In a Word...
Published by Julia Volkovah under on 12:24 PM...suck my rosy red, Irish shillelagh, you fucking Limey sociopath.
Same thing goes for Lloyd Blankfein, John Thain, Jamie Dimon and every Wall Street scumbag including the "late" Ken Lay just in case he is, as I deeply suspect, sipping piƱa coladas in the Bush's South American hideaway in Paraguay and getting his withered knob polished by some dark-skinned 14 year-old twink.
It's some cold comfort to know that Wall Street sociopaths and other captains of industry (as in Captain Bligh) disrespect members of Congress as much as they do us. All we need do is remember the dog and pony shows more commonly referred to as Congressional testimony involving oil, auto, war profiteering and banking CEOs. One need only think back a few years to recall Erik Prince's smirk and stealing the nameplate with his own name on it and the blatant disrespect shown to senior members of Congress, most recently from the arrogantly-squinting Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs.
The BP oil spill that FDL's Michael Whitney uncharitably reminds us cruelly interrupted Tony Hayward's life (and, oh yeah, the lives of thousands of fishermen along the Gulf coast) is now virtually a planetary event, one that will very likely adversely affect roughly a quarter of the southern shoreline of the continental United States.
Yet, despite this Biblical-class fuckuppery, all BP, Transocean and Halliburton can do is act like a sandlot team pointing at everyone else when a neighbor wants to know who put a baseball through his window. Then, to show you how insatiable their greed is, they then have the nerve to petition the Canadian parliament to lift their ban on drilling in the Arctic because they don't wanna pay $100,000,000 to build the backup system that could've prevented the Gulf oil spill.
Despite overwhelming evidence that Goldman Sachs' ultra Gecko-class greed has further hollowed out what was once a prosperous nation, cost us at least 8,000,000 jobs and millions of mortgages, what does it all boil down to? "How dare you question much less threaten our capacity to grab and hoard as much money as possible?"
So, we're now almost (not quite but almost) at the tipping point where the Gorton Fisherman, Rosie the Riveter, John Q. Public, John Doe and Joe Sixpack are finally getting the message that these little freaks that have metaphorically sprung from the ossified cunt of Ayn Rand are really out to kill us or, at the very least, our deaths will be merely incidental and will not cost them one z as they snooze on fine French linen.
So what will happen when we finally do reach that tipping point and take to open rebellion, when the sheer tonnage of screaming humanity will press on their gated communities, knock down those wrought iron gates and we rip their mansions apart with our bare hands?
No one will be home because they have all that covered.
Via Mark Ames of the Smirking Chimp (they're in desperate trouble, btw, and need as much moolah as possible) is a story of cowardly greed on such a level that it reads like something out of an Ian Fleming novel rewritten by the aforementioned Ayn Rand.
Answers Ames to my question,
We finally have the answer, and you're not going to like it: a new fleet of castles that float in the oceans. The super-wealthy are already building their first floating castle, a billion-dollar-plus luxury liner that offers permanent multimillion-dollar housing with the best protection of all: moats made of oceans, keeping the land-based Americans they've plundered at a safe distance.
That's right. To paraphrase a line from The Simpsons, They'll be getting away... very slowly.
The oddly-named Utopia is the first of these private ocean liners that's being built through a consortium of sociopaths that number among its ranks the almost admirably oleaginous Frank Carlucci of CIA infamy, cyber swinger Patri Friedman, grandson of platinum medal-winning douchebag Milton Friedman, and Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Throw in some other galactic-class douchebags deeply involved in a little company that used to employ a Bush and some bin Ladens and you have the blueprint for a massive escape plan for the unlanded gentry when the long-awaited Rapture finally hits.
This ocean liner will be almost 1000 feet long. Try to imagine a slightly shorter version of a Trident-class sub or three NFL football fields and you'll get an idea of the sheer scale of the number of scumbags who will be floating away like perfumed whale shit once the planet descends into an oily, smokey, flaming, cratered nest of homicidal humanity.
It's perhaps no coincidence that this deal is being put together by some of the most sociopathic scumbags this nation's ever produced. Think of the late Dennis Hopper's character The Deacon in Waterworld, his "Smokers" safely sequestered onboard the Exxon Valdez. Now imagine twice the sociopathy only in much more opulent surroundings.
Well, Tony Hayward and every other oil CEO on the planet earth is the Deacon, intent on blotting up for himself and his Randian Remainders every last fucking drop of oil just as Goldman Sachs will not rest until they've snatched every sticky, tarnished penny from every sugar jar in America.
Then they will take off with their ill-gotten swag in floating townships that will be virtually self-sufficient. These aren't luxury yachts we're talking about here, folks, but privately-owned ocean liners that make the largest yachts bought by billionaire sheiks look like glorified tugboats. The largest yachts in the world top out at about 170 meters or roughly 525 feet and cost perhaps $330 million. These will be almost twice that length and will cost over a billion dollars.
Why would anyone spend that much loot on a ship unless they were planning on spending the rest of their lives on it? A ship that size could virtually support its own economy with a permanent servant class that could accommodate a compliment of thousands of only the wealthiest 1/10th of the wealthiest 1%. And several of these are being built.
Imagine the Titanic minus the thousands of poor Irish in steerage. Then imagine Spartacus starring the servant class and you have the ultimate revenge tale. So, if you want a piece of this piratical plunder, start scanning Craigslist for some ocean liner jobs in the next year or two.