At least nine people were killed and at least 35 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. On Thursday police announced that a man had been arrested on charges of firing on a number of motorists recently, wounding three of them, on Kansas City-area highways. On April 13 three people, including a child, were murdered at two Jewish-affiliated facilities in Overland Park, Kan., leading to the arrest of a white supremacist. On April 12, armed militias in Nevada got the federal government to retreat, allowing rancher Cliven Bundy to continue to graze his cattle on public land. All this happened over a span of only nine days in the life of a country where more than 250 people are shot every day. In America, violence and the threat of lethal force are the ways we communicate. Violence-the preferred form of control by the state-is an expression of our hatred, self-loathing and lust for vengeance. And this bloodletting will increasingly mark a nation in terminal decline.

Violence, as H. Rap Brown said, is "as American as cherry pie." It has a long and coveted place in U.S. history. Vigilante groups including slave patrols, gunslingers, Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts detectives, gangs of strikebreakers, gun thugs, company militias, the White Citizens' Council, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the Ku Klux Klan, which boasted more than 3 million members between 1915 and 1944 and took over the governance of some states, formed and shaped America. Heavily armed mercenary paramilitaries, armed militias such as the Oath Keepers and the anti-immigration extremist group Ranch Rescue, along with omnipotent and militarized police forces, are parts of a seamless continuation of America's gun culture and tradition of vigilantism. And roaming the landscape along with these vigilante groups are lone gunmen who kill for money or power or at the command of their personal demons.

Vigilante groups in America do not trade violence for violence. They murder anyone who defies the structures of capitalism, even if the victims are unarmed. The vigilantes, often working with the approval and sometimes with the collusion of state law enforcement agencies, are rarely held accountable. They are capitalism's shock troops, its ideological vanguard, used to break populist movements. Imagine that, if instead of right-wing militias, so-called "ecoterrorists"-who have never been found responsible for taking a single American life-had showed up armed in Nevada. How would the authorities have responded if those carrying guns had been from Earth First? Take a guess. Across U.S. history, hundreds of unarmed labor union members have been shot to death by vigilante groups working on behalf of coal, steel or mining concerns, and thousands more have been wounded. The United States has had the bloodiest labor wars in the industrialized world. Murderous rampages by vigilante groups, almost always in the pay of companies or oligarchs, have been unleashed on union members and agitators although no American labor union ever publicly called for an armed uprising. African-Americans, too, have endured a vigilante reign of terror, one that lasted for generations after the Civil War.

And all the while, vigilantes have been lionized by popular culture, winning mythic status in Hollywood movies that glorify lone avengers.

Vigilante bands have served and continue to serve the interests of state power or, as in the case involving the Nevada rancher, corporations that seek to eradicate public lands. They are used to make sure the dispossessed and marginalized remain dispossessed and marginalized. They revel in a demented hypermasculinity. They champion a racist nationalism that is fused with the iconography, language and rituals of the Christian religion. And they have huge megaphones on the airwaves, funded by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism, to spread their message. They are the bedrock of American fascism. The terror inflicted by street shootings in cities like Chicago conveniently gives these vigilante groups their right to existence.

The raison d'etre given by vigilante groups for the need to bear arms is that these weapons protect us from tyranny and keep us safe and secure in our homes. But history does not support this contention. The Communist Party during the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany did not lack for weapons. Throughout the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, citizens had assault weapons in their homes. In Yugoslavia during the war there, AK-47 assault rifles were almost as common in households as stoves. I watched in Iraq and Yugoslavia as heavily armed units encircled houses and those inside walked out with hands in the air, leaving their assault rifles inside. And neither will American families engage in shootouts should members of the U.S. Army or SWAT teams surround their homes. When roughly 10,000 armed miners at Blair Mountain in West Virginia rose up in 1921 for the right to form unions and held gun thugs and company militias at bay, the government called in the Army. The miners were not suicidal. When the Army arrived they disbanded. And faced with the full weight of the U.S. military, almost any armed group would disband, and that includes vigilantes. The militias in Nevada might have gotten the Bureau of Land Management to back down, but they would have scattered like frightened crows if the government had sent in the 101st Airborne.

