PSALM 52

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Why do you boast of evil, O mighty man?

The steadfast love of God endures all the day.

 Your tongue plots destruction,

like a sharp razor, you worker of deceit.
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 You love evil more than good,

and lying more than speaking what is right. Selah

 You love all words that devour,

O deceitful tongue.

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 But God will break you down forever;

he will snatch and tear you from your tent;

he will uproot you from the land of the living. Selah

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The righteous shall see and fear,

and shall laugh at him, saying,

 “See the man who would not make

God his refuge,

but trusted in the abundance of his riches

and sought refuge in his own destruction!”

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 But I am like a green olive tree

in the house of God.

I trust in the steadfast love of God

forever and ever.

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 I will thank you forever,

because you have done it.

I will wait for your name, for it is good,

in the presence of the godly.

THE EMPIRE OF ILLUSION & WHITE TRASH

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Below is an excerpt from an interview

with Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Chris Hedges, who has a Masters of Divinity

degree from Harvard, and has spent almost

twenty years in global "hotspots" as a

foreign correspondent, fifteen of

them with The New York Times.

His most recent book came out last year:

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy

and the Triumph of Spectacle.

The interview is from the August 2010

issue of the Catholic Agitator.

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There has been a huge assault against

the capacity for moral autonomy,

especially within the church, so that

those figures who speak with any kind

of moral autonomy are immediately labeled

"political" and banished. We have a

corporate-controlled media that determines

almost everything that we watch, hear, or read.

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What they have done on the airways in

the news industry is to turn it into entertainment.

It is all about spectacle and debauchery.

Given what is happening in our country today,

the fact that the national news revolves

around John Edwards' mistress or Tiger Woods

replicates the kind of folly that embraces the

twilight days of civilizations. People are so

disconnected from reality that they do not

know how to read what is happening -

they cannot grasp that the walls are tumbling

down - and so they retreat into absurdities.

Cicero wrote about it at the end of the

Roman republic; Joseph Roth wrote about it

at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;

and I saw it in Yugoslovia. This is the disease

gripping American society today, giving a

kind of absurd quality to political and

civil discourse.

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The undercurrent of a world like ours,

where people are reduced to objects and

where there are no higher values,

where national myths collapse,

triggers a similar longing for annihilation

and a moral decline into hedonism and

giddy communal madness.

This is precisely what we are doing.

Everything that we are doing does ensure

our own annihilation, and yet there is a

kind of intoxicating quality... There is

something very seductive about disconnecting

yourself from the real and entertaining

yourself through the basest forms of

hedonism and selfishness.

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That is what reality programs on TV

are about. It is about promoting values that,

if you ticked them off in any psychology

textbook, belong to psychopaths:

self-aggrandizement; a capacity for

deception; a lack of remorse; an inability

to form friendships; betrayal.

These are all psychopathic qualities and

yet these are the very qualities that seem to

run Goldman Sachs or Citibank.

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The actual qualities that maintain

communities: sharing; honesty; the

capacity for self-sacrifice; loyalty; these

are the qualities that are ridiculed

in the culture, both at the top

and at the bottom.

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Chris Hedges has a column on Truthdig.com -

check it here:
http://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges
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Reality TV is sleazy, it is manipulative.
 It is as momentary as anything in popular culture.
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Morley Safer
CBS
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Mostly, it's a medium created BY white trash,
FOR white trash.  "White trash" has a new meaning.
  It's no longer people in west-Texas trailer courts who wear grimy clothes,
 drink cheap beer, smell strange, and have bad teeth.
These are the unfortunates who have been around since
the time of Christ, and much earlier actually, ever since
the rich and poor got divied' up.  No, it's not them.
It's the people who are horrible examples of their race -
shallow, idiotic cretins with bad values, NO class, and really
 ought to be sterilized....and reality TV is their new medium.
Human waste.  Donald Trump comes to mind.
As for the handful of Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics
who are caught up in it....well, sterilize them too.
 Society needs to get a handle on this, or
 it'll just get worse, and worse, and....
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Jeff Mulcahey
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GOLDMAN SACHS AND PSALM 28

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Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my rock;

be not silent to me: lest, if thou be silent to me,

I become like them that go down to the pit.

Hear the voice of my supplications,

when I cry unto thee, when I lift up

my hands toward thy holy oracle.

Draw me not away with the wicked,

and with the workers of iniquity,

which speak peace to their neighbors,

but mischief is in their hearts.

Give them according to their deeds,

and according to the wickedness

of their endeavors: give them

after the work of their hands;

render to them their desert.

Because they regard not the

works of the Lord,

nor the operation of his hands,

he shall destroy them,

and not build them up.

Blessed be the Lord,

because he hath heard the

voice of my supplications.

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Psalm 28, 1-6

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OBAMA THE SWINE HERDER & HIS PIGS

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The counterfeit nature of our economy

is troubling enough, given that financial

power is concentrated in the hands of a few

key players - "300 white guys in Manhattan,"

as a former high-placed executive puts it.

But over the course of the past year,

that group of insiders has also proved itself

brilliantly capable of enlisting the power of

the state to help along the process of concentrating

economic might - making it less and less likely

that the financial markets will ever be policed,

since the state is increasingly the captive

of these interests.

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The new president for whom we all had such

high hopes went and hired Michael Froman,

a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2

million bonus after he joined the White House,

to serve on his economic transition team -

at the same time the government was giving

Citigroup a massive bailout.

Then, after promising to curb the influence

of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman

Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff

at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite,

Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets.

He handed control of the Treasury and Federal

Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke,

a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers

being bellhops for New York bankers.

And on the first anniversary of the collapse

of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to

Wall Street to promote "serious financial

reform," his plan proved to be so completely

absent of balls that the share prices of

the major banks soared at the news.

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The nation's largest financial players are

able to write the rules for their own businesses

and brazenly steal billions under the noses

of regulators, and nothing is done about it.

A thing so fundamental to civilized society

as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note,

or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer

be protected, not even in a crisis, and a crime

as vulgar and conspicuous as counterfeiting

can take place on a systematic level for years

without being stopped, even after it begins

to affect the modern-day equivalents of the

Rockefellers and the Carnegies.

What 10 years ago was a cheap stockfraud

scheme for second-rate grifters in Brooklyn

has become a major profit center for Wall Street.

Our burglar class now rules the national economy.

And no one is trying to stop them.

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From a much longer article by

Matt Taibbi -

"WALL STREET'S NAKED SWINDLE"

Rolling Stone RS1089 (on the stands now)

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