Is it a signal that she's back in the game because she's selling her president-ability to the world's global billionaire crowd and laying the groundwork for more funds? There are all kinds of ways for foreign billionaires to get money to the U.S. without consequences, after all. What's more, it's pretty much the biggest base of support she has, which is at least one reason why she lost the 2016 election.
Before his first
day in office Barack Obama had sucked in more bribes from banksters than any
president in history.
During the
economic meltdown caused by Obama’s crony banksters, and Obama’s first two
years in office, banks made more money than eight years under pro-bankster
administration of George Bush.
Both of Obama’s
Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were chosen by the banks because
they were from law firms that had long protected big banks from their victims.
“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.”
Joe Biden, the
walking moron, was selected by Obama also because of his ties and servitude to
big banks!
OBOMB'S CRONY
BANKSTERS DESTROYED MORE
THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICAN
HOME
VALUES AND NOW THEY'RE COMING BACK FOR
MORE WITH THE BANKSTES' RENT BOY BIDEN!
Decades of decaying capitalism
have led to this accelerating divide.
While the rich accumulate wealth
with no restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have been under
increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of
the population took in 70 percent
of the nation’s income. But, by 2017,
that fell to only 61 percent.
Obama paid $600,000 for a single speech
In the two years since
leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama has spent his time
raising and solidifying his position in the uppermost echelons of the top one
percent of Americans. Obama has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public
speaking events and made deals worth millions with multiple companies.
Despite his quip, made
during the depths of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made
enough money,” there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has
amassed so much wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a
speech in South Africa last year.
Since he left office,
the former president has given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate
audiences for hundreds of thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same
year he left office, Obama was officially recognized as one of the top ten
highest paid public speakers in the US.
Photo of former president Barack Obama.
(Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Just last month, Obama
was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference
in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is Colombia’s largest marketing
and business event of the year and one of the largest in Latin America. Simply
titled, “A conversation with President Barack Obama,” his talk purportedly
addressed “influential growth strategies” in marketing and other aspects of the
marketing economy.
Colombia is infamous
for the corruption prevalent in its public sector and military,
which costs the country
$17 billion a year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its GDP.
Colombia exports half
of the world’s cocaine and its drug cartels have been known
to have a hand in
the government. Corruption and drug money are so rampant that
Colombia’s Inspector
General likened it to “the new cartel.”
While Obama warns of
the danger of “exploding inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted
to him for one night in Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household
in the US makes in a year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in
Colombia.
Notably, Obama’s purse
was nearly triple the amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious
speeches to Goldman Sachs that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall
Street stooges. Former President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech
when he toured Latin America in 2005.
A key factor in Obama’s
newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A
number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and
investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large
investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations.
According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency,
Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing
between [Wall Street]
and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed
the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial
crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest
redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent,
spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
Under Obama’s watch the
stock markets soared as the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149
percent. Meanwhile, the “war on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with
Obama becoming the first president to spend every day of his two terms at war,
much to the delight of the military-industrial complex.
As the wars raged on
and the financial oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing
mountain of wealth being concentrated at the top of society, real wages
stagnated and an unprecedented opioid overdose crisis spun out of control.
Rising numbers of “deaths of despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among
the working class, resulted in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in
the modern era.
In addition to monetary
rewards for his service to the financial elite and military-intelligence
apparatus, Obama has been lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as
Richard Branson. Obama was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island
where the pair were seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s
exclusive resort.
Michelle Obama has also
benefited after the family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed
a $65 million book deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their
political memoirs. Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of
2018 with over 10 million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals
with Netflix and Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and
promoting diversity in entertainment.
Obama’s lucrative
post-White House career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and
financial elite epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US
government and the private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive
bribery for services rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him
with open arms.
They Destroyed Our Country
“They knew Obama was an unqualified crook;
yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet
they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They
understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made
him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)”
THE RISE TO POWER OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA
'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the
president: Pew Research Center
The
larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters
much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.
OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA -WHY WALL
STREET, ILLEGALS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and the 1% LOVE HIM, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS
GETS THE SHAFT TO PAY FOR HIS CRONY CAPITALISM
CEO pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm
separating the rich and super-rich from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1
percent grew more than 11 percent between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of
the Obama “recovery”—while the incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually
shrank.
Meanwhile,
Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the
next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from
Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED
APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
OBAMA AND BIDEN: 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.