America's vigilante violence, rather than a protection from tyranny, is an expression of the fear by white people, especially white men, of the black underclass. This underclass has been enslaved, lynched, imprisoned and impoverished for centuries. The white vigilantes do not acknowledge the reality of this oppression, but at the same time they are deeply worried about retribution directed against whites. Guns, for this reason, are easily available to white people while gun ownership is largely criminalized for blacks. The hatred expressed by vigilante groups for people of color, along with Jews and Muslims, is matched by their hatred for the college-educated elite, who did not decry the steady impoverishment of the working class. People of color, along with those who espouse the liberal social values of the college-educated elites, including gun control, are seen by the vigilantes as contaminants to society that must be removed to restore the nation to health.

Richard Rorty in "Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America" writes that when our breakdown begins, "the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words 'nigger' and 'kike' will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet."

Our inability to formulate a coherent, militant revolutionary ideology, meanwhile, leaves us powerless in the face of mounting violence. We wander around in a daze. We lack the toughness and asceticism of the radicals who went before us-the Wobblies, the anarchists, the socialists and the communists. We preach a mishmash of tolerance and Oprah-like hope and exude a fuzzy faith in the power of the people. And because of this we are run over like frogs blindly hopping up and down on a road.

Our most cherished civil liberties have been taken from us. Our incomes are in free fall while obscene wealth is in the hands of a few oligarchs. We are watched and monitored by the most pervasive security and surveillance system in human history. We are hemmed in by archipelagos of prisons. And the ecosystem on which we depend for life is being destroyed. And, through it all, we are bombarded with propaganda, manipulated and mocked by our elites as we dance in their choreographed political charades.

We must begin to speak in the language of revolution, not accommodation. We must direct the rage that grips huge swaths of the population not against the oppressed but against the structures of corporate power that create oppression. We will have to begin from scratch, for America has no revolutionary intellectual tradition, with the exception of Thomas Paine. We have produced notable anarchists-Randolph Bourne, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and Noam Chomsky. We have an array of great black radicals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, James Cone and Cornel West, as astute about the evils of empire as white supremacy. We once had some fine socialists, Eugene V. Debs among them. But we lack genuine revolutionists such as Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, and because of this we are losing the class war.

As the historian Richard Hofstadter writes in "American Violence," his book with Michael Wallace, class conflict and income inequality in the United States, now at near historical levels, have traditionally been "overshadowed by ethnic-religious and racial conflict. Intermittent group warfare has been our substitute for, or alternative to, class war, and class war itself, when it has flared up, has seldom taken place in a clear atmosphere, unclouded by our racial-ethnic antagonisms and by our complex hierarchy of status based upon religious-ethnic-racial qualities." There have been a few forays into insurrectionary violence, including the 1786-87 Shays' Rebellion and the armed uprising by the Blair Mountain coal miners. But these insurrections have lacked, as Hofstadter wrote, "an ideological and a geographical center." Insurrectionary violence in America has, he observed, "been too various, diffuse, and spontaneous to be forged into a single, sustained, inveterate hatred shared by entire social classes." A revolutionary language and consciousness must replace the current murderous nihilism.

The government is banking on the fact that we are not hard-wired for revolution. The state, for this reason, permits the population to load itself up with weapons, including assault rifles, because it understands that they are almost never turned against centers of power. There are some 310 million firearms in the United States, including 114 million handguns, 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns. There is no reliable data on the number of military-style assault weapons in private hands, but one estimate is 1.5 million. The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world-an average of 90 per 100 people. We shoot each other or we shoot ourselves. Of the 282 people shot every day in the U.S., according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, 32 die in murders and 51 commit suicide.

