Monday, April 8, 2019

BANKSTER BARACK OBAMA AND LA RAZA PELOSI PUSH THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FURTHER TO THE RIGHT TO SERVE THEIR PAYMASTERS ON WALL STREET AND FLOOD THE COUNTRY WITH "CHEAP" LABOR ILLEGALS


CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?

The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.

Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.

Obama, Pelosi push Democrats further to the right

In back-to-back interventions this week, the current and former top Democrats in Washington called for the party to move even further to the right. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama were singing from the same hymn book, disparaging rhetorical calls for “Medicare for all” and other reform policies in favor of a conservative, pro-business approach.
Pelosi led the way in an interview with the Washington Post, in which she dismissed the “Medicare for all” proposal pushed by a number of candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination as well as members of her own caucus in the House of Representatives. Accepting the $32 trillion price tag placed on the proposal by a right-wing think tank, Pelsoi said that both the cost and the potential benefits of the plan remained to be explained. “I’m agnostic,” she told the Post. “Show me how you think you can get there.”
The House speaker said she preferred a plan based on the Affordable Care Act—the reactionary program enacted under the Obama administration in 2010, which aims to cut spending on health care while safeguarding the profits of the drug and health insurance companies—to any new system.
“When most people say they’re for Medicare for all, I think they mean health care for all,” Pelosi said. “Let’s see what that means. A lot of people love having their employer-based insurance and the Affordable Care Act gave them better benefits.”
Pelosi rejected the notion that the Democratic Party had moved to the left since the Obama presidency, claiming that it was “just a few people” with high profiles and some of the “presidentials.” This was clearly a reference to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, both self-proclaimed “democratic socialists.”
The House speaker, married to a multimillionaire real estate developer, has made it clear that she is perfectly willing to tolerate left-talkers like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, as long as they don’t actually determine the policy of either the Democratic Party or the US government.
Former President Obama sounded the same theme in remarks Saturday to a town hall organized by the Obama Foundation in Berlin, where he discussed the rise of the ultra-right in Europe and internationally and warned against any shift to the left in response to it. He denounced “left” critics of the Democratic Party leadership for undermining party unity.
“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States…is a certain kind of rigidity, where we say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,’” he said. “And then we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’ where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.”
Obama employed a modicum of “left” rhetoric in his own campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, running against Hillary Clinton, the initial choice of the party establishment. But he quickly abandoned this in the general election campaign, where he presented himself as the more reliable defender of Wall Street in the midst of the 2008 financial crash.
Once in the White House, Obama headed a thoroughly right-wing imperialist government, continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan launched by George W. Bush and launching new wars in Libya and (by proxy) in Syria and Yemen. He protected CIA torturers and NSA surveillance of the American people.
In his domestic policy, Obama presented the Affordable Care Act as a progressive reform, although it actually marked a regressive reinforcement of the domination of private insurance companies and health care providers by forcing millions of impoverished working people to buy insurance, rather than establishing health care as a basic right, regardless of ability to pay.
Obama even advocated conciliation with the racist anti-immigrant policies espoused by Trump and the European fascist movements such as the Alternative for Germany. “We can’t label everybody who is disturbed by immigration as racist,” he said. “You know, that’s a self-defeating tactic. You push away potential allies, people who maybe just haven’t thought about it...”
Obama and Pelosi have been working together in a joint effort to curb the activities of the “lefts” in the House Democratic caucus. The House speaker brought in the former president to address a meeting of the caucus last month for that purpose. Pelosi’s top deputy, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, has frequently underscored the fact that there are 62 new Democratic representatives in the House, not three, a sarcastic reference to the publicity given Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
The views expressed by Pelosi and Obama were echoed by the undeclared frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama’s former vice president, Joe Biden. Speaking to reporters Friday, Biden sought to clarify his remarks at a Democratic fundraiser in Delaware, where he declared he would be “the most progressive candidate” in the race.
He emphasized that this referred to issues relating to identity politics and did not refer to the question, “Are you a socialist?” He argued that the “party has not moved” in the direction of socialism, and that “the vast majority of the members of the Democratic Party are still basically liberal to moderate Democrats in the traditional sense.”
Biden’s distancing of himself from the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party is an adaptation to the anti-socialist rampage of President Trump and sections of the Republican Party, backed by the ultra-right media. He knows very well that the “left” Democrats are nothing more than moderate liberals themselves, people who would have been considered middle-of-the-road in the Democratic Party of the 1960s.
Meanwhile, the House Democratic leadership is moving to clip the wings of Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and a handful of other “lefts” in the party caucus. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has enacted a new policy barring DCCC funds for any polling or consulting firm that works for a primary challenger to an incumbent Democrat. The goal is to prevent any repetition of the campaigns by Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, who defeated more conservative incumbent Democrats in safe Democratic seats in New York City and Boston.

BANKSTERS AND THE RICH PARTNER WITH TRUMP TO FIGHT SOCIALISM




"JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who 
was known as Barack Obama’s favorite 
banker and who has been a major donor to
the Democratic Party, centered his annual 
letter to shareholders on a denunciation of
socialism."

"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."



"This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling oligarchy."

"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."

Socialism haunts the American ruling class

In the two months since Donald Trump vowed in his State of the Union Address that “America will never be a socialist country,” the right-wing demagogue president and the Republican Party have embraced anti-socialism as the defining theme of their campaign in the 2020 elections.
Speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee Dinner last week, Trump declared that he will be running in 2020 to fight a “socialist takeover” of the United States. “I love the idea of ‘Keep America Great’” as a campaign slogan, Trump said, “because the socialists will destroy” the country.
Trump’s rhetoric is increasingly being embraced by the Republican Party as a whole. Last week, Utah Congressman Chris Stewart announced the formation of an “anti-socialist caucus” in the House of Representatives. This “anti-socialism movement” would serve “as a bulwark to stop the advancement of socialist policies and legislation,” Stewart said.
“If we fail to recall those dangerous times,” he added, “the primitive appeal of socialism will advance and infect our institutions.” Socialism wants to “destroy freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” the congressman declared.
Republican ideologue Pat Buchanan went farther, declaring that the 2020 election would be a choice between Trump and socialism, in which “Trump would be the nation’s last line of defense against the coming of a Socialist America.”
While Trump and the Republicans express it in a particularly crude form, both major parties of the American ruling elite are united in their hatred and fear of socialism. Last week, 
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who 
was known as Barack Obama’s favorite 
banker and who has been a major donor to
the Democratic Party, centered his annual 
letter to shareholders on a denunciation of
socialism.

