Tuesday, August 27, 2019

JACKSON HOLE CONFERENCE FOR BANKSTERS AND THE SUPER-RICH - 'The existing system will not hold'..... MORE BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS ON THE WAY!

NO BANKSTER-OWNED RENT BOY SERVED THEIR INTEREST MORE THAN BARACK OBAMA FROM DAY ONE!

Banks can always rely on the government to bail them out when the house of cards collapses.


With the passage of time, swamp-dwellers like Eric Holder and Lois Lerner, knee-deep in the mud with congressional contempt charges, continue to be financially enriched and will slowly be forgotten, while more recognizable swamp royalty like Hillary Clinton get to run for president. 


Until Americans see guilty members within the United States 

government wearing orange jumpsuits and serving time, the 

investigations and congressional hearings are mere sideshow 

spectacles to appease the masses.



So when it was revealed that the financial system was in reality a snake pit of corruption and conflicts of interest, it was a case of all hands on deck to provide the justification for the trillions of dollars made available to the very banks and financial institutions whose activities had sparked the crisis, while hundreds of millions of workers the world over were made to pay through wage cuts and austerity measures.

NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA!
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.”


Bank of England governor tells Jackson Hole conference: Existing financial system will not hold

One of the fictions most assiduously promoted by the ideological representatives of the capitalist economy is that those in charge of monetary and economic policy have a sound knowledge of the system over which they preside and a clear idea of what they are doing. Such operations assume great importance when events, such as the financial crash of 2008, reveal to masses of working people that this is not the case.
The collapse eleven years ago was preceded by assertions as to the “efficiency” of the market. A “great moderation” had been established in which the evils of the past had been finally conquered, with anyone who dared to differ being declared guilty of blasphemy against gods such as Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.
So when it was revealed that the financial system was in reality a snake pit of corruption and conflicts of interest, it was a case of all hands on deck to provide the justification for the trillions of dollars made available to the very banks and financial institutions whose activities had sparked the crisis, while hundreds of millions of workers the world over were made to pay through wage cuts and austerity measures.
The bailouts may have been regrettable, it was argued, but these measures were necessary to prevent something even worse. New regulations were being put in place to prevent a recurrence and after a period of “unconventional” measures—essentially the handout of virtually free money to the “malefactors of great wealth”—things would return to “normal.”
This piece of fiction was exposed at the conference of central bankers and financial experts held at Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week.
Reporting on the meeting, the Financial Times noted “there was a sense that things would never be the same again.” In an interview with the newspaper the president of the St Louis Federal Reserve, James Bullard said there had been a “regime shift” in economic conditions.
Its manifestations are all too apparent. The supply of ultra-cheap money, either through interest rate cuts or the purchases of financial assets by central banks, so-called “quantitative easing,” has failed to provide any significant stimulus to the real economy, inflation continues to remain below the target rate set by central banks of 2 percent and interest rates remain at historic lows.
So persistent is this phenomenon that the financial system has entered a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where some $16 trillion worth of bonds are trading at negative yields, meaning that an investor holding them to maturity would suffer a loss.
“Something is going on,” Bullard told the Financial Times, “and that’s causing a total rethink of central banking and all our cherished notions about what we think we’re doing. We just have to stop thinking that next year things are going back to normal.”
However much they seek to promote the illusion that they are in control, those in charge of the financial system do have to engage in a discussion over the mounting problems they confront and what might be done to alleviate them. And a couple of papers presented at the meeting were significant from that standpoint.
Over the past months, the realisation has begun to grow that trade war is not a passing phase but is now a permanent feature of economic and political life. This is coupled with the recognition that the role of the US dollar as the basis of stability for the financial system is now increasingly being called into question.
Mark Carney, the retiring governor of the Bank of England, told the conference the present international monetary system based on the US “won’t hold” and that a new international monetary system had to be constructed.
He noted that the US accounted for only 10 percent of global trade and 15 percent of global GDP but the dollar formed the basis for half of world trade invoices and two-thirds of global securities issuances. Movements in the dollar, therefore, were of fundamental importance to other economies even if they had few trade links with the US. They were forced to hoard dollars in order to guard against capital flight.
The dollar was just as important as in 1971 when US President Nixon removed it gold backing and ended the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency relations anchored by gold.
At that time US Treasury Secretary John Connally dismissed the concerns of other countries with the dictum “our dollar, your problem.” This had now broadened, Carney said, to “any of our problems is your problem.”
For decades the mainstream view had been that countries could achieve price stability and regulate economic growth by targeting inflation and adopting floating exchanges rates. This consensus was now “increasingly untenable.” This was because US developments now had “significant spillovers onto both the trade performance and the financial conditions of countries even with relatively limited direct exposure to the US economy.”
He said there was little that could be done in the short term and central bankers had to “play the cards they have been dealt as best they can.”
However, in the longer term “we need to change the game.” The international monetary system could not be reformed overnight but equally “blithe acceptance of the status quo is misguided.”
“Risks are building, and they are structural. As [the late economist] Rudi Dornbusch warned, ‘In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.’”
In the medium term he called for the International Monetary Fund to increase its resources and set up a global fund to deal with capital flight. In the longer term there needed to be multipolar global economy and consideration should be given to the establishment of a “synthetic hegemonic currency.” possibly through a network of central bank digital currencies, in order to “dampen the domineering influence of the US dollar on global trade” so that US shocks would not reverberate around the world as they do now.
In essence this is a modern-day version of the proposal advanced by the British representative John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 for the establishment of a global currency, bancor. At that time, the US asserted its power and insisted that the dollar, backed by gold, had to be the international currency. But since the removal of the gold backing in 1971 as a stable anchor, the global financial system has become increasingly impacted by movements in the US dollar.
“The deficiencies of the international monetary and financial system have become increasingly potent,” Carney concluded and that “even a passing acquaintance with monetary history suggests that this centre won’t hold.”
Similar warnings of financial instability were given in another paper presented by Stanford University economists Arvind Krishnamurthy and Hanno Lustig who pointed to the role played by dollar-denominated investments in providing global investors with safe assets.
They recalled the warnings by economist Robert Triffin in 1960 about the essential contradiction at the heart of the Bretton Woods system. Triffin pointed out that the expansion of global trade and finance depended on the continual outflow of US dollars. But this meant that this pool of dollars would outgrow the gold backing that was its anchor, leading to a crisis. That crisis erupted when Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility.
The authors noted that Triffin’s logic could be extended to the current situation. “The supply of safe dollar assets is no longer backed by gold; however, the supply is fueled by increases in public and private leverage. Will dollar leverage be supplied in a manner consistent with financial stability? The events of the last 15 years suggest that policy makers should pay close attention to this question.”


BANKS RAN THIS COUNTRY AND RAN IT INTO THE GROUND FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY.

 

“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.”

“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.”

“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.” 
NICOLE GELINAS

Bank Money: ‘The Root of All Evil’

Waste and corruption are the result of banks' privilege to create money out of nothing


The one force that causes the most harm in our economy also happens to be the least well-known and understood.
While the left blames greedy corporations and individuals, and the right blames the government, it is in fact the collusion between the government and private banks that leads to problems like environmental degradation, unemployment, income inequality, and many more.
In the United States and most other countries, the government grants private banks the right to create money out of nothing and forces individuals to accept said money as legal tender and to use it to pay their taxes.
The Coinage Act of 1965 states, “United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.”
Today, the “notes” are mostly electronic credits in the form of bank deposits, but the same law applies. So much for legal tender—what about creating money out of nothing? Don’t banks take savers’ deposits and then loan them out to borrowers?
The short answer is no. Instead of taking in savings from companies and individuals, then waiting for a suitable borrower, banks use a simple accounting trick to create new money whenever someone applies for a loan.
Let’s assume you apply for a mortgage of $450,000. Once it’s approved, the bank simply credits your account with $450,000 in the form of a deposit, which you can then use to spend on your house. This is the bank’s liability. On the bank’s asset side, it credits itself with a loan of $450,000 to you, which you will pay back over the course of 30 or so years, plus interest.
For this process, no savings are necessary. The only thing the bank has to do from a regulatory perspective is keep a very low fraction of its assets in cash or balances at the Federal Reserve (Fed), so it can pay out some cash on demand if needed. This is often not more than 1 percent of its assets, hence the term “fractional reserve” banking.

The Root

The popular saying has it that money is the root of all evil. However, the original quote from the Bible would be more accurately applied to the process described above, wherein banks are allowed to create money out of nothing and charge you interest for the trouble: “for the love of money is the root of all evil.”
*
Money itself, of course, cannot be evil. It merely measures the value of goods and services produced and the value of capital saved. However, under the bank money monopoly, the new money created doesn’t measure production and savings, but actually changes them.
The creation of “money,” in the form of the loan and deposit, required nothing to be produced and nothing to be saved. The production only begins later, when the contractors start building the house—although even that is not guaranteed, given that many mortgages or other loans are used to buy up existing assets, which drives up prices.
Even loans that finance new construction alter the economy in unnatural ways: bankers’ prejudice directs production instead of consumer demand from their own savings. And the bank, which can repossess the collateral unless the loan is repaid, gets something for nothing.
The principle at work here is pure love of money—nothing more. The bank does not need to expend any effort but can “earn” the interest on the loan, which is the same as a private tax on the money supply. It is the equivalent of a few designated individuals being allowed to keep a money press at home, which they could then use to print cash, make loans, and charge interest against. Meanwhile, everyone else is forced to use those printed loans to make investments. Clearly, this is not fair.

The Problem

The ease with which banks can create money explains the recurring colossal blunders in risk management and loan creation, of which the subprime crisis is only the most recent manifestation. Because money is free, it makes sense for banks to loan out as much as possible. After all, they don’t have to do anything to source the funds, but get to reap the interest payments as the loans are repaid.
If the market for money were not completely cartelized by the government for the banks, even this perverse mechanism would have its limit, and would ultimately lead to the demise of the participating banks—just as what played out in the 2008 crisis.
However, because banks, regarded as too big to fail, collude with the government and sponsor politicians with campaign contributions, they can always rely on the government to bail them out when the house of cards collapses. This is not a problem of too little regulation, but instead of the wrong kind of regulations, perpetrating a systematic theft of public resources.
Banks can always rely on the government to bail them out when the house of cards collapses.
Even this is just the tip of the iceberg. Because the capital allocation process in this system is so flawed, the private sector is encouraged to spend funds on inefficient and unnecessary vanity projects—real estate is the most obvious, along with massive industrial overcapacity.
Because big corporations have better access to big banks, they have better access to this artificial “capital,” and they can therefore crowd out smaller players that may be able to service their communities better. Too much real estate development and industrial overcapacity also put the most strain on environmental resources.

The process leads to the centralization and bureaucratization of everything, not just the government. Big corporations, paying lower interest charges than their smaller competitors, end up providing the majority of goods and services. This is why we see the same brands and chains everywhere.
Because the money supply “tax” needs to be paid to private banks, corporations are constantly looking for ways to cut costs, which often means firing people and replacing them with robots.
Workers and ordinary consumers, on the other hand, get trapped. They have no choice but to meet high interest payments on credit card loans and mortgages, while the prices of goods, and anything they might invest in, shoot through the roof.

The Solution

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. If banks did not have the privilege of creating money out of nothing, and instead had to source their loans from real savings, their incentives would change immediately. It would also help if there were no government bailouts.
In that case, investment would equal real savings and would by definition be limited, because savings require a reduction in consumption. This is harder to achieve than simply printing money. Resources would, therefore, be economized. Opportunities for accumulating extravagant wealth, while still present, would also be reduced, and there would be a natural tendency toward a more even wealth distribution—not one engineered by a centralized bureaucracy.
Honest banking and honest money have existed before in history. 
If banks and borrowers had skin in the game, capital allocation decisions would be examined not according to the “love for money” principle, but rather according to how productive the investment would be.
More productivity means producing more with less, thus saving natural resources. Less capital investment would mean more room for humans to participate in the economic process. Prices for capital and goods would be more stable.
This is not a dream, nor a vision of Utopia. Honest banking and honest money have existed before in history. The first step to solving this problem is to become aware of the problem.
This article is part of a special Epoch Times series on the Federal Reserve. Click here to see all articles.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

$2,198,468,000,000: Federal Spending Hit 10-Year High Through March; Taxes Hit 5-Year Low

By Terence P. Jeffrey | April 10, 2019 | 5:09 PM EDT
(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.

