BLOG: ONLY HILLARY CLINTON IS OUT THERE HISPANDERING FOR THE ILLGALS' VOTES MORE THAN SANDERS.
BOTH OF PROMISED THE INVADING MEXICANS AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY AND BILLIONS MORE IN WELFARE FOR EVERY DEM VOTE THEY ILLGALLY CAST.
Placating Americans with Fake Immigration Law Enforcement
How our leaders create fantasy 'solutions' for our immigration-related vulnerabilities.
By Michael Cutler
FrontPageMag.com, December 4, 2015
. . .
Therefore the Visa Waiver Program should have been terminated after the terror attacks of 9/11 yet it has continually been expanded.
It is clear that the overarching goal of a succession of administrations and many members of Congress, irrespective of political party affiliation, is to keep our borders open and take no meaningful action to stop that flow of aliens into the United States.
. . .
The obvious question is why the Visa Waiver Program is considered so sacrosanct that even though it defies the advice and findings of the 9/11 Commission no one has the moral fortitude to call for simply terminating this dangerous program.
The answer can be found in the incestuous relationship between the Chamber of Commerce and its subsidiary, the Corporation for Travel Promotion, now doing business as Brand USA.
The Chamber of Commerce has arguably been the strongest supporter of the Visa Waiver Program, which currently enables aliens from 38 countries to enter the United States without first obtaining a visa.
The U.S. State Department provides a thorough explanation of the Visa Waiver Program on its website.
Incredibly, the official State Department website also provides a link, “Discover America,” on that website which relates to the website of The Corporation for Travel Promotion, which is affiliated with the travel industries that are a part of the “Discover America Partnership.”
much more here:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/12/amnesty-hoax-to-keep-wages-depressed.html
PHONY BERNIE!
This caveat confirms that his proposal is entirely unserious. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank Act, was enacted after the 2008 financial crisis in order to shield the major financial institutions, whose quasi-criminal speculative activity triggered the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, from any significant liability, while providing a public pretense of banking “reform.”
"For the financial elite and the corporate-controlled Democratic Party, the speech was meant to be the equivalent of a reassuring wink that, notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Sanders could be counted on to defend the interests of American capitalism."
"As always, Sanders failed to explain how the party he seeks to head, one of the two main parties of American big business, could or would carry out any significant reform of Wall Street. He did not address the critical role the Democratic Party has played, including under the Obama administration, in the explosive growth of social inequality and the deregulation of corporate America in general and Wall Street in particular."
President Obama, under whose administration the richest 1 percent has captured 95 percent of all income gains, was mentioned only once, when Sanders singled him out for praise for “improving this economy.” The presidential aspirant offered only muted criticisms of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who has extensive ties to the financial industry, arguing that her proposals for Wall Street “reform” did not go far enough.
Bernie Sanders poses as an opponent of Wall Street in New York speech
Bernie Sanders poses as an opponent of Wall Street in New York speech
By Tom Hall
6 January 2016
Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders expanded on his campaign pledge to break up the major Wall Street financial institutions during his first year in office in a speech on financial regulation delivered Tuesday in New York City.Sanders’ speech was meant for two audiences simultaneously. For those who are attracted to his campaign by its focus on social inequality, its purpose was to bolster the Vermont senator’s credentials as an opponent of the criminal activities of Wall Street. For the financial elite and the corporate-controlled Democratic Party, the speech was meant to be the equivalent of a reassuring wink that, notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Sanders could be counted on to defend the interests of American capitalism.
Sanders delivered his remarks to an invitation-only crowd at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, a few miles from Wall Street. The select character of the audience stood in marked contrast to earlier campaign appearances at which Sanders addressed tens of thousands of people lured by his stated opposition to the “billionaire class” and social inequality and his talk of a “political revolution.”
In attendance at Monday’s speech, billed in advance as a major policy statement, were numerous Democratic Party establishment figures from the New York City area, including Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of nearby Newark, New Jersey. The event was emceed by New York State Senator James Sanders, who, during his time on New York’s City Council, supported the administration of the billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear. Greed is not good,” Sanders admonished. The line, which was released in advance by the campaign, was repeated in friendly media headlines and served as the speech’s “catchphrase.”
BLOG: DOES ANYONE BELIEVE SANDERS WOULD BREAK UP WALL STREET'S BIG LOOTING BANKSTERS????????????????