Dimon’s bank received tens of billions of 
dollars in government bailouts and many 
billions more from the Obama 
administration’s ultra-low interest rate and 
“quantitative easing” money-printing policies. 
He told his shareholders that “socialism 
inevitably produces stagnation, corruption” 
and “authoritarian government,” and would 
be “a disaster for our country.”
These statements express the fear that pervades the ruling class over the growth of political opposition within the working class to social inequality, which is fueling an international strike wave. Last year, more than half a million US workers went on strike, a 20-fold increase over 2017.
Last week, Ray Dalio, the former CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, published an essay warning that the United States may be on the brink of social revolution. 

He wrote: “Disparity in wealth, especially when 
accompanied by disparity in values, leads to 
increasing conflict and, in the government, 
that manifests itself in the form of populism of 
the left and populism of the right and often in 
revolutions.”
He added that “we are now at a juncture in which” the growth of social inequality, unless reversed, would lead to a “great conflict and some form of revolution.”
Stratfor, the private intelligence service, warned that the 2020 US election represents a “global inflection point,” marked by the intersection of soaring social inequality and a crisis of global dominance for the United States. “The ‘socialist’ label is being bandied left and right,” it wrote, “as a way of questioning the very survival and moral legitimacy of US capitalism.”
What haunts the ruling class is not left-talking figures within the Democratic Party such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but rather the objective impulse toward mass working-class struggle and hostility toward capitalism. Though only as yet in its initial stages, the growth of the class struggle will inevitably bring about a development of explicit anti-capitalist and socialist sentiment.
Facing an international economic, social and political crisis for which they have no answers, the ruling elites around the world are promoting extreme right-wing movements. All of these movements rose to prominence, like Trump, by promoting xenophobia and economic nationalism, but they are increasingly expressing their essential social character, in keeping with all fascist organizations, in their extreme hatred of socialism.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron has made overtures to the far-right National Rally and praised Marshal Philippe Petain, the war-time Nazi collaborationist dictator. In Britain, Brexit has been used to mobilize right-wing extremists, who murdered Labour Party MP Jo Cox, plotted to kill another Labour MP, violently assaulted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and repeatedly desecrated the grave of Karl Marx.
The efforts of the American ruling elite to promote a fascistic movement against the growth of socialist opposition within the working class underscores the critical importance of the meetings being held across the US by the Socialist Equality Party and the IYSSE, beginning this week, under the title “The Threat of Fascism and How to Fight 
WALL STREET CRIMINALS and the ultimate death of America’s middle-class





However, the dominant force in American politics for the last two decades has been economic warfare against American citizens.
This economic warfare has two primary components; the use of government to economically favor one group over another; and the collusion of immigrant groups to economically inhibit Americans who oppose replacement migration.
JOSHUA FOXWORTH – AMERICAN THINKER
Jim Carrey: America ‘Doomed’ If We Don’t Regulate Capitalism

"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
*
"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
*
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
*

"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now."  ----  Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com

Jamie Dimon Says He Didn't Seriously Consider Running for President


Michelle F. Davis



















Jamie Dimon Says He Didn't Seriously Consider Running for President
(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said he’s not considering a run for U.S. president, and said a report that he had given serious thought to a campaign was misleading.
“I tell people, I thought that I should think about it,” Dimon said Thursday, drawing laughs from the audience at a Council on Foreign Relations event in New York. “I never did any work or any polling or any of that. I did think about it and decided not to.”
CNBC reported earlier in the day that Dimon spent much of 2018 mulling a possible run for president.
“I didn’t do any real work. If I was going to really think about it, I would have spoken to 50 people. I would have done my homework, which I didn’t do any of that,” Dimon said. “So it was blown out of proportion.”
By 2008, America's parasitic monster banksters had nearly brought down the American economy with reverberations through out the global economy. Their toxic mortgages cost millions their lives savings as invested in their homes. 
These very criminal banksters were rewarded with  bottomless bailouts and no interests loans to buy up their competitors and rig the system even more.
No president in history had sucked in more bribes from banksters even before his first day in office than BARACK OBAMA who went on to serve his crony banksters with devote loyalty.
Both of the Obomb's Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch were had selected by Obomb's banksters because of their long history of serving the criminal banksters from their respective law firms.


“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”

“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD 

“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT


 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” – Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com

"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now."  ----  Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com


“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service” into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."

"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."