At the same time that the Treasury was spending the most it has spent in ten years, it was also taking in less in tax revenue than it has in the past five years.
In the October-through-March period, the Treasury collected $1,507,293,000,000 in total taxes. The last time it collected less than that in the first six months of any fiscal year was fiscal 2014, when it collected $1,420,897,880,000 in constant March 2019 dollars.
The difference in the federal taxes taken in and the spending going out resulted in a federal deficit of $691,174,000,000 for the first six months of the fiscal year.
During those six months, the Department of Health and Human Services spent the most money of any federal agency with outlays of $583.491 billion. The Social Security Administration was second, spending $540.426 billion. The Department of Defense was third, spending $325.518 billion. Interest on Treasury securities was third, coming in at $259.687 for the six-month period.
Both individual and corporation income taxes were down in the first six months of this fiscal year compared to last year. In the first six months of fiscal 2018, the Treasury collected $736,274,000,000 in individual income taxes (in constant March 2019 dollars). In the first six months of this fiscal year, it collected $723,828,000,000.
In the first six months of fiscal 2018, the Treasury collected $80,071,070,000 in corporation income taxes (in constant March 2019 dollars). In the first six months of this fiscal year, it collected $67,987,000,000.
(Historical budget numbers in this story were adjusted to March 2019 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.)
(Table 3 from the Monthly Treasury Statement, seen below, summarizing federal receipts and outlaws for the past month and for the fiscal year to date and compares it to the previous fiscal year.)

 

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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 

FROM THE MAGAZINE

Finance’s Lengthening Shadow

The growth of nonbank lending poses an increasing risk.
Economy, finance, and budgets

CITY JOURNAL

A decade ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October, two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America, needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac, died.
After the crisis, the goal was to make banks safer. The 2010 Dodd-Frank law, coupled with independent regulatory initiatives led by the Federal Reserve and other bank overseers, severely tightened banks’ ability to engage in speculative ventures, such as investing directly in hedge funds or buying and selling securities for short-term gain. The new regime made them hold more reserves, too, to backstop lending.
Yet the financial system isn’t just banks. Over the last ten years, a plethora of “nonbank” lenders, or “shadow banks”—ranging from publicly traded investment funds that purchase debt to private-equity firms loaning to companies for mergers or expansions—have expanded their presence in the financial system, and thus in the U.S. and global economies. Banks may have tighter lending standards today, but many of these other entities loosened them up. One consequence: despite a supposed crackdown on risky finance, American and global debt has climbed to an all-time high.
Banks remain hugely important, of course, but the potential for a sudden, 2008-like seizure in global credit markets increasingly lies beyond traditional banking. In 2008, government officials at least knew which institutions to rescue to avoid global economic paralysis. Next time, they may be chasing shadows.
The 2008 financial crisis vaporized 8.8 million American jobs, triggered 8 million house foreclosures, and still roils global politics. Many commentators blamed a proliferation of complex financial instruments as the primary reason for the meltdown. Notoriously, financiers had taken subprime “teaser”-rate mortgages and other low-quality loans and bundled them into opaque financial securities, such as “collateralized debt obligations,” which proved exceedingly hard for even sophisticated investors, such as the overseas banks that purchased many of them, to understand. When it turned out that some of the securities contained lots of defaulting loans—as Americans who never were financially secure enough to purchase homes struggled to pay housing debt—no one could figure out where, exactly, the bad debt was buried (many places, it turned out). Global panic ensued.
The “shadow-financing” industry played a role in the crisis, too. Many nonbank mortgage lenders had sold these bundled loans to banks, so as to make yet more bundled loans. But the locus of the 2008 crisis was traditional banks. Firms such as Citibank and Lehman had kept tens of billions of dollars of such debt and related derivative instruments on their books, and investors feared (correctly, in Lehman’s case) that future losses from these soured loans would force the institutions themselves into default, wiping out shareholders and costing bondholders money.
The ultimate cause of the crisis, however, wasn’t complex at all: a massive increase in debt, with too little capital behind it. Recall how a bank works. Like people, banks have assets and liabilities. For a person, a house or retirement account is an asset and the money he owes is a liability. A bank’s assets include the loans that it has made to customers—whether directly, in a mortgage, or indirectly, in purchasing a mortgage-backed bond. Loans and bonds are bank assets because, when all goes well, the bank collects money from them: the interest and principal that borrowers pay monthly on their mortgage, for example. A bank’s liabilities, by contrast, include the money it has borrowed from outside investors and depositors. When a customer keeps his money in the bank for safekeeping, he effectively lends it money; global investors who purchase a bank’s bonds are also lending to it. The goal, for firms as well as people, is for the worth of assets to exceed liabilities. A bank charges higher interest rates on the loans that it makes than the rates it pays to depositors and investors, so that it can turn a profit—again, when all goes well.
When the economy tanks, this system runs into two problems. First, a bank’s asset values start to fall as more people find themselves unable to pay off their mortgage or credit-card debt. Yet the bank still must repay its own debt. If the value of a bank’s assets sinks below its liabilities, the bank is effectively insolvent. To lessen this risk, regulators demand that banks hold some money in reserve: capital. Theoretically, a bank with capital equal to 10 percent of its assets could watch those assets decline in value by 10 percent without insolvency looming.
Yet investors would frown on such a thin margin, and that highlights the second problem: illiquidity. A bank might have sufficient capital to cover its losses, but if depositors and other lenders don’t agree, they may rush to take their money out—money that the bank can’t immediately provide because it has locked up the funds in long-term loans, including mortgages. During a liquidity “run,” solvent banks can turn to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding.
By 2008, bank capital levels had sunk to an all-time low; bank managers and their regulators, believing that risk could be perfectly monitored and controlled, were comfortable with the trend. By 2007, banks’ “leverage ratio”—the percentage of quality capital relative to their assets—was just 6 percent, well below the nearly 8 percent of a decade earlier. Since then, thanks to tougher rules, the leverage ratio has risen above 9 percent. Global capital ratios have risen, as well. Many analysts believe that capital requirements should be higher still, but the shift has made banks somewhat safer.
The government doesn’t mandate capital levels with the goal of keeping any particular bank safe. After all, private companies go out of business all the time, and investors in any private venture should be prepared to take that risk. The capital requirements are about keeping the economy safe. Banks tend to hold similar assets—various types of loans to people, businesses, or government. So when one bank gets into trouble, chances are that many others are suffering as well. A higher capital reserve lessens the chance of several banks veering toward insolvency simultaneously, which would drain the economy of credit. It was that threat—an abrupt shutdown of markets for all lending, to good borrowers and bad—that led Washington to bail out the financial industry (mostly the banks) in 2008.
But what if the financial industry, in creating credit, bypasses the banks? According to the global central banks and regulators who make up the international Financial Stability Board, this type of lending constitutes “shadow banking.” That’s an imprecise, overly ominous term, evoking Mafia dons writing loans to gamblers on betting slips and then kneecapping debtors who don’t pay the money back on time, but the practice is nothing so Tony Soprano-ish. The accountancy and consultancy firm Deloitte defines shadow banking, wonkily, as “a market-funded credit intermediation system involving maturity and/or liquidity transformation through securitization and secured-funding mechanisms. It exists at least partly outside of the traditional banking system and does not have government guarantees in the form of insurance or access to the central bank.”
“Shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from corporate bond markets to payday lending.”
In plain English, “maturity and/or liquidity transformation” is exactly what a bank does: making a long-term loan, such as a mortgage, but funding it with short-term deposits or short-term bonds. Outside of a bank, the activity involves taking a mortgage or other kind of longer-term loan, bundling it with other loans, and selling it to investors—including pension funds, insurers, or corporations with large amounts of idle cash, like Apple—as securities that mature far more quickly than the loans they contain. The risks here are the same as at the banks, but with a twist: if people and companies can’t pay off the loans on the schedule that the lenders anticipated, all the investors risk losing money. Unlike small depositors at banks, shadow banks don’t have recourse to government deposit insurance. Nor can shadow-financing participants go to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding during a crisis—though, in many cases, they wouldn’t have to: pensioners and insurance policyholders generally don’t have the right to remove their money from pension funds and insurers overnight, as many bank investors do.
Understood broadly, shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from corporate bond markets to payday lending. And much of it isn’t very shadowy; as a recent U.S. Treasury report noted, the government “prefers to transition to a different term, ‘market-based finance,’ ” because applying the term “shadow banking” to entities like insurance companies could “imply insufficient regulatory oversight,” when some such sectors (though not all) are highly regulated. It isn’t always easy to separate real banks from shadow banks, moreover. Just as before the financial crisis, banks continue to offer shadow investments, such as mortgage-backed securities or bundled corporate loans, and, conversely, banks also lend money to private-equity funds and other shadow lenders, so that they, in turn, can lend to companies.
Such market-based finance has its merits; sound reasons exist for why a pension-fund administrator doesn’t just deposit tens of billions of dollars at the bank, withdrawing the money over time to meet retirees’ needs. For people and institutions willing, and able, to take on more risk, market-based finance can offer higher interest rates—an especially important consideration when the government keeps official interest rates close to zero, as it did from 2008 to 2016. Shadow finance also offers competition for companies, people, and governments unable to borrow from banks cheaply, or whose needs—say, a multi-hundred-billion-dollar bond to buy another company—would be beyond the prudent coverage capacity of a single bank or even a group of banks.
Theoretically, bond markets and other market-based finance instruments make the financial system safer by diversifying risk. A bank holding a large concentration of loans to one company faces a major default risk. Dispersing that risk to dozens or hundreds of buyers in the global marketplace means—again, in theory—that in a default, lots of people and institutions will suffer a little pain, rather than one bank suffering a lot of pain.
But too much of a good thing is sometimes not so good, and, in this case, the extension of shadow banking threatens to reintroduce the risks that innovation was supposed to reduce. Recent growth in shadow banking isn’t serving to disperse risk or to tailor innovative products to meet borrowers’ needs. Two less promising reasons explain its expansion. One is to enable borrowers and lenders to skirt the rules—capital cushions—that constrain lending at banks. The other—after a decade of record-low, near-zero interest rates as Federal Reserve policy—is to allow borrowers and lenders to find investments that pay higher returns.
The world of market-based finance has indeed grown. Between 2002 and 2007, the eve of the financial crisis, the world’s nonbank financial assets increased from $30 trillion to $60 trillion, or 124 percent of GDP. Now these assets, at $160 trillion, constitute 148 percent of GDP. Back then, such assets made up about a quarter of the world’s financial assets; today, they account for nearly half (48 percent), reports the Financial Stability Board (FSB).
Within this pool of nonbank assets, the FSB has devised a “narrower” measure of shadow banking that identifies the types of companies likely to pose the most systemic risk to the economy—those most susceptible, that is, to sudden, bank-like liquidity or solvency panics. The FSB believes that pension funds and insurance companies could largely withstand short-term market downturns, so it doesn’t include them in this riskier category. That leaves $45 trillion in narrow shadow institutions and investments, a full 72 percent of it held in instruments “with features that make them susceptible to runs.” That’s up from $28 trillion in 2010—or from 66 percent to 73 percent of GDP.
Of that $45 trillion market, the U.S. has the largest portion: $14 trillion. (Though, as the FSB explains, separation by jurisdiction may be misleading; Chinese investment vehicles, for example, have sold hundreds of billions of dollars in credit products to local investors to spend on property abroad, affecting Western asset prices.) Compared with this $14 trillion figure, American commercial banks’ assets are worth just shy of $17 trillion, up from about $12 trillion right before the financial crisis. Banks as well as nonbank lenders have grown, in other words, but the banks have done so under far stricter oversight.
An analysis of one particular area of shadow financing shows the potential for a new type of chaos. A decade ago, an “exchange-traded fund,” or ETF, was mostly a vehicle to help people and institutions invest in stocks. An investor wanting to invest in a stock portfolio but without enough resources to buy, say, 100 shares apiece in several different companies, could purchase shares in an ETF that made such investments. These stock-backed ETFs carried risk, of course: if the stock market went down, the value of the ETF tracking the stocks would go down, too. But an investor likely could sell the fund quickly; the ETF was liquid because the underlying stocks were liquid.
Over the past decade, though, a new creature has emerged: bond-based ETFs. A bond ETF works the same way as a stock ETF: an investor interested in purchasing debt securities but without the financial resources to buy individual bonds—usually requiring several thousand dollars of outlay at once—can purchase shares in a fund that invests in these bonds. Since 2005, bond ETFs have grown from negligible to a market just shy of $800 billion—nearly 10 percent of the value of the U.S. corporate bond market.
These bond ETFs are riskier, in at least one way, than stock ETFs. Some bond ETFs, of course, invest solely in high-quality federal, municipal, and corporate debt—bonds highly unlikely to default in droves. Default, though, isn’t the only risk: suddenly higher global interest rates could cause bond funds to lose value (as new bonds, with the higher interest rates, would be more attractive). And with the exception of federal-government debt, even the highest-quality bonds aren’t as liquid as stocks; they have maturities ranging anywhere from hours remaining to 100 years.
Investors in bond-based ETFs, then, face a much bigger “liquidity” and “maturity” mismatch risk. If the investors want to sell their ETF shares in a hurry, the fund managers might not be able to sell the underlying bonds quickly to repay them, particularly in a tense market. That’s especially true, since bond markets are even less liquid than they were pre–financial crisis. Because of new regulations on “market making,” banks will be highly unlikely to buy bonds in a declining market to make a buck later, after the panic subsides.
(ALBERTO MENA)
Alook at a related type of debt-based ETF raises even bigger mismatch concerns. “In 2017, investors poured $11.5 billion into U.S. mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in high-yield bank loans,” notes Douglas J. Peebles, chief investment officer of fixed-income—bonds—at the AllianceBernstein investment outfit. A high-yield bank loan is one that carries particular risk, such as a loan to a company with a poor credit rating or to a company borrowing money to merge with another firm or to expand; the “yield” refers to the higher interest rate required to compensate for this risk. Rather than keep this loan on its books, the bank is selling it, in these cases, to the exchange-traded funds that are a rising component of shadow banking.
This new demand has induced lending that otherwise wouldn’t exist—in many cases, for good reason. “The quality of today’s bank loans has declined,” Peebles observes, because “strong demand has been promoting lax lending and sketchy supply. . . . Companies know that high demand means they can borrow at favorable rates.” Further, says Peebles, “first-time, lower-rated issuers”—companies without a good track record of repaying debt—are responsible for the recent boom in loan borrowers, from fewer than 300 institutions in 2007 to closer to 900 today. The number of bank-loan ETFs (and similar “open-ended” funds) expanded from just two in 1992 to 250 in June 2018.
Peebles worries as well about the extra risk that this financing mechanism poses to investors. “In the past, banks viewed the loans as investments that would stay on their balance sheets,” he explains, but now that banks sell them to ETFs, “most investors today own high-yield bank loans through mutual funds or ETFs, highly liquid instruments. . . . But the underlying bank loan market is less liquid than the high-yield bond market,” with trades “tak[ing] weeks to settle.” He warns: “When the tide turns, strategies like these are bound to run into trouble.”
The peril to the economy isn’t just that current investors could lose money in a crisis, though big drops in asset markets typically lead people to curtail consumer spending, deepening a recession. The bigger danger is a repeat of 2008: fear of losses on existing investments might lead shadow-market lenders to cut off credit to all potential new borrowers, even worthy ones. Banks, because they’re dependent on shadow banks to buy their loans, would be unlikely to fill the vacuum. “Although non-bank credit can act as a substitute for bank credit when banks curtail the extension of credit, non-bank and bank credit can also move in lockstep, potentially amplifying credit booms and busts,” says the FSB. The porous borders between the supposedly riskier parts of the nonbank financial markets—ETFs—and the less risky ones also could work against a fast recovery in a crisis. Thanks to recent regulatory changes, insurance companies, for example, are set to become big purchasers of bond ETF shares.
Worsening this hazard, just as with the collateralized debt securities of the financial meltdown, many bond-based ETFs contain similar securities. Such duplication could eradicate the diversification benefit that the economy supposedly gets from dispersing risk. Contagion would be accelerated by the fact that debt-based ETFs, like stock-based ETFs, must “price” themselves continuously during the day, according to perceived future losses; this, in effect, introduces the risk of stock-market-style volatility into long-term bond markets. (Bond-based mutual funds, of course, have existed for decades, but they did not trade like stocks and thus did not feature this particular risk.) Via the plunging price of collateralized debt obligations, we saw, in 2008, what happened to the availability of long-term credit when exposed to the pricing signals of an equity-style crash, but those collateralized debt obligations traded far less frequently than bond ETFs do today. Bond ETFs may be more efficient, yes, in reflecting any given day’s value; that supposed benefit could also allow a panic to spread more rapidly.
During the last global panic, the answer to getting credit flowing again—so that companies could perform critical tasks, such as meeting payrolls, before revenue from sales came in—was to provide extraordinary government support to the large banks. But even if one believes that such bailouts are a sensible approach to financial crises—a highly tenuous position—how would the government provide longer-term support to hundreds of individual funds, to ensure that the broader market keeps functioning for credit-card and longer-term corporate debt? This would greatly expand the government safety net over supposedly risk-embracing financial markets—by even more than it was expanded a decade ago.
“When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may need shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.”
Unwise lending also harms borrowers. Private-equity firms, too, are increasingly lending companies money, instead of just buying those firms outright, their older model. As the Financial Times recently reported, private-equity funds—or, more accurately, their related private-credit funds—have more than $150 billion in money available for investment. They make loans that banks won’t, or can’t, make, though this is leading banks to take greater risks to compete. “It’s been great for borrowers,” says Richard Farley, chair of law firm Kramer Levin’s leveraged-finance group, as “there are deals that would not be financed,” or would not be financed on such favorable terms.
Competition is usually healthy, and risky finance can spark innovation that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. But easy lending can also make economic cycles more violent. Even in boom years, excess debt can plunge firms that otherwise might muddle through a recession deep into crisis, or even cause them to fail, adding to layoffs and consumer-spending cutbacks. We can see this happening already, as the Financial Times reports, with bankrupt firms like Charming Charlie, an accessories store that expanded too fast; Six Month Smiles, an orthodontic concern; and Southern Technical Institute, a for-profit technical college.
The numbers are troubling. The expansion of shadow banking has unquestionably brought a pileup of debt. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group, estimates that U.S. bond markets, overall, have swollen from $31 trillion to nearly $42 trillion since 2008. Federal government borrowing accounts for a lot of that, but not close to all of it. The corporate-bond market, for example, went from $5.5 trillion to $9.1 trillion over the same decade. Corporations, in other words, owe almost twice as much today in bond obligations as they did a decade ago. That’s sure to make it harder for some, at least, to recover from any future downturn.
There are policy approaches to resolving these debt issues. An unpopular idea would be to treat markets that act like banks, as banks—requiring ETFs, say, to hold the same capital cushions and adhere to the same prudence standards as banks. In the end, though, the bigger problem is cultural and political. What we’re seeing, more than a decade after the financial crisis, results from the government’s mixed signals about financial markets. On the one hand, the U.S. government, along with its global counterparts, realized in 2008 that debt had reached unsustainable levels; that’s partly why it sharply raised bank capital requirements. On the other hand, the government recognized that the economy is critically dependent on debt. Absent large increases in workers’ pay, consumer and corporate debt slowdowns would stall the economy’s until-recently modest growth. That’s why the U.S. and other Western governments have kept interest rates so low, for so long.
Thus, we find ourselves with safer banks but scarier shadows. Global debt levels are now $247 trillion, or 318 percent, of world GDP, according to the Institute of International Finance, up from $142 trillion owed in 2007, or 269 percent of GDP. When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may have to invent shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.
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.

