They will chuckle and smirk their
ways to hell on Earth, for no riverieras
will survive as their playgrounds and their mansions sink into the earth as if
they had been built in quicksand.
Enough of Revelation and
Jeremiah.
The book is structured
in a way that envelopes the catalog of the international crimesters with the
particulars of their drowning of this country's underclasses--our voting rights,
in particular. Other perspectives might be as compelling (people's health
insurance and their right to union pay scale, and their pensions)--this Titanic
is almost sunk--but voting embraces the bottom line of our democracy, the first
modern democracy that has spawned so many successful offspring. As long as its
smallest tip is visible above the Corruption Ocean, the battle must persist.
And so atrocities that
have so mangled our voting rights (effects) surround discussion of the causes
(the bad billionaires).
The transition from effects to causes of this miasma is campaign finance--who's working so hard backstage to finance all of these operations ("These operations"--undermining of our electoral system--cost money, manhours, and ingenuity)? Well, Citizens United in 2010 freed all of those billionaires to heave as much as they wanted into political campaigning. And who allowed that? The Roberts-run Supreme Court.
Then there are those
Kardashians of the underworld, the Koch Brothers, becoming more and more
notorious as the effects of their activities multiply exponentially. It was
their corporate lawyer, Ted Olson, who took some time off to argue before the
Supreme Court on behalf of Citizens United, which represented all that is
reprehensible about the human race, as it drove through this epic overturning
of limitations on campaign finance, known as the McCain-Feingold Act. Russ
Feingold was turned out of office thereafter and McCain abandoned his morals to
join new compadres. So it went.
Most charitably, the bazillions
these compadres amass don't all go to line their pockets. Some of it goes into
corrupting elections among other forms of skullduggery, which inflates their
power, and this in turn amasses more money. You know the drill.
Palast exposes their
machinations--only some of them, alas, for there are so many--zeroing in on
characters we have met in his previous publications, including Armed Madhouse and Vultures' Picnic. Remember the
top Vulture, Goldfinger Paul Singer? Revered among his crooked colleagues
for buying up third-world debt, inflating it, and then inflicting his bill
collectors on collapsing economies like Greece and, even worse, the Congo? This
"corpse chewer" also thrives on an asbestos manufacturer he purchased and
salvaged by reducing compensatory payments to the multitude of asbestosis
patients the industry generated.
Blocked from devouring
Argentina's economy in one gulp, "undermining the safety of the entire world, financial
system, destabilizing every financial rescue mission from South America to
Greece to the Congo," by Obama, Goldfinger salivates for this kill as even UBS,
JPMorgan, and Citibank chieftains have allied themselves with Obama and
Clinton.
Like Cheney, Goldfinger does have
a soft spot for gay marriage in that his son wanted to marry his partner, so
Dad bought out the New York state legislature to guarantee the nuptials, all
the while collaborating with radical reactionary colleagues throughout the
country who block this leniency in other states.
Remember Ice Man Simmons? That
government manipulator who spins his way through government regulations to
build toxic waste dumps that infect, for example, the Ogallala aquifer, the
gigantic reservoir that provides drinking water for eight states? Obama managed
to steer the XL pipeline away from it. But the King of Filth couldn't care less--he
amassed the billions to build the dumps by manufacturing paint that has led-poisoned countless
public school students.
Oh, God, and how did Larry
Summers and Tim Geithner receive the keys to our economy under Obama? Through a
nice lady, Penny P., who introduced him to Paul Rubin, responsible for raining
the "pennies from heaven" on O's 2008 campaign that helped win him the White
House. So pour a bit of dust on the Donkeys' halo, alas. Palast even catches
them compromising with the pachyderms to avoid massive criminal indictment--oh,
celebrate post-partisanship!
"It's billionaire
banking-powers versus billionaire hedge-fund speculators," writes the Truth
Sleuth.
"Here is the real battle
of 2012--a winner-take-all war over the control of the world financial system. .
. .
"The trillion-dollar high-stakes showdown between these finance
superpowers, the billionaires versus the bankers, will be played out in 2012
and beyond, with super-PACs, supercomputers, voter-roll purges, senators, congressmen,
and the White House as the pieces on the chessboard moved by the invisible
hands."
Don't forget the Koch
brothers, who would receive a Nobel prize for gutter sliming if such a thing
existed. Whistleblower Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona reported their theft
of "tens of millions worth of oil snatched from Indian and federal lands, possibly
over $100 million pilfered altogether" and subsequently lost his job. They have
a grand interest in the future of the XL pipeline, in that they own an oil
refinery in Texas where it would terminate its sinuous trek from Canada.
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