The report found that the growth of global inequality has
accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial
assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE WALL
STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING
BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS
“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
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under
Obama-Biden and their bankster regime 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.”
“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
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech
to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE REAL
ECONOMY:
US “retail
apocalypse” expected to exceed annual high with more than 1,100 store closures
announced in one day.
The
declining living standards of the working class are feeding directly into the
retail apocalypse and mass layoffs of retail workers will only exacerbate the
issue. Workers’ wages have seen little to no growth in the last four decades,
and any economic growth experienced since 2008 has gone to the wealthiest of
the wealthy.
Why do all
global billionaires want wider open borders, amnesty and no E-VERIFY?
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech
to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
AMERICA:
THE ECONOMY IS RIGGED BY CONGRESS SO THE RICH BECOME SUPER RICH.
The
American middle class gets the tax bills for Wall Street’s crimes and
bottomeless bailouts!
Wealth
concentration increases in US.
The latest
research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor
Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the
global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who
benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have
seen their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the
population has suffered a major decline.
The past
40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has
subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever
more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have
captured all of the increase in national income over the past two
decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
“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
Biden defended the
wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth
inequality.
BILLIONAIRE
BETO “BETOMATIC” O’ROURKE PROCLAIMS AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION INVADING
“UNREGISTERED” DEMOCRAT VOTING ILLEGALS.
No word on
America’s homeless, housing or jobs crisis for Legals!
Joe Biden Fundraises with Wall
Street During Donald Trump Rally
18 Jun 201984
1:34
Former Vice President Joe Biden attended a fundraiser with Wall Street
donors during President Donald Trump’s campaign kickoff rally in Florida on
Tuesday.
It was
the fourth New
York City fundraiser for Joe Biden in about 24 hours.
The
fundraiser was hosted by Eric Mindich, the CEO of Eton Park Capital Management
with about 100 donors including Stephen Scherr, the executive vice president
and chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, H. Rodgin Cohen the senior
chairman at Sullivan & Cromwell as well as former Clinton and Obama
officials
Biden
defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of
wealth inequality.
“You
know what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people,” he
said. “Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made
money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your
gut what has to be done.”
Biden
warned that if Trump won re-election, he would “literally fundamentally change
the nature of who we are and how we function.”
Biden
boasted that Obama leaned on him to help bring members of Congress together
during their administration.
“Folks,
I believe one of the things I’m pretty good at is bringing people together,” he
said. “Every time we had trouble in the administration, who got sent to the
Hill to settle it? Me. No, not a joke. Because I demonstrate respect for them.”
Biden
defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of
wealth inequality.
AMERICA: THE RICH GET MUCH RICHER AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS
BLUDGEONED…. Illegals get the jobs!
*
Why do the billionaire
class all want wider open borders and hordes more “cheap” labor illegals? It’s
all about keeping wages depressed for greater profits!
*
“Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped
not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic elite. Big
banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in
the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in
the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the
world” Sen. Josh Hawley
*
*
"This
is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist
billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked
with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the
cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing
but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of
our
communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human
traffickers. These
people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats
who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA
McCARTHY
“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
*
“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."
*
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating
divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the
population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell
to only 61 percent.
*
Millionaires
projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a
breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy,
skewed towards the very top.
At the
end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private
wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million
households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million
per household.
By Gabriel Black
*
The massive increase in the value of the stock market,
which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that
the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of
all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren
Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America
combined last year.
Biden
defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of
wealth inequality.
America
Created Just 20,000 Jobs in February...and those all went to foreign
born
Exclusive–Mo
Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of
Americans’
Consequently,
the pumping of ultra-cheap money into the financial system,
fueling speculation and parasitism, together with ever-widening
social inequality, is not a temporary measure but must be
made permanent.
The
declining living standards of the working class are feeding directly into
the retail apocalypse and mass layoffs of retail workers will
only exacerbate the issue.
Workers’
wages have seen little to no growth in the last four decades, and any
economic growth experienced since 2008 has gone to
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
“US
household net worth sees biggest fall since crisis”
*
“Trump
Touts Legal Immigration
System for ‘Our Corporations’ at Expense of
American Workers “– JOHN
BINDER
Trump’s
shift from a wage-boosting legal immigration system to one that benefits
corporations and their shareholders coincides with recent big business lobby
influence over his White House, at the behest of advisers Jared Kushner and
Brooke Rollins.