“Truthfully, It Is Tough To Ignore Some Of  

The Gross Immoral Behavior By The  

President” WASHINGTON POST



Immigration as Economic Warfare




Political influence in America is garnered through a number of mechanisms -- campaign contributions, social media, YouTube, news channels, and authority from moral figures such as the church, to name a few. However, the dominant force in American politics for the last two decades has been economic warfare against American citizens.
This economic warfare has two primary components; the use of government to economically favor one group over another; and the collusion of immigrant groups to economically inhibit Americans who oppose replacement migration.
The first aspect of this warfare is simple. The government institutes programs that give special privileges to one group of people in the form of educational access and benefits, exclusive contracts with the government, quotas within the job market, and legal protections that are exclusive to those people. While many of these benefits are subtle, on multigenerational timelines they effectively destroy the unprotected group while ensuring the success of the protected group. In addition to this, there is the selective enforcement of laws and the absolution of some groups from many laws.
However, the more important aspect of this warfare is the collusion of immigrants to exclude portions of the native population from the economy. This activity has two facets -- exclusion from the market and denial of service.
Consider a nation where the native people makes up 70% of the population and the immigrant population makes up 30%. If the entirety of the immigrant population refuses to purchase the products of the native population, then as long as the native population does not reciprocate this behavior, immigrant businesses have access to 100% of the market and the native businesses have access to only 70% of the marketplace. The end result of this activity is that immigrant businesses will always win out over native businesses.
In practice, the immigrant population need not exclude all the native population. They only need to target those who openly oppose their goals of mass legal and illegal immigration. Add in the portion of the native population that goes along with the boycott of the nativists, and it becomes impossible for anyone within the native group who opposes replacement migration to complete in the marketplace.
In effect, a smaller population of people willing to engage in this economic exclusion can unquestionably control the policies of a nation when the larger group is unwilling or incapable of implementing similar policies. The smaller population has effectively conquered the larger population and controls the political future of the nation.
While marketplace exclusion is passive, the denial of service phase of the warfare is active. Here, the immigrant population and those who support the policy of replacement migration implement the following practices:
  • Place pressure on employers to fire natives openly opposed to replacement
  • Deny platforms to the native population that opposes replacement
    • Payment processors
    • YouTube
    • Twitter
    • Facebook
    • Email, etc
  • Write articles condemning the natives and ensure that anyone who employs them will be targeted as well
  • Engage in violence against the natives and protest their house and employment
  • Deny legal protections to those nativists as a recourse of defense from violence
  • Prosecute any physical defense mounted by the nativists as initiatory violence
  • Place the same pressures on their families
Using these practices, the immigrant population and their supporters can effectively destroy the ability of any native member to economically support themselves. Opposition to the immigrant group is impossible as members cannot raise capital, are not protected from violence, and have their personal sources of income destroyed. Their First Amendment rights are effectively nonexistent as exercising that right results of violence and economic destruction at the hands of foreign powers.
It is in this state that the American people now find themselves. Any citizen who openly opposes replacement migration and supports the enforcement of U.S. laws is denigrated by foreign media, has their personal businesses attacked, and if they attempt to peaceably assemble, then they are set upon by violent political groups like Antifa that assault them in the open without fear of police or legal punishment.
The end result of this economic warfare is the usurpation of power from American citizens to foreign nationals. First, this is hidden but as their power grows it moves into the open. This can be seen in Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez asserting that immigration laws should not apply to Latinos as this land is rightfully theirs, as well as Senator Kamala Harris asserting that foreign nationals have the right to make laws with respect to U.S. citizens.
There is no good response to this type of cultural and economic warfare, but the first step in defeating it is acknowledging both that it is happening and that the American people have both the right and the obligation to oppose it.









Jim Carrey: America ‘Doomed’ If We Don’t Regulate Capitalism



HOLLYWOOD, CA - NOVEMBER 18: Jim Carrey attends 'Jim Carrey In Conversation with Jerry Saltz' during Vulture Festival Presented By AT&T at Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on November 18, 2018 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for New York Magazine)
Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for New York Magazine
BREITBART NEWS
  10
10:09

LAS VEGAS (AP) — At the just-wrapped CinemaCon, celebrities talked about their upcoming movies but much much more. From Linda Hamilton and her “strange” return to the “Terminator” franchise to Jamie Lee Curtis demanding Joe Biden apologize to Anita Hill to Jim Carrey talking about his politically inspired paintings, stars had a lot to say at the Las Vegas event.

Carrey also said a few words as to why it was important to him to continue to draw political cartoons to post on his Twitter feed.
“Well you know, it’s just a little solace to me in this odd time of complete capitalism breakdown,” he said. “Just a little regulation would help, you know. That’s all. It’s just without that, we are doomed so we are spiraling out of control and its corruption on every level and every walk of life. It’s all attributed to that, so I really think we need to turn that around.”

THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY










SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS

THE CRONY CLASS:

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.



“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”

INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES

(THERE'S A REASON WHY GEORGE SOROS RUNS OBAMA'S BID FOR A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE).



CRONY CAPITALISM

Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US

history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.


OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. 


“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER


Investigators have released their 

findings on the Ethiopian Airlines 

crash. They say the crew followed all the 

manufacturer's instructions for the 737 Max 

plane. Critics of the Federal Aviation 

Administration say the agency delegated to 

Boeing much of the testing of its jets — 

basically allowing the company to certify its 

own planes through self-regulation. The FAA 

isn’t alone in this.


Why aren’t Boeing executives be

ing prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?

