down on the growth rate of the money supply, would stick to its guns, even though that course would have thrown the economy into a recession. Financial markets were sending the classic signals that this is, indeed, what was coming, as I pointed out in several articles, including "Toward Full Yield Curve Inversion," which I wrote and published in March of 2006.

By that time, however, the reckless mendacity of this Administration was returning to fashion at the Fed: as it turned out, the Fed had rather swiftly and quietly untethered the broad monetary aggregates M2 and M3, once again causing them to grow out of control, leaving only M1—the kind of money ordinary people use—under an approximately zero growth rate regimen. The broader aggregates M2 and M3, feeding as they do the financial sectors and the wealthy, are now growing at rates that have absolutely no justification whatsoever other than to forestall economic catastrophe until the Bush Administration leaves office.

The growth rates of M2 and M3 are breath-taking. As mentioned above, the Fed no longer publishes M3. Including as it does M2, which in turn includes M1 (which, until recently, was not growing), this broadest measure of the money circulating in the economy is now in the growth rate range of 20 percent.

Two years ago, the yield curve inverted, which has historically signaled a good possibility of economic downturn that might become a recession. Shortly after full inversion, and notably in what was the Spring of a mid-term election year, the Fed panicked, backing down from tight monetary policy and thereby leaving only the people who use cash and checking account types of money to labor under a money supply being held at zero growth. As it turned out, the Fed was commencing the second phase of what would be a nearly unprecedented expansionary monetary policy that continues to this very day. Under this regime, not only is the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply at a rate in excess of the real growth rate of the economy, but the Fed is accelerating this growth rate! Although the chart below has been published here on several recent, prior occasions, it is worth publishing again, and it should be noted that John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics showed an almost identical chart in the video offered above.



The Federal Reserve is pouring hundreds of billions of excess dollars into the economy to hold off an economic crash. The longer it does this, the worse the resulting inflation will be; more importantly, however, the longer it pursues this radically irresponsible policy, the worse the recession will be when a new Federal Reserve Board must crush the money supply long enough to drain out the staggering greenback overhang. Interest rates, which will already be rising because of inflation expectations embedded in them, will skyrocket because interest rates are the price of money, and when the supply of anything contracts, its price goes up. Business investment, already laboring under tight credit conditions, will grind to a standstill, as will consumer spending on anything other than basics, which will absorb a greater and greater share of income in the spiral of accelerating inflation caused by the almost incomprehensible oversupply of money progressively eroding the purchasing power of each dollar circulating in the economy.

On the international front, as the dollar continues its inexorable plunge into Second World currency weakness, U.S. exports to other countries will rise as our goods become cheaper overseas, and foreign imports to the United States will become more expensive. That has two sour notes. First, as imports become more expensive on American shelves, the domestic substitutes right beside them on the shelves will rise in price by the so-called "substitution effect," fed as it will be by the excess money that will fuel the demand-pull inflation at the retail level. Second, as Americans buy fewer imports, foreign reserves of dollars, which are the means by which our government, our businesses, and our households have been able to borrow so much money for the past several decades, will begin to dry up; and with the U.S. government spending in stupendous excess of the tax revenues it draws, the U.S. Treasury in the years ahead will suck up what little there will be of foreign capital available for lending, leaving both households and private businesses with virtual bread crumbs of lendable funds, especially once the Fed begins the long, gruesome process of letting the economy slowly absorb in real output gains what will ultimately be the trillions of dollars in excess liquidity poured in by the Bush Administration's Federal Reserve.

All of the righteous, legitimate, and perhaps even understated condemnation of the Bush Administration and its Federal Reserve aside for a while, the pertinent questions on most people's minds revolve around what is to come; and by no means are the answers pleasant. Even under the most responsible, intelligent, and take-charge President—of which none appear to be on hand for the up-coming election—the economy and its constituents will suffer, and the suffering will be severe.

