Here is former CNBC moneybunny Erin Burnett, now prostituting herself before a wider audience at CNN. Listen carefully, it's hard to keep track of all the lies she tells.
I wonder, does it hurt? In those quiet moments, the tranquil, fleeting interludes between thoughts, in the space between here and there, does she feel remorse for the crimes to which she is a willing party? Guilt for her complicity in the greatest heist in the history of our species? Her viewers, the poor fools, trust her. She enters their homes and speaks to their families, they believe what she tells them. And she abuses them nightly. I could find no shelter from my conscience were I ever to be so disingenuous, yet Burnett routinely betrays the people who adore her, and on behalf of the worst filth on earth.
She can make a million dollars a month without victimizing anyone, yet she prefers to commit treason.
Let's deconstruct her lies:
1, The protests started with less than a dozen and is now grown to hundreds.
There have been people in Zuccotti Park for weeks and initially they may have been as few as she suggests, but when the OccupyWallStreet protest began it was considerably more than a dozen and is now thousands and growing daily.
2, The protesters don't seem to know what they are protesting.
Wow! Now that's a whopper! Everybody on the planet knows what this rebellion and all the others going on around the world are about, but in case you, like Ms. Information, missed it, here is their statement:
Occupy Wall Street! Collective statement of the protesters…
What follows is the first official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park:
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government ontracts.*
To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
If Erin still doesn't get it we can have this translated into pictures for her.
3, Now for the money shot: Taxpayers have made money from Wall Street part of the bailout.
Here is Dean Baker on this deception:
The news outlets that insisted Congress approve TARP or the world will end have been anxiously touting the prospect of repayments and possible profits for the taxpayers from one-time basket cases like Citigroup and AIG. It is worth noting that the question of the government showing a profit or loss on its loans to these companies has little to do with whether the bailout was a net benefit to taxpayers.
Suppose the government uncovered a counterfeiting operation. Instead of shutting it down, suppose it allowed the counterfeiters to print $1 trillion in counterfeit money and buy up the stock of legitimate companies. The counterfeiters would then give ten percent of this stock, worth $100 billion, to the government and shut down their counterfeiting operations.
By the TARP accounting logic, the taxpayers made $100 billion on this deal. In reality, the counterfeiters were allowed to lay claim to $900 billion of the country's wealth based on their counterfeit currency.
The situation with the TARP is similar. Through the TARP and the much larger Fed lending operations, the Wall Street banks were able to borrow money at far below market interest rates. This allowed them to make substantial profits at the peak of the financial crisis. They are now using the profits made with government funds to repay the government with interest. However, the shareholders, creditors, and top executives of these banks are now far richer than they would be if they had not been given access to public money at below market rates.
To imply that this situation has profited the taxpaying public as a whole because the loans have been repaid is extremely misleading, just as it would be inaccurate to imply that the country had benefited by getting a cut of the counterfeiters' profits.
There's actually more to it than this. The banks got TARP and other moneys from the Treasury and then got more loans from the Fed which they used to pay off the original loans. In this brief video Dylan Ratigan explains the criminality.
And here he explains how the claim that the TARP hasn't been paid off in full even with the Fed pushing sheaf after sheaf of new, low-interest money out the discount window to Wall Street:
1. TARP itself hasn't even made money. AIG alone still owes us $75.6 billion. However, they always add the caveat "Other than AIG..." when they say that the bailouts were "profitable." But the AIG money was directly paid to many of these same banks that "paid back their TARP" at an outrageous 100 cents on the dollar! Mind you, this was done by government officials that were the former employees and current shareholders of the very banks they were helping. Let's make banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Societe Generale pay back the $105 billion of stolen taxpayer money before we let anyone say "TARP was paid back."
2. TARP is a tiny little part of a massive amount of taxpayer support. TARP is actually less than 10 percent of your tax dollars that have been handed to the banks. And now the banks "paid back" the tiny slice that is TARP with our money, and you are supposed cheer them for savvy. At this very moment, the taxpayer is still owed $2.02 trillion dollars for the bailout by our politicians and banksters, and that number is growing every day.
Never mind the money that these same banks make getting endless 0 percent interest loans from the Federal Reserve (aka you) while either they lend it back to you at 14 percent interest or just lend it right to back the government and pocket the yield. Never mind the multitude of benefits they get from being Too Big To Fail. But you're not supposed to pay attention to that; you're only supposed to notice how fast they paid back TARP!
So instead of these politicians looking for the only obvious place to find the money --clawbacks from the people who continue to steal it -- we are now being subjected to outright lies as they once again pick the banksters over the people who voted them in. But don't let them, or anyone in the media, get away with it without hearing from you.