Decade after financial crisis 


JPMorgan predicts next one’s 


coming soon

 


Published time: 13 Sep, 2018 14:00

© Ole Spata / Global Look Press
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With the 10th anniversary approaching of the catalyst for the last major global stock market crash – the Lehman Brothers’ collapse – strategists from JPMorgan are predicting the next financial crisis to strike in 2020.
Wall Street’s largest investment bank analyzed the causes of the crash and measures taken by governments and central banks across the world to stop the crisis in 2008, and found that the economy remains propped up by those extraordinary steps.
According to the bank’s analysis, the next crisis will probably be less painful, however, diminished financial market liquidity since the 2008 implosion is a “wildcard” that’s tough to game out.
“The main attribute of the next crisis will be severe liquidity disruptions resulting from these market developments since the last crisis,” the reports says.
Changes to central bank policy are seen by JPMorgan analysts as a risk to stocks, which by one measure have been in the longest bull market in history since the bottom of the crisis.
JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic has previously concluded that the big shift away from actively managed investing has escalated the danger of market disruptions.
“The shift from active to passive asset management, and specifically the decline of active value investors, reduces the ability of the market to prevent and recover from large drawdowns,” said JPMorgan’s Joyce Chang and Jan Loeys.
The bank estimates that actively managed accounts make up only about one-third of equity assets under management, with active single-name trading responsible for just 10 percent or so of trading volume.
JPMorgan referred to its hypothetical scenario as the “great liquidity crisis,” claiming that the timing of when it could occur “will largely be determined by the pace of central bank normalization, business cycle dynamics, and various idiosyncratic events such as escalation of trade war waged by the current US administration.”
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section

As US banks report record profits

Regulators, Congress move to end all restraints on Wall Street speculation

On Tuesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to exempt the vast majority of financial firms from the Dodd-Frank bank regulations passed after the 2008 Wall Street crash. This coincided with press reports that the Federal Reserve Board and other bank regulators will announce as soon as next week proposals to gut the provision of Dodd-Frank most hated by Wall Street—the so-called “Volcker Rule.”
The accelerating offensive against even the most minimal restrictions on financial speculation takes place in the context of surging bank profits and CEO pay. On Tuesday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the agencies that is preparing to eviscerate the Volcker Rule, reported that US banks recorded record profits of $56 billion in the first quarter of 2018, a 28 percent increase over the same period last year.
As the tenth anniversary of the September 2008 Wall Street crash approaches, the token restrictions on the banks that were passed during the Obama administration are being dismantled. These minimal measures, including increased capital reserve requirements, annual “stress tests” and limited restrictions on risky derivative trading, were mainly enacted to provide political cover for the administration’s multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the financial institutions responsible for the wholesale destruction of jobs, millions of home foreclosures and the wiping out of retirement savings.
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.
The Volcker Rule, named after the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Paul Volcker, was included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank act but not drafted and approved by the regulatory agencies until 2013. It took effect only in 2015.
The rule ostensibly bars commercial banks, which benefit from federally guaranteed retail deposits and other government backstops, from speculating with bank funds, including customers’ deposits, on their own account—a practice known as proprietary trading. However, the rule incorporates huge loopholes allowing banks to speculate with their own funds under cover of hedging their investments and providing liquidity to the financial markets.
At the time of its adoption, the Wall Street Journal cynically but accurately wrote: “Rest assured banks will find loopholes. And rest assured some of the Volcker rule-writers will find private job opportunities to help with that loophole search once they decide to lay down the burdens of government service.”
No banks have been cited for violating the rule since it took effect.
Nevertheless, top Wall Street CEOs such as JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein have campaigned ferociously against the measure, denouncing it as an arbitrary restriction on the financial markets and an impediment to economic growth. Wall Street lobbyists have spent many millions of dollars bribing politicians of both parties to weaken the rule to the point of complete irrelevance.
In a speech to international bankers in March, Randal Quarles, the Fed’s new vice chairman for supervision, said, “We want banks to be able to engage in market making and provide liquidity to financial markets with less fasting and prayer about their compliance with the Volcker Rule.”
The plan is to make the rule a dead letter through administrative changes in the language of the regulation rather than by means of legislation. At the behest of the major banks, federal regulators are preparing to widen even further the existing loopholes, allowing the banks to carry out short-term trades with their own funds and amass more speculative assets in the name of “market-making.” They will also end requirements that the banks provide documentation to prove that their activities comply with the rule, relying instead on assurances from the bankers.
The banking bill passed by the House on Tuesday increases the Dodd-Frank asset threshold for financial firms to be considered “systemically important financial institutions,” and thus subject to tighter regulatory oversight, from $50 billion to $250 billion. This is being presented by Democratic as well as Republican backers as a matter of fairness to small and midsize banks. In fact, the exemption covers such giant companies as American Express, SunTrust Banks and Fifth Third Bank.
These companies will no longer be subject to yearly Federal Reserve “stress tests” or higher capital reserve requirements. The bill also exempts banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the Volcker Rule and exempts banks that have granted fewer than 500 mortgages from reporting requirements.
Thirty-five House Democrats joined all but one of the House Republicans to pass the measure, which now goes to President Trump, who has pledged to sign it. The Senate version was passed in March with broad Democratic support, including 11 Democratic co-sponsors. A total of 17 Senate Democrats voted for the bill.
Another aspect of the attack on Dodd-Frank is the strangulation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). This agency, lacking any serious enforcement powers and fully subordinate to the Federal Reserve, was set up under Obama-era legislation to give the impression of government support for consumers victimized by illegal or fraudulent banking practices. Despite its toothless character, it was immediately targeted by Wall Street for destruction.
Under Trump, this process is now well underway. The White House pressured the Obama holdover Richard Cordray to resign as director of the CFPB and installed Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, as acting head of the bureau to oversee its dismantling. Mulvaney has halted investigations, imposed a hiring freeze, stopped the agency from collecting certain data from banks and proposed cutting off public access to a database of consumer complaints.
Despite for-the-record verbal protests by Democratic politicians over the gutting of bank regulations, the removal of restrictions on financial institutions is a bipartisan policy. Trump’s scorched earth approach is an intensification of the basic line of the Obama administration rather than a departure from it.
In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations produced a 650-page report on the financial crisis documenting in detail the fraudulent and illegal activities of the major Wall Street banks, aided by corrupt and compliant federal regulatory agencies and credit rating firms that had a vested interest in promoting the banks’ subprime mortgage fraud and other swindles. At the time, the chairman of the subcommittee, Michigan Senator Carl Levin, gave a press conference at which he said the investigation had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
Nevertheless, Obama pursued a deliberate policy of shielding the big banks and their top executives from criminal prosecution. Financial speculation and fraud continued unabated, subsidized by the government’s policy of supplying the banks with virtually free credit by means of near-zero interest rates and the Fed’s money-printing “quantitative easing” program.
Despite a wave of scandals, including the manipulation of the key Libor interest rate, JPMorgan’s $6.2 billion “London Whale” derivative loss, money-laundering cases involving some of the world’s biggest banks, and the forging of documents to facilitate home foreclosures, not a single leading banker was criminally charged, let alone jailed during the Obama years.
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.”
Meanwhile, government policies favored the further consolidation of financial institutions, including JPMorgan’s subsidized takeover of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo’s absorption of Wachovia. As a result, the stranglehold of a handful of megabanks over economic and social life in America is tighter than ever.

