Wednesday, October 13, 2010

OBAMA and his CORRUPTION - A Nation Melts From the Weight Of It!

OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED PRESIDENT, AND HIS HAREM OF CORRUPTION!
THE NATION IS IN MELTDOWN, WHILE HIS BANKSTER DONORS COLLECT BILLIONS IN PILLAGE!
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The administration has rejected any effort to create jobs directly through a major public works program, or any serious measures to alleviate deepening poverty and mass suffering in a crisis which is now completing its third full year, with the average duration of unemployment the highest ever recorded.
This week, even as Obama was mouthing utterly hollow populist-sounding slogans, his spokesmen were taking to the airways to reject calls for a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures, despite mounting evidence of systematic fraud by banks and mortgage lenders.
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Obama and the Democrats combine pseudo-populist rhetoric with right-wing policies that benefit the financial-corporate elite. For the tens of millions of working people facing unemployment and the specter of homelessness and destitution, they have nothing to offer.

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The charge of foreign money allows the Democrats to wrap themselves in the flag and compete with the Republicans in appeals to nationalism and anti-immigrant prejudice. It has no factual basis. The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is an instrument of American banks and corporations that operate all over the world.
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Millions of working people in the United States are moving into a collision with the policies of the financial aristocracy and both of its parties. The November election will be followed by a turn to austerity policies, including attacks on Social Security, Medicare, public education and access to health care. It will signal an intensification of the war in Afghanistan and a continuation of US military interventions in Iraq and elsewhere. The attacks on democratic rights at home will be stepped up.
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Demagogy and duplicity: The Democrats in the 2010 elections
13 October 2010
With less than three weeks remaining in the 2010 election campaign, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are seeking to stave off a major electoral defeat by making a last-minute, fraudulent appeal to popular hostility towards Wall Street and big business.
In his remarks Sunday to a rally in Philadelphia, largely drawn from the ranks of the trade union bureaucracy, Obama attacked “millionaires and billionaires,” “Wall Street banks,” “corporations”, the “oil industry,” the “insurance industry” and “credit-card companies.”
He charged that “a former lobbyist for AIG and Exxon Mobil” helped draft the “Pledge to America” adopted by the Republican Party. He then declared that “the centerpiece of the pledge is a $700 billion tax cut that would only go to the top 2 percent, the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.”
The business-bashing demagogy has been combined in the past week with an ugly dose of American chauvinism, with Obama and congressional Democrats claiming that their opponents are benefiting from money from “foreign-owned corporations,” supposedly funneled through the US Chamber of Commerce, the biggest single fundraiser for the Republican Party.
The charge of foreign money allows the Democrats to wrap themselves in the flag and compete with the Republicans in appeals to nationalism and anti-immigrant prejudice. It has no factual basis. The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is an instrument of American banks and corporations that operate all over the world. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Obama and the Democrats combine pseudo-populist rhetoric with right-wing policies that benefit the financial-corporate elite. For the tens of millions of working people facing unemployment and the specter of homelessness and destitution, they have nothing to offer.
While Obama claims that his administration is “finally holding accountable” the financial interests that caused the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, the Obama-Bush bailout has put the entire financial resources of the federal government at the disposal of Wall Street.
The administration has rejected any effort to create jobs directly through a major public works program, or any serious measures to alleviate deepening poverty and mass suffering in a crisis which is now completing its third full year, with the average duration of unemployment the highest ever recorded.
This week, even as Obama was mouthing utterly hollow populist-sounding slogans, his spokesmen were taking to the airways to reject calls for a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures, despite mounting evidence of systematic fraud by banks and mortgage lenders.
The basic outcome of next month’s congressional elections is assured, regardless of whether the November 2 vote puts the Republicans in control of Congress or leaves a reduced Democratic majority in power. The Obama administration will move even further to the right, supposedly in response to public opinion.