As we build a revolutionary consciousness, we must never place our faith in violence, even as we understand that violence, especially by vigilantes, criminals and militarized police forces, will be used against us. Our strength is our truth. And this truth terrifies our power elites. Truth, not force, is the real power of revolutionaries. It was an understanding of the truth about the decadence of the czarist regime that led soldiers in the 1917 February Revolution in Russia to mutiny against their officers, leading to the abdication of Nicholas II. It was similar truths that, having finally penetrated the militaries, doomed Louis XVI, the Shah of Iran and the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Revolutions do not succeed because of violence, although violence is often a component of revolutions. The glorification of violence as the principal agent of change is a lie. Revolutions succeed because of revolutionary thinking. Such consciousness takes years to build. It slowly, invisibly burrows into the organs of power. It leads those on the inside to defect to the revolution. And once that happens, state power crumbles.

If you read one business book this year, make it "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis. The journalist famous for "Moneyball" and "The Big Short" takes readers inside the parasitic world of high-frequency trading that is harming the broader economy.

The technical architecture of high-frequency trading is right out of a sci-fi movie - the schemes rely on algorithms that seem artificially intelligent, and the velocity of transaction signals approach light speed. As Lewis recounts, all that technological wizardry is marshaled to let insiders know information before everyone else, which consequently lets those insiders extract wealth from the market.

The good news is that a financial transaction tax can at once raise public resources and disincentivize the most predatory schemes. The even better news is that structural changes in the industry have made such a tax more economically viable than ever.

Before getting to that change, consider the basics of the tax proposal. The idea is that if a tiny fee is slapped on securities transactions - say, a cent - the tax will barely affect the average investor but will force high-frequency, high-volume traders to pay a lot. Consequently, those predators might see less of an upside from - or even abandon - their market-rigging schemes. And if they don't, then at least the government will generate new resources to enforce laws protecting average investors.

Of course, when this idea gained steam before, it was deflated by those arguing that the tax would prompt stock exchanges to move to jurisdictions that don't impose such a levy. In this tale, the city, state or country that creates a transaction tax won't stop high-frequency trading - it will only hurt itself by driving financial business to another locale.

On its face, it is a powerful argument - so powerful, in fact, that when Chicago's municipal government recently considered a financial transaction tax, the proposal was quickly dismissed.

The Illinois legislature then gave the Chicago Mercantile Exchange an $85 million tax cut when company executives threatened to move the company out of state.

No doubt, fear of such flight seems logical. Essentially, tax opponents ask us to assume that in the Internet era, stock exchanges - like many other information-sector enterprises - are no longer moored to specific geographies because they can supposedly conduct business through any digital conduit.

But that's where the aforementioned structural change has created a flaw in the logic. In a financial world where microseconds are now king, all conduits are not created equal and average Internet velocity is no longer enough. That reality potentially reduces some of the industry's geographic mobility. Why? Because while speculators themselves no longer need to physically be on specific trading room floors, they do need their computers to either be physically near those exchanges' computers or hooked up to them through special ultra-fast conduits. Additionally, the newly computerized exchanges need ever-more massive data centers and conduits to process the accelerating information flow.

All of that technology requires financial firms to make huge investments in lots of immobile digital infrastructure. That means it may now be prohibitively expensive and/or logistically difficult for those financial firms to simply pick up and move. Indeed, just like petroleum companies cannot realistically threaten to leave oil-rich locales if they don't like a tax, parts of the financial world are captive to the locales in which they've built their digital systems.

This is the silver lining of speed-driven finance. Simply put, the federal, state and local governments that host the financial industry have more leverage because, despite threats, they don't have to fear the industry leaving.

Three years ago Sweden was widely regarded as a role model in how to deal with a global crisis. The nation's exports were hit hard by slumping world trade but snapped back; its well-regulated banks rode out the financial storm; its strong social insurance programs supported consumer demand; and unlike much of Europe, it still had its own currency, giving it much-needed flexibility. By mid-2010 output was surging, and unemployment was falling fast. Sweden, declared The Washington Post, was "the rock star of the recovery."

