Before I Give Myself a Well-Deserved RugBurn

I'm in a horrendous mood: EFCA's fucked, fntsy bsbl is off to a false start, and my worst pangs are wholly unmentionable for the moment. Suffice it to say that the soothing, sleek seal that is the Sea and Cake's Car Alarm isn't even enough to calm my shit down. Whatever, I'll spin it again....

Anyway, all this shit makes Dean Baker's shit-talk-y, sardonic Beat the Press blog even more appropriate than it already always is. No matter how far we've all contorted ourselves in the service of sanctioning and/or "giving a pass" to these or those of the President's this and thats, I think we all do well to keep the raspier raps from Baker, Henwood, Frank and Reed close at hand --- even if it means my recycling new iterations of what're closely-held, nearly 'goes without saying'-y premises.

Par example:

The media are busy perpetuating a myth that the United States has been a beacon of "free market" capitalism. This is a lie. The United States never had free market capitalism and certainly the system in place over the last three decades hardly qualifies.

The U.S. put in place policies designed to transfer income from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. This is most evident now with the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent bailing out the banks. For the last three decades, the banks and their top executives, made vast fortunes using a free government insurance policy called "too big to fail," under which bond holders and other creditors could lend money to the banks knowing that the government would honor their debts if they ever got into trouble.

It is an outright lie to call this a "free market." This is a huge government handout. This insurance policy is enormously valuable and the banks did not have to pay a penny for it. The banks are ardent opponents of free market capitalism. None of them have advocated that they be allowed to collapse.