The official narrative of the 2010 election campaign, promoted in lock-step by the corporate-controlled media, both openly right-wing and nominally liberal, is that Obama has tilted too far to the left. His supposedly massive federal spending has, according to the media, aroused deep anger in the public at large, reflected in the growth of support for the Tea Party campaigns.
The received wisdom is that the American people, who repudiated Bush and the Republicans just two years ago, are now, in the midst of a social crisis without precedent in the post-war period, clamoring for more of the very pro-corporate policies—tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, the dismantling of social programs—they voted to end in 2008.
In this conception, American politics is divided along partisan lines between the Republican right and the Democratic “left,” with most of those who are dissatisfied with the existing parties residing somewhere in between these two supposed polar opposites. Summing up the conventional wisdom, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times wrote of the elections: “The party that seizes the center will win.”
Besides grotesquely distorting the actual right-wing record of the Obama administration, this portrait of American political life leaves out a decisive fact: the actual sentiments of the working people who constitute the vast majority of the population.
Never in history has a deep-going economic crisis of the capitalist system produced a shift in the masses in favor of the capitalists. On the contrary, opinion poll after opinion polls shows growing popular hatred of Wall Street speculators and corporate CEOs, who are—absolutely correctly—held responsible for the destruction of jobs and living standards. The masses in America are moving to the left, not to the right.
Within the peculiar political structure of the United States, limited to two officially recognized parties, both controlled by corporate interests and offering only right-wing policies, this shift in mass sentiment has as yet found no political outlet. But even the opinion polls conducted in the current election campaign, skewed as they are by the assumption that the existing political and social structures are unalterable, rebuts the claim that the enormous and growing dissatisfaction with the Obama administration has produced a surge of support for the policies of the Republican right.
A Zogby International poll of independent voters found that only 13 percent gave a favorable rating to congressional Democrats and only 5 percent to congressional Republicans, staggering figures that give a glimpse of the deep dissatisfaction with both of the major capitalist parties.
A Bloomberg poll conducted October 7-10 found that more than 40 percent of those who had once supported Obama said they were either less supportive or did not support him at all, two years after the 2008 presidential election. While Obama’s recent populist rhetoric has been attacked by the Republicans and sections of the media as “anti-business,” a majority of those interviewed by Bloomberg rejected this criticism, and more felt that the Obama administration had been too soft on Wall Street than too harsh.
A majority of those polled by Bloomberg rejected cuts in nearly every significant federal program: Social Security, Medicare, roads and public transportation, funding for disease research, education. They flatly opposed either privatizing Social Security or raising the age of eligibility. Most opposed the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
Millions of working people in the United States are moving into a collision with the policies of the financial aristocracy and both of its parties. The November election will be followed by a turn to austerity policies, including attacks on Social Security, Medicare, public education and access to health care. It will signal an intensification of the war in Afghanistan and a continuation of US military interventions in Iraq and elsewhere. The attacks on democratic rights at home will be stepped up.
The emergence of an independent political movement of the working class is the only way to defend jobs, living standards and democratic rights against this corporate onslaught. The Socialist Equality Party advances a political program for the defense of the social rights of working people on the basis of socialist policies. We call on the readers of the WSWS to consider this program and make the decision to join and build the SEP.
Patrick Martin
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ARE AMAZED AT HOW UTTERLY BRAZEN THESE CORPORATE OWNED POLITICIANS ARE?
GET THIS BOOK!
Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
by Michelle Malkin
Editorial Reviews
In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.
From the Inside Flap
The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it.
Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption, Malkin reveals:
* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily
* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide
* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable "czars" than any other administration
* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons
* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power
* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden.