It is nearly a month since the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which slammed into the ground only six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa airport, killing all 157 people on board. That disaster came less than five months after the fatal crash of Lion Air Flight 610 only 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta airport, killing all 189 passengers and crew members.
Both crashes involved the same airplane, the Boeing 737 Max 8, and both followed wild up-and-down oscillations which the pilots were unable to control.
In the weeks since these disasters, there have been no calls within the media and political establishment for Boeing executives to be criminally prosecuted for what were evidently entirely avoidable tragedies that killed a total of 346 people. This speaks to the corrupt relationship between the US government and the aerospace giant—the biggest US exporter and second-largest defense contractor—as well as the company’s critical role in the stock market surge and the ever-expanding fortunes of major Wall Street investors.
Black box recordings and simulations show that in the 60 seconds the pilots had to respond to the emergency, faulty software forced the Lion Air flight into a nose dive 24 separate times, as the pilots fought to regain control of the aircraft before plunging into the ocean at more than 500 miles per hour.
Evidence has mounted implicating in both crashes an automated anti-stall system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was installed by Boeing in response to the new plane’s tendency to pitch upward and go into a potentially fatal stall. On a whole number of fronts—design, marketing, certification and pilot training—information from the black boxes of the two planes points to a lack of concern for the safety of passengers and crew on the part of both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, reaching the level of criminality.
The most recent revelations concerning the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines crash, based on preliminary findings from the official investigation, show that the pilots correctly followed the emergency procedures outlined by Boeing and disengaged the automated flight control system. Nevertheless, the nose of the plane continued to point downward. This strongly suggests a fundamental and perhaps fatal flaw in the design of the aircraft. Numerous questions have been raised about the design and certification process of the 737 Max 8 and MCAS, including:
  • Despite the presence on the plane of two angle-of-attack sensors, which signal a potential stall and trigger the automated downward pitch of the plane’s nose, MCAS relied on data from only one of the sensors. This means the standard redundancy feature built into commercial jets to avert disasters resulting from a faulty sensor was lacking. Boeing’s main rival to the 737 Max, the European-built Airbus A320neo, for example, uses data from three sensors to manage a system similar to MCAS.
  • Boeing Vice President Mike Sinnett admitted last November that cockpit warning lights alerting pilots of a faulty angle-of-attack sensor were only optional features on the Max 8.
  • The MCAS system was absent from pilot manuals and flight simulators, including for the well-known flight training program X-Plane 11, which came out in 2018, one year after the first commercial flight of the 737 Max 8.
  • Pilot training for the 737 Max 8, which has different hardware and software than earlier 737s, was a single one-hour computer course. Pilot certification for a commercial plane typically requires hundreds of hours of training, both in simulators and in actual flights. Boeing itself is now mandating at least 21 days of training on new Max planes.
There is no innocent explanation for these obvious safety issues. They point to reckless and arguably criminally negligent behavior on the part of Boeing executives, who rushed the new plane into service and marketed it against the Airbus A320neo on the basis of its cost-saving features. Threatened with a loss of market share and profits to its chief competitor, Boeing reduced costs by claiming that no significant training on the new Max 8 model, with the money and time that entails, was necessary for pilots with previous 737 experience.
Such imperatives of the capitalist market inevitably downgrade safety considerations. This is highlighted by a press release the day of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, in which Boeing stated that for “the past several months and in aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610,” the company “has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX.”
In other words, both Boeing and the FAA were aware, possibly even before the October 2018 Lion Air crash and certainly afterward, that a system critical to the safe operation of the aircraft needed to be fixed, and still allowed the plane to continue flying. The wording also suggests that the plane shouldn’t have been certified for flight in the first place.
This was aided and abetted by the Trump administration, which shielded Boeing as long as it could by not ordering the FAA to ground the plane immediately after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. There were no doubt immense concerns that such a move would cut into Boeing’s multibillion-dollar profits and affect its stock price, which has nearly tripled since the election of Trump in November 2016, accounting for more than 30 percent of the increase in the Dow Jones index since then.
Trump himself received a call from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg two days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash, during which Muilenburg reportedly continued to uphold the Max 8’s safety. The FAA finally grounded the plane on March 13, after every other country in the world had done so.
The relationship between Trump and Muilenburg is only a symptom of the much broader collusion between the airline industry and the US government. Starting in 2005 and expanded during the Obama administration, the FAA introduced the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, which allows the agency to appoint as “designees” airplane manufacturers’ employees to certify their own company’s aircraft on behalf of the government.
As a result, there was virtually no federal oversight on the development of the 737 Max 8. FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell told Congress, “As a result of regular meetings between the FAA and Boeing teams, the FAA determined in February 2012 that the [Max 8] project qualified … [a] project eligible for management by the Boeing ODA.” This extended to the MCAS system as well.
This is the logical end of the deregulation of the airline industry as a whole that was spearheaded by the Democratic Carter administration, which passed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. With the help of liberal icon Edward Kennedy, the legislation disbanded the Civil Aeronautics Board, which up to that point treated interstate airlines as a regulated public utility, setting routes, schedules and fares.
In a rational world, the ongoing Senate hearings and Department of Justice investigations would have already brought criminal charges against Muilenburg, Sinnett, Elwell and all those involved in overseeing the production, certification and sale of the 737 Max 8. This would include the executives at Boeing and all those who have helped to deregulate the industry at the expense of human lives.
Under capitalism, however, Boeing will get little more than a slap on the wrist. Experts estimate the company will likely be fined at most $800 million, less than one percent of the $90 billion Boeing expects in sales from the Max 8 in the coming years. As in Hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street crash in 2008, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017, the brunt of this disaster will be borne by the working class.
The Boeing 737 Max 8 disasters point to the inherent incompatibility between safe, comfortable and affordable air transport and private ownership of the airline industry, as well as the division of the world economy between rival nation-states. These catastrophes were driven by both the greed of Boeing executives and big investors and the intensifying trade conflict between the United States and Europe.

The technological advances that make it possible for travelers to move between any two points in the world in a single day must be freed from the constraints of giant corporations and the capitalist system as a whole. Major airlines and aerospace companies must be expropriated on an international scale and transformed into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities, as part of the establishment of a planned economy based on social need, not private profit.

Boeing CEO praised “streamlined” oversight of 737 plane that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia


In a conference call with Wall Street firms in April of 2017, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg lauded the Federal Aviation Administration's “streamlined” certification process for enabling the aircraft manufacturer to rush its new 737 Max model into service.
“That’s helping us more efficiently work through certification on some of our new model aircraft such as the Max as it’s going through flight test and entering into service,” Muilenburg told the financial analysts. “So we’re already seeing some benefits there of some of the work that’s being done with the FAA.”
Four months later, the first 737 Max 8 commercial jet was brought into service. Since then it has become the giant aircraft makers' best-selling plane, accounting for 30 percent of its profits, which grew 24 percent in 2018 to $10.5 billion.
It is this aircraft that crashed in Indonesia in October of 2018 and on March 10 of this year in Ethiopia, killing all passengers and crew on board, a combined total of 346 people. In both cases, investigators have identified an automated system designed to counter the plane's tendency to stall, called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), as a key factor in the fatal crashes.
Muilenberg’s touting of the gutting of serious government oversight points to the systemic subordination of safety concerns to profit and market share and the transformation of regulatory agencies into rubber stamps for the major corporations.
CNN reported Muilenburg’s remarks on Thursday, the same day that the Ethiopian Transport Ministry released the results of its preliminary investigation into the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 just six minutes after takeoff from the airport in Addis Ababa. As in the Lion Air disaster just five months before, which crashed just 13 minutes after takeoff, the plane repeatedly pitched downward and the pilots were unable to regain control.
The Ethiopian report, based on information from the recovered flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, as well as communications between the pilots and air traffic controllers, contradicted attempts by Boeing and some media commentators to imply that pilot error, not design flaws or faulty equipment and software, was responsible for the disaster. It concluded that just a minute into the flight, one of two angle of attack sensors on the plane began emitting false readings, triggering the MCAS anti-stall mechanism and forcing down the nose of the aircraft.
Particularly damning for Boeing and the FAA was its finding that the pilots followed the emergency procedures provided by Boeing to counter such a development and manually stabilize the aircraft, but were unable to regain control of the plane. This shattered the claims made by both Boeing and the FAA after the Ethiopian crash that the steps provided to pilots to overcome such an emergency and manually fly the plane were simple and easy to carry out, and their suggestions that the Flight 302 pilots had failed to follow the prescribed emergency procedures.
The preliminary report issued by the Transport Ministry’s Accident Investigation Bureau explained that the pilots disengaged MCAS, but the plane continued repeatedly to pitch downward despite their efforts to manually raise the nose. It further concluded that the manual control in the cockpit designed to lift or lower the nose, called the manual trim, failed to work.
The Initial Findings state, in part:
  • After the autopilot disengaged, the DFDR (digital flight data recorder) recorded an automatic aircraft nose down trim command four times without pilot’s input.
  • The crew… confirmed that the manual trim operation was not working
It was at this point, some four minutes into the flight, and only then that the pilots reengaged MCAS, presumably in a desperate, last ditch attempt to save the plane. In the event, MCAS forced the nose down at a 40 degree angle, leading the plane to plunge to earth at an impact speed of 575 miles per hour.
The report’s Safety Recommendations unambiguously place the onus for the disaster on Boeing and US regulators and imply that a far more serious and thorough examination is needed than the software patch on which Boeing is working before there is any return to service by the 737 Max.
  • Since repetitive un-commanded aircraft nose down conditions are noticed in this preliminary investigation, it is recommended that the aircraft flight control system related to flight controllability shall be reviewed by the manufacturer.
  • Aviation authorities shall verify that the review of the aircraft flight control system related to flight controllability has been adequately addressed by the manufacturer before the release of the aircraft to operations.
This evaluation was underscored by Ethiopian Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges at a press conference in Thursday. She said, “The crew performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer but was not able to control the aircraft.”
Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the American Airlines pilots union and 737 pilot, was quoted Friday in the New York Times as saying:
“The captain was not able to recover the aircraft with the procedures he was trained on and told by Boeing.” Speaking of the MCAS system, he continued, “It was too aggressive. They left the pilot with no ability to gain control of the aircraft if it went to the full limit.”
Muilenburg, in a statement Thursday following the release of the Ethiopian report, acknowledged for the first time that faulty sensor data and MCAS played a role in the crash of Flight 302. However, the company and the FAA are planning only to add a software patch to MCAS that will prevent the system from being triggered by only one, instead of both sensors, and moderate the aggressiveness of its downward push of the nose.
However, virtually nothing is being said about the highly unusual design that allowed MCAS to be triggered by only one sensor in the first place. The standard design for systems that are critical to the safety of a commercial aircraft has always included some form of redundancy, so that the malfunction of a single sensor does not lead to disaster. Why the 737 Max was designed without such redundancy for the critical MCAS function, and why no change was made after the Indonesian crash last October, has not been explained.
Even as Muilenburg and Boeing reaffirmed the “fundamental safety” of the 737 Max, the company announced Thursday that it had discovered another problem requiring an additional software patch, further delaying the implementation of changes to the MCAS system. While a company spokesman called the new problem “relatively minor,” the Washington Post cited two officials “with knowledge of the investigation” as saying the new problem related to software affecting flight control hardware and was there classified as “critical to flight safety.”


OBAMANOMICS:

Further, nearly 60% think that the next generation will be worse off than they are. And few have any faith that the economic outlook for the country will improve in the near or distant future.
*

There are many parallels between “Betomania” and “Obamamania,” and O’Rourke has been called the “white Obama.”


He is married to the daughter of a billionaire, so if nominated, Democrats would have a hard time attacking Republicans for supporting a billionaire president without being accused of hypocrisy. 
*

“Beto also questioned whether the Constitution was still relevant, which makes one wonder how seriously he would take the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” should he be sworn in as president.”


WORDS OF A PSYCHOPATH BARACK OBAMA:


"In his 2006 autobiography The Audacity of Hope, then-Senator Obama wrote, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”  That is why Obama won the presidency, and should O’Rourke win too, that is why he will have won" 

GENERAL MOTORS DUMPS THOUSANDS OF WORKERS AND CLOSES PLANTS   -  Stockholders celebrate!
"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 yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documentsa sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”

"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."

"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."


TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE RICH…. and his parasitic family!

Report: Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit After He's Gone


 "Trump's alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect.  I'll leave you with 
this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."

TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE SUPER RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!

"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top

of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed

recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income

bracket."

TRY TO SEPARATE THE CLINTON MAFIA AND DONALD TRUMP’S CRIMES FROM THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS!

Can’t be done!


NEW YORK — In the midst of a public relations nightmare, former White House Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Habib Powell took charge of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation, helping to resurrect the big bank’s shattered image after it was implicated in practices that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.


“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”

 

TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING AMERICA

Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES
Amazon
Walmart

 GET THIS BOOK!

Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY

 Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores, and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE THE RICH AND GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: You were wondering how many jobs went to illegals and how well Obama’s crony banksters have done???

The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.

Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs.

WHY DO YOU THINK THE RICH AND 

CROOKED WANT HILLARY CLINTON 

IN 
THE WHITE HOUSE?


Their net worth today is now in excess of $150 million, accumulated not by traditional means of work and investment, but rather by pay-for-play influence peddling through speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising -- with the tacit understanding that the Clintons would be in a position to return favors to donors after Hillary won the 2016 presidential election. 


FOLLOWING THE CRIMES OF BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BECOMES AMERICA’S ROAD TO REVOLUTION

 http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/bill-and-hillary-clintons-global.html


Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising  the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson- Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’

 CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?


The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was a boon for Wall Street firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to the 2008 financial crisis.

Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her husband secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000 from three Goldman Sachs events.


Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.


It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office:  the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn

"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."

HAS AMERICA DESTROYED ITSELF MERELY TO MAKE THE RICH SUPER RICH?
 
Viking Economics by George Lakey

by Melville House

This week, we’re excited to be publishing Viking EconomicsGeorge Lakey’s look at how the Nordic countries, in a very short span of time, managed to move past many of the problems faced by nations like the US and UK today — problems with inequality, infrastructural weakness, the cost of education, and personal freedom. Today, the people of DenmarkIcelandNorway, and Sweden enjoy widely-shared prosperity, low crime rates, reliable infrastructure, affordable education, great personal freedoms — some of the highest standards of living in the world.
Particularly as both the US and the UK face some of our biggest challenges in a generation — and, in both cases, under new leadership — Viking Economicsoffers some crucial examples of how we might get some things right.
Here’s a brief excerpt to read on the longship ride over to your local bookstore to buy a copy; please try not to get herring on it.