*
“Trump
Abandons ‘America First’ Reforms: ‘We Need’ More Immigration to
Grow Business Profits” JOHN BINDER
Biden
defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of
wealth inequality.
Despite a booming economy,
many U.S. households are still just holding on
"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."
“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 THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“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
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."
The father of US Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin just completed the most
expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in
US history, spending over $91 million on a
three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin,
the founder of hedge fund Citadel,
recently dropped $238 million on a
penthouse in New York City, the most
expensive US home ever purchased. And
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man,
has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year
clock.
Decades
of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich
accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been
under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70
percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
"This
is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist
billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked
with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the
cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing
but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our
communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
In 2014
the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median
household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to
$56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during
the recession, they are more than making that money back.
Between
2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1
percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
Additionally, Koch spokespeople at the donors’ conference
said the network has its sights set on pushing amnesty for millions of illegal
aliens this year.
Biden defended the wealthy in his
speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
NO PRESIDENT SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS BEFORE AND
AFTER HIS PRESIDENCY THAT BARACK OBAMA.
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.
“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.”
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close
personal connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from
corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major
financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their
role in the financial crisis.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a
low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL
GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
"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."
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the
Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in
pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules
America.
“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 THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“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.”
"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."
$2,198,468,000,000: Federal Spending Hit 10-Year High Through March;
Taxes Hit 5-Year Low
(Getty
Images/Ron Sachs-Pool)
(CNSNews.com) - The federal government spent $2,198,468,000,000
in the first six months of fiscal 2019 (October through March), which is the
most it has spent in the first six months of any fiscal year in the last
decade, according
to the Monthly Treasury Statements.
The last time the government spent more in the
October-through-March period was in fiscal 2009, when it spent
$2,326,360,180,000 in constant March 2019 dollars.
Fiscal 2009 was the fiscal year that began with President George
W. Bush signing a $700-billion law to bailout the banking industry in October
2008 and then saw President Barack Obama sign a $787-billion stimulus law in
February 2009.
JPMorgan
shares climb after the bank posts record earnings and revenue
3h
Jamie Dimon arriving to testify before
Congress. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters
· JPMorgan
reported first-quarter earnings results on Friday, kicking off another earnings
season for the largest US banks.
JPMorgan Chase reported record first-quarter results on both the
top and bottom lines Friday morning. Shares climbed 2.3% in early trading to
$108.68.
Here's how the results stacked up with Wall Street's
expectations as compiled by Bloomberg.
· Adjusted
net income: $9.18 billion versus $7.7 billion expected
· Earnings
per share: $2.65 versus $2.34 expected
· Revenue: $29.85
billion versus $28.4 billion expected
· Expenses: $16.4
billion versus $16.7 billion expected
"In the first quarter of 2019, we had record revenue and
net income, strong performance across each of our major businesses, and a more
constructive environment," CEO Jamie Dimon said in the earnings
release. "Even amid some global geopolitical uncertainty, the US
economy continues to grow, employment and wages are going up, inflation is
moderate, financial markets are healthy, and consumer and business confidence
remains strong."
A deeper look into the numbers showed the trading and
investment-banking businesses exceeded expectations, though trading declined
17% from the year earlier:
· FICC sales
& trading revenue: $3.73 billion versus $3.67 billion
expected
· Equity
sales & trading revenue: $1.74 billion versus $1.73
billion expected
· Investment-banking
revenue: $1.75 billion versus $1.63 billion expected
"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.
Obama's Wall Street cabinet
6 April 2009
A series of articles published over the weekend, based on
financial disclosure reports released by the Obama administration last Friday
concerning top White House officials, documents the extent to which the administration,
in both its personnel and policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial
elite that were put in place over the past month by the Obama administration
have fed a surge in share values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to
use hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy
up the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection
of the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even
more brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and
pensions, and the decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
to weaken “mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value
of their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on
bonuses paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group
(AIG) and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he
will slash social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors
directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall
Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic
Council and Obama’s top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous
character of relations between the Obama administration and the American
financial elite.
Last year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of
D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7
million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received
government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each
from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away
with $135,000. This is substantially more than double the earnings for an
entire year of high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the
Obama administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and
“unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest
revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr.
Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important
influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial
industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.”