Product Details
• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Publishing (July 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596981091
• ISBN-13: 978-1596981096
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Michelle Malkin
No Shady Banking Buddy Left Behind

First Lady Michelle Obama's latest overseas jaunt is getting all the headlines. But President Obama's money-grubbing junket to Chicago may cost taxpayers far more in the long run. With his Gaultier-clad wife sashaying around the Spanish seaside, the lonely fundraiser-in-chief returned to Illinois to take care of some birthday-week business. Job One: Filling the Senate campaign coffers of his corruption-tainted political protege Alexi Giannoulias.
Mission accomplished. Obama's Thursday afternoon campaign event for Giannoulias, the beleaguered state treasurer of Illinois, reportedly raked in $1 million. Lagging behind his GOP opponent, liberal Republican Rep. Mark Kirk, Giannoulias has coveted one-on-one, grip-and-grin time with Obama for months. In addition to the cash, photo-ops and video of the Obama fundraising event that Giannoulias will milk from now until Election Day, the White House has dispatched Vice President Joe Biden, White House senior adviser David Axelrod and White House campaign management guru David Plouffe to boost Giannoulias' bid. Plouffe proclaimed Democrats "all in" for Giannoulias, whom he described as "a great progressive champion."
Obama gave his own personal seal of ethical approval, telling deep-pocketed donors this week: "I appreciate his strong sense of advocacy for ordinary Americans. You can trust him -- you can count on him." Uh-huh. And I've got a bridge to Hope and Change to sell you.
What would Giannoulias know about "ordinary Americans"? Giannoulias, 34, befriended Obama during pickup basketball games with an elite group that also included Michelle Obama's brother, Craig; Chicago edu-crat Arne Duncan (now Education Secretary); and hedge fund manager John Rogers (the ex-husband of the Obamas' ex-White House social secretary, Desiree Rogers). He spread his wealth and influence around early and often to support Obama's fledgling political career. He pitched in $7,000 in 2003-2004 to Obama's Illinois State Senate bids. He hosted fundraisers for Obama's U.S. Senate campaign in 2004 and for his presidential campaign in 2007.
Where'd the cash come from? Giannoulias' Greek immigrant family founded Chicago-based Broadway Bank, a now-defunct financial institution that loaned tens of millions of dollars to convicted mafia felons and faced bankruptcy after decades of engaging in risky, high-flying behavior. It's the place where Obama parked his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign funds. And it's the same place where a mutual friend of Obama and Giannoulias -- convicted Obama fundraiser/slum lord Tony Rezko -- used to bounce nearly $500,000 in bad checks written to Las Vegas casinos. This week, the Chicago Sun-Times revealed an additional $22.75 million Broadway Bank loan to a Rezko-owned business in 2006. Giannoulias held an ownership stake in the bank at the time.
Giannoulias served as Broadway Bank vice president and senior loan officer for four years. According to the Chicago Tribune, during Giannoulias' tenure, some $27 million of Broadway Bank's funny money went to mob crooks Michael "Jaws" Giorango and Demitri Stavropoulos. Giorango is a hustler who fronted a nationwide prostitution ring and was sentenced to six months in prison; Stavropoulos is behind bars for operating a multistate bookmaking ring. Giorango ran the $400-an-hour call girl operation out of high-rise luxury apartments in Chicago with the infamous "Gold Coast Madam," Rose Laws. Giorango and Stavropoulos used their Broadway Bank loans to start their own risky lending business for nontraditional borrowers unable to secure traditional bank financing.
Despite Giorango's criminal record exposed by the Tribune in 2004, Broadway Bank approved massive mortgages for him. Giannoulias' brother, Demetris, explained that as a "relationship bank," Broadway wouldn't just throw someone under the bus because of a "bad article." Instead, the bank went ahead and rubber-stamped a September 2005 loan for $3.4 million to buy a 32-unit Los Angeles apartment complex. The application falsely stated that the borrower, Giorango, had "not been convicted of a felony." Giannoulias oversaw the servicing of such shady loans totaling $11 million. Remember: He was no low-level staffer. He was, as he reminded supporters when he needed to deflect attention away from his youth, top management at Broadway Bank.
In January 2010, the bank entered a consent decree with federal and Illinois state regulators. It required Broadway Bank "to raise tens of millions in capital, stop paying dividends to the family without regulatory approval, and hire an outside party to evaluate the bank's senior management." The city's former inspector general blasted Giannoulias and his family for tapping $70 million worth of dividends in 2007 and 2008 as the real estate crash loomed. Broadway Bank was sitting on an estimated $250 million in bad loans. In late April, federal regulators shut it down. Cost to taxpayers: an estimated $390 million. Giannoulias refused to drop out of the race -- and instead used the company failure to argue that it made him (SET ITAL) more (END ITAL) qualified to serve in office: "I have a renewed vigor and a new perspective on just how horrible it is out there for so many people."
President Obama agrees: Abysmal failure should be rewarded with promotion. He's leaving no shady banking buddy behind.
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Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY


Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.
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Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers.
Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:
* The Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate profits and more government control
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
If you’ve wondered what’s happening to our country, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages” that create make-work government jobs, this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.
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Praise for Obamanomics
“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama
“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul
“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
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• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596986123
• ISBN-13: 978-1596986121
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