Like most Americans today, Norwegians a century ago didn’t like the results of a wealth gap: the hunger and poverty, the crime, elderly friends warehoused or left in isolation, young people without hope of a good job. Norwegians also didn’t like the attitudes that went with inequality: an inclination toward arrogance among higher-income people and the feeling among lower-income people that they were losers, defeated by the system.
Early in the twentieth century, Norway had the formal institutions of parliamentary democracy, but ordinary people were not empowered: they did not set the direction of their society. The direction was set, instead, by the economic elite, through the political parties they dominated and the businesses they ran. Career options were limited, and there was little social mobility.
The differences between then and now are striking: If you’re a Norwegian teenager today and the job you’re interested in pursuing doesn’t require higher education, you can choose among good public vocational courses. If you learn better in a hands-on apprenticeship mode, publicly supported programs help you do that. If, instead, you prefer to develop a talent in art or music, or follow a career at sea or in engineering, you can attend a free post-secondary school.
Paid maternity and paternity leave (including for adoptive parents) is built into the system, and your job is held until you return. After the leave is over, child support is increased if you choose to be a full-time parent. If your choice is to go back to work, affordable childcare is available.
Extensive, subsidized public transport means that you probably won’t need a car to get to work. High educational standards prevail in big-city schools, as well as in the suburbs. Small towns receive subsidies to make them attractive for people who might otherwise feel forced to live in a city for cultural amenities, again increasing your options. The economy subsidizes family farming both for its own sake and for food security, so farmers can earn a reasonable income, another freedom denied in many industrialized countries.
The government offers free vocational counseling, education, and job-training resources for people seeking a career change, and entrepreneurialism is encouraged through free health care and a public pension for all: In Norway, you have the freedom to fail without becoming a failure.
Money doesn’t dominate the political system, so citizens are freer to participate meaningfully in political life—and they’re more likely to be exposed to newspapers with a variety of points of view, because journalism is subsidized to avoid a narrowing of perspective. According to Freedom House, in 2013, Norway was tied with Sweden at number one in the world for freedom of the press. Denmark was sixth, and Iceland was tenth. (The United States was twenty-sixth.) Indeed, this approach to public life has a long lineage in the region: Sweden was the first country in the world to establish freedom of the press—in 1766.
The Nordics are among the longest-living people in the world, and older citizens continue to benefit from an economy designed for personal freedom. The Global Watch Index studied ninety-six countries and rated Norway as the best place to grow old, followed closely by Sweden. The pension system enables you to live at home with health aides or in a senior living facility. You don’t need to fear hunger or lack of medicines or of health care. Every small town has a music and culture center where you can enjoy the arts and pursue your hobbies.
The crime rate is very low, partly because societies with high equality tend to experience less crime. Even in their largest city, Norwegians enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom from fear about personal safety.
Designing an economy that supports freedom and equality pays off in happiness, judging from the Vikings’ descendants making the top ten in the UN’s International Happiness Index. In 2015, the ratings showed Denmark, Iceland, and Norway sharing first place with Switzerland, while Sweden was close to its cousins.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), composed of thirty-four of the most-developed nations, compared life satisfaction experienced by the people in each country in 2013. The OECD found Norway second, Iceland third, Sweden fourth, and Denmark fifth.
And yet in spite of all this security and support, the Nordic yen for adventure has not disappeared. Americans, too, have a strong yearning for both freedom and equality, so the Nordic desire for both isn’t surprising. What is surprising, though, is that they went ahead and built an economy to serve those values. That’s the story in this book.
Like their Viking ancestors, the moderns made mistakes in their explorations. Iceland’s financial collapse of 2008 was a spectacular error, and, as I’ll describe, back in the 1980s, the Norwegians and Swedes made a series of serious economic mistakes. The Nordics haven’t built a utopia: Norwegians see themselves as “a nation of complainers,” and this book doesn’t shy away from the challenges that face them and their Nordic cousins.
Still, it’s useful for us as outsiders to observe the Nordics’ expeditions and to use them to reflect on our own situations. There are many important lessons to be learned.





Part of Trump tax bill bonanza for the 

wealthy


"The $100 billion figure is not so much a record as it is another dimension in corporate plunder."


“It has been estimated that the cost of an iPhone, retailing for around $650 to $700, is made up of $220 for the components and $5 for the labor of assembly.”

"In the past week, at least one prominent Republican, 

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, has publicly admitted that 

the tax bill was sold under false pretenses."

TRUMPERNOMICS: The Trickle Up to the Rich Economy


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/congress-passes-tax-windfall-for-super.html

 "It will, in fact, no more provide decent-paying jobs and improved wages than the previous tax “reforms” carried out over the past three-and-a-half decades. The Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and 1986, Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cut in 1997 and George W. Bush’s tax “reform” of 2001 were all part of a ruling class offensive against the working class, which included sweeping attacks on wages, jobs, pensions, education, health care, housing and other social benefits."





The very rich are different








Wealthy parents buying admission for their children to elite universities.  A prominent actor excused from trial in spite of damning police and grand jury  evidence.  Perceived preferential or deferential  treatment by our judicial system.  Politicians basking in the fruits of capitalism while publicly condemning it in favor of socialism.  What do they all have in common?  A passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 short story "Rich Boy" provides insight. 
Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.  They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.  They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
A century later, those observations still ring true.  The rich think they are better than the rest of us poor folks, because they perceive themselves to be different and therefore superior.  They feel entitled.  Bribing to get the kids into college is no more than their pragmatic take on affirmative action.  Do something; do anything money can buy...money talks; lots of it just talks louder.  Angelo Codevilla's 2010 The Ruling Class provides a considered insight into the heavy hand of money and claimed superior wisdom of those running our political system.
Another observation by Fitzgerald in that short story quote is that being rich not only makes them different, but also "makes them soft where we are hard."  Does that not bring to mind the current demand for safe spaces, cringing snowflake students, and trigger alerts, lest a word provoke a mental breakdown?  Lyle Rossiter's 2006 book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness is a compilation of this psychiatrist's interviews with hundreds of patients.  His conclusion is that modern progressives are suffering from their own form of mental illness.  The softness of which Fitzgerald spoke is Rossiter's: "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."
In the vernacular, they are a bunch of rich, spoiled brats who have aged chronologically but not matured mentally.  They march for saving the climate and the world with the same childish enthusiasm as kids chanting, "I scream for ice cream."
Fitzgerald nails the blatant hypocrisy of the rich noting that when they fail or are proved wrong, "they still think that they are better than we are."
Let us not judge them too harshly, for they are rich and they are different. 
Charles G. Battig, M.S., M.D., Heartland Institute policy expert on environment.  His website is www.climateis.com.