Summers was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As
treasury secretary in the second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting
of basic financial regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes
that among his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten
regulation of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the
Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled
with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own
political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for
international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than
$7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama
administration this year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed
him this past January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in
cash and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now
senior adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two
consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another
$3 million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of
between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was
paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include
Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made
$227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily
promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under
federal receivership.
The presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends
to second- and third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David
Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing
Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster
Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top
executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was
bailed out and seized by federal regulators in September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the
president for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant
Hartford Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment
bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.
It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to
high posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort
to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of
cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the
appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades,
moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from
industry than from finance.
In the Obama administration such considerations have largely
been abandoned.
This will not come as a surprise to those who critically
followed Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as
a critic of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was
from the first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of
powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial
firms lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than
they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Friday’s financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of
American democracy. Elections have no real effect on government policy, which
is determined by the interests of the financial aristocracy that dominates both
political parties. The working class can fight for its own interests—for jobs,
decent living standards, health care, education, housing and an end to war.
///
“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are
employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
OBAMA and HIS BANKS: THEIR PROFITS, CRIMES and LOOTING SOAR
CRONY KING OBAMA: CURL: The Obamas live the 1% life
OBAMAnomics:
FROM THE MAN THAT HATED AMERICAN BUT LOVED AMERICAN BANKSTERS:
OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED LA RAZA DEM
THE GLOBALIST LEGACY OF A SOCIOPATH
Obama warns against “cynicism” at Ohio State commencement
address
7 May 2013
At a commencement address on Sunday at Ohio State University,
President Barack Obama counseled students not to be “cynical” about government
and politics.
There was an almost comically absurd element to Obama’s remarks,
delivered with his characteristic demagogy and attempted gestures at
profundity. In his first four years in office, along with the first
months of his second term, Obama proceeded to systematically repudiate every
campaign pledge and to deflate every illusion that, with the assistance of a
highly coordinated marketing campaign, led millions of people, including a
large number of young people, to vote for him in 2008.
The Obama administration handed trillions of dollars to the
banks; has overseen a massive attack on public education; is leading the
campaign to slash Social Security and Medicare, the core federal retirement and
health care programs; expanded the war in Afghanistan, led a war against Libya,
and is preparing a new war in Syria; and has asserted the right to kill anyone,
anywhere, including US citizens, without due process.
After this record of service to the corporate elite, he
declares: “When we turn away and get discouraged and cynical… we grant our
silent consent to someone who will gladly claim it. That’s how we end up with
lobbyists who set the agenda; and policies detached from what middle class
families face every day; the well-connected who publicly demand that Washington
stay out of their business—and then whisper in government’s ear for special
treatment that you don’t get.”
The references to the “whispers” of the wealthy and
well-connected is particularly rich, coming only a week after Obama nominated
Penny Pritzker for commerce secretary. The selection of Pritzker—a
longtime Obama confidant, billionaire heiress and owner of a private equity
company—only underscores the fact that the administration is a government of,
by and for the financial aristocracy. She will be the wealthiest
person ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.
Previous to his appointment of Pritzker, Obama appointed Mary Jo
White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), one of the main
financial regulators. White made millions of dollars as an attorney
for banks responsible for the financial crisis, including Bank of America and
JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, called White the “perfect choice” to
head the SEC.
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal
connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate
boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial
firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the
financial crisis.
As a whole, Obama’s speech was characterized by a complete
separation from the actual conditions facing the graduates he spoke to, who
confront joblessness, falling wages, and a lifetime in debt. “You have every
reason to believe that your future is bright,” he told his audience. “You’re
graduating into an economy and a job market that is steadily healing.”
He added later, “The trajectory of this great nation should give
you hope.” Really? This is under conditions in which over 11 percent of college
graduates are unemployed a year after getting out of school, and another 16.1
percent simply drop out of the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. Most of those who do find a job are paid barely enough to get by,
let alone pay off student loans. Wages for young adults are falling faster than
any other part of the population, and are down by 6 percent in the past four
years.
Most of the students that Obama addressed Sunday will be so
burdened with debt that they will delay or have to completely put off starting
a family or buying a home.
It is not surprising that Obama should neglect to dwell on this
disastrous situation, because his administration bears responsibility for it.
In the government-sponsored restructuring of the auto industry, the White House
insisted that the wages of new-hires be slashed in half, setting the stage for
vast reduction of wages throughout the economy.