Then the sadomonetarists moved in.

The story so far: In 2010 Sweden's economy was doing much better than those of most other advanced countries. But unemployment was still high, and inflation was low. Nonetheless, the Riksbank - Sweden's equivalent of the Federal Reserve - decided to start raising interest rates.

There was some dissent within the Riksbank over this decision. Lars Svensson, a deputy governor at the time - and a former Princeton colleague of mine - vociferously opposed the rate hikes. Mr. Svensson, one of the world's leading experts on Japanese-style deflationary traps, warned that raising interest rates in a still-depressed economy put Sweden at risk of a similar outcome. But he found himself isolated, and left the Riksbank in 2013.

Sure enough, Swedish unemployment stopped falling soon after the rate hikes began. Deflation took a little longer, but it eventually arrived. The rock star of the recovery has turned itself into Japan.

So why did the Riksbank make such a terrible mistake? That's a hard question to answer, because officials changed their story over time. At first the bank's governor declared that it was all about heading off inflation: "If the interest rate isn't raised now, we'll run the risk of too much inflation further ahead ... Our most important task is to ensure that we meet our inflation target of 2 percent." But as inflation slid toward zero, falling ever further below that supposedly crucial target, the Riksbank offered a new rationale: tight money was about curbing a housing bubble, to avert financial instability. That is, as the situation changed, officials invented new rationales for an unchanging policy.

In short, this was a classic case of sadomonetarism in action.

I'm using that term (coined by William Keegan of The Observer) advisedly, not just to be colorful. At least as I define it, sadomonetarism is an attitude, common among monetary officials and commentators, that involves a visceral dislike for low interest rates and easy money, even when unemployment is high and inflation is low. You find many sadomonetarists at international organizations; in the United States they tend to dwell on Wall Street or in right-leaning economics departments. They don't, I'm happy to say, exert much influence at the Federal Reserve - but they do constantly harass the Fed, demanding that it stop its efforts to boost employment.

Indeed, the Riksbank's evolving justifications for rate hikes were mirrored at international organizations like the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements, an influential bankers' bank that is a sadomonetarist stronghold. Just like the Riksbank, the bank changed its rationale for rate hikes - It's about inflation! It's about financial stability! - but never its policy demands.

Where does this gut dislike for low rates come from? At some level it has to reflect an instinctive identification with the interests of wealthy creditors as opposed to usually poorer debtors. But it's also driven, I believe, by the desire of many monetary officials to pose as serious, tough-minded people - and to demonstrate how tough they are by inflicting pain.

Whatever their motives, sadomonetarists have already done a lot of damage. In Sweden they have extracted defeat from the jaws of victory, turning an economic success story into a tale of stagnation and deflation as far as the eye can see.

And they could do much more damage in the future. Financial markets have been fairly calm lately - no big banking crises, no imminent threats of euro breakup. But it would be wrong and dangerous to assume that recovery is assured: bad policies could all too easily undermine our still-sluggish economic progress. So when serious-sounding men in dark suits tell you that it's time to stop all this easy money and raise rates, beware: Look at what such people have done to Sweden.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

Wow, I am always puzzled at how lucky some people are as apposed to others. Presently, a lot of media fanfare and armed militia have come to the aid of rancher "Cliven Bundy." It seems that they have helped him win the day. Or, so it would seem at least for now.

Currently, his brothers in arms have successfully stopped the confiscation of his cattle by U.S. Federal Agents and the Bureau of land Management (BLM) authorities. Heck, he even got his cattle returned to him after they had him dead to rights grazing cattle for 20 years on land he did not own. Amazing! That's what I call one lucky SOB! Although, my intuition tells me the FED will soon get their money in full.