After Lehman's Collapse: A Decade of Delay



Now that the 2018 midterms are over, folks can address the elephant in the room. If one tuned into Fox Business midday on January 7, one heard legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn dilate on the dimensions of the pachyderm, which he pegged at $250 trillion. That’s the size of worldwide debt. But can that be right -- it’s more than eleven times the official U.S. federal government’s debt? And in case you didn’t notice, it is a quarter of one quadrillion bucks. Pretty soon we’ll be talking real money.
Icahn’s $250T quotation for worldwide debt came out last year. On September 13, Bloomberg ran “$250 Trillion in Debt: the World’s Post-Lehman Legacy” by Brian Chappatta, who draws off data from the Institute of International Finance’s July 9 “Global Debt Monitor,” (to read IIF reports, one must sign up). Chappatta wonders how the world’s central bankers can “even pretend to know how to reverse what they’ve done over the past decade”:
[Central banks] kept interest rates at or below zero for an extended period […] and used bond-buying programs to further suppress sovereign yields, punishing savers and promoting consumption and risk-taking. Global debt has ballooned over the past two decades: from $84 trillion at the turn of the century, to $173 trillion at the time of the 2008 financial crisis, to $250 trillion a decade after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse.
Chappatta breaks global debt down into four categories: financial corporations, nonfinancial corporations, households, and governments. In every category, global nominal debt rose from 2008 to 2018, with the debt of governments hitting $67T. In the important debt-as-a-percentage-of-gross-domestic-product measurement, three of the categories rose while only financial corporations fell, “leaving their debt-to-GDP ratio as low as it has been in recent memory.” Global banks seem to be “healthier and more resilient to another shock.” After reporting on worldwide debt, Chappatta then looks at U.S. debt.
What’s interesting about debt in America is that as a percentage of GDP, households and financial corporations have sharply reduced their debt. It is only government in America that has seen a sharp debt-to-GDP uptick, and it was quoted at more than 100 percent of GDP. That’s rather higher than for all government debt worldwide.
Besides the massive racking up of debt over the last decade there’s something else that should concern us: the massive creation of new money. One of the ways money is created is when central banks engage in the “bond-buying programs” that Chappatta refers to. We call such programs “quantitative easing.” When the Federal Reserve buys assets, like treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, it needs money. So the Fed just creates the money ex nihilo.
Since the U.S. isn’t the only nation that has been busy buying bonds and creating money, one might wonder just how much money there is in the world. In June of 2017,HowMuch put out “Putting the World’s Money into Perspective,” which is a nice little graphic that puts the category “All Money” at $83.6T.
In November of 2017, MarketWatch ran “Here’s all the money in the world, in one chart” by Sue Chang, who in her short intro to the chart has some interesting things to say about global money, including cryptocurrencies. She writes of “narrow money” and “broad money” and pegs the latter at $90.4T, (or what Sen. Everett Dirksen would call “real money”.) If you want to examine Chang’s chart more closely, I’ve “excised” it here for your convenience; don’t miss the notes on the right margin. (Because its depth is 13,895 pixels, you might want to just save the chart to your computer rather than print it off.)
So, in addition to an historic run-up in debt, there’s been a monster amount of new money created. Chappatta calls it the “grandest central-bank experiment in history.” His use of “experiment” is apropos, as one wonders whether the world’s central bankers and their economists really know what they’ve been doing.
One ray of hope might just be President Trump’s choice of Jerome Powell as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, (Trump has such good instincts about people). One can get a sense of the man from his January talk with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. (video and transcript). It’s refreshing that Mr. Powell disdains the “Fed speak” used by his predecessors.
Chappatta’s article is quite worth reading, and it’s not very long. The charts are user-friendly, although animated ones are a bit “creative.” The last section, “China Charges Forward,” is especially worthwhile.
This is the post-Lehman legacy. To pull the global economy back from the brink, governments borrowed heavily from the future. That either portends pain ahead, through austerity measures or tax increases, or it signals that central-bank meddling will become a permanent fixture of 21st century financial markets.
Given those alternatives, let’s try a little austerity. But austerity would entail spending cuts, and Congress has a poor history in that regard. In fact, since fiscal 2007, the year before the financial crisis, total federal spending has gone from $2.72T a year to more than $4T. While austere citizens deleverage and get their fiscal affairs in order, Congress shamefully borrows and spends like never before.
Congress’ solutions are to bail out, prop up, and do whatever it takes to avoid reforming what it has created. So they farm out their responsibilities to the Federal Reserve. Indeed, in the July 17, 2012 meeting of the Senate Banking Committee (go to the 53:50 point of this C-SPAN video), Chuck Schumer told Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke the following:
So given the political realities, Mr. Chairman, particularly in this election year, I'm afraid the Fed is the only game in town. And I would urge you to take whatever actions you think would be most helpful in supporting a stronger economic recovery… So get to work, Mr. Chairman. (Chuckles.)
So the Fed is “the only game in town” because there are only monetary solutions for the economy, right? There aren’t any fiscal solutions, as they would involve Congress, and Congress is busy running for re-election, right? Sounds like you’re abdicating your responsibilities, Chuck.
The last decade has been an exercise in delay. Congress has avoided doing the difficult and unpopular things that would help avoid future financial collapses. If Congress were serious about balancing the budget, then social programs would be on the chopping block, because that’s where the real money goes.
Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.