The candidate went on to say that, within 100 days of taking office, he would direct his treasury secretary to draw up a list of major banks, shadow banks and insurance firms “who pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.” These corporations would be broken up by the end of the year.
Sanders listed a number of other regulatory proposals, including reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, a law separating investment and commercial banking that was repealed during the Clinton administration. He pledged to transform the major credit rating agencies into nonprofit institutions, cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent, and impose a tax on Wall Street speculation to fund tuition for public colleges and universities.
As always, Sanders failed to explain how the party he seeks to head, one of the two main parties of American big business, could or would carry out any significant reform of Wall Street. He did not address the critical role the Democratic Party has played, including under the Obama administration, in the explosive growth of social inequality and the deregulation of corporate America in general and Wall Street in particular.
President Obama, under whose administration the richest 1 percent has captured 95 percent of all income gains, was mentioned only once, when Sanders singled him out for praise for “improving this economy.” The presidential aspirant offered only muted criticisms of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who has extensive ties to the financial industry, arguing that her proposals for Wall Street “reform” did not go far enough.
Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist,” has made clear in the course of his campaign that he opposes any measures that would threaten the fundamental economic interests of the financial elite and the capitalist class as a whole. He does not challenge private ownership of the banks and corporations or the profit system itself, and does not advocate public ownership of the banks he claims to oppose. This makes his talk of taming Wall Street cynical bluster, as he is well aware that the massive wealth of those who control the levers of finance is the basis for their domination of the political system and the state.
In the course of his hour-long speech, Sanders made one passing and obscure remark that was meant to reassure those in the know that they had nothing to fear from his populist demagogy. He said that his proposal to break up the banks would be “authorized under Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.”
This caveat confirms that his proposal is entirely unserious. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank Act, was enacted after the 2008 financial crisis in order to shield the major financial institutions, whose quasi-criminal speculative activity triggered the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, from any significant liability, while providing a public pretense of banking “reform.”
Under section 121 of the law, it is the Federal Reserve’s unelected Board of Governors, dominated by bankers, and not the president, that has the authority to break up companies worth more than $50 billion, and only if lesser measures are determined to be “inadequate to mitigate a threat to the financial stability of the United States.”
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the activities of the Federal Reserve have been aimed at defending and increasing the wealth of the super-rich and expanding the size and power of the biggest Wall Street banks. Its policies, including the printing of hundreds of billions of dollars under its “quantitative easing” program and keeping benchmark interest rates near zero, have directly contributed to record profits for American corporations. Sanders himself admitted as much when he accused the Federal Reserve of being “hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating” in the course of his speech.
(Sanders’ feigned indignation notwithstanding, the use of the word “hijacked” to describe the domination of the US central bank by bankers is an example of the puerile phrase-mongering that is typically used to dress up a conventional bourgeois politician as a “radical.”)
In any event, a Sanders administration, under the rules of appointment to the Fed, would have little influence on the composition of the current board. As one news outlet noted, the 14-year terms for all of the current members of the board, all Obama appointees, do not expire until 2020 or later, and the next president will not be able to replace Janet Yellen as chairwoman of the Fed until 2018, a full year after Sanders’ proposal would supposedly be implemented.
Even taken at face value, Sanders’ proposals are modest by historical standards. The break-up of major trusts was actually carried out at the turn of the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt, a pro-business politician and early supporter of American imperialism.
Last week, Sanders released a statement angrily denouncing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for claiming that Sanders supports increasing tax rates for the wealthy to 90 percent. Instead, Sanders reiterated, he merely advocates that the super-rich “pay their fair share” of taxes. During the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, the top income tax bracket was 92 percent.
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
Never have the rich increased their wealth so
quickly as in America since the financial crash
of 2008. But side by side with the amassing
of previously unthinkable private fortunes,
the infrastructure of America is crumbling,
education, health care and other social
services are starved of funding, and the living
standards of the vast majority of the
population, the working people who produce
the wealth, are declining.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY HAS TAKEN MORE DIRTY BANKSTER MONEY THAN BARACK OBAMA WHO PROMISED THAT HIS CRONIES WOULD NEVER BE "PUNISHED".
IF FACT, THEIR LOOTING ONLY RATCHETED UP AFTER THE 2008 BAILOUT.
OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS ARE NOW HEAVILY INVESTED IN HILLARY CLINTON. BILLARY AND HILLARY HAVE SUCKED UP A VAST FORTUNE IN "SPEECH" BRIBES FROM THE BANKSTERS THAT OWN OBAMA!
The calamity was further deepened by the use of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out the biggest Wall Street firms. For millions of people in the US and around the world, the 2008 collapse was a social tragedy from which there has been no meaningful recovery. Yet, as The Big Short points out, the bankers and speculators––who ought to be sitting in prison––are richer and more powerful today than ever.
The Big Short: The criminality of Wall Street and the crash of 2008
By Joanne Laurier
31 December 2015
Directed by Adam McKay; screenplay by McKay and Charles Randolph, based on the book by Michael LewisAdam McKay’s new film The Big Short is a hard-hitting comedy-drama about the historic collapse of the US housing bubble in 2008.
Based on Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short: Inside The
Doomsday Machine (2010), the film offers a picture of rampant
criminality on the part of the financial establishment and its
government co-conspirators who, while systematically looting the
American economy, created a financial disaster.
The calamity was further deepened by the use of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out the biggest Wall Street firms. For millions of people in the US and around the world, the 2008 collapse was a social tragedy from which there has been no meaningful recovery. Yet, as The Big Short points out, the bankers and speculators––who ought to be sitting in prison––are richer and more powerful today than ever.
McKay’s The Big Short centers on a number of Wall Street “outliers” who, despite the efforts of the banks, government regulators and media lackeys, uncover the truth about the explosive market for bonds based on subprime mortgages: that the latter are “junk” and a rotten foundation for an economic boom.
The film takes the form of a series of vignettes involving these figures, a number of whose paths cross at critical moments.
Bankers, The Big Short’s narrator (Ryan Gosling) explains at the outset, were once perceived as staid and conservative. Now, as the trade in mortgage-backed securities mushrooms and a vast housing bubble develops, they have gone “from the country club to the strip club,” a function of the degree of parasitism and degeneracy in the system.
Christian Bale plays the real-life San Jose, California neurosurgeon-turned-money manager Michael Burry, who sports a glass eye and has a penchant for heavy metal. With a manic focus, he spends the end of 2004 and early 2005 scanning hundreds of home loans that are packaged into mortgage bonds, eventually discovering an alarming pattern. As opposed to the prevailing wisdom that “the housing market is rock solid,” Burry comes to believe it is a flimsy house of cards.
Burry approaches Goldman Sachs, seeking to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars in credit default swaps (a form of insurance against a loan default or other credit event) that amount to a bet against the housing market. His hedge fund’s owners and investors are apoplectic, but the eccentric, anti-social Burry is convinced that patience is the key as he waits for the bottom to drop out and his assumptions to pay off. (According to Lewis’s book, Burry explained, “I’m not making a bet against a bond, I’m making a bet against a system.”)
He admonishes his skeptics: “[Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles––or major deflations––on any national scale. This is ridiculous, of course…. In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10 percent of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80 percent.”
Jared “Chicken Little” Vennett (Gosling, playing a fictionalized Greg Lippman), a Deutsche Bank subprime mortgage bond manager, gets wind of Burry’s astonishing gamble. Vennett, slick, sleazy and smart, crunches the numbers and sees a potential gold mine.
Vennett solicits financial backing from Wall Street-bashing Mark Baum (Steve Carell, based on Steve Eisman), head of FrontPoint Partners, a unit of Morgan Stanley. Vennett explains the certainty of a housing catastrophe. The irascible Baum, who continues to suffer from his brother’s suicide, is chronically appalled by the banks’ shenanigans.
To investigate Vennett’s claims, Baum sends his colleagues to a subdivision in Florida, where they discover homes in foreclosure, delinquent mortgages that were purchased in the name of family pets, and a stripper who owns several properties—all with adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs)—and was told that continuous refinancing would always work in her favor. In one abandoned south Florida home, an alligator has taken over the swimming pool. One of Baum’s associates says, “It’s like Chernobyl.”
Baum also talks to cocky young mortgage brokers who inform him, with a laugh, that they have made millions selling subprime mortgages to poor people and immigrants. He subsequently meets with a Standard & Poor’s representative (Melissa Leo), who tells Baum she has to rate all the banks’ financial vehicles at AAA (the top rate) to keep their business.