No, the United States economy is not in a "recession," yet, despite the premature squealing of quite a few people. Although some parts of the country might already be experiencing negative economic growth, according to the latest figures released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Commerce Department, the overall economy actually grew in the first quarter of 2008, albeit at an anemic rate of just 0.6 percent, matching the growth rate for the final quarter of 2007; and, although the Commerce Department is notorious for revising such GDP growth rate numbers several times, the signs simply are not there of a widespread recession underway for the U.S. as a whole. Americans have not seen a severe recession in more than a generation. The last bad one was caused by the contractionary monetary policy of the Federal Reserve under the leadership of Chairman Paul Volker, President Jimmy Carter's appointee; Volker's Fed aggressively clamped down on the money supply to drain out the excess money that had been building at a greater or lesser pace for more than a decade. Volker did not let go until not only the inflation had abated, but so too had the far more important expectation of future inflation. Recessions since then have been relatively short and mild by comparison, and the "recession" that heralded the beginning of the current Administration was not a recession by the technical measure of two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth, but it was certainly more than enough of a pretext for George W. Bush and his Republican allies in Congress to get their way with drastic tax cuts to "stimulate" the economy, a siren call the GOP has used in the past, most notably at the outset of the Reagan years and, before that, near the end of the Eisenhower Administration. Unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who led their party's parade to the trough of wildly generous tax cuts for the rich, Eisenhower resisted the tax cut bleatings of his fellow Republicans and, in so doing, was able to deliver several years of balanced federal budgets, unlike either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. Of course, in all fairness at least to the current President of the United States, few are those even among the professional apologists for Mr. Bush who would accuse him of being the latter-day incarnation of President Eisenhower in fiscally responsible leadership, much less in statesmanship and general intelligence.

As a touchstone for reference, the table below presents the record of recessions in the United States from the third decade of the 20th Century to the present.



With that data providing helpful historical guidance, and with some well-established macroeconomic principles being applied, what follows is a summary, if highly preliminary, assessment of what interested readers should expect of the economy in the coming months and years.

First, the economy will not go into recession for a while. The current scenario appears too much like the U.S. economy in 1979, except that the incumbent Federal Reserve is far more out of control than the pre-Volker Fed was. We will experience what in Carter's time was called "stagflation": paltry real growth of GDP coupled with accelerating inflation. Eventually, as that inflation becomes more and more embedded in interest rates, the Fed's efforts to hold interest rates down by pouring money at greater and greater rates into the economy will begin to fail, and the economy will teeter closer and closer to the brink of negative real growth in GDP.

As far as inflation is concerned, a quick, dirty way to generate a forecast is to take the year-over-year growth rate of the money supply and subtract from it the real growth rate of GDP: that's the "overhang" of dollars the economy's real (that is, production-based) spending growth cannot use, so that overhang must, sooner or later, become inflation. If the broadest money aggregate, M3, is growing at close to 20 percent, and the real GDP is growing at around half-a-percent, that means inflation will eventually hit 19.5 percent or so on an annualized basis. As a nice, round number, call it a forecast of 20 percent inflation. As mind-numbing as that number is, the worse part is that, the longer the Federal Reserve under the new President fails to crush the money supply, the closer expected inflation will get to that 20 percent figure, which means interest rates will climb to the point where economic activity in the United States will grind to a virtual halt; but that's not the worst part.

The expected inflation premium does not affect only interest rates; it becomes embedded in the forward expectations of compensation for all factors of production, perhaps most notable among them being labor, which has been on its back for years in terms of its ability to successfully project bargaining power into management-labor wage negotiations. That will change: under mounting pressure from rank-and-file workers who will begin to experience real deprivations as their nominal purchasing power withers in the accelerating inflation, people will forcefully demand far greater performance from their unions and, in the absence of union representation, from the employers themselves. Long dormant (in some cases, even intergenerational) frustrations with the inability to get ahead economically will translate, at best, into far more active, vociferous workers and, at worst, widespread agitation and activities that will bring down what has become a swift, efficient, often merciless fist of retributive law enforcement surveillance, actions, and violence, which will be wholly and prejudicially supported by courts packed by the Bush Administration with extemist conservative and Right-wing judges.

The next President, regardless of which nominee it is, will be faced with the choice of either forestalling the application of draconian remedies for the hyperinflation or forcing the Fed to quickly and resolutely clamp down on the money supply, this latter choice sending the economy into a hard recession near the depth and length of the Great Depression. Either way the new President decides to play it, by 2010 or 2011, unprecedented, severe, unavoidable demands on the federal budget will emerge, and they will get worse with each successive budget cycle. At the same time, the utter debilitation of the U.S. armed forces will have become apparent not merely to the U.S. brass, but to the heads of state of adventurous countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a nascent South American alliance, the European Union, and loner countries like Japan, all of whom will shed at least some pretense of disinterest in taking command of land, the seas, the sky, and space in the growing chasm between continued American military posturing and viable, multi-theater engagement capability.