Here is Propublica's Bailout Tracker. Do the math.
And there's more:
Burnett's assertion that the bailout has been profitable for the American taxpayer is a garish, grotesque lie, and she knows it. She is a professional liar, a hired gun. It is what the media is for.
4, She double-checked her facts and confirmed that the bailout has been a money-maker for the American taxpayer.
Good work Erin!
5, With all the beatings and pepper spray, the police may have overstepped their bounds.
May?
Burnett is not alone in her condemnation of democracy. Note how Stretch Coulter keeps hitting her "mob uprising" talking point.
Here Wall Streeter turned TV host Larry Kudlow and Coulter, America's celebrity anorexic, spew all kinds of dreck to demonize the rebels.
1, Activists violently took on the NYPD.
The first rule of propaganda: Assert the opposite.
2, There's a link between Obama and the protesters.
Now that's funny. They are denouncing Obama, not endorsing him.
3,Protesters want Obama re-elected.
Miscasting this democratic, non-sectarian protest as a partisan plot is a typical propaganda ploy. And it is often effective as the purveyors of this filth are the same people who control what get said on newscasts. The can suppress the truth, and do.
4,Obama bailed out the banks.
While it is true that Obama supported the bailout and continued the program after assuming office, it was George Bush who bailed out the banks. His signature is on the authorizing bill, not Obama's
5, Obama made Goldman Sachs the 4th branch of government.
This is a whole lot of stink even for Ms. Flatulence as a) it was Bush who brought in Paulson from GS to run the bailout scam, and 2) she was all over the media at the time endorsing it. She must have fallen off her broomstick and hit her head.
6, The union agenda is Obama's agenda.
Obama has overseen the largest retrenchment in unionism since the Wilson administration. From a labor perspective, Obama is one of the worst presidents of all time.
7, Obama is behind the protest.
This is the single greatest threat to his presidency. The Tea Party has been calling him a socialist for years and he's ahead of every Republican challenger in the polls. The Occupy- protests around the country may bring his government down (and I hope it will).
8, It was a mob uprising like this that got us our constitution, the Shays' Rebellion.
Alas, the woman with the straw up her nose gets one right! Indeed there were a number of democratic insurrections in the aftermath of the War of Independence (Shays', Fries', the Whiskey Rebellion, which, incidentally, was caused by a government bailout of industry much like this one). The Constitution was, to paraphrase George Washington, an attempt to protect the rich from the poor. When they announced the original version it nearly caused a second revolution. A House of Representatives was reluctantly added and a Bill of Rights too, and the Founders eventually managed to ram it through the State assemblies after putting down the various rebellions. Where Stretch goes amok is in suggesting that the rebels were regressive and the Founders democratic. The opposite is true.
Kudlow and the blond bulimic are there to spin the revolt as favorably as possible for Wall Street, which in practice means lying their undersize asses off. Their adversary, the shill Walsh, is there in lieu of somebody who might genuinely argue the protesters case. If Wall Street didn't trust him he wouldn't be the host of Left Jab nor on the Larry Kudlow Show. This is political theater intended to frame the debate within acceptable parameters and to cast the protesters in the least flattering light. This is called perception management, and it's what the media does.
Here's an interesting twist on the "mob uprising" talking point. Rand Paul, a chip of the old plutocratic block, describes the protesters as a "Paris mob." There is in some circles in this country an infantile need to insult the French. Paul exploits this squalid tendency for his patrons on Wall Street. It is not clear if he is referring to the French Revolution, or the uprisings of 1848, 1871, 1936, or 1968. In any case each was a sublimely democratic event, and worthy of praise.
Here are Ingram and US Representative Peter King of New York hitting the same memes as Burnett, Kudlow, Stretch, and Paul: a mob that doesn't know what it wants. Contrasting this allegedly law-breaking movement with the Wall Street-launched, -organized, and -funded Tea Party demonstrations is obviously also an important talking point. The reaction of the police to the two movements tells us everything we need to know about the function of the state, and whose interests it serves.
And King throws in the standard canard of class war being waged by the poor against the rich. Remember the first rule of propaganda is assert the opposite.
And here is Liz Trotta going over the top. Note the they-don't-know-what-they-want trope is in play again.
The media exists to defend the ruling class. They exist to disinform, to safeguard the wealth and privilege of the oligarchy. And if you don't know that by now, you need to learn, before it's too late.
The good news is that they are scared. That capital is deploying their best celebrity dissemblers and devoting so much of their valuable air time to this democratic uprising is indicative of how frightened they are.
Who knows, maybe this time...