 

 

 

 

 

"The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for perpetuating this whole filthy system, in which "Wall Street rules."


Wall Street rules

 
The Federal Reserve sent a clear message to Wall Street on Friday: It will not allow the longest bull market in American history to end. The message was received loud and clear, and the Dow rose by more than 700 points.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain furloughed or forced to work without pay as the partial government shutdown enters its third week, but the US central bank is making clear that all of the resources of the state are at the disposal of the financial oligarchy.
Responding to Thursday’s market selloff following a dismal report from Apple and signs of a manufacturing slowdown in both China and the US, the Fed declared it was “listening” to the markets and would scrap its plans to raise interest rates.
Speaking at a conference in Atlanta, where he was flanked by his predecessors Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, both of whom had worked to reflate the stock market bubble after the 2008 financial crash, Chairman Jerome Powell signaled that the Fed would back off from its two projected rate increases for 2019.
“We’re listening sensitively to the messages markets are sending,” he said, adding that the central bank would be “patient” in imposing further rate increases. To underline the point, he declared, “If we ever came to the conclusion that any aspect of our plans” was causing a problem, “we wouldn’t hesitate to change it.”
This extraordinary pledge to Wall Street followed the 660 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday, capping off the worst two-day start for a new trading year since the collapse of the dot.com bubble.
William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman from 1951 to 1970, famously said that his job was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” Now the task of the Fed chairman is to ply the wealthy revelers with tequila shots as soon as they start to sober up.
Powell’s remarks were particularly striking given that they followed the release Friday of the most upbeat jobs report in over a year, with figures, including the highest year-on-year wage growth since the 2008 crisis, universally lauded as “stellar.”
While US financial markets have endured the 
worst December since the Great Depression, 
amid mounting fears of a looming recession 
and a new financial crisis, analysts have been
quick to point out that there are no “hard” 
signs of a recession in the United States.
Both the Dow and the S&P 500 indexes have fallen more than 15 percent from their recent highs, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ has entered bear market territory, usually defined as a drop of 20 percent from recent highs.
The markets, Powell admitted, are “well ahead of the data.” But it is the markets, not the “data,” that Powell is listening to.
Since World War II, bear markets have occurred, on average, every five-and-a-half years. But if the present trend continues, the Dow will reach 10 years without a bear market in March, despite the recent losses.
Now the Fed has stepped in effectively to pledge that it will 
allocate whatever resources are needed to ensure that no 
substantial market correction takes place. But this means 
only that when the correction does come, as it inevitably 
must, it will be all the more severe and the Fed will have 
all the less power to stop it.
From the standpoint of the history of the institution, the Fed’s current more or less explicit role as backstop for the stock market is a relatively new development. Founded in 1913, the Federal Reserve legally has had the “dual mandate” of ensuring both maximum employment and price stability since the late 1970s. Fed officials have traditionally denied being influenced in policy decisions by a desire to drive up the stock market.
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979, deliberately engineered an economic recession by driving the benchmark federal funds interest rate above 20 percent. His highly conscious aim, in the name of combating inflation, was to quash a wages movement of US workers by triggering plant closures and driving up unemployment.
The actions of the Fed under Volcker set the stage for a vast upward redistribution of wealth, facilitated on one hand by the trade unions’ suppression of the class struggle and on the other by a relentless and dizzying rise on the stock market.
Volcker’s recession, together with the Reagan administration’s crushing of the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, ushered in decades of mass layoffs, deindustrialization and wage and benefit concessions, leading labor’s share of total national income to fall year after year.
These were also decades of financial deregulation, leading to the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, the dot.com bubble of 1999-2000, and, worst of all, the 2008 financial crisis.
In each of these crises, the Federal Reserve carried out what became known as the “Greenspan put,” (later the “Bernanke put”)—an implicit guarantee to backstop the financial markets, prompting investors to take ever greater risks.
In 2008, this resulted in the most sweeping and systemic financial crisis since the Great Depression, prompting Fed Chairman Bernanke, New York Fed President Tim Geithner and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs) to orchestrate the largest bank bailout in human history.
Since that time, the Federal Reserve has carried out its most accommodative monetary policy ever, keeping interest rates at or near zero percent for six years. It supplemented this boondoggle for the financial elite with its multi-trillion-dollar “quantitative easing” money-printing program.
The effect can be seen in the ever more staggering wealth of the financial oligarchy, which has consistently enjoyed investment returns of between 10 and 20 percent every year since the financial crisis, even as the incomes of workers have stagnated or fallen.
American capitalist society is hooked on the toxic growth of social inequality created by the stock market bubble. This, in turn, fosters the political framework not just for the decadent lifestyles of the financial oligarchs, each of whom owns, on average, a half-dozen mansions around the world, a private jet and a super-yacht, but also for the broader periphery of the affluent upper-middle class, which provides the oligarchs with political legitimacy and support. These elite social layers determine American political life, from which the broad mass of working people is effectively excluded.
The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for 
perpetuating this whole filthy system, in 
which “Wall Street rules.” But its services in behalf of 
the rich and the super-rich only compound the fundamental and 
insoluble contradictions of capitalism, plunging the system into 
ever deeper debt and ensuring that the next crisis will be that 
much more violent and explosive.
In this intensifying crisis, the working class must assert its independent interests with the same determination and ruthlessness as evinced by the ruling class. It must answer the bourgeoisie’s social counterrevolution with the program of socialist revolution.

 

 

 

the depression is already here for most of us below the super-rich!


Trump and the GOP created a fake economic boom on our collective credit card: The equivalent of maxing out your credit cards and saying look how good I'm doing right now.

*
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.
*
"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."  
*

"Overall, the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial conditions."

*
"It is significant that what the Financial Times described as a “tsunami of money”—estimated to reach $1 trillion for the year—has failed to prevent what could be the worst year for stock markets since the global financial crisis."
*
"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."
*

The GOP said the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" would reduce deficits and supercharge the economy (and stocks and wages). The White House says things are working as planned, but one year on--the numbers mostly suggest otherwise. 
CITY JOURNALA 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.
Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington.

 

 

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.
Note: See full topline results and methodology here (PDF). 


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.



No comments: