Saturday, January 2, 2016

Plagiarist Fareed Zakaria Confirms That Psychopath Barack Obama and His Crony Banksters Are Killing What Was the American Middle Class

Plagiarist Fareed Zakaria Celebrates: White People are Dying and Trump Can’t Save You!

THE OBAMA PLAN:

FIRST LET HIS CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROY THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS FINANCIALLY.

THEN OPEN THE BORDERS FOR ENDLESS HORDES OF MEXICANS TO LOOT, BREED ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE, STEAL JOBS WITH STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS AND VOTE DEM FOR MORE.

IS IT WORKING?

 
 
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/01/02/plagiarist-fareed-zakaria-celebrates-white-people-are-dying-and-trump-cans-save-you/


Citing a study that shows Middle American whites are dying in increasing numbers, like a twisted and bitter eugenicist, serial-plagiarist Fareed Zakaria doesn’t even attempt to contain his glee. By painting those who are supposedly dying as useless, drug-addicted ragers, he paints a picture of a weak, angry, and ultimately stupid ethnic group getting what it deserves.

If this were any other group, Zakaria would not be using the pages of the Washington Post for a victory dance. Instead, he would be launching an emotional blackmail campaign to cure this “epidemic” with hundreds of billions of federal dollars. Like most of the elite media, though, Zakaria despises Middle America, so he joyously assumes the study is accurate and bloodlessly screams “Told You So!”
The headline says it all: “America’s Self-Destructive Whites,” and naturally the opening paragraph contains the words “Donald” and “Trump.”
Why is Middle America killing itself? The fact itself is probably the most important social science finding in years. It is already reshaping American politics. The Post’s Jeff Guo notes that the people who make up this cohort are “largely responsible for Donald Trump’s lead in the race for the Republican nomination for president.”
What does this “epidemic” mean to Zakaria?
That it’s time for compassion?
Time for government action?
Time for understanding?
No. It means “more rage” from creepy Middle America:
The key question is why, and exploring it provides answers that suggest that the rage dominating U.S. politics will only get worse.
Zakaria hints that the study’s numbers are a tad shaky, but that doesn’t stop him from doing a happy dance around the fact that…
Middle America’s Got It Coming….
The main causes of death are as striking as the fact itself: suicide, alcoholism, and overdoses of prescription and illegal drugs. “People seem to be killing themselves, slowly or quickly,” Deaton told me. These circumstances are usually caused by stress, depression and despair.
Middle America’s a Bunch of Wussies….
A conventional explanation for this middle-class stress and anxiety is that globalization and technological change have placed increasing pressures on the average worker in industrialized nations. But the trend is absent in any other Western country — it’s an exclusively American phenomenon. And the United States is actually relatively insulated from the pressures of globalization, having a vast, self-contained internal market.
Stupid Middle America Should Stop Voting Against the Welfare State…
Deaton speculated to me that perhaps Europe’s more generous welfare state might ease some of the fears associated with the rapid change.
Middle America’s Spoiled By White Privilege…
[O]ther groups might not expect that their income, standard of living and social status are destined to steadily improve. They don’t have the same confidence that if they work hard, they will surely get ahead. In fact, Rouse said that after hundreds of years of slavery, segregation and racism, blacks have developed ways to cope with disappointment and the unfairness of life[.]
They do not assume that the system is set up for them. They try hard and hope to succeed, but they do not expect it as the norm.
Donald Trump Can’t Save You!
Mwuh, huh, huh, huh
Donald Trump has promised that he will change this and make them win again. But he can’t. No one can. And deep down, they know it.
Speaking only for myself, I’d rather die young in Middle America than as an old metrosexual, content-thieving, throne-sniffing, left-wing elitist so lacking in humanity that I not only gloat over racially-focused studies involving premature death, but like Joseph Goebbels, I openly spread the word that this is good news.

<em>The Big Short</em>: The criminality of Wall Street and the crash of 2008


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 Lewis

Adam 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."