Call me Curious George. Now that Bundy got his cattle back, will the Koch Brothers quietly come to his aid and pay his fines for him? Or, perhaps some other filthy rich fat cat such as Sheldon Adelson? Will they both gallop in on their white horses with cash registers in their saddlebags? If so, expect a lot of future political posturing to be exploited out of this ordeal. Stay tuned for that GOP goodie. Hmmm, I would sure love to be a fly on the wall at the Bundy ranch when this all plays out.

Imagine that! A Federal hotplate was in the "on" position (with white rancher frog in pot) slowly simmering in the courts for 20 years. Then suddenly -- for no apparent reason -- Federal boots appeared on the ground in Nevada going after poor Mr. Bundy for repeatedly refusing to pay the Department of Interior money he owes to the tune of one million dollars for grazing his cattle on public land.

And, although I admit, I'm no fan of the BLM or the FED; something doesn't fit. To me, this whole Bundy affair seems more like a square peg being forced into a round hole for reasons not yet known. It almost seems staged... I do not know. Regardless, I feel a real sense of injustice when I compare the Bundy ordeal to a much worse incident that occurred 11 years ago to an honorable Western Shoshone family who fought a much worse battle and lost much, much more.

Indeed, such was the case with Western Shoshone Tribal members Carrie and Mary Dann. I admit, this is personal for me. I say this because my parents knew the Dunn family. And my father, Anthony Guarisco, was especially close to Clifford Dunn and many other Native Americans when he organized protest events at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) back in 1991.

Unfortunately, the Danns did not have the devil's luck, like Mr. Bundy. Nope, they had no merry band of gun toting militia to help them out. Nor did they have any politicians in their pocket on their side of the isle. Sadly, just like most other honorable Native American citizens throughout history trying to live their lives in peace on their ancestral land, they got screwed without a kiss.

And just why is that? How do some frogs beat the slow boiling pot scenario more than others? Is a white rancher frog somehow more heat resistant than those of color? Truth or consequence -- is this some weird "pot" high that reeks of unfairness? What gives?

FYI, back in 1973, and in direct violation of the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863, U.S. Government goons relentlessly ordered the Dann sisters off their land near Crescent Valley, Nevada -- not far from where the Bundy ranch is located. Boldly, the brave Native American sisters stood their ground and, in 1979 (at a time when bucko corporate money filled bureaucratic pockets wanting to exploit the land for mining, etc.), the U.S. Government attempted to buy them-off, offering pennies on the dollar to abandon their claim to their sacred land. In fairness of Native American customs, it was even put to a vote.

And the verdict was crystal clear. Over 80% of the Western Shoshone refused to take the deal. Furthermore, the Western Shoshone rightfully demanded the treaty of 1863 be upheld and honored; and it was upheld by the United Nations and to this day, the United States (in direct violation) refuses to acknowledge it.

It begs many questions: Since when did Shoshone land become property of the U.S. Government in violation of the U.N.?

Why does the Government continue to falsely claim ownership of this ancestral Native American land, when it is not theirs?

What gives the U.S. Government the right to charge anyone anything when they do not own it?

This and many more questions need to be answered.

Perhaps this is a good time to note that Mr. Bundy said he believes the Federal Government does not own the land his cows have grazed on. I agree. He also asserts this land belongs to the State of Nevada. Well, since the U.N. agrees this land belongs to the Western Shoshone, perhaps rancher Bundy should pay his rent to the legal owner where his cows go moo -- to the "Western Shoshone."

Also, Mr. Bundy's son declared "this is how the west was won." Well, let's set the record straight here and now: I think most of us with half a brain already know the west was conquered by blood thirsty animals that brutally killed Indians and stole their land. And, it's also worth noting they enslaved many others with their barbaric human trafficking.

As I said before, the Dann sisters were NOT nearly as lucky as Mr. Bundy. In 2003, Federal agents conducted a series of raids on the Dann ranch. They came in full force with helicopters, ATVs, and men on horseback and these brutes confiscated/stole over 500 horses and many, many cattle without any legal authority to do so.