Who Can We Blame For The Great Recession?


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This year marks the tenth anniversary of the “Great Recession” and the media are trying to determine if we have learned anything from it. The Queen visited the London School of Economics after the “Great Recession” to ask her chief economists why they hadn’t seen this disaster coming. They told her they would get back to her with an answer.  Later, they wrote her a letter saying that the best economic theory asserts that recessions are random events and they had successfully predicted that no one can predict recessions.  
Still, George Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine since 2003, thinks he knows more than the LSE academics. He wrote the following in the August 27 print issue:
"It was caused by reckless lending practices, Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W. Bush years, and deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into debt...
"In February, 2009, with the economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month, Congress passed a stimulus bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts, aid to states, and infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists of every persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not a single Republican member of the House."
Typically, journalists will defer to an expert on matters in which they aren’t trained, which is most subjects. But Packer didn’t bother to ask an economist as the Queen did. Had he done so, he would have received the same answer from mainstream economists – recessions are random events and can’t be predicted. If economists knew the causes of recessions they could predict them when they see the causes present. 
So where did Packer get his “causes” for the latest recession? In the classic movie Casablanca, the corrupt and lazy policeman Renault is “shocked” to find gambling going on at Rick’s place and orders the others to round up the “usual suspects.” That’s what Packer does. People have blamed greedy businessmen and bankers for crises for centuries. Since the rise of socialism they added capitalism and the politicians who support it. The only new suspect in the socialist line up is inequality, even though inequality has varied little since 1900 and is near its record low since then.
Had Packer consulted the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he wouldn’t have received much help. Keep in mind that mainstream economists think recessions are random events. After the storm subsides, they can identify likely contributors for the latest disaster, but those differ with each recession. Recently Chicago Booth queried experts for the top contributing factors of the latest recession. The top answer was flawed regulations, followed by underestimating risk and mortgage fraud. 
The “flawed regulations” excuse assumes that bitter bureaucrats who write the regulations are wiser than the actual bankers and ignores the fact that banking is one of the most regulated industries. One analyst described the recent recession as the perfect storm of regulations so massive no one group could understand them all and many of them working against other regulations. 
Blaming “underestimated risk” is good Monday morning quarterbacking. Everyone has 20/20 hindsight, or 50/50 as quarterback Cam Newton said. The same economists don’t explain why banks that took similar risks didn’t fail or why what seems risky now didn’t seem so risky in 2007. As for fraud, the amount was negligible and is always there; why did it contribute to a recession this time? Sadly, the correct answer to what caused the Great Recession– “Loose monetary policy” – came in next to last among Chicago Booth’s experts. 
Perspective is vital. A magnifying glass can make a lady bug look terrifying. Let’s pull back and put the latest recession in a broader context. There have been 47 recessions/depressions since the birth of the nation. Before the Great Depression economists called crises “depressions” and since then they are “recessions.” They’re the same thing; economists thought “recession” was less scary. 
Recessions before the Great Depression were mild compared to it. It took the Federal Reserve and the US government working together trying to “rescue” us to plunge the country into history’s worst economic disaster. Journalists like Packer have convinced people that the Great Recession of 2008 was second only to the Great Depression, but if we combine the recessions of 1981 and 1982, separated only by a technicality and six months, that recession would have been worse. The Fed did not reduce interest rates after that recession because it was still battling the inflation it has caused in the 1970s, yet the economy bounced back and recovery lasted almost a decade. 
I want to drive home the fact that the three worst recessions in our history assaulted us after the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. 
The best explanation of the causes of recessions, because it enjoys the greatest empirical support, is the Austrian business-cycle theory, or ABCT. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek are most famous for refining and expounding it, but the English economists of the Manchester school were the first to write about it. They discovered that expansions of the money supply through low interest rates motivated businesses to borrow and invest at a rapid rate. That launches an unsustainable boom because businesses are trying to deploy more capital goods than exist. Banks raise rates to rein in galloping inflation and the boom turns to dust. 
Banks don’t control interest rates today as they did in the past. That’s the Federal Reserve’s job. The Fed generally reduces interest rates or expands the money supply through “quantitative easing,” or buying bonds from banks, in order to force an economy in the ditch to climb out. The recovery from the Great Recession remained on its feet for so long because the Fed’s policy of paying interest on reserves at banks soaked up much of the new money it created out of thin air. Also, much of the money went overseas to buy imports or as investments. 
The lesson – don’t ask medical advice from your plumber or economics from a journalist. And if you ask an economist, make sure he follows the Austrian school. 
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA!


“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
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 / FRONTPAGE MAG

Why the swamp has little to fear


The midterm elections will either halt or hasten the current soft coup whose aim is to overthrow a legally elected President now being conducted by the swamp.   And if the history of Washington, D.C. corruption is any indication of what will happen after the midterms, the swamp will survive regardless of its coup's success or failure.  But the efforts to expose the treasonous plot will fade away into the dustbin of political history after being seen as just another waste of time and taxpayer money.  The seemingly endless parade of corruption scandals and mind-numbing criminal activity will go on unabated and continue to escalate to unimaginable heights because of an inescapable fact of human nature. 
In a Forbes 2015 article entitled "The Big Bank Bailout," author Mike Collins mentions several ways to prevent another housing bubble crisis from destroying the world economy when he writes, "But perhaps the best solution is to make the CEOs and top managers of the banks criminally liable for breaking these rules so that they fear going to jail.  These people are not afraid to do it again so if you can’t put some real fear in their heads, they will do it again."
What Collins has honed in on is accountability and punishment, the very things lacking in today's dealings with the swamp.  Just as the major banking institutions will soon, if not already, re-enter into risky, corrupt, and illegal lending practices because there was not a "smidgen" of accountability for the trillions of dollars they lost in the housing bubble catastrophe, so too will the past and presently unknown criminals within the IRS, FBI, and DOJ continue to thumb their noses at the law.
What the American people have been subjected to over the past 18 months since President Trump took office is a series of crimes that have been painstakingly unearthed but little else.  "Earth-shattering," "bombshell," and "constitutional crisis" are just some of the words and phrases used by media outlets to describe the newest update regarding the many ongoing investigations.  These words are meant to shock the audience but no longer have the impact they once did because of their overuse and because of the likely lack of any substantive outcome.  What Americans have seen are trials without consequences, clear proof of guilt with no punishment.  Draining the swamp without any repercussions to the swamp creatures inside is like going on a diet but eating the same foods.  
Americans witnessed no accountability regarding exhaustive investigations into the deadly circumstances surrounding the swamp's gun-walking campaign named Fast and Furious, a program where U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and hundreds of innocent Mexican citizens were killed with guns the government sold to criminals.  The swamp continued on its power mission and attempted the deceitful confiscation of America's health care with Obamacare, whose real aim was a redistribution of the nation's wealth.  After little pushback and the passage of Obamacare,  Americans witnessed Benghazi in 2012, and when nothing was accomplished over the investigations of that tragedy, the swamp trampled on the rights of conservatives in what became known as the IRS scandal of 2013.  Nothing was done about that.  And on and on, with the swamp committing one bigger and bolder crime after the next with impunity. 
So we have arrived at the doorstep of the Russian collusion investigation farce by first traveling through the swamp of unsolved crimes perpetrated inside the Obama administration.  With the passage of time, swamp-dwellers like Eric Holder and Lois Lerner, knee-deep in the mud with congressional contempt charges, continue to be financially enriched and will slowly be forgotten, while more recognizable swamp royalty like Hillary Clinton get to run for president. 
Until Americans see guilty members within the United States government wearing orange jumpsuits and serving time, the investigations and congressional hearings are mere sideshow spectacles to appease the masses.

More stiffing the little guy from haughty Kamala Harris


As we've said more than once, Kamala Harris has an authenticity problem.
This characterization, from Thomas Lifson last month, pretty well sums her up every time a Kamala Harris story comes to light:
Kamala Harris is scary in her pathological ambition, moral flexibility, comfort with deception, and sheer ruthlessness.
So here's a new one, from California watcher Susan Crabtree atRealClearPolitics, reporting Harris's soapboxing at the second presidential debate:
“So in my background as attorney general of California, I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of whom lost their homes and will never be able to buy another,” Harris said in late July during the second round of Democratic debates in Detroit.
Here's what really happened:
In fact, she and several other state attorneys general were instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other financial services to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after Harris secured those funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from California’s portion of the settlement to pay off state budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.
Although Harris initially spoke out against Brown’s diversion of the funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court battle that began in 2014 – even after she left the attorney general’s office and for the last year and a half while serving as senator and during her presidential bid this year.
Which is pretty outrageous. Harris shook down some banks in the name of "the people" and then like a crooked lawyer, didn't give the "winnings" to the clients. Whoever got wronged in this mortgage-lending mess didn't see a penny of the won cash. It all just went to other Democrat priorities within the one-party state.
Sound like the kind of lawyer you'd want to have if you got stiffed in some bank deal? Whatever this is, it's not the doing of the consumer advocate she's now painting herself to be.
Any more than she's the prison-rights advocate she claims to be - she threw thousands of them in jail for petty offenses during her time as State Attorney General, kept people in jail beyond their sentences in order to retain them to fight fires, and refused to disavow false testimony from prosecutorial misconduct that would have freed prisoners. She's never been about the little guy.
The mortgage-payout story shows two distasteful things about Harris.
One, she plays the old California political machine game (it probably happens in other crooked one-party states, too) of amassing a vast pot of money for one purpose, a virtue-signaling purpose, a purpose that press releases can be released on, and political campaign speeches can be made ... and then spending the same pile of cash on something thing else, something far less salable to the voters, something that will cover up spending mismanagement or fatten pensions. In California, this game is gotten away with all the time. Gas tax is approved by voters to improve roads ... and ends up bankrolling bureaucrat and administrative hiring sprees. Federal stimulus money is shoveled into the state for shovel-ready bridges and road improvements --- and goes to cover municipal budget holes brought on by mismanagement. Voters approve bond measures in the name of hiring teachers and getting more school supplies for kids in education -- and it goes to educrat pensions and union siphon-offs. Harris is comfortable operating that way in taking on the big banks, shaking them down -- and just letting the money head elsewhere.
Two, she's still the teacher's pet of Democrats, the sidling, sucking-up, get-along-to-go-along, slept-her-way-to-the-top errand girl the more powerful Democrats like. Crabtree reports that Harris first protested the diversion of the funds, and then went silent. Why would she do that? Obviouly, she heard from more powerful Democrats, the kind who could make or break her career. An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style boat-rocker she was not. The money was won, the cash was collected, the whole thing went to the government instead of the little guys, and she went along.
Which pretty well tells us what kind of leader she would be if heaven forbid she should win the presidency. In winning the money and then allowing it to be diverted, she failed the little guys she now says she was serving. And with that, she shows she's never been about serving the people, she's about obeying the greater interests of the Democratic political machine. No wonder she's so popular in those circles - she's been kowtowing to these rich and powerful since the dawn of her career. For voters, the real message, as she vows to take over their health care, hand out reparations to black people, and offer free stuff for votes is clear: That the cash she promises isn't going to get anywhere near the little guys. Not even the illegal immigrants she's promising free health care for can believe her.

  

“One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him.  He's been sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala Harris.  The fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did.”

In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost their homes as a result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be legally recovered in the first place. She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
The problem with Harris instead is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did. RYAN COOPER

 

Obama Doctor: Biden ‘Looked Frail’ when Confronted by Harris at Debate

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
27 Jul 201925
2:14

A former doctor for President Barack Obama claimed that Joe Biden, the Democrat frontrunner, “looked frail” when confronted by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) over his record on civil rights at the first Democrat presidential debate last month.

Dr. David Scheiner, who served as Obama’s personal physician for more than 20 years prior to his election to the presidency, told the Washington Examiner on Friday that after having watched the debate, he was worried about the 76-year-old former vice president’s state of health.
The longtime Obama physician even drew comparison between Biden’s faculties and those of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who appeared weak, frail, and confused while testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee this week.
“Harris started attacking him and he looked frail to me,” Scheiner said. “I sort of got the feeling he wasn’t very strong. It was similar to the feeling I got when Republicans started attacking Mueller so fiercely.”
Biden, who if elected would be the oldest president ever inaugurated, is generally perceived to have done poorly at the first debate. In particular, the former vice president struggled to defend himself in the face of a fiery rebuke from Harris over his recent praisefor segregationists and long held opposition against busing to integrate public schools.
Instead of presenting an adequate rebuttal to Harris’s critiques, Biden attempted to dismiss her outright by claiming she had mischaracterized his record. He then proceeded to muddle his position on busing and inaccurately claim he never offered praise for racists, before conceding the argument by saying “my time’s up, I’m sorry.”
The poor performance renewed existing concerns about the former vice president’s capabilities as a candidate, and not just from opponents. After the debate, Biden’s team was reportedly “freaking out” about the way he handled the encounter with Harris. Federal Election Commission filings show his aides took the incident seriously enough to have hired a speech coach, best known for his work with President Bill Clinton, one day after the debate.

Joe Biden admits it: Obama stiffed the deplorables




It's getting weird out there in these dog days of the Democratic presidential nomination race ahead of the Big One in 2020.

Departing from his nonstop praise for President Obama, former vice president Joe Biden came up with this doozy in his interview with the New York Times.  Here's the money quotes picked out by Breitbart:

Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted "a lot of people were left behind" during his and President Barack Obama's tenure in the White House.
Biden, who has pitched himself as the only Democrat capable of winning back the white working class in 2020, made the admission when being interviewed for a profile in The New York Times that was published on Tuesday.
"A lot of people were left behind," the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat the recession. "In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we paid enough attention to their plight."

So some kind of reality has dawned on him.  He's noticed the Obama-era meth addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by the Obama "you didn't build that" agenda, but not quite enough to recognize that a large portion of Trump voters were actually well educated.

None of this makes Biden look like someone you'd like to elect president.
Three possibilities are there for what is going on.

One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him.  He's been sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala Harris.  The fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did.  These Biden remarks suggest that maybe he's realized this and is distancing himself, even as the Breitbart report noted that he tried to soften the blame.  Nope, blame is blame, even with sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is trying to draw negative attention to Obama...to deflect from all the stuff he didn't bother to do.  According to Breitbart:
Despite the confession, Biden stopped short of laying the culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and others were preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in office.
"Everything landed on the president's desk but locusts," Biden said in describing the early days of the administration. He added that Obama was so busy he "didn't have time to breathe."
The former vice president attributed the "lack of messaging" and Obama's reluctance to "promote his successes."
Obama was busy?  Where the heck was Joe, then?  Vice presidents are supposed to be there to do all the work the president can't do, such as go to funerals.  Biden declaring Obama busy only raises the question about what Biden was doing.  Was he doing anything at all — other than meddling in the internal affairs of Ukraine in the name of business deals?  Biden, like Obama, had his priorities — and helping deplorables wasn't one of them.  So now he's trying to pin the whole thing on Obama.
Third, it may just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy at all, just bits and pieces and parts and particles, and he likes the sound of his voice to interviewers.  He's popping off and doing gaffes.  He doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to him because of what it reveals.  What could it reveal?  That he's bitter at Obama, that he was a lazy, shiftless, do-nothing vice president, that he doesn't know what he's talking about.  What a picture of incompetence.
There aren't any other scenarios.  Biden's remarks on this, after years of effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of truth coming out.  Truth is not going to help old Joe.
Democrats Allow Communists to Infiltrate Their Party Across the Nation



“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.”
*
“Professor Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama.  Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.”
*
We are all victims of the Obama cabal’s collusion with Russia – President Trump’s voters and all Americans who believe in our free and fair election process.

Meanwhile, Citigroup has promoted mass immigration as a necessary component to growing the American economy in terms of increasing GDP.


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.

Joe Biden Admits ‘A Lot of People Were Left Behind’ During the Obama Years

  23 Jul 2019
2:55


Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted “a lot of people were left behind” during his and President Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House.

Biden, who has pitched himself as the only Democrat capable of winning back the white working class in 2020, made the admission when being interviewed for a profile in The New York Times that was published on Tuesday.
“A lot of people were left behind,” the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama administration’s efforts to combat the recession. “In areas where people were hard hit, I don’t think we paid enough attention to their plight.”
Despite the confession, Biden stopped short of laying the culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and others were preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in office.
“Everything landed on the president’s desk but locusts,” Biden said in describing the early days of the administration. He added that Obama was so busy he “didn’t have time to breathe.”
The former vice president attributed the “lack of messaging” and Obama’s reluctance to “promote his successes.”
“He told me that he had encouraged Obama to promote his successes more — to “explain to people how we got where we were now and why it happened” — but that Obama was resistant. “The president said: ‘Joe, I’m not taking a victory lap. We have so much more work to do,’ ” Biden recalled.”
According to Bide, those failures helped lead to the rise and eventual election of President Donald Trump. In 2016, voters without a college degree backed Trump over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a margin of 52 percent to 44 percent. The share was significantly larger among non-college educated whites who broke for Trump by the largest margin since 1980—67 percent to 28 percent.
Although the numbers of such voters are decreasing nationally, non-college educated whites are still a sizable population in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio—states that put Trump over the top in the electoral college.
Exit polling showed that most of these voters, many of whom identify as conservative Democrats, were inspired to join Trump’s movement because of his nationalist views on trade and economics. Many especially felt left behind by the Democrats’ embrace of globalization under President Bill Clinton and the “new economy” during Obama’s tenure.
Biden’s admission about having failed the white working class is surprising, considering he not only embraced the same policies as both Obama and Trump, but has spent considerable time positioning himself as Obama’s rightful heir.
Just last month, after a disappointing performance in the first Democrat presidential debate, Biden invoked Obama’s legacy during an address in front of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/Push Coalition.
“My president gets much too little credit for all that he did, he was one of the great presidents of the United States of America and I’m tired of hearing about what he didn’t do,” Biden told the audience.

Kamala Harris stood up to big banks, with mixed results for consumers in crisis

·          
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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - In her presidential pitch to voters, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris touts as a signature accomplishment the $20 billion relief settlement she secured as California attorney general for homeowners hit hard by the foreclosure crisis.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Kamala Harris speaks to members of the American Federation of Teachers in Detroit, Michigan, U.S. May 6, 2019. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/File Photo
Consumer advocates praise Harris for demanding more money from the banks and for backing stronger protections for homeowners. But thousands of people still lost their homes after not getting the help they needed, advocates say.
The settlement’s uneven results leave Harris, one of more than 20 Democrats seeking the party’s nomination to run against President Donald Trump in 2020, vulnerable to skepticism from voters dismayed by how it played out and attacks from competitors for not being tougher on banks.
“If you’re running against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, you have to be anti-bank,” said Steven Maviglio, a California Democratic strategist who has advised two assembly speakers and a governor. “That would possibly give them fodder if she catches fire.”
Warren and Sanders, who serve with Harris in the Senate, have led the charge among progressives calling for aggressive regulation and oversight of financial institutions. Warren has proposed making it easier to jail executives whose companies commit wrongdoing.
Just two years into her first term as a senator, Harris, 54, relies heavily on the campaign trail on her experience as an elected prosecutor in California, including six years as attorney general in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis.
In 2011, she famously walked away from the table when attorneys general from other states were negotiating a settlement with the big banks that would require them to help consumers harmed by foreclosure and predatory lending practices.
Her bold move led to tough negotiations that more than quadrupled the money promised to help Californians reduce the amount they owed on their mortgages. A few years later, Harris also championed a Homeowners Bill of Rights in California that helped protect consumers in the wake of the crisis.
“Senator Harris fought hard on behalf of California homeowners, and she secured the largest settlement of any attorney general in America,” said Ian Sams, her campaign spokesman. “It was a big risk to press the banks even further for a larger settlement, but she had the conviction to do it and the toughness to win that fight.”
But consumer advocates who worked with California homeowners during the mortgage crisis say the most vulnerable – limited English speakers, the disabled, widows and minorities - had the least luck obtaining relief.
“What we heard repeatedly was people who should be getting loan modifications weren’t getting them,” said Kevin Stein, deputy director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, an association of about 300 nonprofit consumer finance groups.
The state did not track individual consumers who applied for or received help under the settlement, or gather information on ethnicity, income or other circumstances. However, repeated detailed surveys of California Reinvestment Coalition’s member organizations during the financial crisis showed the difficulty credit counselors had obtaining help for their clients. The surveys, seen by Reuters, highlight in particular the trouble faced by disadvantaged groups.
About 150,000 homeowners received relief under the mortgage settlement in California, according to a 2013 report by then-law professor Katie Porter, who served as Harris’ monitor over the settlement proceeds. Porter was elected as a Democratic congresswoman last year.
Advocates also say the state did not do enough to prosecute banking executives for predatory practices.
“It is absolutely reprehensible that you can get thrown in jail for stealing a box of Kleenex at the 7-11, but if you steal from people at a multi-million dollar scale, nothing happens to you,” said Maeve Elise Brown, executive director of Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, a legal assistance group in Oakland.

LIMITED RELIEF

Sams said Harris brought numerous mortgage fraud cases, including several against middlemen who profited from predatory loans. State records show the attorney general’s mortgage fraud strike force filed 41 cases during her tenure.
Of the roughly $18 billion offered to consumers to reduce what they owed on loans, about $9.2 billion was used to forgive money lost when people sold their homes for less than they owed, known as a short sale. Another $4.7 billion was used to forgive some or all of the money owed on second mortgages.
Putting nearly $14 billion toward short sales and second mortgages allowed the banks to use settlement money to reimburse themselves for money they might have lost anyway, said Bruce Marks, founder of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a national nonprofit home ownership and advocacy organization that was active in California during the crisis.
Families still lost their homes under short sales. But Harris’ campaign said those sales helped thousands of homeowners who otherwise would have faced foreclosure, a painful process that would have ruined their credit.
Harris’ efforts won praise from Warren, who in 2015 called the then-Senate candidate “fearless” in taking on the big banks.
Marks said Harris stepped back once the big settlement was negotiated, however, and failed to aggressively police the way the money was used.
“That would give me pause supporting her,” Marks said.
California real estate economist Christopher Thornberg, an expert on the financial crisis, credits Harris with bringing needed reforms to the state’s mortgage and foreclosure systems.
But she politicized a complicated problem, he said. And because the state did not keep track of individual consumers and what happened to them, there is no way to know how well her solutions really worked.
“It was very impressive politically,” said Thornberg, director of the University of California, Riverside, Center for Economic Forecasting and Development. “But we don’t really know ultimately if she moved the needle.”

Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank

FORMER CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation.
“It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.
“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”
Mnuchin is Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury Department, and served as CEO of OneWest from 2009 to 2015. In an internal memo published on Tuesday by The Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney general’s office said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by his bank during that time, and predicted that further investigation would uncover many thousands more.
But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the bank.
Harris’s statement on Tuesday doesn’t explain how involved she was with the decision to not prosecute, or why the decision was made. She also would not say whether the revelations would disqualify Mnuchin for the position of treasury secretary. “The hearings will reveal if it’s disqualifying or not, but certainly he has a history that should be critically examined, as do all of the nominees,” Harris told The Hill. She added that she would review the background and history of all Trump cabinet nominees.
Senate Democrats have vowed to put up a fight over Mnuchin — even creating a website inviting homeowners to list their complaints against OneWest. And yet not one senator has commented publicly on the leaked memo, which received media coverage in Politico, Bloomberg, the New York Post, CBS News, Vanity Fair, CNN, CNBC, and other outlets.
The Intercept has reached out to half a dozen Senate Democratic offices, including those of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and leading Mnuchin critics Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, receiving no response.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., retweeted the story, as did the Twitter account of the Democratic National Committee. But another DNC tweet just hours later hinted at the bind Democrats are in when it comes to using the information against Mnuchin. That tweet praised Harris’s swearing-in. Her decision not to prosecute may make her new colleagues wary of pursuing it.
Progressive groups have not been so reluctant. Three groups — the Rootstrikers project at Demand Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Campaign, and the California Reinvestment Coalition – have called for a delay of Mnuchin’s confirmation hearing until he publicly discloses all settlements and lawsuits OneWest has faced from its foreclosure-related activities, responds fully to all questions submitted by members of the Senate Finance Committee, and publicly discloses his role in obstructing the California attorney general investigation, or any others.
The California Reinvestment Coalition followed that up on Thursday by asking OneWest to release the obstructed evidence, which involved loan files held by a third party then known as Lender Processing Services (it’s now called Black Knight Financial Services). “That’s something the Senate Finance Committee should ask him for, prior to scheduling their hearing with him,” said Paulina Gonzalez, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition.
Mnuchin has already declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Finance Committee member Sherrod Brown, which Brown sent before the release of the leaked memo.
After The Intercept story was published, Mnuchin spokesperson Barney Keller called it “meritless,” and highlighted OneWest’s completion of a foreclosure review with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (which involved completely separate issues from the California inquiry) and what he claimed was OneWest’s issuance of over 100,000 loan modifications to borrowers.
“Memos like this belong in the garbage, not the news,” Keller said.
Meanwhile, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, an organizing group that made headlines in 2010 by protesting on Mnuchin’s front lawn over OneWest’s foreclosure practices, expressed disbelief that he could now become treasury secretary. “My family lived first hand the fraud and unethical behavior under his leadership when I was told to default before they could help me, and (was) instead pushed into foreclosure,” said Peggy Mears, a OneWest victim.
ACCE plans to ask incoming California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to take up the prosecution of OneWest based on the newly released evidence. And the group vowed to fight the Mnuchin nomination. “No one who oversaw the defrauding of thousands of homeowners should be allowed to serve watch over our country’s money,” Mears said.
By David Dayen

Kamala Harris’s Socialist Ties

Part 1: Red diaper baby

Democratic presidential primary front-runner Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) recently told reporters at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that she is “not a democratic socialist.”
The next question should have been obvious: “Well, then, what kind of socialist are you?”
Harris has been surrounded by socialists and communists her entire life—beginning with her staunchly Marxist father. Harris is the older child of two 1960s Berkeley radicals: Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, and Donald J. Harris, an economist from Jamaica.
Gopalan and Donald Harris were very active during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the era, often taking baby Kamala to protests in a stroller, according to a recent article in San Jose daily newspaper The Mercury News on the Harris family.
The couple separated after Donald Harris took a professorship at the University of Madison–Wisconsin. Gopalan filed for divorce in 1971 and won custody of her two daughters in 1973.
Kamala and her younger sister, Maya—now her presidential campaign chair—regularly visited their father during school holidays.
In 1972, Donald Harris left the University of Madison–Wisconsin to begin a visiting professorship of economics at Stanford University.
On Nov. 3, 1976, an article published in the Stanford Daily newspaper claimed that more than 250 students were clamoring for more Marxist perspectives.
Shortly thereafter, a letter was published in the Stanford Daily on Nov. 12, 1976, signed by the Stanford branch of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), with signatures from members Bill Dittenhofer, Ari Cohen, Eric Berg, David O’Connor, Arthur Slepian, Sandy Thompson, and Tracy Mott:
“The program in Marxian economics would be much weaker than it is today if had it not been for massive student efforts in the form of petitions, open meetings …
“[It] was only after a divisive one and a one-half year struggle that the opposing elements in the department gave into student pressure and conceded to ‘the appointment of Prof. Donald Harris. Thus the presence of Marxian economists here simply indicates the success of the student struggle. … The recent addition of course offerings in Marxian economics is again a direct result of student pressure, not departmental benevolence.”
After an 18-month campaign by the union, Harris was offered and accepted a permanent professorship.
The URPE (which last year celebrated its 50th anniversary) began in 1968 as a spinoff of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). URPE has overlapped considerably with America’s largest Marxist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), since its founding in 1982. One of professor Donald Harris’s Stanford supporters and URPE letter signatories, Mott, is now a professor at the University of Denver, where he works with local DSA activists.
During the summer and fall of 2006, the DSA’s Political Action Committee helped DSA activists around the country host house parties to raise funds that helped Bernie Sanders become the “sole socialist in the U.S. Senate.”
According to DSA magazine Democratic Left: “Boulder, Colorado, guests braved a downpour to attend the party at the home of Leslie Lomas and hear a talk about giving money by economics professor and socialist Tracy Mott.”
According to The Mercury News: “Several of his former students said it wasn’t accurate to describe him [Donald Harris] as Marxist, although ‘he might have been a lot more sympathetic to Marx than a lot of other economists were at the time,’ said Tracy Mott.”
Mott was being disingenuous. Several Stanford Daily articles at the time described Donald Harris as “Marxist,” and Mott and his friends made it very clear that Harris was hired specifically for his radical ideology.
Donald Harris wrote papers such as “The Black Ghetto as Colony: A Theoretical Critique” ‎(1972) and “Capitalist Exploitation and Black Labor: Some Conceptual Issues” (1978).
Harris’s Marxism was never questioned or denied at any stage of his career.
URPE also was very close to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), once the largest and most influential of the far-left think tanks in Washington. Since its founding in 1963, the IPS has consistently followed a pro-Marxist line on foreign policy, defense, and economic issues.
To put its policy recommendations into action, the IPS “built networks of contacts among congressional legislators and their staffs, academics, government officials, and the national media,” according to the book “The War Called Peace: The Soviet Peace Offensive.”
The IPS also was on very close terms with representatives of communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union.
In 1978, in an article in National Review, Brian Crozier, director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described IPS as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.”
In the 1988 book “Winning America: Ideas and Leadership for the 1990s,” edited by IPS leaders Marcus Raskin and Chester Hartman, the IPS and DSA affiliate Sean Gervasi recommended a slate of radical colleagues as potential appointees in a hoped-for new Democratic administration after the 1988 election.
Gervasi’s wish list including the following:
• Barry Bluestone—SDS founder, DSA affiliate, URPE member. Served as a member of the senior policy staff of former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.).
• Gar Alperovitz—IPS, DSA, Brookings Institute.
• Robert Browne—SDS, IPS.
• Jeff Faux—DSA affiliate. Faux has worked as an economist with the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity and the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce, and Labor.
• Carol O’Cleireacain—DSA member, Brookings Institute. In 2014, she became Detroit deputy mayor for economic policy, planning, and strategy.
• Howard Wachtel—IPS, URPE member.
• Art MacEwan—URPE member, DSA affiliate.
And, of course, Donald Harris, Marxist professor and Kamala Harris’s father.
Republican George H.W. Bush won the 1988 election, so professor Harris stayed on at Stanford until his retirement.
Ironically, Kamala Harris’s most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary so far is Bernie Sanders, a favorite of professor Harris’s old URPE and DSA colleagues.
When Sanders drops out of a very crowded Democratic primary, will his supporters cross over to support Kamala Harris?
I believe they will. In fact, I believe it has already been decided.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.




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.

Pollak: Barack Obama Wrote the Playbook on Political Division

 22 Jul 2019721
4:13

Left-wing pundits have accused President Donald Trump of using his tweets last weekend to launch a divisive re-election campaign.

David Axelrod, former adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted: “With his deliberate, racist outburst, @realDonaldTrump wants to raise the profile of his targets, drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire party. It’s a cold, hard strategy.”
That is debatable — but if so, Axelrod should know; Obama did it first.
By 2011, Obama knew that re-election would be difficult. The Tea Party had just led the Republicans to a historic victory in the 2010 midterm elections, winning the House and nearly taking the Senate. The economy was only growing sluggishly, and Obama’s stimulus had failed to keep unemployment below eight percent, as projected. Moreover, the passage of Obamacare had provoked a backlash against Obama’s state-centered model of American society.
Facing a similar situation in the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton had “triangulated,” moving back toward the middle, frustrating the GOP by taking up their issues, such as welfare reform.
But Obama rejected that approach. Having watched his icon, Chicago mayor Harold Washington, settle for an incremental approach when faced with opposition in the 1980s, only to die of a sudden heart attack before fulfilling his potential, Obama chose the path of hard-left policy — and divide-and-rule politics.
The first hint of his strategy emerged during the debt ceiling negotiations in the summer of August 2011. As Bob Woodward recounted in his book about the crisis, The Price of Politics, then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) had wanted to reach a “grand bargain” with the president on long-term spending cuts. But Obama blew up that agreement by demanding $400 billion in new taxes, to his aides’ surprise. Obama wanted an opponent, not a deal. (Last week, Boehner told Breitbart News Tonight that Obama’s decision was his worst disappointment in 35 years of politics.)
In the fall of 2011, a new left-wing movement, Occupy Wall Street, was launched. A mix of communists, anarchists, and digital pranksters, the Occupy movement cast American society as a struggle between the “99 percent” and the “one percent.”
Obama and then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) embraced the movement — and failed to distance themselves from it even as it collapsed into violence, sexual assault, and confrontations with police.
Instead, Obama picked up on Occupy’s themes and used them to shape his campaign.
In December 2011, Obama gave a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas — a place steeped in radical symbolism — at which he doubled down on his left-wing policies. He focused on the issue of economic inequality, and attacked the idea that the free market could lift the middle class to prosperity. “This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare,” he insisted.
Then, in the spring of 2012, Obama made a controversial play on race. When a black teen, Trayvon Martin, was killed in Florida during a scuffle with neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, Al Sharprton — who was serving as an informal adviser to Obama at the time — made the local crime story into a national racial controversy. Obama, following Sharpton’s lead, weighed in: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said at the time.
Poll numbers suggest that race relations, which had been improving, dropped precipitously after that. But to Obama, it was worth it: the campaign needed to find a way to motivate minority voters. (Vice President Joe Biden did his part, telling black voters that GOP nominee Mitt Romney was “gonna put y’all in chains.”)
Trump is pushing a non-racial, nationalist message. But if he actually wanted to divide America for political gain, he could learn from the master.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.


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

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-recovery-that-never-happened-except.html

"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.


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).”

Biden Lays Out Globalist Vision to Counter Trump’s America First Agenda: ‘I Respect No Borders’

Spencer Platt/Getty Images
 11 Jul 20194,419
6:14

Former Vice President Joe Biden laid out an extensive foreign policy vision meant to counter President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda during a speech in New York City on Thursday.

Biden, who has been criticized by former Obama administration colleagues for being on the “wrong” side of most international issues, began his remarks by noting that American policies at home and abroad are “deeply” intertwined.
“In 2019, foreign policy is domestic policy, in my view, and domestic policy is foreign policy. They’re deeply connected,” the 76-year-old Democrat frontrunner said. “A deeply connected set of choices we make about how to advance the American way of life and our vision for the future.”
Arguing that Trump’s “Twitter tantrums” and “embrace of dictators” had ruined America’s standing in the eyes of other nations, Biden said his first actions as president would focus on strengthening democracy. To that end, Biden said his administration would remake the U.S. education system, expand the Voting Rights Act, reform the criminal justice system, and implement more transparent campaign finance laws.
“We have to prove to the world the United States is prepared to lead, not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” he said.
Biden further pledged to improve America’s moral leadership by relaxing immigration and asylum laws, protecting illegal aliens already in the country, and reversing policies that prevent tax dollars from going to abortion providers overseas .
“The challenge of following this disastrous presidency will not be just to restore the reputation of our credibility,” Biden said. “It will be to enact a forward-looking foreign policy for the world as we find it today and as we anticipate it will be tomorrow and years to come.”
The centerpiece of that “forward-looking global” agenda, according to the former vice president, would be renewed cooperation with other nations to tackle “dangers” like climate change, nuclear proliferation, cyber warfare, and terrorism.
“American security, prosperity, and our way of life requires the strongest possible network of partners and alliances working alongside one another,” Biden said. “Donald Trump’s brand of ‘America First’ has too often led to America alone.”
If elected, Biden promised to organize and host a “global summit for democracy” to renew “the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world.” The summit’s goal would be to push countries to fight corruption, advance human rights, and fight back against authoritarianism, nationalism, and ill-liberal tendencies.
“We have to be honest about our friends that are falling short and forge a common agenda to address the greatest threats to our shared values,” Biden said, before outlining the private sector’s role.
“We’ll challenge the private sector, including the tech companies and social media giants, to make their own commitments,” he said. “I believe they have a duty to make sure their algorithm and platforms are not misused to sew division here at home or empower their surveillance states to be able to facility their oppression and censorship in China or elsewhere.”
Despite the lofty promises, the majority of Biden’s speech was dedicated to repudiating Trump’s “America First Agenda,” which emphasizes national sovereignty and the American worker over global interests.
“The world is not organized itself,” the former vice president said. “If we do not shape the norms and institutions that govern relations among nations, rest assured that some nation will step into the vacuum, or no one will, and chaos will prevail.”
In order to have a foreign policy that placed the “America back at the head of the table working” with allies and other nations, Biden urged the country to recognize that working in tandem across national boundaries was unavoidable.
“Let me be clear, working cooperatively with other nations to share our values and goals doesn’t make America as it seems to imply in this administration, suckers,” he said. “It makes us more secure. Enables us to be more successful… No country, even one as powerful as ours, can go alone in the challenge of the 21st century.
“I respect no borders and cannot be contained by any walls,” Biden added, taking a shot at Trump’s efforts to reassert control over the U.S.-Mexico border.
With that in mind, the former vice president committed to leading “an effort to reimagine” America’s global priorities. At the top of his list was preventing nuclear proliferation, which Biden hoped to accomplish by rejoining the Iran Nuclear Deal and extending the New START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia. Both are Obama-era initiatives widely interpreted to have been negotiated to the detriment of U.S. interests.
The Iran Deal, which Trump abandoned soon after taking office, would have removed sanctions and given the country millions in financial relief in exchange for little oversight on their commitment to shutter their nuclear arsenal. Likewise, the New START Treaty, which is still in effect until 2021, has been criticized by Trump for allowing Russia to violate its parameters.
Apart from reentering the nuclear deal, Biden signaled he would further take pressure off Iran by ending U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. The conflict has been brewing since 2014, when Houthi rebels, backed by Iran, attempted to overthrow the Yemeni government. Saudi Arabia, seeking to counter Iran’s influence in the Middle East, interceded to defend Yemen through aerial bombardment. Although the bombing likely staved off the collapse of the Yemeni government, it has been blamed for civilian causalities. There is also debate in Congress as to whether America’s support for the Saudis requires military authorization.
The former vice president also lambasted one of Trump’s major political accomplishments in opening communication with North Korea. Even though Biden initially criticized Trump for having fallen “in love with a murderous dictator in North Korea,” he nevertheless suggested his administration would do a better job of convincing the country to denuclearize by teaming up with China.
“I will empower our negotiators to jumpstart a sustained coordinated campaign with our allies and others including China to advance our shared objective,” he said. “It is a shared objective.”
The one issue Biden appeared to agree with Trump on was scaling down America’s involvement in the Middle East.
“It’s long past time we end the forever wars which have cost us untold blood and treasure,” the former vice president said. “I have long-argued that we should bring home the vast majority of our combat troops from the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East and narrowly focus on our mission to deal with Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the region.”
Biden, however, failed to mention that he had championed both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, even applauding President George W. Bush in 2002 for having chosen a “course of moderation and deliberation.”


Kamala Harris Takes Her Shot

No other matchup would be as riveting—or as revealing—as Harris versus Trump. But first she has to get through the primaries.
Sasha Arutyunova

·       MAY 2019 ISSUE

·       POLITICS


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So here’s the plan:
Kamala is going to walk up to Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ from the left. At 12:50 p.m., Rodney Scott will greet her. She’ll enter through the side door and order at the second register, from the woman in the red shirt. Kamala, Scott, and Maya Harris—that’s Kamala’s sister and campaign chair—will sit and eat. Kamala will then exit through the front door and walk around back to look at the smoker. She’ll reenter through the front, cross the dining room, and exit through the side door to take reporters’ questions.
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Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog, on the corner of King and Grove Streets in Charleston, South Carolina, is perfect—the kind of fast-casual, deeply American spot almost any voter can get behind: local pit master anointed by Anthony Bourdain, outdoor seating under tasteful white Christmas lights, wooden tables with wrought-iron legs, red stools. In the hour leading up to Kamala’s arrival, men walking and biking slowly down Grove Street give way to police cars, followed by unmarked cars. At T minus 10, the campaign’s 23-year-old South Carolina communications director, Jerusalem Demsas, asks, “Can we get Rodney out here?” She places Scott, handsome and regionally beloved, on his mark to the left of the door. After Demsas leaves, Scott mutters, “People with warrants must be running off the block.”
It’s all happening before you can even see her, so thick and aggressive is the press: the 20-plus reporters with TV cameras, boom mics, lenses larger than some dogs. Kamala shakes Scott’s hand; touches his arm; smiles her big, open, I-am-so-happy-to-be-with-you-right-now smile. She’s shorter, even in heels, than one expects. But she’s magnetic, authoritative, warm—leaning in, nodding, gesturing with both hands, moving those hands from a voter’s biceps or shoulder to a position of deep appreciation over her heart.
Kamala wends through the scrum of press, makes her way to the counter, and finds the woman in the red shirt, who happens to be Scott’s wife. Kamala greets her with a two-handed clasp (a simple shake would come across as too formal and masculine). Then, right there, a decision needs to be made on the fly: What is Kamala going to order?
Kamala Harris—the Democratic presidential hopeful and 54-year-old junior senator from California—is a prosecutor by training. She knows well that any misstep, anything you say or do, can and will be held against you. Her fundamental, almost constitutional, understanding of this has made her cautious, at times enragingly so.
Harris’s demographic identity has always been radical. She was San Francisco’s first female district attorney, first black district attorney, first Asian American district attorney. She was then California’s first female attorney general, first black attorney general, first Asian American attorney general. She was the second black woman, ever, to win a seat in the United States Senate. But in office, she’s avoided saying or doing much that could be held against her. As attorney general, she declined to support two ballot measures to end the death penalty. She declined to support making drug possession a misdemeanor. She declined to support legalizing pot. She declined to support a ballot measure reforming California’s brutal three-strikes law. The point is: She had power. She kept most of it in reserve. More important than fixing the broken criminal-justice system, it seemed, was protecting her status as a rising star. She had earned that reputation by the time the first major profile of her was written: San Francisco Magazine, 2007. The article also described her as “maddeningly elusive.”
Growing up at protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” She wanted insider power, establishment power.
It takes Harris a minute, but she decides on a pulled-pork sandwich, with corn bread and collard greens, and a banana pudding to split with Maya. They sit and eat, ignoring the two dozen recording devices in their faces, talking about Scott’s vinegar-based BBQ sauce and his recipe for banana pudding—good territory for Harris, as she’s a serious cook. Nearby, there are a few appalled customers, including a family that has driven 40 minutes to celebrate the father’s birthday and has no idea what’s happening, no idea even who Harris is, and would just like this rugby squad of reporters to move aside long enough for their son to refill his drink. But for the most part, the patrons are dazzled by Harris, whose star quality drew 20,000 people to her kickoff rally in Oakland. The dynamism she displayed there made the event feel like a cause, or a concert—Kamalapalooza—and gave her campaign significant momentum. (Laurene Powell Jobs, the president of Emerson Collective, which is the majority owner of The Atlantic, has provided financial support to the Harris campaign.)
After 15 minutes, right on schedule, Harris sets down her napkin and walks around back. She takes some photos near the smoker with Scott’s family and looks deeply into the eyes of his adorable 10-year-old son. She tells him she’s giving a speech later and she’d like him to let her know what he thinks of it. Then she walks back through the restaurant and exits, as planned, through the side door so she can gaggle with the press. (NB: Gaggle is now a verb in American politics, meaning “to answer questions shouted at you by a group of reporters.”)
Here, again, Harris is graciously, militarily on point. All good politicians stick to a script, but Harris speaks like a woman who knows that facts are ammunition. Everything you say can and will be used against you. Just this week she’s been in the weeds, so to speak, with Reefergate, a kerfuffle that arose when Harris was asked on the Breakfast Club radio show what music she’d listened to when she smoked pot in college and she said Tupac and Snoop Dogg. Social media erupted with gotchas, as those artists didn’t release songs until after she’d graduated.
Harris’s spokesperson said that she’d been answering a different question, about the music she listens to now, but even so The New York TimesThe View, MSNBC, and Fox & Friends all picked up the story. Harris’s own father, who is Jamaican, flamed her on Jamaica Global Online for insinuating that she supported legalized pot because she was Jamaican: “My dear departed grandmothers … as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The uproar caused the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to flip out on Pod Save America: “Donald Trump is president … We cannot be talking about this fucking shit again with the Democratic candidates.”
Harris on the trail in South Carolina. Once a stiff and guarded campaigner, she’s learned how to radiate warmth. (Phyllis B. Dooney)
But Harris, today, gaggling, is in top form: We don’t need a tragedy to enact commonsense gun reform. This economy is not working for working people. Every American needs a path to success. We need to speak truth. If Harris’s campaign has a mantra, that’s it: truth truth truth truth truth. She delivers her talking points while dressed, as she always is, in her uniform of dark suit, pearls, black heels. I know—you think I shouldn’t be writing about her clothes. But the clothes themselves are a smart, cautious play, one that Hillary Clinton, frankly, could have benefited from. If you wear the same outfit every single day, pretty soon the haters will run out of snarky things to say about your appearance and move on.
Among Harris’s core traits, arguably her Shakespearean-tragedy trait, the one so central to her character that it has the potential to lift her to the highest post in the land but could also take her down, is her discipline. It is what has allowed her to play the long game, to protect her future. It has also infuriated constituents over the years who wanted Harris to take a stand and fight for them today, not when she reached a higher office. Yet Harris, on the trail, seems bolder than she has in the past. She’s declared that she’s for reparations, for the Green New Deal, for decriminalizing sex work and legalizing pot. She comes across as a woman who is cashing in her chips, taking all the political and social capital she was safeguarding for all those years and putting it on the table, declaring that her moment is now. She’s a black female prosecutor; we have a racist, misogynist, possibly criminal president. All of that caretaking of her political future—what was it for if not this?
By harris’s side, on the road, is not her husband, Doug Emhoff, a Los Angeles lawyer she married in 2014, but her sister, Maya, who was a top policy adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and, before that, the vice president for democracy, rights, and justice at the Ford Foundation and the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California. When the world is following you with boom mics and long knives, Maya told me, “it’s good to know there are people with you 100 percent. Ride or die. Not going anywhere.”
Harris’s parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, met in Berkeley, California, in the early 1960s, in the civil-rights movement. They’d both come to the United States to study at UC Berkeley: Shyamala, at age 19, from a Brahman family in India, to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology and nutrition; Donald, from Jamaica, for a doctorate in economics. As with almost everything else in her life, Harris has a set of stock stories she tells about her upbringing, all of which are laid out in her heavily vetted, surprise-free memoirThe Truths We Hold, which was released two weeks before she announced her candidacy. (The big vulnerable reveal in it is that Harris had to take the bar exam twice.) As a girl, she loved the outdoors; her father yelled at her, “Run, Kamala! As fast as you can. Run!” Her mother sang along to Aretha Franklin; her dad played Thelonious Monk. They divorced when Harris was 7. Before that, the family attended protests together. At one, Harris, a toddler, started fussing. Her mother bent down and asked, “What do you want?”
Harris said, “Fweedom!”
Shyamala, the daughter of a diplomat father and a mother who educated fellow Indian women about birth control through a bullhorn, was barely 5 feet tall, and formidable. She was supposed to return to India for an arranged marriage. She refused. “She had literally no patience for mediocrity,” Maya said. Her outlook was: “Be your best. If you’re going to do something, be the best. Work hard, the whole way.” En route to becoming a prominent breast-cancer researcher, she raised her girls primarily as a single mother. She took Harris with her to her lab when necessary and directed her to wash test tubes. She covered the kitchen in their small apartment with waxed paper and made lollipops and other candy. If she bought gifts, she set up a game in the style of Let’s Make a Deal. What do you want—Door No. 1 (the bedroom) or Door No. 2 (the kitchen)? Inside, the girls would find a blue bike with tasseled handlebars or an Easy-Bake Oven. In Harris’s telling, Shyamala didn’t coddle. If her children came home from school with a problem, she would ask, “Well, what did you do?,” in order to push them to solve it themselves. She raised her daughters in the black community, taking them to Berkeley’s black cultural center, Rainbow Sign, where Maya Angelou read poetry and Nina Simone sang. In 1971, when Harris was 7, Shirley Chisholm dropped by. She was exploring a bid for president.
When I asked Maya about her relationship with her sister, Kamala raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, like, This had better be good. “Well, she’s a big sister and …” Maya paused and turned to Harris. “Are you going to qualify that?”
Harris, laughing, declined. So Maya continued: “She was protective … Maybe just a liiiiiiiittle bossy.” If there was a problem in the schoolyard, Harris would assess the situation and make sure Maya was okay. The two organized a children’s protest to overturn a no-playing policy in their apartment building’s empty courtyard. Do I even need to say it? They won.
When Harris was in middle school, Shyamala took a post at McGill University and moved with her daughters to Montreal. Harris attended high school there. At Howard University, in Washington, D.C., she chaired the economics society, argued on the debate team, and pledged the AKA sorority, the first black sorority in the country, whose alumnae show up at Harris’s campaign events in force, dressed in AKA pale pink and green, a squadron of extra aunts. At UC Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, Harris “found her calling,” as she writes in her memoir, and decided to become a prosecutor.
This was not an easy sell for her parents. Shyamala believed, as Harris writes, that America had “a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” Among Shyamala’s closest friends was Mary Lewis, a professor and public intellectual who helped lead the black-consciousness movement in the Bay Area. Donald Harris, meanwhile, had become an economics professor at Stanford University, the first black man in his department and one of about 10 black faculty members total. He was a left-leaning iconoclast who wrote and taught about uneven economic development around the world, particularly across racial lines, long before many Americans had ever heard the phrase income inequality. Colleagues found his progressivism threatening—he was called “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students away from neoclassical economics,” in The Stanford Daily.
Yet growing up at protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” That dynamic did not appeal to her. She wanted insider power, establishment power. “When activists came marching and banging on doors,” Harris writes, “I wanted to be on the other side to let them in.” Shyamala interrogated this logic. As Harris says, both in her book and in speeches, “I had to defend my choice as one would a thesis.”
It was the choice of a woman who likes control. Even sitting with Maya, post-barbecue, in a corridor of a black church in South Carolina before a town hall—when Harris is laughing and slightly slouched in her chair, seemingly relaxed—she’s a woman who maintains a tight grip on the narrative. No detail is too small.
When Harris was district attorney, if staffers tried to leave for the evening before she thought they should, she shouted, “Well, I guess justice has been done! Everybody’s going home.”
“I stay with her a lot when I’m in D.C.,” Maya says, trying to tell me a story about how Harris likes to take care of people. (I experienced this myself. I showed up that day with a cough, and Harris instantly offered me cough drops and green tea.)
Harris corrects Maya, quietly but firmly: “Always.”
“Always … almost always,” Maya says. “Okay, mostly.”
Harris stands her ground: “Always.”
Maya—a Stanford Law School grad and one of the youngest people ever appointed dean of a law school—drops the point.
Harris will talk about cooking, specifically and in great detail, if you ask her. She’ll even get out her iPad and show you the recipes she’s marked from The New York Times’ cooking section, which she reads in the campaign van, after events, to relax. Chicken Cacciatore With Mushrooms, Tomatoes, and Wine—what’s oppo research going to do with that? I can tell you that her go-to dinner is roast chicken and that she’s cooked almost every recipe in Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food. In the kitchen, she’s a fundamentalist. “Salt, olive oil, a lemon, garlic, pepper, some good mustard—you can do almost anything with those ingredients.”
But turn the discussion to this moment in her life, to taking her shot—how she’s going to both protect this opportunity and go all out; where the line is between being too cautious and too open—and the specificity disappears. First she pivots away from caution. “I wouldn’t say cautious as much as smart. We have to be smart. We have to be strategic.” (This is a favorite move. For more than a decade Harris has talked about being “smart” on crime rather than “tough” or “soft.”) Then she turns to truth. “We have to speak truths, and in speaking those truths, some people are surprised that I’m actually saying that on a stage … So we have to push it.”
Lord knows we are all desperate for a president who values truth. But that wasn’t what I was getting at. There are a great many truths in the world. I wanted to know which ones were on her mind. Where is she going to be bold? Where does she feel she needs to hold back?
“I guess a lot of how I decide [what to] talk about is based on what people tell me they want to discuss,” Harris says. “Not so much what they want to discuss as what are the concerns for them.” This is going nowhere. “Certainly I do think in specifics. And when I’m in a smaller group where there’s more latitude to have a real conversation …”
I have limited time. I drop the question and move on, which of course was Harris’s goal.
Harris at her law-school graduation in 1989, with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan (center) and her first-grade teacher, Frances Wilson. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris)
It is truly a shame that Shyamala Gopalan isn’t here for this—her two daughters together, Kamala running for president of the United States.
She died 10 years ago. She had colon cancer, and when the end was near, Harris visited her in the hospital while running for attorney general. “She was starting to tune things out. She’d stopped watching the news and reading the paper, which was so unlike her, and she was tired. She was sleeping a lot. And I was with her in the hospital. I was sitting next to her—here’s the bed,” Harris says, motioning to her side, “and she was turned that way. We were just spending time together. And she said, looking away, with her eyes closed, I’m sure: ‘What’s going on with the campaign?’
“I said, ‘Well, Mommy, they said they’re gonna kick my ass.’ My mother leaned over and looked at me and had the biggest smile. Just the biggest smile on her face.”
Harris laughs. I ask what the smile meant. She says, “Bring it on. Good luck to them.”
America—at least the blue parts—came to see Harris as its potential savior in June 2017, when she questioned then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the Russia investigation. Sessions sat at a desk before the Senate Intelligence Committee, his mouth pursed in a boyish smirk, his white hair looking as though his mother had combed it for him, Harris regal on the dais above. Here was a man thinking he was going to get away with something, as he nearly always had. Then, in view of the world and this very smart black woman 18 years his junior, he began to realize he was not.
Harris, detailed notes in hand, had no patience for his “I do not recall”s and his long-winded responses to run out the clock. She just calmly and repeatedly demanded an answer to her question: “Did you have any communication with any Russian businessmen or any Russian nationals?” Her mental clarity was terrifying.
Sessions broke down after three and a half minutes. “I’m not able to be rushed this fast!,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in September 2018, cemented many Americans’ belief that Harris was the woman to go after Trump. “Have you discussed [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller or his investigation with anyone at Kasowitz Benson Torres, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer?”
Harris—who, like any good prosecutor, knows not to pose a question to which she doesn’t already have the answer—asked this nearly verbatim six times, shining a hot and unflattering spotlight on Kavanaugh, who responded, in order, as capillaries appeared to burst all over his face:
1. “Ah …”