And if all of that is not enough, the growing independence of the world economy and its sovereign participants from the U.S. dollar will mean that U.S. goods and services, although cheap and well received in other countries, will become not just more expensive here at home, but also subject to much more price volatility as the greenback no longer serves as the anchor in international contracts for everything from foodstuffs to hydrocarbon products.

Other catastrophes will attend and succeed those listed above, but that's a good start, although, as cautioned earlier, this is just a preliminary and quite summary impression of what is to come. Indeed, it could get much worse.

One way or the other, despite the greatest efforts of the stupefyingly irresponsible Bush Administration and its swirling cacophony of apologists in the Right-wing think tanks, the mainstream media, academia, the courts, the religious community, and the general population, reality will soon arrive on the unstoppable freight train of dire consequences to which each of the aforementioned groups will no doubt find its own means by which to dismiss personal responsibility for national calamity. That, no doubt, was why the gallows were so popular in a by-gone era: a good noose not only kills the mendacious, it shuts them up, too.


The Dark Wraith will offer further economic forecasts as events merit.

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The 2002 horror movie The Ring wove a tale about a horrific video that would predicate the death in seven days of anyone who watched it. The only way to avoid this fate was to further propagate the video, allowing others to suffer its fatal curse. Personally, I enjoyed the movie; but, then again, I'm a sucker for scary movies, although I can pretty much always do without gore-galore festivals (unless the victims were really, really bad actors). The Ring was satisfying for me to the extent that it presented a kind of terror too remote to make me worry about some real-world version of its central premise coming true.

Therein was my potentially grave error in assessing the story line of The Ring, and I have now decided that the only way I can dispense with what could otherwise be an unwanted curse upon my soul is to invite—indeed to encourage—readers to watch a 139-minute film by über-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Prison Planet. The movie is herewith embedded near the end of this article.

Long-time readers of my articles might recall that I have mentioned Mr. Jones in the past, specifically with respect to the fact that maverick Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul appeared in a film of his. In my tradition of diplomatic understatement, I wrote of Alex Jones that, "[He is] believed by at least some rational people to be a few cheese cubes short of a snack tray..."

That aside, for readers who want a remarkable, although incomplete, rundown of a principal branch of conspiracy theory, allow me to recommend Alex Jones's 2007 movie, Endgame. It is sweeping, and it is compelling. It is also deeply flawed, primarily by the way it, like most conspiracy theories, constructs conspiracy by virtue of mere associations, some of them familial, others chronological, still others even less well-defined. For example, Jones connects the evolution theory of Charles Darwin to a cousin's twisted ideas on eugenics, and then he goes on to associate the early eugenics whackos—admittedly including a number of Charles Darwin's subsequent family members—to the later eugenics whackos like Adolf Hitler and the better-race promoters in the U.S., including the predecessor to Planned Parenthood. In all fairness to Jones, however, he does not directly attack the theory of evolution, nor does he condemn the idea of the right of women to choose abortion; but he does seem to have an intense interest in offering a less-than-dim view of the foundations of many modern-day organizations, including everything from the World Wildlife Federation to the Federal Reserve system. Along the way, as well as going after the predecessor to Planned Parenthood, he jumps on the usual list of conspiracy theory hot buttons like the United Nations, the European Union, and NAFTA. I roll my eyes every last time the conspiracy theorists trot out these worn-out whipping boys, although the matter of that trans-America highway corridor is a little less of an eye-roller than meets the eye, particularly since officialdom in Washington acts to this very day like the thing doesn't even exist.

I must admit that, within the sweep of his attack, Jones goes after some of my favorite rich-boy charlatans. One of them is Al Gore, a gentleman who in my own, personal opinion is a PowerPoint-wielding, sky-is-falling elitist-opportunist. My published writing and comments about him are harsh and unyielding, and I am not in the least impressed by his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded as it was to a quite comfortable, upper-class gentleman at the same time in history that genuine heroes the world over are rotting in prisons, being tortured, and getting executed for demanding such trivial things as freedom in unfree lands. Yes, the Presidency of the United States was stolen from Mr. Gore; but, no, sometimes it is not better for the Republic that its wronged meekly stand down, for their surrender is not theirs alone, but is also the sacrifice of the millions who will then suffer under the reign of the venal thieves wretchedly proclaimed victor.

Enough with grinding the personal axes; this post is about Endgame, which is, as noted above, incomplete. While it fabulously explains the Bilderberg Group—a favorite sore spot of any self-respecting conspiracy theorist—it completely avoids mentioning the Illuminati, Opus Dei, Freemasonry (although a stylized version of the All Seeing Eye is presented several times), the Jewish conspiracy, and anything whatsoever having to do with UFOs. (Those who know about these matters will, however, notice in the movie all kinds of visual hints of other conspiracy theory threads.) Strangely, avoiding a free-fall involvement of all these other branches of conspiracy theory keeps the movie from drifting into complete silliness.