On the threshold of the New Year

On the threshold of the New Year

31 December 2015
As the year 2015 ends, a general mood of fear and foreboding predominates in ruling circles. It is hard to find a trace of optimism. Commentators in the bourgeois media look back on the past year and recognize that it has been a year of deepening crisis. They look forward to 2016 with apprehension. The general sense in government offices and corporate boardrooms is that the coming year will be one of deep shocks, with unexpected consequences.

The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman gives expression to this pervasive feeling in his end-of-the-year assessment published on Tuesday. “In 2015, a sense of unease and foreboding seemed to settle on all the world’s power centers,” he writes. “All the big players seem uncertain—even fearful.” China “feels much less stable.” In Europe, the mood is “bleak.” In the US, public sentiment is “sour.”
Significantly, Rachman singles out as the “biggest common factor” in the world situation “a bubbling anti-elite sentiment, combining anxiety about inequality and rage about corruption that is visible in countries as different as France, Brazil, China and the US.” This observation reflects a growing recognition within the corporate media that the coming period will be one of immense social upheavals.

Rachman’s comment and others like it that have appeared in recent days confirm the assessment made by the World Socialist Web Site during the first week of 2015. The intervals between the eruption of major geopolitical, economic and social crises have “become so short that they can hardly be described as intervals,” we wrote. Crises “appear not as isolated ‘episodes,’ but as more or less permanent features of contemporary reality. The pattern of perpetual crisis that characterized 2014—an essential indicator of the advanced state of global capitalist disequilibrium—will continue with even greater intensity in 2015.”

In defending its rule, the ruling class seeks to cover over the reality of capitalism beneath a mass of lies and hypocrisy. War is cloaked in the language of freedom and democracy; antisocial domestic policy is portrayed as the pursuit of equality and freedom. But—and this is characteristic of a period of crisis—more and more, the essential nature of capitalism—a system of exploitation, inequality, war and repression—comes into alignment with the everyday experiences of broad masses of people. Illusions are dispelled; the essence appears.

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. Europe is growing at less than 2 percent a year, and large parts of the European economy—including Greece, the target of brutal austerity measures demanded by the European banks—are in deep recession. China, presented as a possible engine of world economic growth, is slowing sharply. Brazil and much of Latin America are in deep slump. Russia is in recession.


BLOG: OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS HAVE BEEN BUSY BEAVERS SINCE THE LAST MELTDOWN THEY CAUSED!

Meanwhile, the easy-money policy of the world’s central banks has produced a new wave of speculative investment, centered in junk bonds and other forms of debt, which is beginning to unravel in a process that parallels the crisis in subprime mortgages prior to 2008.

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.”

Joseph Kishore

BILLARY and HILLARY and BILL'S RAPE VICTIMS

If you asked one hundred people what they think about when they hear the name Bill Clinton, a goodly number will say womanizer, cheater &ndash; a few will use the dreadful word rapist. And that number will increase. Time and neurology are working aga...


 Everyone knows she stood by her man, blamed his women, and perhaps was a psychological co-rapist for the sake of her political ambitions.


Bill and Hill - and the Evil that Men Do

If you asked one hundred people what they think about when they hear the name Bill Clinton, a goodly number will say womanizer, cheater – a few will use the dreadful word rapist. And that number will increase. Time and neurology are working against the Clintons.

Most memory training programs are simply a matter of learning how to associate memories with emotionally charged ideas. This is because the brain is designed to remember where the dangers and the goodies lie and to forget the dry statistics. The brain is more inclined to remember Jennifer Flowers than the unemployment rate in 1996. This effect has tainted the collective memory of many presidents, for example, disclosures about the mistresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy. This effect will increase for Bill Clinton both because of the outrageous nature of his conduct and the way it has and will be reported.

People tend to cut quite a bit of slack for the weaknesses of the flesh because there’s a lot of that going around. But Hillary will gain no benefit from that latitude. Everyone knows she stood by her man, blamed his women, and perhaps was a psychological co-rapist for the sake of her political ambitions.  Before the next president is elected, Hillary will not only have an albatross around her neck, she will be covered with names like Wellstone, Broaddrick, Moffet, Ward Gracen, Brown, Dowdy, Jones, Ferguson, Zercher, Willey, and more. A majority of those one hundred people will remember the evil the Clintons did, and their legacy will be lost in the folds of tattered dresses and bleeding lips.