Another of The Big Shor t’s plot strands involves young, inexperienced money managers, Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro), who parlay $110,000 of their own money into a $30 million fund. Also seeing the writing on the wall for the housing market, they enlist the help of retired guru/trader and drop-out Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, based on Ben Hockett), whose connections help them secure an agreement enabling them to work directly with the banks.
The filmmakers intersperse the narrative with comic interludes featuring what they call “celebrity explainers,” brought in to help make the complicated terminology comprehensible. In the movie’s production notes, director McKay elaborates: “Bankers do everything they can to make these transactions seem really complicated, so we came up with the idea of having celebrities pop up on the screen throughout the movie and explain things directly to the audience.”
Sipping champagne in a bubble bath, actress Margot Robbie discusses mortgage-backed securities, while chef Anthony Bourdain compares a “toxic financial asset” to a seafood stew. (McKay recruited Bourdain after reading the latter’s recommendation that no one should “order seafood stew because it’s where cooks put all the crap they couldn’t sell.”
The director goes on, “I thought, ‘Oh my God that’s a perfect metaphor for a collateralized debt obligation, where the banks bundle a bunch of bad mortgages and sell it as a triple-A rated financial product.’”)
Economist Dr. Richard Thaler and actress Selena Gomez take part in a casino sequence to demonstrate how synthetic Credit Default Obligations (CDOs)––essentially groups of bad mortgages bundled together to hide the real likelihood of default––are the means of arranging numerous layers of speculation. Says McKay: “It was investors making those kinds of side bets on mortgage-backed securities through CDOs that drove the whole world economy to where it was poised to crash.”
The film’s tipping point comes when Vennett convinces Baum to attend the American Securities Forum in Las Vegas, an event whose out of control goings-on prove to the latter that the housing market is a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
The vindication of the nay-sayers is delayed when the housing market begins to collapse, but the value of the CDOs remains steady. Only then do the protagonists realize that the banks are concealing the toxicity of their holdings on a massive scale.
As the meltdown approaches, the mood of The Big Short markedly darkens. Baum starts to believe the “party’s over” and that “the world economy will collapse.” He is convinced the bankers “are crooks and should be in jail.”
This is effectively highlighted by a scene where Baum debates a representative of Bear Stearns. The latter sings the praises of the housing market even as the firm’s stock price falls off the cliff.
The Big Short’s approach to the run-up to one of the greatest financial crises in history, despite its comic-absurdist mode, is a serious one. The filmmakers do their best to bring this crisis and its human dimensions to life.
The film touches upon the systemic and far-reaching character of the 2008 crash. McKay and his collaborators are obviously appalled by its outcome and consequences, and even invent an alternative scenario in which the bankers responsible for the crash are jailed and the banks become regulated. They point the finger at not only those who issued the mortgages, but those who sliced and diced them into rotten products and the credit agencies that gave them top ratings. They conclude that the financial establishment made super profits through the immiseration of the population. The various actors, as clearly demonstrated by their performances, were fully committed to the project.
Of course, dramatizing something as complex as the 2008 financial collapse is an immense undertaking, involving a mass of historical and social questions. The Big Short’s makers have chosen one means of treating it. This film is clearly not the final word. While McKay and the others involved obviously feel sympathy for those devastated by the crisis, the mass of the population is largely absent. Their attitude to capitalism is a critical one, but they are not opponents of the profit system.
However, at a time when most filmmakers seem obsessed with gender, sexuality and race (and themselves), McKay and the others have chosen to treat—and treat trenchantly—one of the critical events in recent times. Genuine credit is due them.
"During the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires surged past $7 trillion and the top 1 percent now controls half of the world’s wealth."
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
"In the sphere of world economy, any expectation of an upturn has given way to the reality of permanent crisis. In the United States, six years into the so-called economic “recovery,” real unemployment remains at near-record highs, wages are under attack, and health care and pensions for millions of Americans are being wiped out."
"The essential and intended consequence of government policy over the past seven years has been to vastly increase social inequality. During the past year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires surged past $7 trillion and the top 1 percent now controls half of the world’s wealth. In the US, the scale of social inequality—and therefore political inequality—is so great that one recent scientific study concluded that “the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt."
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