Along the way, the movie gets a little slow in some places, but the tenor re-attains fever pitch at several places in the last half. Without giving away too many details, the mention that Hillary Rodham Clinton did a half-day appearance at the 2006 Bilderberg Group conference is worth noting. No, she's not a Bilderberger: a half-day visit would mean she was there to briefly present herself for the core group to consider. At that 2006 conference, by the way, Jones got photographs of none other than the disgraced Ahmed Chalabi of Iraq pre-invasion disinformation fame; Chalabi was slithering around at the hotel like some kind of creepy denizen from the depths, apparently a welcome participant in the confab of the rich and powerful.

Another fun part of the movie is the interview into which Jones suckered a young Rothschild heir, a fellow heavily into promoting save-the-planet concerts. Jones threw a rather ludicrous "fact" at the dear boy, who took the bait like an idiot and responded with one of the most self-defeatingly stupid answers I've ever heard from an ostensible heir to shadowy greatness. I actually had to get out of my chair and walk a few feet away during the Rothschild pup's blithering oral dance. Whether or not Jones knew his "fact" about other planets in the solar system exhibiting signs of warming was ridiculous, he certainly got a future Bilderberger to make an ass of himself.

I should also point out that Endgame touched a soft spot in my heart as it took on such historical icons as Bertrand Russell, a man whose bizarre statements about depopulation made him someone I have reviled both as a person and as an intellectual inspiration my whole adult life; Russell resides in the same level of my esteem with self-fawning sods like Ayn Rand and Henry David Thoreau. Another joy to my heart came in the mention that Vice President Dick Cheney, in making his triumphal return to the Council on Foreign Relations some years back, commented on the use of ethnic bio-weapons. (Gee, with stuff like that being talked about by White leaders of the Free World, it's no wonder people like Rev. Wright are considered total lunatics when they start their bizarre rants about AIDS being human-manufactured to kill Blacks.)

I tell you, if all that wasn't enough, I became downright giddy when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were trotted out for a brief flogging.

Yes, for me, Endgame was a veritable orgy of evil, sinful, wrongful delight, the kind of stuff I know very well is just plain mind-rotting in the same way a rare, fatty, 20-ounce steak cooked on an open fire and a nose-piercing, mucous-clearing cigar are bad for me. God! but it was sweet.

For me, the list of pleasure points in Endgame was rather long; but just because Jones and I have a common manifest of disliked creeps and just because we share a deep concern for the emergence of an authoritarian state, I simply cannot allow that I agree with the scope of his conspiracy theory. I do not, and the reason is quite simple: even though the Bilderbergers really do imagine themselves controlling the fate of the world, and even though their idiocy has caused actual harm, they are pathetically incompetent in their silly plans, schemes, and dreams. Unless their master plan really was to crater the world economy with a blithering combination of neo-liberals, neo-conservatives, communists, Right-wing thugs, religious nutcases, and assorted other thunderously ignorant operatives, where we are headed would be the very last place putative global controllers would have wanted to go: down this path we are plunging lies what will in all likelihood be a horrendous, destructive clash of classes over everything from food to shelter to freedom. As enfeebled of mind as Americans have been for a long time, and as weak and reckless as political opposition has been to the insanity of the Bush Administration, its military adventures abroad, and its ever-expanding, ever-more-intrusive law enforcement machinery at home, the dynamic will change, and the change will be dramatic.

It will also be ugly.

Shadowy, filthy rich cretins who meet once a year to plan the fate of the world would be awfully stupid to risk a global economic collapse that could just as easily lead to anarchy as it could to some pretext for a one-world, authoritarian government solution.

Certainly, those shadowy, filthy rich cretins are not that stupid. Such an idea is every bit as crazy as saying that the richest, most powerful nation on Earth would allow itself to be ruled, and thereby economically destroyed, for eight long years by a vicious, moronic, inarticulate, power-mad, secretive, incompetent fool.

The very idea is laughable.

Anyway, grab some popcorn, pour a drink, close the curtains, and spend a little more than two hours watching Endgame. If nothing else, it's certainly worth a laugh.




The Dark Wraith gives it two thumbs way up.

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With thanks to Minstrel Boy of Harp and Sword for the inspiration, this graphic may be republished with attribute.