Lives -- after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with the Clintons.
 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/01/bill_and_hill__and_the_evil_that_men_do.html#ixzz3w7CfTc1m
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Hillary Hauls Out Our Former Rapist-in-Chief

This week I was struck by two news items that were offered up to the public -- the first was that Bill Clinton was going to be more actively supporting Hillary’s presidential run; the second that Bill Crosby was indicted for rape. I found the juxtaposition of these two “Bills” both amusing and ironic. A formerly revered comic and alleged rapist may be on his way to jail, and a formerly not-so-revered ex-president and alleged rapist is on his way to the campaign trail on behalf of his wife (the enabler of his various sexual predations). The disparate treatment being accorded these two dirtbags cast a serious cloud over not just our criminal justice system, but of our culture in general.

Of course there are a couple of outstanding differences in the two cases -- one guy was just an entertainer, the other was president of the United States. Cosby’s stuff was kept under wraps for many years; and now that it has surfaced in his dotage, he may well go to jail for his conduct. Clinton’s conduct, which, in many respects, was equally unacceptable (and his womanizing indiscretions were well known throughout his entire adult life), will not result in any punishment of a criminal nature. And, in his case, shameful as that conduct is, it won’t even result in a loss of friends, let alone his personal liberty.
 
Clinton’s reaction to his adolescent sexualizing was equally amusing to me. When accusations were being hurled at him -- public accusations -- Clinton observed that these slings and arrows might damage his reputation, but they would not affect his “character.” And, of course, in a somewhat perverse sense, he’s right -- you can’t affect something that doesn’t exist. And Clinton, while a charming con man, is a man without content, courage, or character. And the really sad part of this is that the worthless charmer could probably be re-elected tomorrow. Indeed, if Hillary, an angry, incompetent witch, had 1/10th of his charm, she would almost be a shoe-in for the presidency (while a Republican victory should be a no-brainer, given the last eight years under Obama and Hillary, the Republicans can almost always be counted on to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory).
 
What adds to the amusement inherent in this situation is Hillary’s recent statement that a woman’s assertion of having been sexually assaulted should be taken seriously -- as indeed it should be. However, when such charges were leveled against her husband -- by a plethora of women -- she not only failed to take them seriously, she immediately went after the women making such charges and sought to ruin them. When confronted by this bit of hypocrisy on the campaign trail by a woman who was paying attention, Hillary’s weak response was:
“Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence”
Of course, this response was not just weak, it was meaningless. Bill’s accusers were never controverted by any evidence stronger than his denial, which no one took seriously. Indeed, Monica’s stained blue dress clearly indicated who should be believed when Bill Clinton was involved.

Given Bill’s disgraceful behavior in this area, you would think that sexually assaulting women would be the last subject that Hillary would want to open up. But, true to form, demonstrating once again another of her failings -- i.e. lack of judgement -- she tried to use it against Trump in response to one of his silly off-the-cuff comments utilizing a sexual innuendo. Even some lefties so the absurdity of this approach -- Ruth Marcus, a left-wing reporter writing for the Washington Post, had this to say:
“‘Sexism’’ isn’t the precise word for his predatory behavior toward women or his inexcusable relationship with a 22-year-old intern.Yet in the larger sense of things, Bill Clinton’s conduct toward women is far worse than any of the offensive things that Trump has said. Trump has smeared women because of their looks. Clinton has preyed on them, and in a workplace setting where he was by far the superior. That is uncomfortable for Clinton supporters but it is unavoidably true.”
This from a lefty in one of the consummate lefty publications. Trump may shoot off his mouth, but at least he keeps his pants on when he’s doing it.

Another interesting aspect of this “assault-on-women” thing is the double standard. When a conservative crosses the sexual line in the moral sand, the press gets up in arms. It’s like he fell from grace (apparently due to the right’s connection with family values). When a lefty gets caught in the wrong bed, the media (and, of course, lefties) treat it as a sign of his enhanced masculinity (the left having no grace to fall from).

Bill Clinton’s conduct with women was more than disgraceful -- it was criminal, and he should be in jail. Hillary’s supporting him in the great multitude of his meanderings (enabling him in the first instance, and defending him on his being caught) is no less disgraceful. And, certainly, no feminist would consider supporting a husband who has been as compulsively unfaithful as Bill Clinton as an understandable act of standing by your man (which, you will recall, Hillary informed us that she was not). No, I believe that Hillary could not be on weaker ground than to accuse the Republicans of engaging in a war on women. Maybe she should consider cleaning up her own house first.
 
This week I was struck by two news items that were offered up to the public -- the first was that Bill Clinton was going to be more actively supporting Hillary’s presidential run; the second that Bill Crosby was indicted for rape. I found the juxtaposition of these two “Bills” both amusing and ironic. A formerly revered comic and alleged rapist may be on his way to jail, and a formerly not-so-revered ex-president and alleged rapist is on his way to the campaign trail on behalf of his wife (the enabler of his various sexual predations). The disparate treatment being accorded these two dirtbags cast a serious cloud over not just our criminal justice system, but of our culture in general.

Of course there are a couple of outstanding differences in the two cases -- one guy was just an entertainer, the other was president of the United States. Cosby’s stuff was kept under wraps for many years; and now that it has surfaced in his dotage, he may well go to jail for his conduct. Clinton’s conduct, which, in many respects, was equally unacceptable (and his womanizing indiscretions were well known throughout his entire adult life), will not result in any punishment of a criminal nature. And, in his case, shameful as that conduct is, it won’t even result in a loss of friends, let alone his personal liberty.

Clinton’s reaction to his adolescent sexualizing was equally amusing to me. When accusations were being hurled at him -- public accusations -- Clinton observed that these slings and arrows might damage his reputation, but they would not affect his “character.” And, of course, in a somewhat perverse sense, he’s right -- you can’t affect something that doesn’t exist. And Clinton, while a charming con man, is a man without content, courage, or character. And the really sad part of this is that the worthless charmer could probably be re-elected tomorrow. Indeed, if Hillary, an angry, incompetent witch, had 1/10th of his charm, she would almost be a shoe-in for the presidency (while a Republican victory should be a no-brainer, given the last eight years under Obama and Hillary, the Republicans can almost always be counted on to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory).

What adds to the amusement inherent in this situation is Hillary’s recent statement that a woman’s assertion of having been sexually assaulted should be taken seriously -- as indeed it should be. However, when such charges were leveled against her husband -- by a plethora of women -- she not only failed to take them seriously, she immediately went after the women making such charges and sought to ruin them. When confronted by this bit of hypocrisy on the campaign trail by a woman who was paying attention, Hillary’s weak response was:
“Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence”
Of course, this response was not just weak, it was meaningless. Bill’s accusers were never controverted by any evidence stronger than his denial, which no one took seriously. Indeed, Monica’s stained blue dress clearly indicated who should be believed when Bill Clinton was involved.
Given Bill’s disgraceful behavior in this area, you would think that sexually assaulting women would be the last subject that Hillary would want to open up. But, true to form, demonstrating once again another of her failings -- i.e. lack of judgement -- she tried to use it against Trump in response to one of his silly off-the-cuff comments utilizing a sexual innuendo. Even some lefties so the absurdity of this approach -- Ruth Marcus, a left-wing reporter writing for the Washington Post, had this to say:
“‘Sexism’’ isn’t the precise word for his predatory behavior toward women or his inexcusable relationship with a 22-year-old intern.Yet in the larger sense of things, Bill Clinton’s conduct toward women is far worse than any of the offensive things that Trump has said. Trump has smeared women because of their looks. Clinton has preyed on them, and in a workplace setting where he was by far the superior. That is uncomfortable for Clinton supporters but it is unavoidably true.”
This from a lefty in one of the consummate lefty publications. Trump may shoot off his mouth, but at least he keeps his pants on when he’s doing it.

Another interesting aspect of this “assault-on-women” thing is the double standard. When a conservative crosses the sexual line in the moral sand, the press gets up in arms. It’s like he fell from grace (apparently due to the right’s connection with family values). When a lefty gets caught in the wrong bed, the media (and, of course, lefties) treat it as a sign of his enhanced masculinity (the left having no grace to fall from).

Bill Clinton’s conduct with women was more than disgraceful -- it was criminal, and he should be in jail. Hillary’s supporting him in the great multitude of his meanderings (enabling him in the first instance, and defending him on his being caught) is no less disgraceful. And, certainly, no feminist would consider supporting a husband who has been as compulsively unfaithful as Bill Clinton as an understandable act of standing by your man (which, you will recall, Hillary informed us that she was not). No, I believe that Hillary could not be on weaker ground than to accuse the Republicans of engaging in a war on women. Maybe she should consider cleaning up her own house first.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/12/hillary_hauls_out_our_former_rapistinchief.html#ixzz3w7F3XpDB
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<em>The Big Short</em>: The criminality of Wall Street and the crash of 2008




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 Lewis

Adam 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."



On the threshold of the New Year

On the threshold of the New Year

31 December 2015
As the year 2015 ends, a general mood of fear and foreboding predominates in ruling circles. It is hard to find a trace of optimism. Commentators in the bourgeois media look back on the past year and recognize that it has been a year of deepening crisis. They look forward to 2016 with apprehension. The general sense in government offices and corporate boardrooms is that the coming year will be one of deep shocks, with unexpected consequences.

The Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman gives expression to this pervasive feeling in his end-of-the-year assessment published on Tuesday. “In 2015, a sense of unease and foreboding seemed to settle on all the world’s power centers,” he writes. “All the big players seem uncertain—even fearful.” China “feels much less stable.” In Europe, the mood is “bleak.” In the US, public sentiment is “sour.”
Significantly, Rachman singles out as the “biggest common factor” in the world situation “a bubbling anti-elite sentiment, combining anxiety about inequality and rage about corruption that is visible in countries as different as France, Brazil, China and the US.” This observation reflects a growing recognition within the corporate media that the coming period will be one of immense social upheavals.

Rachman’s comment and others like it that have appeared in recent days confirm the assessment made by the World Socialist Web Site during the first week of 2015. The intervals between the eruption of major geopolitical, economic and social crises have “become so short that they can hardly be described as intervals,” we wrote. Crises “appear not as isolated ‘episodes,’ but as more or less permanent features of contemporary reality. The pattern of perpetual crisis that characterized 2014—an essential indicator of the advanced state of global capitalist disequilibrium—will continue with even greater intensity in 2015.”

In defending its rule, the ruling class seeks to cover over the reality of capitalism beneath a mass of lies and hypocrisy. War is cloaked in the language of freedom and democracy; antisocial domestic policy is portrayed as the pursuit of equality and freedom. But—and this is characteristic of a period of crisis—more and more, the essential nature of capitalism—a system of exploitation, inequality, war and repression—comes into alignment with the everyday experiences of broad masses of people. Illusions are dispelled; the essence appears.

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. Europe is growing at less than 2 percent a year, and large parts of the European economy—including Greece, the target of brutal austerity measures demanded by the European banks—are in deep recession. China, presented as a possible engine of world economic growth, is slowing sharply. Brazil and much of Latin America are in deep slump. Russia is in recession.


BLOG: OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS HAVE BEEN BUSY BEAVERS SINCE THE LAST MELTDOWN THEY CAUSED!

Meanwhile, the easy-money policy of the world’s central banks has produced a new wave of speculative investment, centered in junk bonds and other forms of debt, which is beginning to unravel in a process that parallels the crisis in subprime mortgages prior to 2008.

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.”

Joseph Kishore