During the last raid, in a final act of desperation, Elder Clifford Dann poured gasoline on himself and lit the match thinking his self-emulsion might stop the thieving federal agents. Nope. Not on that day. Not ever. They barely skipped a beat. They quickly put the fire out, arrested him, and continued the raid unabated. In the end, the Federal government levied a hefty $3 million fine on the Dann sisters and kept their horses and cattle, never to be returned. Are you paying attention Mr. Bundy? This was a repeat lesson of how the west was won.

Don't take my word for it.

Simply ask any Native American Indian. And, if you really want to know the real scoop of over 200 years of constant injustice, have a chat with any member of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Be it Wounded knee, the Trail of Tears, or the massacres at Pine Ridge, et al ... take your pick, the evidence is overwhelming.

"I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." So proclaimed Alabama Gov. George Wallace more than a half-century ago. His proudly racist rhetoric was matched by heinous actions: Murders, lynchings and systemic violence, often endorsed or organized by state and local governments, were inflicted on African-Americans and their allies struggling for civil rights. Despite that, those fighting for equality prevailed. Among the successes were the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, affirmative action and court-ordered integration of schools. But with this week's U.S. Supreme Court decision supporting Michigan's ban against affirmative action in state university admissions, and with the increasing resegregation of schools, it seems like Wallace's dream of "segregation forever" may be alive and all too well.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist with the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which has just published her yearlong, 9,000-word piece on the resegregation of public schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This remarkable report, "Segregation Now," notes that "In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened." The Brown decision, issued in May of 1954, covered several pending court cases (all organized by the NAACP) challenging school segregation. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren authored the unanimous decision, writing, "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Hannah-Jones tells the history of school desegregation in Tuscaloosa through the lens of three generations of the Dent family. James Dent grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, never sharing a classroom with a white student. His daughter, Melissa, first went to an integrated middle school in 1980. It had taken decades for Tuscaloosa to implement desegregation, and then only by additional court orders. The city's two high schools were consolidated into one, Central High, which became a state powerhouse of excellence, both academic and athletic. Melissa went on to become the first in her family's history to graduate from college.

But this golden era of desegregation was short-lived. "Tuscaloosa has become one of the most rapidly resegregating school districts in the country," Hannah-Jones explained on our "Democracy Now!" news hour. "In 2000, when a federal judge released Tuscaloosa from its court order, the school board immediately voted to split up Central [High School]. Because of fears of white flight ... they created three high schools-two integrated and one that was entirely black." Here is her key finding: a new kind of segregation. While there are no "whites only" schools in Tuscaloosa, as there were up until 1979, there is now a struggling "blacks only" school-Central High. "The irony is that Central High School is actually located in an integrated neighborhood, but the white students right across the street from the school are gerrymandered into a district to go to an integrated school, and that Central was created as a black school by the intentional drawing of district lines."

The problem is not limited to the Deep South. UCLA's Civil Rights Project has been tracking national trends. Surprisingly, it found that "New York has the most segregated schools in the country. ... Heavily impacting these state rankings is New York City, home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation." The UCLA report repeatedly uses a term that is now common in academic circles studying resegregation: "apartheid schools"-those schools with less than 1 percent white student enrollment. The report continues, "Across New York City, 73 percent of charters were considered apartheid schools and 90 percent were intensely segregated (less than 10 percent white enrollment) schools in 2010."

This week's Supreme Court decision will surely continue the trend of resegregation from high schools into colleges. The 6-2 vote upheld the Michigan ban on race-based affirmative action in state university admissions. Chief Justice John Roberts expressed his feelings about race in 2007, when he controversially said, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent from the majority this week, wrote, "My colleagues are of the view that we should leave race out of the picture entirely and let the voters sort it out. ... It is a sentiment out of touch with reality."

Dear Unter Fuhrer Pompeo,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your attempts to hide GMO poisons in our food, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglicans whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 05-24-2014. We salute you Herr Pompeo, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Biden