Obama sought to paint opposition to the government’s violation
of democratic rights as right-wing hysterics. “Unfortunately, you’ve grown up
hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some
separate, sinister entity,” Obama said. “They’ll warn that tyranny is always
lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”
This comes from a president who has personally overseen the
illegal assassination of thousands of people, including at least three American
citizens, in weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. The assertions of executive
power have been systematically expanded, going beyond those claimed even by the
Bush administration. The specter of a police state—the response of the ruling
class to growing social opposition—is in fact lurking around the corner.
The moribund state of American politics, of which the Obama
administration is a principal expression, is, according to the president, the
fault of the American people. “Democracy doesn’t function without your active
participation,” he admonished. If politicians “don’t represent you the way you
want… you’ve got to let them know that’s not okay. And if they let you down,
there’s a built-in day in November where you can really let them know that’s
not okay.”
Such limp efforts to encourage illusions in the viability of the
“democratic process” in the United States will not go very far. The experience
of the past four years has not passed in vain. Millions of people, including
many of those in the audience at Ohio State, are drawing the quite justified,
if “cynical,” conclusion that the entire political and economic system is
rotten to the core.
Mounting evidence of international collusion in Libor rigging -
THE RAPE OF THE ECONOMY BY THE BANKSTERS
Mounting evidence of international collusion in Libor rigging
OBAMA'S
AND HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS AT WORK:
JPMorgan’s investment arm, which includes its energy group,
collects $14 billion annually; in comparison, six months’ worth of fines would
amount to a paltry $180 million.
THERE IS A REASON WHY THE BANKSTERS INVESTED HEAVILY IN OBAMA’S
CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION!
Records
show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
Obama:
JPMorgan Is 'One of the Best-Managed Banks'
By
Mary Bruce | ABC OTUS News – 2 hrs 31 mins ago
Obama:
JPMorgan Is 'One of the …
Lou
Rocco / ABC News
Just
hours after a top JPMorgan Chase executive retired in the wake of a stunning $2
billion trading loss, President Obamatold the hosts of ABC's "The
View" that the bank's risky bets exemplified the need for Wall Street
reform.
*
JPMorgan Chase investigated for manipulating California energy
market
By Oliver Richards
23 July 2012
The California
Independent Systems Operator (CalISO), the nonprofit organization that
coordinates the state’s electricity market, has alleged that JPMorgan
Chase& Co. manipulated the state’s energy market, resulting in at least $73
million in improper payments—costs passed along to the state’s energy
consumers.
OBAMA’S
CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL
SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the
Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in
pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules
America.
“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 THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“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.”
OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE BANKSTERS
AND GLOBAL BILLIONAIRES
"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."
BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND THE RICH PARTNER WITH TRUMP TO
FIGHT … economic equality.
"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."
BANKSTER
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.”… UNLESS IT IS SOCIALISM FOR BANKSTERS AND WALL STREET!
*
"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.
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.
THE DEMISE AND ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION of HILLARY
CLINTON
"Hillary Clinton is a known liar, a
criminal of monstrous proportions; others have gone to
prison for crimes she has committed over and over: lying to Congress,
lying to the FBI, violating national security laws by which she was bound
as Secretary of State, etc. It's a long list."
Clinton, the candidate favored by most of Wall
Street and the corporate
elite and large sections of the Republican Party establishment, is seeking to
assemble something akin, within the framework of the US political setup, to a
grand coalition between the Democratic Party and the Republican leadership.
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’ health benefits; and
huge cuts in income taxes for the wealthy and corporate taxes.
HILLARY CLINTON: The woman who fought Barack Obama to be America's
first dictator.
In the days of the Cold
War, the narrative of the arch-reactionaries and anticommunists revolved around
a conspiracy theory according to which the United States had been infiltrated
at the highest levels by agents of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950s,
Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy led the anti-Soviet campaign, alleging that
Russian spies occupied top positions in the government, in universities, in
Hollywood and even in the military. According to McCarthy, “a conspiracy so
immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history
of man” implicated not only the Soviet Union but was also responsible for the
“loss of China” in the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
The “Red Menace” was
the pretext for attacking and delegitimizing all manifestations of social and
political opposition, including the Civil Rights movement, as the work of
“outside agitators” who received their orders from Moscow. It was Martin Dies,
the Democratic congressman from Texas and initiator of the witch-hunting House
Un-American Activities Committee, who declared in his 1940 book The Trojan
Horse in America that Moscow had “envisioned an unusual opportunity to create
racial hatred between the white and Negro citizens of the United States.”
In the late 1950s,
after the heyday of McCarthy, the political thread was taken up by the John
Birch Society, founded in 1958 by Massachusetts businessman Robert Welch, who
notoriously declared that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated,
conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
In 1964, Welch backed
the ultra-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, whose failed presidential
campaign was heavily influenced by John Stormer’s book None Dare Call It Treason.
“Will America continue to aid the communist enemy,” Stormer asked, “to disarm
in the face of danger, to bow before communist dictators in every corner of the
earth? The decision is yours.”
Nothing is dead in
politics. The legacy of McCarthyism is now being revived by the campaign led by
the Democratic Party and summed up in a hysterical screed published Wednesday
in the Washington Post by Hillary Clinton, the
self-professed former “Goldwater girl,” under the headline, “Mueller documented
a serious crime against all Americans. Here’s how to respond.”
According to Clinton,
“Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and
security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert
S. Mueller III’s report.” The perpetrator again is Russia, which Clinton,
citing the Mueller report, claims has carried out a “sweeping and systematic”
attack on the United States.
The Clinton narrative,
which is the official line of the Democratic Party, is a monumental lie.
Responsibility for Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 elections is attributed
entirely to the operations of Russian bots and “Guccifer 2.0,” the persona of
the individual who supposedly hacked Democratic Party emails. Her campaign,
Clinton writes, was the “target of a Russian plot,” directed by President
Vladimir Putin, who “seeks to weaken our country.”
And what did this new
“conspiracy so immense” actually involve? According to the Mueller report
itself, organizations associated with Russia allegedly spent $100,000 on
Facebook ads. This is 0.12 percent of the $81 million spent by the Democratic
and Republican election campaigns themselves on Facebook ads, in a campaign
dominated by the $5 billion spent by the billionaire backers of the two parties
to buy the election.
As for the release of
Democratic Party emails, even if one accepts the unsubstantiated claim that it
was Russian operatives who turned them over to WikiLeaks, what the emails
revealed were true facts about the operations of Clinton and the Democratic National
Committee (DNC)—facts that the electorate had every right to know. Among the
documents released were Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs and other banks,
for which she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other leaked emails
exposed the corrupt efforts of the DNC to rig the primaries against Bernie
Sanders.
Clinton lost in the
2016 elections because the Democratic Party, in line with the class interests
it represents, made a calculated decision not to raise any social issues or
make any appeal to the working class in its campaign against Trump. Do Clinton
and company really expect the public to believe that Facebook ads put out by
Russian agents were behind the collapse in voter turnout in working-class areas
of Michigan, Wisconsin and other states?
The victory of the
billionaire demagogue Trump was the result of widespread disillusionment with
the Democratic Party after eight years of the Obama administration, which broke
every campaign promise and exposed as lies the empty prattle about “hope” and
“change.” Obama focused his energies on bailing out Wall Street and shoring up
the wealth of the corporate and financial elite.
In her column, Clinton
goes on to call for an alliance between the Democratic Party and the
Republicans. The situation calls for “clear-eyed patriotism, not reflexive
partisanship,” she writes. She urges Republicans to work with Democrats in an
intensified campaign against Russia—with or without the Trump administration.
She writes: “It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map
[provided by the Mueller report] leads—to the eventual filing of articles of
impeachment, or not. Either way, the nation’s interests will be best served by
putting party and political considerations aside and being deliberate, fair and
fearless.”
Clinton wants a
bipartisan foreign policy that is “fearless” in its aggression against not only
Russia, but also China. “Unless checked, the Russians will interfere again in
2020, and possibly other adversaries, such as China or North Korea, will as well,”
she warns. Unless Trump is “held accountable, the president will likely
redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda, including rolling back
sanctions, weakening NATO and undermining the European Union.”
Changing what needs to
be changed, such words could have been penned by Robert Welch himself.
Confronting a fascistic president, the Democrats have managed to frame their
entire opposition around a right-wing narrative. If the Democrats had their way
and Trump were removed—to be replaced, don’t forget, by the ultra-right Vice
President Mike Pence—it is almost certain that the immediate consequence would
be war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Inextricably connected
to the conflicts over foreign policy is the escalation of the attack on
democratic rights within the United States. Reprising the ravings of Dies,
social discontent is attributed to the nefarious efforts of Russia to “sow
discord” within the United States.
Significantly, Clinton
cites as a model the actions of the ruling class after the September 11, 2001
attacks, when “Congress established an independent, bipartisan commission to
recommend steps that would help guard against future attacks.” She concludes,
“We need a similar commission to help protect our elections.”
The September 11
attacks—a terrorist atrocity that killed nearly 3,000 people—were followed by
the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department, the Northern Command,
domestic spying, Guantanamo Bay, the institution of torture and drone
assassinations as government policy, and other crimes. The campaign of the
Democrats over the Russian “attack”—a lie fashioned from whole cloth—has been
accompanied by far-reaching moves to censor the internet under the guise of
combating “fake news.”
The Democrats’
warmongering and attack on democratic rights come together in the persecution
of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, whose enduring contribution to the
population of the world was the exposure of the crimes of American imperialism.
For this, Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain, facing imminent rendition
to the United States. The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning is in jail
for refusing to testify against him.
Such is Clinton’s
defense of “our democracy.”
All of this further
demonstrates that in the conflict between Trump and the Democratic Party there
is no progressive or democratic faction. The anti-Russia narrative has not been
challenged by any section of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders,
who is again seeking to cover up this warmongering party with a thin veneer of
social reforms that it has no intention of implementing.
The conflict between
the Democrats and the Trump administration is a conflict between two
reactionary factions of the ruling class. All those political organizations and
groups that are seeking to direct social opposition behind the Democratic Party
are playing the most criminal role. They are no less terrified than Trump and
the Democrats of the development of a genuine socialist movement of the working
class, which will oppose American capitalism and its wars.
///
Everyone knows she stood by her man, blamed his
women, and perhaps was a psychological co-rapist for the sake of her political
ambitions.
Bill and Hill - and the Evil that Men Do
If you asked one
hundred people what they think about when they hear the name Bill Clinton, a
goodly number will say womanizer, cheater – a few will use the dreadful word
rapist. And that number will increase. Time and neurology are working against
the Clintons.
Most memory training programs are simply a matter of learning how to associate
memories with emotionally charged ideas. This is because the brain is designed
to remember where the dangers and the goodies lie and to forget the dry
statistics. The brain is more inclined to remember Jennifer Flowers than the
unemployment rate in 1996. This effect has tainted the collective memory of
many presidents, for example, disclosures about the mistresses of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy. This effect will increase for Bill Clinton
both because of the outrageous nature of his conduct and the way it has and
will be reported.
People tend to cut
quite a bit of slack for the weaknesses of the flesh because there’s a lot of
that going around. But Hillary will gain no benefit from that latitude.
Everyone knows she stood by her man, blamed his women, and perhaps was a
psychological co-rapist for the sake of her political ambitions. Before
the next president is elected, Hillary will not only have an albatross around
her neck, she will be covered with names like Wellstone, Broaddrick, Moffet,
Ward Gracen, Brown, Dowdy, Jones, Ferguson, Zercher, Willey, and more. A majority
of those one hundred people will remember the evil the Clintons did, and their
legacy will be lost in the folds of tattered dresses and bleeding lips.
Lives -- after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be
with the Clintons.
If you asked one
hundred people what they think about when they hear the name Bill Clinton, a
goodly number will say womanizer, cheater – a few will use the dreadful word
rapist. And that number will increase. Time and neurology are working against
the Clintons.
Most memory training programs are simply a matter of learning how to associate
memories with emotionally charged ideas. This is because the brain is designed
to remember where the dangers and the goodies lie and to forget the dry
statistics. The brain is more inclined to remember Jennifer Flowers than the
unemployment rate in 1996. This effect has tainted the collective memory of
many presidents, for example, disclosures about the mistresses of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy. This effect will increase for Bill Clinton
both because of the outrageous nature of his conduct and the way it has and
will be reported.
People tend to cut quite a bit of slack for the weaknesses of the flesh because
there’s a lot of that going around. But Hillary will gain no benefit from that
latitude. Everyone
knows she stood by her man, blamed his women, and perhaps was a psychological
co-rapist for the sake of her political ambitions. Before the next
president is elected, Hillary will not only have an albatross around her neck,
she will be covered with names like Wellstone, Broaddrick, Moffet, Ward Gracen,
Brown, Dowdy, Jones, Ferguson, Zercher, Willey, and more. A majority of those
one hundred people will remember the evil the Clintons did, and their legacy
will be lost in the folds of tattered dresses and bleeding lips.
Lives -- after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be
with the Clintons.
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