A central theme of the hysteria over alleged “Russian meddling” in US politics is the sinister effort supposedly being mounted by Vladimir Putin “to undermine and manipulate our democracy” (in the words of Democratic Senator Mark Warner).
According to the narrative fabricated by the intelligence agencies and promoted by the Democratic Party and the corporate media over the past year and a half, Putin and his minions hacked the Democrats and stirred up social divisions and popular grievances to secure the election for Donald Trump, and they have been working ever since to destroy “our institutions.”
Their chosen field of battle is the internet, with Russian trolls and bots infecting the body politic by taking advantage of lax policing of social media by the giant tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.
To defend democracy, the argument goes, these companies, working with the state, must silence oppositional viewpoints—above all left-wing, anti-war and socialist viewpoints—which are labeled “fake news,” and banish them from the internet. Nothing is said of the fact that this supposed defense of democracy is a violation of the basic canons of genuine democracy, guaranteed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution: freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
But what is this much vaunted “American democracy?” Let's take a closer look.
The working class will never achieve genuine democracy, nor succeed in defending the democratic gains it extracted in the course of more than a century of struggle against the capitalist class, so long as it remains an oppressed class, exploited by the corporate owners and their state apparatus. Democracy for the workers and oppressed, as opposed to the phony democracy of the rich, can be achieved only through the creation of organs of workers’ struggle and control and the building of a revolutionary leadership to overthrow the existing state, place power in the hands of the working class, expropriate the capitalists and establish a socialist economy based on social equality.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Finance’s Lengthening Shadow
The growth of nonbank lending
poses an increasing risk.
Economy, finance, and
budgets
A decade
ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman
Brothers, the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy
in mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had
required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October,
two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America,
needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller but
still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac, died.
After the
crisis, the goal was to make banks safer. The 2010 Dodd-Frank law, coupled with
independent regulatory initiatives led by the Federal Reserve and other bank
overseers, severely tightened banks’ ability to engage in speculative ventures,
such as investing directly in hedge funds or buying and selling securities for
short-term gain. The new regime made them hold more reserves, too, to backstop
lending.
Yet the
financial system isn’t just banks. Over the last ten years, a plethora of
“nonbank” lenders, or “shadow banks”—ranging from publicly traded investment
funds that purchase debt to private-equity firms loaning to companies for
mergers or expansions—have expanded their presence in the financial system, and
thus in the U.S. and global economies. Banks may have tighter lending standards
today, but many of these other entities loosened them up. One consequence:
despite a supposed crackdown on risky finance, American and global debt has
climbed to an all-time high.
Banks
remain hugely important, of course, but the potential for a sudden, 2008-like
seizure in global credit markets increasingly lies beyond traditional banking.
In 2008, government officials at least knew which institutions to rescue to
avoid global economic paralysis. Next time, they may be chasing shadows.
The 2008 financial crisis vaporized 8.8 million American jobs,
triggered 8 million house foreclosures, and still roils global politics. Many
commentators blamed a proliferation of complex financial instruments as the
primary reason for the meltdown. Notoriously, financiers had taken subprime
“teaser”-rate mortgages and other low-quality loans and bundled them into
opaque financial securities, such as “collateralized debt obligations,” which
proved exceedingly hard for even sophisticated investors, such as the overseas
banks that purchased many of them, to understand. When it turned out that some
of the securities contained lots of defaulting loans—as Americans who never
were financially secure enough to purchase homes struggled to pay housing
debt—no one could figure out where, exactly, the bad debt was buried (many
places, it turned out). Global panic ensued.
The
“shadow-financing” industry played a role in the crisis, too. Many nonbank
mortgage lenders had sold these bundled loans to banks, so as to make yet more
bundled loans. But the locus of the 2008 crisis was traditional banks. Firms
such as Citibank and Lehman had kept tens of billions of dollars of such debt
and related derivative instruments on their books, and investors feared
(correctly, in Lehman’s case) that future losses from these soured loans would
force the institutions themselves into default, wiping out shareholders and
costing bondholders money.
The
ultimate cause of the crisis, however, wasn’t complex at all: a massive
increase in debt, with too little capital behind it. Recall how a bank works.
Like people, banks have assets and liabilities. For a person, a house or
retirement account is an asset and the money he owes is a liability. A bank’s
assets include the loans that it has made to customers—whether directly, in a
mortgage, or indirectly, in purchasing a mortgage-backed bond. Loans and bonds
are bank assets because, when all goes well, the bank collects money from them:
the interest and principal that borrowers pay monthly on their mortgage, for
example. A bank’s liabilities, by contrast, include the money it has borrowed
from outside investors and depositors. When a customer keeps his money in the
bank for safekeeping, he effectively lends it money; global investors who
purchase a bank’s bonds are also lending to it. The goal, for firms as well as
people, is for the worth of assets to exceed liabilities. A bank charges higher
interest rates on the loans that it makes than the rates it pays to depositors
and investors, so that it can turn a profit—again, when all goes well.
When the
economy tanks, this system runs into two problems. First, a bank’s asset values
start to fall as more people find themselves unable to pay off their mortgage
or credit-card debt. Yet the bank still must repay its own debt. If the value
of a bank’s assets sinks below its liabilities, the bank is effectively
insolvent. To lessen this risk, regulators demand that banks hold some money in
reserve: capital. Theoretically, a bank with capital equal to 10 percent of its
assets could watch those assets decline in value by 10 percent without
insolvency looming.
Yet
investors would frown on such a thin margin, and that highlights the second
problem: illiquidity. A bank might have sufficient capital to cover its losses,
but if depositors and other lenders don’t agree, they may rush to take their
money out—money that the bank can’t immediately provide because it has locked
up the funds in long-term loans, including mortgages. During a liquidity “run,”
solvent banks can turn to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding.
By 2008,
bank capital levels had sunk to an all-time low; bank managers and their
regulators, believing that risk could be perfectly monitored and controlled,
were comfortable with the trend. By 2007, banks’ “leverage ratio”—the percentage
of quality capital relative to their assets—was just 6 percent, well below the
nearly 8 percent of a decade earlier. Since then, thanks to tougher rules, the
leverage ratio has risen above 9 percent. Global capital ratios have risen, as
well. Many analysts believe that capital requirements should be higher still,
but the shift has made banks somewhat safer.
The
government doesn’t mandate capital levels with the goal of keeping any
particular bank safe. After all, private companies go out of business all the
time, and investors in any private venture should be prepared to take that
risk. The capital requirements are about keeping the economy safe. Banks tend to hold similar assets—various types of
loans to people, businesses, or government. So when one bank gets into trouble,
chances are that many others are suffering as well. A higher capital reserve
lessens the chance of several banks veering toward insolvency simultaneously,
which would drain the economy of credit. It was that threat—an abrupt shutdown
of markets for all lending, to good borrowers and bad—that led Washington to
bail out the financial industry (mostly the banks) in 2008.
But what if the financial industry, in creating credit, bypasses
the banks? According to the global central banks and regulators who make up the
international Financial Stability Board, this type of lending constitutes
“shadow banking.” That’s an imprecise, overly ominous term, evoking Mafia dons
writing loans to gamblers on betting slips and then kneecapping debtors who
don’t pay the money back on time, but the practice is nothing so Tony
Soprano-ish. The accountancy and consultancy firm Deloitte defines shadow
banking, wonkily, as “a market-funded credit intermediation system involving
maturity and/or liquidity transformation through securitization and
secured-funding mechanisms. It exists at least partly outside of the
traditional banking system and does not have government guarantees in the form
of insurance or access to the central bank.”
“Shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from
corporate bond markets to payday lending.”
In plain
English, “maturity and/or liquidity transformation” is exactly what a bank
does: making a long-term loan, such as a mortgage, but funding it with
short-term deposits or short-term bonds. Outside of a bank, the activity
involves taking a mortgage or other kind of longer-term loan, bundling it with
other loans, and selling it to investors—including pension funds, insurers, or
corporations with large amounts of idle cash, like Apple—as securities that
mature far more quickly than the loans they contain. The risks here are the
same as at the banks, but with a twist: if people and companies can’t pay off
the loans on the schedule that the lenders anticipated, all the investors risk
losing money. Unlike small depositors at banks, shadow banks don’t have
recourse to government deposit insurance. Nor can shadow-financing participants
go to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding during a crisis—though, in many
cases, they wouldn’t have to: pensioners and insurance policyholders generally
don’t have the right to remove their money from pension funds and insurers
overnight, as many bank investors do.
Understood
broadly, shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from corporate
bond markets to payday lending. And much of it isn’t very shadowy; as a recent
U.S. Treasury report noted, the government “prefers to transition to a
different term, ‘market-based finance,’ ” because applying the term “shadow
banking” to entities like insurance companies could “imply insufficient
regulatory oversight,” when some such sectors (though not all) are highly
regulated. It isn’t always easy to separate real banks from shadow banks,
moreover. Just as before the financial crisis, banks continue to offer shadow
investments, such as mortgage-backed securities or bundled corporate loans,
and, conversely, banks also lend money to private-equity funds and other shadow
lenders, so that they, in turn, can lend to companies.
Such
market-based finance has its merits; sound reasons exist for why a pension-fund
administrator doesn’t just deposit tens of billions of dollars at the bank,
withdrawing the money over time to meet retirees’ needs. For people and
institutions willing, and able, to take on more risk, market-based finance can
offer higher interest rates—an especially important consideration when the
government keeps official interest rates close to zero, as it did from 2008 to
2016. Shadow finance also offers competition for companies, people, and
governments unable to borrow from banks cheaply, or whose needs—say, a
multi-hundred-billion-dollar bond to buy another company—would be beyond the
prudent coverage capacity of a single bank or even a group of banks.
Theoretically,
bond markets and other market-based finance instruments make the financial
system safer by diversifying risk. A bank holding a large concentration of
loans to one company faces a major default risk. Dispersing that risk to dozens
or hundreds of buyers in the global marketplace means—again, in theory—that in
a default, lots of people and institutions will suffer a little pain, rather
than one bank suffering a lot of pain.
But too much of a good thing is sometimes not so good, and, in this
case, the extension of shadow banking threatens to reintroduce the risks that
innovation was supposed to reduce. Recent growth in shadow banking isn’t
serving to disperse risk or to tailor innovative products to meet borrowers’
needs. Two less promising reasons explain its expansion. One is to enable
borrowers and lenders to skirt the rules—capital cushions—that constrain
lending at banks. The other—after a decade of record-low, near-zero interest
rates as Federal Reserve policy—is to allow borrowers and lenders to find
investments that pay higher returns.
The world
of market-based finance has indeed grown. Between 2002 and 2007, the eve of the
financial crisis, the world’s nonbank financial assets increased from $30
trillion to $60 trillion, or 124 percent of GDP. Now these assets, at $160
trillion, constitute 148 percent of GDP. Back then, such assets made up about a
quarter of the world’s financial assets; today, they account for nearly half
(48 percent), reports the Financial Stability Board (FSB).
Within
this pool of nonbank assets, the FSB has devised a “narrower” measure of shadow
banking that identifies the types of companies likely to pose the most systemic
risk to the economy—those most susceptible, that is, to sudden, bank-like
liquidity or solvency panics. The FSB believes that pension funds and insurance
companies could largely withstand short-term market downturns, so it doesn’t
include them in this riskier category. That leaves $45 trillion in narrow
shadow institutions and investments, a full 72 percent of it held in
instruments “with features that make them susceptible to runs.” That’s up from
$28 trillion in 2010—or from 66 percent to 73 percent of GDP.
Of that
$45 trillion market, the U.S. has the largest portion: $14 trillion. (Though,
as the FSB explains, separation by jurisdiction may be misleading; Chinese
investment vehicles, for example, have sold hundreds of billions of dollars in
credit products to local investors to spend on property abroad, affecting
Western asset prices.) Compared with this $14 trillion figure, American
commercial banks’ assets are worth just shy of $17 trillion, up from about $12
trillion right before the financial crisis. Banks as well as nonbank lenders
have grown, in other words, but the banks have done so under far stricter
oversight.
An analysis of one particular area of shadow financing shows the
potential for a new type of chaos. A decade ago, an “exchange-traded fund,” or
ETF, was mostly a vehicle to help people and institutions invest in stocks. An
investor wanting to invest in a stock portfolio but without enough resources to
buy, say, 100 shares apiece in several different companies, could purchase
shares in an ETF that made such investments. These stock-backed ETFs carried
risk, of course: if the stock market went down, the value of the ETF tracking
the stocks would go down, too. But an investor likely could sell the fund
quickly; the ETF was liquid because the underlying stocks were liquid.
Over the
past decade, though, a new creature has emerged: bond-based ETFs. A bond ETF
works the same way as a stock ETF: an investor interested in purchasing debt
securities but without the financial resources to buy individual bonds—usually
requiring several thousand dollars of outlay at once—can purchase shares in a
fund that invests in these bonds. Since 2005, bond ETFs have grown from
negligible to a market just shy of $800 billion—nearly 10 percent of the value
of the U.S. corporate bond market.
These
bond ETFs are riskier, in at least one way, than stock ETFs. Some bond ETFs, of
course, invest solely in high-quality federal, municipal, and corporate
debt—bonds highly unlikely to default in droves. Default, though, isn’t the
only risk: suddenly higher global interest rates could cause bond funds to lose
value (as new bonds, with the higher interest rates, would be more attractive).
And with the exception of federal-government debt, even the highest-quality
bonds aren’t as liquid as stocks; they have maturities ranging anywhere from
hours remaining to 100 years.
Investors
in bond-based ETFs, then, face a much bigger “liquidity” and “maturity”
mismatch risk. If the investors want to sell their ETF shares in a hurry, the
fund managers might not be able to sell the underlying bonds quickly to repay
them, particularly in a tense market. That’s especially true, since bond
markets are even less liquid than they were pre–financial crisis. Because of
new regulations on “market making,” banks will be highly unlikely to buy bonds
in a declining market to make a buck later, after the panic subsides.
(ALBERTO
MENA)
Alook at a related type of debt-based ETF raises even bigger
mismatch concerns. “In 2017, investors poured $11.5 billion into U.S. mutual
funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in high-yield bank loans,” notes
Douglas J. Peebles, chief investment officer of fixed-income—bonds—at the
AllianceBernstein investment outfit. A high-yield bank loan is one that carries
particular risk, such as a loan to a company with a poor credit rating or to a
company borrowing money to merge with another firm or to expand; the “yield”
refers to the higher interest rate required to compensate for this risk. Rather
than keep this loan on its books, the bank is selling it, in these cases, to
the exchange-traded funds that are a rising component of shadow banking.
This new
demand has induced lending that otherwise wouldn’t exist—in many cases, for
good reason. “The quality of today’s bank loans has declined,” Peebles
observes, because “strong demand has been promoting lax lending and sketchy
supply. . . . Companies know that high demand means they can borrow at
favorable rates.” Further, says Peebles, “first-time, lower-rated
issuers”—companies without a good track record of repaying debt—are responsible
for the recent boom in loan borrowers, from fewer than 300 institutions in 2007
to closer to 900 today. The number of bank-loan ETFs (and similar “open-ended”
funds) expanded from just two in 1992 to 250 in June 2018.
Peebles
worries as well about the extra risk that this financing mechanism poses to
investors. “In the past, banks viewed the loans as investments that would stay
on their balance sheets,” he explains, but now that banks sell them to ETFs,
“most investors today own high-yield bank loans through mutual funds or ETFs,
highly liquid instruments. . . . But the underlying bank loan market is less
liquid than the high-yield bond market,” with trades “tak[ing] weeks to
settle.” He warns: “When the tide turns, strategies like these are bound to run
into trouble.”
The peril to the economy isn’t just that current investors could
lose money in a crisis, though big drops in asset markets typically lead people
to curtail consumer spending, deepening a recession. The bigger danger is a
repeat of 2008: fear of losses on existing investments might lead shadow-market
lenders to cut off credit to all potential new borrowers, even worthy ones.
Banks, because they’re dependent on shadow banks to buy their loans, would be
unlikely to fill the vacuum. “Although non-bank credit can act as a substitute
for bank credit when banks curtail the extension of credit, non-bank and bank
credit can also move in lockstep, potentially amplifying credit booms and
busts,” says the FSB. The porous borders between the supposedly riskier parts
of the nonbank financial markets—ETFs—and the less risky ones also could work
against a fast recovery in a crisis. Thanks to recent regulatory changes,
insurance companies, for example, are set to become big purchasers of bond ETF
shares.
Worsening
this hazard, just as with the collateralized debt securities of the financial
meltdown, many bond-based ETFs contain similar securities. Such duplication
could eradicate the diversification benefit that the economy supposedly gets
from dispersing risk. Contagion would be accelerated by the fact that
debt-based ETFs, like stock-based ETFs, must “price” themselves continuously
during the day, according to perceived future losses; this, in effect,
introduces the risk of stock-market-style volatility into long-term bond
markets. (Bond-based mutual funds, of course, have existed for decades, but
they did not trade like stocks and thus did not feature this particular risk.)
Via the plunging price of collateralized debt obligations, we saw, in 2008,
what happened to the availability of long-term credit when exposed to the
pricing signals of an equity-style crash, but those collateralized debt
obligations traded far less frequently than bond ETFs do today. Bond ETFs may
be more efficient, yes, in reflecting any given day’s value; that supposed
benefit could also allow a panic to spread more rapidly.
During
the last global panic, the answer to getting credit flowing again—so that
companies could perform critical tasks, such as meeting payrolls, before
revenue from sales came in—was to provide extraordinary government support to
the large banks. But even if one believes that such bailouts are a sensible
approach to financial crises—a highly tenuous position—how would the government
provide longer-term support to hundreds of individual funds, to ensure that the
broader market keeps functioning for credit-card and longer-term corporate
debt? This would greatly expand the government safety net over supposedly
risk-embracing financial markets—by even more than it was expanded a decade
ago.
“When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may
need shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.”
Unwise lending also harms borrowers. Private-equity firms, too, are
increasingly lending companies money, instead of just buying those firms
outright, their older model. As the Financial Times recently reported,
private-equity funds—or, more accurately, their related private-credit
funds—have more than $150 billion in money available for investment. They make
loans that banks won’t, or can’t, make, though this is leading banks to take
greater risks to compete. “It’s been great for borrowers,” says Richard Farley,
chair of law firm Kramer Levin’s leveraged-finance group, as “there are deals
that would not be financed,” or would not be financed on such favorable terms.
Competition
is usually healthy, and risky finance can spark innovation that otherwise
wouldn’t have happened. But easy lending can also make economic cycles more
violent. Even in boom years, excess debt can plunge firms that otherwise might
muddle through a recession deep into crisis, or even cause them to fail, adding
to layoffs and consumer-spending cutbacks. We can see this happening already,
as the Financial Times reports, with bankrupt
firms like Charming Charlie, an accessories store that expanded too fast; Six
Month Smiles, an orthodontic concern; and Southern Technical Institute, a
for-profit technical college.
The
numbers are troubling. The expansion of shadow banking has unquestionably
brought a pileup of debt. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets
Association, a trade group, estimates that U.S. bond markets, overall, have
swollen from $31 trillion to nearly $42 trillion since 2008. Federal government
borrowing accounts for a lot of that, but not close to all of it. The
corporate-bond market, for example, went from $5.5 trillion to $9.1 trillion
over the same decade. Corporations, in other words, owe almost twice as much
today in bond obligations as they did a decade ago. That’s sure to make it
harder for some, at least, to recover from any future downturn.
There are policy approaches to resolving these debt issues. An
unpopular idea would be to treat markets that act like banks, as banks—requiring
ETFs, say, to hold the same capital cushions and adhere to the same prudence
standards as banks. In the end, though, the bigger problem is cultural and
political. What we’re seeing, more than a decade after the financial crisis,
results from the government’s mixed signals about financial markets. On the one
hand, the U.S. government, along with its global counterparts, realized in 2008
that debt had reached unsustainable levels; that’s partly why it sharply raised
bank capital requirements. On the other hand, the government recognized that
the economy is critically dependent on debt. Absent large increases in workers’
pay, consumer and corporate debt slowdowns would stall the economy’s until-recently
modest growth. That’s why the U.S. and other Western governments have kept
interest rates so low, for so long.
Thus, we
find ourselves with safer banks but scarier shadows. Global debt levels are now
$247 trillion, or 318 percent, of world GDP, according to the Institute of
International Finance, up from $142 trillion owed in 2007, or 269 percent of
GDP. When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may have to
invent shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.
Maxine Wants
Revenge
"La
vengeance est un plat qui se mange froide" (“revenge is a dish best served
cold”) is an oft-cited proverb from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in
1782. A good line in a book or play, but a mentality that should have no place
in the business of public policy. Such is not the case.
Last
month an elected representative publicly stated that revenge is a part of her
motivation and agenda when Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) told a
constituent gathering in Los Angeles that she is “going to do to you what you did to us.”
The “you” Waters was referring to are players in the mortgage and banking
industry. The odd twist here is that Waters is planning revenge on institutions
for doing what she herself instructed them to do.
Waters,
who was easily re-elected in the 2018 midterms with nearly 76% of votes cast,
represents California’s 43rd congressional district which includes much of
south-central Los Angeles. She appears poised to chair the House Financial
Services Committee when Democrats assume control of the House of
Representatives in January.
"I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses. I have
not forgotten that you undermined our community. I have not forgotten that you
sold us those exotic products, had us sign on the line for junk and for mess we
could not afford. …What am I going to do you? What I’m going to do you is fair,
I’m going to do to you what you did to us!”
A
sitting House representative threatening U.S. businesses with retribution is
remarkable enough, but retribution for what?
Apart
from the dismissal of personal responsibility inherent in the idea that people
were somehow forced into purchasing something they couldn’t afford, of note
here is how the situation came about in the first place; how citizens of
Waters’ community found themselves able to qualify for mortgages that were
beyond their financial means. Making such loans is not in a lending
institution’s best interests, so why would one do it? The institutions did it
because Maxine Waters, among others, forced them to.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s a small cadre of
House Democrats, most prominently Waters and Barney Frank (D-MA), worked in
cahoots with then-CEO of Fannie Mae,Franklin Raines,
to loosen mortgage lending standards and practices for the purpose of making
homeownership a reality for a greater number of economically disadvantaged
Americans. (Raines was subsequently embroiled in a scandal at Freddie Mac and
Fannie Mae that resulted in him having to pay a record $24.7 million
settlement.)
At
the time Waters heaped praise upon banks and lending institutions for allowing
people to sign on the line for loans they could not afford, saying in aSeptember
2003 hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services:
"Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and
in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank
Raines. Everything in the 1992 act has worked just fine. In fact, the GSEs have
exceeded their housing goals. What we need to do today is to focus on the
regulator, and this must be done in a manner so as not to impede their
affordable housing mission, a mission that has seen innovation flourish from
desktop underwriting to 100 percent loans.”
In
later comments during the hearing, Waters made clear the true mission for
Fannie and Freddie that Democrats had in mind, which was finding ways to get
minorities into mortgaged houses even if they could not meet qualification
requirements for standard loans, such as the ability to bring a down payment to
the closing transaction or to borrow an amount in excess of typical
underwriting limits.
“Since
the inception of goals from 1993 to 2002, loans to African-Americans increased
219 percent and loans to Hispanics increased 244 percent, while loans to
non-minorities increased 62 percent. Additionally, in 2001, 43.1 percent of
Fannie Mae’s single-family business served low-and moderate-income borrowers….”
Congressional
and public records alike show that at the time Waters was a staunch opponent of
anything resembling more oversight of lenders or lending practices; thus, more
and more loans were made to those least able to pay them back and most likely
to default on them.
And
default they have, which brings the story full circle to last month when Waters
vowed revenge on those banks and lenders that have “done this” to her
constituent communities. Sadly, many in those communities believe it. They
believe the reason they lost their homes is because when they fell behind on
payments and were foreclosed upon, it was because those big banks forced them
to take out a loan they couldn’t afford -- without realizing that their
congressional representative forced those banks to lend them the money in the
first place.
As for Waters’ accusation of banking having done this “to us,”
at last check there have been no foreclosure proceedings brought against her
$4.69 million, 8-bedroom, 5-bathroom, 6,100-square-foot West
Hollywood mansion.
THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOYS & GIRLS IN CONGRESS GATHER ROUND
TO UNLEASH THE WHOLESALE LOOTING OF THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS EVEN MORE….
BOTTOMLESS
BAILOUTS AROUND THE CORNER WAITING!
After eight years of the
Dodd-Frank bank “reform,” the American financial oligarchy exercises its
dictatorship over society and the government more firmly than ever. This
unaccountable elite will not tolerate even the most minimal limits on its
ability to plunder the economy for its own personal gain.
“Democrats Move Towards ‘Oligarchical
Socialism,’
Says Forecaster Joel Kotkin.”
NO POL IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS THAN
BARACK
OBAMA, AND HE DID IT BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE. What
did the Wall Street
banksters know that took us so long to find out???
"One of the premier institutions of
big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the
eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
Obama, of course, covered up his own
role, depicting his presidency as eight years of heroic efforts to repair
the damage caused by the 2008 financial crash. At the end of those
eight years, however, Wall Street and the financial oligarchy were
fully recovered, enjoying record wealth, while working people were
poorer than before, a widening social chasm that made possible the
election of the billionaire con man and Demagogue in November 2016.
“The response of the administration was to
rush to the defense of the banks. Even before coming to power, Obama expressed
his unconditional support for the bailouts, which he subsequently
expanded. He assembled an administration
dominated by the interests of finance
capital, symbolized by economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner.”
Trump criticized
Dimon in 2013 for
supposedly contributing to the country’s economic downturn. “I’m not
Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case and then pays $11
billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst banker in
the United States,” he told reporters.
10 years after the
financial crisis,
Americans are divided on security of U.S. economic
system
A decade after
the 2008 financial crisis, the public is about evenly split on whether the U.S.
economic system is more secure today than it was then. About half of Americans
(48%) say the system is more secure today than it was before the 2008 crisis,
while roughly as many (46%) say it is no more secure.
Opinions have
changed since 2015 and 2013, when majorities said the economic system was no
more secure than it had been prior to the crisis (63% in both years), according
to the new survey, conducted Sept. 18-24 among 1,754 adults.
Republicans are
now far more likely to view the system as more secure than they were during
Barack Obama’s presidency. Three years ago, just 22% of Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents said the economic system was more secure than
before the crisis. Today, the share saying the same has increased 48 percentage
points to 70%.
Views among
Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have moved in the opposite
direction. Today, Democrats are less confident that the economy is more secure
than it was before the 2008 financial crisis: Just a third say the economy is
more secure – a drop of 13 percentage points from 2015 (46%).
Meanwhile, the
public’s views of current economic conditions – and the trajectory of the U.S.
economy over the next year – have changed little since March.
About half of
Americans (51%) now rate the national economy as excellent or good, among the
most positive measures in nearly two decades.
As has been the
case since Donald Trump took office, Republicans are far more positive than
Democrats about economic conditions: 73% of Republicans and Republican-leaning
independents say economic conditions are excellent or good while just 35% of
Democrats and Democratic leaners agree.
Partisans also
are divided in their expectations for the economy. Republicans (57%) are much
more likely than Democrats (12%) to say they expect the national economy to get
better in the next year. Partisan differences in opinions about the economy –
current and future – are about as wide as they were in March.
Similarly,
there has been little recent change in Americans’ views of their own financial
situations. About half (49%) say their finances are in excellent or good shape.
Partisan
differences in people’s assessments of their personal finances, which were
modest during most of Obama’s presidency, have increased since then.
A majority of
Republicans (61%) say their personal financial situation is excellent or good,
compared with about four-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners (41%).
Most Americans
remain optimistic about their personal financial future. Almost seven-in-ten
adults (68%) expect their financial situation to improve some or a lot over the
next year. Republicans (79%) more than Democrats (59%) are optimistic about
their finances getting better next year.
Fannie Mae and 'Freddie Maxine'
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of
California appears a lock to become the next chairman of the House's powerful
Financial Services Committee. Waters is pledging to be a diligent watchdog
for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that when it comes to
the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies, "We are going
to do to them what they did to us." I'm not going to cry too many tears
for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats in these midterm
elections. You get what you pay for.
But here we go again asking the
fox to guard the henhouse.
Back during he the financial
crisis of 2008 to 2009, which wiped out trillions of dollars of the wealth
and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put the two major
arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Former Democratic Sen. Chris
Dodd of Connecticut and former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts
were the co-sponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers will
recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to reign in Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac and said he wanted to "roll the dice" on the housing
market. That worked out well.
Meanwhile, Dodd took graft
payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide, while greasing
the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of going to jail or
at least being dishonorably discharged from Congress, he wrote the Dodd-Frank
bill to regulate the banks.
Enter Maxine Waters. Back in
2009, I had a run-in with "Mad Maxine," as she is called on Capitol
Hill. The two of us appeared together on HBO's "Real Time With Bill
Maher," and when she pontificated about the misdeeds of the housing
lobby, I confronted her on the money she took from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
PACs for her campaign.
Here is how the conversation
went:
MAHER: Don't you think Wall
Street needs regulation? That's where the problem is: that there was no
regulation.
MOORE: Well, let's talk about
regulation. One of the biggest institutions that have failed this year was
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is an institution that your friends, the
Democrats, in fact, you, Congresswoman Waters, did not want to regulate. You said
it wasn't broke five years ago at a congressional hearing, and you took
$15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie.
WATERS: No, I didn't.
MOORE: Yeah, you did. It's in the
FEC (Federal Election Commission) records.
WATERS: No, it's not.
MOORE: And so did Barney Frank.
And so did Chris Dodd.
WATERS: That is a lie, and I
challenge you to find $15,000 that I took from Fannie PAC.
I have to confess that Waters is
very persuasive. I feared when the show was over that I had gotten my numbers
wrong and that I had falsely charged the congresswoman of corruption. But
several fact-checking groups looked it up, and sure enough, I was right. She
took $15,000 from the PAC and another $17,000, all told.
I was also right about her
statements during a 2004 congressional hearing when she said:
"Through nearly a dozen
hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something (Fannie and Freddie) that
wasn't broke. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and
particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin
Raines."
We learned the hard way just four
years later; this was all a fraudulent claim to avoid oversight of her
campaign contributors. Imagine if a Republican had said these things.
She took in more than $100,000
from Wall Street this year as well. None of this is illegal, but it calls
into question her shakedown tactics. First, she threatens to put their head
in a noose as chairman of the Financial Services Committee — as she is
getting them to pony up campaign contributions. Pay to play? You decide.
Waters has had run-ins with the
House Ethics Committee because of fundraising tactics and insider wheeling
and dealing. Back during the financial crisis, she was suspected of helping
arrange meetings with Treasury Department officials and getting bailout money
for OneUnited, a troubled bank that her family owned major stock holdings in.
She beat the rap of corruption, but it sure smelled bad.
So will Maxine Waters be the
crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and save America from the
next financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots of harassment and
shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall Street excesses.
If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy raising money from
the people she is now in charge of regulating.
Stephen Moore is a senior
fellow at The Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with
FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad
War on Energy."
The global banking system has historically
played both sides of major conflicts through war financing, and drawing
out the battles by providing funds beyond what each country could have
otherwise spent.
|
|
|
Why Banks Love War & the War Economy
|
|
|
|
|
Fannie Mae and
'Freddie Maxine'
Democratic
Rep. Maxine Waters of California appears a lock to become the next chairman of
the House's powerful Financial Services Committee. Waters is pledging to be a
diligent watchdog for mom and pop investors, and recently told a crowd that
when it comes to the big banks, investment houses and insurance companies,
"We are going to do to them what they did to us." I'm not going to
cry too many tears for Wall Street since they poured money behind the Democrats
in these midterm elections. You get what you pay for.
But
here we go again asking the fox to guard the henhouse.
Back
during he the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009, which wiped out trillions of
dollars of the wealth and retirement savings of middle-class families, we put
the two major arsonists in charge of putting out the fire. Former Democratic
Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of
Massachusetts were the co-sponsors of the infamous Dodd-Frank regulations. Readers
will recall that good old Barney resisted every attempt to reign in Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac and said he wanted to "roll the dice" on the housing
market. That worked out well.
Meanwhile,
Dodd took graft payments in the form of low-interest loans from Countrywide,
while greasing the skids for the housing lenders in these years. Instead of
going to jail or at least being dishonorably discharged from Congress, he wrote
the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate the banks.
Enter
Maxine Waters. Back in 2009, I had a run-in with "Mad Maxine," as she
is called on Capitol Hill. The two of us appeared together on HBO's "Real
Time With Bill Maher," and when she pontificated about the misdeeds of the
housing lobby, I confronted her on the money she took from Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac PACs for her campaign.
Here
is how the conversation went:
MAHER:
Don't you think Wall Street needs regulation? That's where the problem is: that
there was no regulation.
MOORE:
Well, let's talk about regulation. One of the biggest institutions that have
failed this year was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This is an institution that
your friends, the Democrats, in fact, you, Congresswoman Waters, did not want
to regulate. You said it wasn't broke five years ago at a congressional
hearing, and you took $15,000 of campaign contributions from Fannie and
Freddie.
WATERS:
No, I didn't.
MOORE:
Yeah, you did. It's in the FEC (Federal Election Commission) records.
WATERS:
No, it's not.
MOORE:
And so did Barney Frank. And so did Chris Dodd.
WATERS: That is a lie, and I
challenge you to find $15,000 that I took from Fannie PAC.
I
have to confess that Waters is very persuasive. I feared when the show was over
that I had gotten my numbers wrong and that I had falsely charged the
congresswoman of corruption. But several fact-checking groups looked it up, and
sure enough, I was right. She took $15,000 from the PAC and another $17,000,
all told.
I
was also right about her statements during a 2004 congressional hearing when
she said:
"Through
nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something (Fannie and
Freddie) that wasn't broke. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac,
and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin
Raines."
We
learned the hard way just four years later; this was all a fraudulent claim to
avoid oversight of her campaign contributors. Imagine if a Republican had said
these things.
She
took in more than $100,000 from Wall Street this year as well. None of this is
illegal, but it calls into question her shakedown tactics. First, she threatens
to put their head in a noose as chairman of the Financial Services Committee —
as she is getting them to pony up campaign contributions. Pay to play? You
decide.
Waters
has had run-ins with the House Ethics Committee because of fundraising tactics
and insider wheeling and dealing. Back during the financial crisis, she was
suspected of helping arrange meetings with Treasury Department officials and
getting bailout money for OneUnited, a troubled bank that her family owned
major stock holdings in. She beat the rap of corruption, but it sure smelled
bad.
So
will Maxine Waters be the crusading financial protector of our 401k plans and
save America from the next financial bubble? Well, there will certainly be lots
of harassment and shakedowns. But don't count on her steering us clear of Wall
Street excesses. If history is any guide, Mad Maxine will be way too busy
raising money from the people she is now in charge of regulating.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and
an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of "Fueling
Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy."
*
“A series of recent
polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with
capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by
the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said
they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed
with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”
White House report on socialism
The specter of Marx haunts the
American ruling class
Last month, the Council
of Economic Advisers, an agency of the Trump White House, released an
extraordinary report titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” The report
begins with the statement: “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl
Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse.
Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in
Congress and among much of the younger electorate.”
The very fact that the
US government
officially acknowledges
a growth of popular
support for socialism,
particularly among the
nation’s youth,
testifies to vast changes taking
place in the political
consciousness of the
working class and the
terror this is striking
within the ruling
elite. America is, after all, a
country where
anti-communism was for the
greater part of a
century a state-sponsored
secular religion. No
ruling class has so
ruthlessly sought to
exclude socialist politics
from political
discourse as the American ruling
class.
The 70-page document is
itself an inane right-wing screed. It seeks to discredit socialism by
identifying it with capitalist countries such as Venezuela that have expanded
state ownership of parts of the economy while protecting private ownership of
the banks, and, with the post-2008 collapse of oil and other commodity prices,
increasingly attacked the living standards of the working class.
It identifies socialism
with proposals for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and
increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton
Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,”
i.e., the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all
social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that
impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment.
The report’s arguments
and themes find expression in the fascistic campaign speeches of Donald Trump,
who routinely and absurdly attacks the Democrats as socialists and accuses them
of seeking to turn America into another “socialist” Venezuela.
What has prompted this
effort to blackguard socialism?
A series of recent
polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism
and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union
of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they
would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with
the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”
Last November, a poll
conducted by YouGov showed that 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 21
and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country than in a
capitalist country.
In August of this year,
a Gallup poll found that for the first time
since the organization
began tracking the figure, fewer than half
of Americans aged 18–29
had a positive view of capitalism, while
more than half had a
positive view of socialism. The
percentage of young
people viewing
capitalism positively
fell from 68 percent
in 2010 to 45 percent
this year, a 23-
percentage point drop
in just eight years.
This surge in interest
in socialism is bound up with a resurgence of class struggle in the US and
internationally. In the United States, the number of major strikes so far this
year, 21, is triple the number in 2017. The ruling class was particularly
terrified by the teachers’ walkouts earlier this year because the biggest
strikes were organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the
unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate organizations that
have suppressed the class struggle for decades.
The growth of the class
struggle is an objective process that is driven by the global crisis of capitalism,
which finds its most acute social and political expression in the center of
world capitalism—the United States. It is the class struggle that provides the
key to the fight for genuine socialism.
Masses of workers and
youth are being driven into struggle and politically radicalized by decades of
uninterrupted war and the staggering growth of social inequality. This process
has accelerated during the 10 years since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The
Obama years saw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in
history, the escalation of the wars begun under Bush and their spread to Libya,
Syria and Yemen, and the intensification of mass surveillance, attacks on
immigrants and other police state measures.
This paved the way for
the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness
of the ruling oligarchy.
Under conditions where
the typical CEO in the US now makes in a single day almost as much as the
average worker makes in an entire year, and the net worth of the 400 wealthiest
Americans has doubled over the past decade, the working class is looking for a
radical alternative to the status quo. As the Socialist Equality Party wrote in
its program eight years ago, “The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism
in the United States”:
The change in objective
conditions, however, will lead American workers to change their minds. The
reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a
fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society.
The response of the
ruling class is two-fold. First, the abandonment of bourgeois democratic forms
of rule and the turn toward dictatorship. The run-up to the midterm elections
has revealed the advanced stage of these preparations, with Trump’s fascistic
attacks on immigrants, deployment of troops to the border, threats to gun down
unarmed men, women and children seeking asylum, and his pledge to overturn the
14th Amendment establishing birthright citizenship.
That this has evoked no
serious opposition from the Democrats and the media makes clear that the entire
ruling class is united around a turn to authoritarianism. Indeed, the Democrats
are spearheading the drive to censor the internet in order to silence left-wing
and socialist opposition.
The second response is
to promote phony socialists such as Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists
of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left organizations in order to confuse the
working class and channel its opposition back behind the Democratic Party.
In 2018, with Sanders
totally integrated into the Democratic Party leadership, this role has been
largely delegated to the DSA, which functions as an arm of the Democrats. Two
DSA members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rashida Tlaib in Detroit,
are likely to win seats in the House of Representatives as candidates of the
Democratic Party.
The closer they come to
taking office, the more they seek to distance themselves from their supposed
socialist affiliation. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, joined Sanders in eulogizing
the recently deceased war-monger John McCain, refused to answer when asked if
she opposed the US wars in the Middle East, and dropped her campaign call for
the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
OBAMA:
SERVANT OF THE 1%
Richest
one percent controls nearly half of global wealth
The
richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of
global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.
Supreme Court Considers
Who Bears Responsibility for Security Fraud
December 3, 2018 Updated: December 3, 2018
Share
An investment banker who sent deceptive
emails dramatically overstating the financial health of a failing clean energy
company shouldn’t be held responsible for securities fraud because he was only
following his supervisor’s directions, the man’s attorney told a skeptical
Supreme Court.
U.S. securities laws forbid those offering
securities for sale from making false statements or participating in fraudulent
schemes. Whether a person who merely passes the bad information along is
legally liable is at issue in this case.
The company, Waste2Energy Holdings Inc. of
Neptune Beach, Florida, founded in 2007, went out of business in 2013 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company had
hoped to develop technology to convert waste into energy but failed to do so.
In 2009 Francis V. Lorenzo, then the
director of investment banking at the brokerage Charles Vista LLC, emailed
prospective investors offering for sale $15 million in debentures secured only
by W2E’s earning capacity.
The emails indicated that W2E had $10
million in assets and purchase orders north of $40 million, and that the
brokerage was willing to raise money to repay investors if needed.
But at the time the emails were sent, the
company had already acknowledged that an audit had determined its assets were
worth much less than $1 million.
Lorenzo’s boss and the brokers settled the
claims the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought but Lorenzo
refused. An SEC administrative law judge found Lorenzo’s superior drafted the
emails but that Lorenzo had nonetheless broken the law by sending them because
they contained false information about W2E’s financial situation.
The SEC banished Lorenzo from the
securities industry for life and imposed a $15,000 civil penalty.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against Lorenzo in 2017,
finding that he participated in a scheme to defraud investors by sending the
misleading emails even though he was not deemed to have made the untrue
statements himself.
Lorenzo disagreed with the circuit court
and the Supreme Court decided June 18 to hear his appeal. He argues that at
most he may have aided and abetted a fraudulent scheme as a “secondary”
violator of securities laws.
Borrowing language from the Supreme Court’s
ruling in the 2011 case, Janus Capital Group Inc. v. First Derivative Traders,
Lorenzo argued that because he did not have “ultimate authority over the
statement, including its content and whether and how to communicate it,” he
cannot be held liable under Rule 10-5(b) of the Securities Exchange Act. The
rule forbids fraudulent schemes or devices, making false statements, and
engaging in fraud that harms investors.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who sat on the
circuit court panel at the time, dissented from its majority opinion, writing
that Lorenzo hadn’t violated securities laws. “How could [petitioner] have
intentionally deceived the clients when he did not draft the emails, did not
think about the contents of the emails, and sent the emails only at his boss’s
direction?”
Kavanaugh recused himself from the Supreme
Court case, leaving the other eight justices to participate in oral arguments
Dec. 3.
Justices Have Doubts
During those oral arguments, Lorenzo’s
attorney, Robert Heim, said that sending the email was not an inherently
deceptive act. Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared to agree that Lorenzo was not the
author of the false statements in the emails.
But Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel
Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor seemed to disagree with Heim.
Ginsburg asked Heim why it wasn’t
“inherently deceptive to send a succession of untruths?”
“Lorenzo is essentially a conduit,” Heim
replied. “He’s somebody that’s transmitting statements … on behalf of another …
simply sending an e-mail is not enough to transform Frank Lorenzo into a
primary violator from, perhaps, somebody who gave substantial assistance.
The language of the statutes and the rules
make “a clear distinction between statements and … conduct.”
Alito asked why Lorenzo’s behavior wouldn’t
“fall squarely” within the language of the rule used by the SEC.
Sotomayor was just as blunt, telling Heim:
“I’m having a problem from the beginning. Once you concede … that you’re not
challenging that your client acted with an intent to deceive or defraud, that
you aren’t challenging the D.C. Circuit’s conclusion to that effect? Is that
correct?”
Heim replied, “Yes, Your Honor.”
Sotomayor continued: “I don’t understand,
once you concede that mental state, and he has the act of putting together the
email and encouraging customers to call him with questions, not to call his
boss with questions, how could that standing alone give away your case?
“That makes him both the maker of a false
statement, but it’s also engaging in an act, practice, or course of conduct
which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit.”
The Trump administration argues the
treatment Lorenzo received at the hands of the SEC was just.
“I don’t think
you’re likely to see a … more
egregious fraud than this,” Christopher Michel,
assistant to the solicitor general, told the justices.
CRIMINAL GLOBALIST BANKSTERS AND THE POLITICIANS THEY BOUGHT:
The Story of Goldman Sachs and Clinton, Obama and Trump corruption.
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 TO
SERVE THE RICH AND GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.
No comments:
Post a Comment