2. “I’m not remembering, but if you have something …”

3. “Kasowitz? Benson? …”

4. “Is there a person you’re talking about?”

5. “I’m not remembering, but I’m happy to be refreshed or if you want to tell me who you’re thinking of …”

6. “Do I know anyone who works at that firm? I might know … I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.”
Harris then said, “I think you’re thinking of someone and you don’t want to tell us.” Finally Senator Mike Lee of Utah raised an objection and stalled her line of questioning.
Historically, the prosecutor’s office has been a hard place to run from on the left. You will never really be the progressive. By definition, you are defending the state. On the stump, Harris reframes her prosecutorial role: “My whole life, I’ve only had one client: the people,” which sounds nice coming from the mouth of a public servant. What voter is not for that? Yet when Harris entered a courtroom stating that she was there to argue “for the people,” she was not the voice of the underdog. She was the voice of enforcement, the voice of the law.
As California attorney general, Harris referred to herself as the state’s “top cop.” (Sasha Arutyunova)
Jeff Adachi, the city’s longtime elected public defender (who died of an apparent heart attack at age 59 not long after I interviewed him for this article), met Harris when she was a first-year law student at Hastings. “Did she always have the charm and ambition she’s known for today? Yeah,” he told me. Adachi was “a little surprised,” he said, when Harris aligned herself “with law enforcement and wanting to put people behind bars,” because “we had probably talked about politics before and she was always seen as more of a liberal progressive.” But there were very few prosecutors of color at the time, and very few women, and, Adachi said, the prosecutor path was “seen as a stepping stone to do something bigger or greater.”
When Harris ran for district attorney, in 2003, she challenged Terence Hallinan, her former boss, from the right. He was entangled in Fajitagate, a preposterous scandal that involved three off-duty police officers beating up two residents and then demanding their takeout fajitas. The public saw the department as an unprofessional and incompetent bunch of good ol’ boys. (Hallinan had a low conviction rate, and he did not help his reputation when he handed members of the Fajitagate grand jury a blank indictment form and asked them to fill in the names of the officers they thought should be charged.) Harris enlisted her mother to stuff envelopes and brought an ironing board to neighborhood campaign stops, to use as a portable table. She wasn’t a natural. She felt awkward talking about herself with strangers.
She’d had a much-discussed relationship with future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was 31 years older and estranged from his wife. Brown was a local kingmaker. Still, Harris did not assume that he would anoint her. During the campaign, her longtime mentee Lateefah Simon took a BART train into the Mission early one weekday. “It’s, like, 7:30 in the morning—legit,” she told me. “I’m coming up the escalator and I see Kamala Harris, by herself, in a suit at 16th and Mission.” The intersection then smelled like feces and was filled with drug dealers. Simon looked at Harris like, Are you stupid? What are you doing here, dressed like that, when people are still high from the night before?
“I’m trying to win this race!” Harris told her.
“She had on pearls!,” Simon said.
Once in office, Harris got straight to work cleaning up Hallinan’s mess. She painted the office walls, which no one had done in years. She replaced the jam-prone copy machine. If staffers tried to leave for the evening before Harris thought they should, she shouted, “Well, I guess justice has been done! Everybody’s going home.”
She endured one major scandal, over a rogue tech in her crime lab. The tech stole cocaine and mishandled evidence, which was bad enough. But then Harris, likely thinking she could address the issue quietly, failed to follow procedure and inform the defense lawyers in the cases involved. One thousand cases had to be thrown out.
Nevertheless, in her first three years as DA, San Francisco’s conviction rate rose from 52 to 67 percent. She even created a new category of crime—truancy—and punished parents who failed to send their children to school. Then, as now, no one contested the link between high-school graduation and a person’s future in a well-paying job as opposed to jail. Harris still talks about this. She stirs outrage at America’s collective failure to invest in the education of other people’s children, often citing the statistic that nearly 80 percent of all prisoners are high-school dropouts or GED recipients. But is arresting a mother whose life is so frayed that she can’t get her child to school the best way to set that child on the path to success? Many, particularly in the black community, answered no. They still do. “Identity politics is stupid,” says Phoenix Calida, a co-host of The Black Podcast, “if you’re not going to enact identity policy.”
Harris ran against the death penalty, and, in what was arguably the first and last truly controversial decision she’s made in her political career, she stuck to her position and did not seek capital punishment when a San Francisco cop was killed in the line of duty several months into her tenure. The pressure to reverse her campaign promise was intense. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who’d served as San Francisco’s mayor from 1978 to 1988, chastised Harris for not doing so at the slain officer’s funeral.
Still, Harris kept her promise—and paid for it. No police union endorsed her for 10 years. One plausible read of her political history suggests that this experience, less than a year into elected office, taught her to fear and avoid taking a stand.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re black or not if your policies are not for black people. And her policies are not supportive of black families,” Tanya Faison, of Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, says.
Harris calls herself a progressive prosecutor, which she’s not, though she did lift up individual lives. She started one of the first prisoner reentry programs in the country, Back on Track. It helped young, first-time drug offenders find jobs and services and earn high-school degrees. But Back on Track served only 300 people; Harris never took the program to scale. She also mentored young women, among them Lateefah Simon, who went from being a high-school dropout to becoming a MacArthur genius-grant winner in 10 years, which has got to be a record.
Simon now runs the Akonadi Foundation, in Oakland, dedicated to eliminating structural racism. The two met when Simon was 22 years old, with a 4-year-old daughter. At the time, Harris was running a child-exploitation task force; Simon showed up at a meeting to advocate for young women who’d been trafficked by pimps and then charged with prostitution instead of being treated as victims of rape. Harris listened to Simon, recognized her intelligence, and took her potential seriously. “I was like, Who is this woman? No one listens to us,” Simon told me. “People hate us. We’re garbage, in policy and in public.”
Harris helped Simon raise money and throw events for her organization. She insisted that Simon enroll in college, and when Simon said that was impossible—she was already working and raising a daughter alone—Harris talked about Maya, who’d had a daughter herself at age 17 and then graduated from UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School. The powerful, polished black woman who believed that Simon could be a powerful, polished black woman too blew Simon’s mind: “This was before Olivia Pope!” But Harris’s role as DA took some getting used to. “Why would you want to do that?” Simon asked. “I so deeply knew what was happening with girls in the system, and the DA was our nemesis. The DA and the pimp, right? The DA and the pimp.”
Harris’s race for California attorney general was extremely tight—so tight that her opponent, Steve Cooley, gave a victory speech on Election Night, which he had to retract the next day. She campaigned as a progressive, figuring, perhaps, that many people think they support criminal-justice reform more than they actually do. “They like these talking points and these platitudes,” Phoenix Calida says. Let’s be smart on crime. “But her tough-on-crime policies—nobody’s really gonna complain, because they feel safe.”
Harris’s record in that office is marked more by what she didn’t do than what she did. She did not support a ballot initiative reforming California’s three-strikes law, which incarcerated people for life for petty crimes (an interesting family moment, because Maya, while working at the ACLU of Northern California, had championed a proposition to take three strikes down). She did not join the fight against solitary confinement. She did not support two state ballot propositions to end the death penalty (and when a federal court in California struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional, she appealed the decision). She did not support legalizing pot. She did not advocate for reopening several high-profile cases, including a capital one widely suspected to have resulted in a wrongful conviction. She did not prosecute Steven Mnuchin, the CEO of OneWest Bank and Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, for more than 1,000 foreclosure violations. She did not take an aggressive stance on officer-involved shootings—most notably, she did not endorse a bill requiring independent investigations of them and declined to use the power of the office to investigate the killing of Mario Woods, who was shot 26 times by five police officers in 2015.
Harris has since taken strong progressive positions. But some of her constituents still feel burned. “California has had the most police killings, and we haven’t had any officers ever charged,” Tanya Faison, the lead organizer for Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, told me. “That was on her watch.” Sure, “it would be beautiful to have a black woman as the president,” Faison continued. But “it doesn’t matter if you’re black or not if your policies are not for black people. And her policies are not supportive of black families.”
To be fair, while in office, Harris did institute implicit-bias training for police officers. She did test a large backlog of rape kits. And she did negotiate well with the nation’s five largest mortgage firms in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. She walked away from an offer of $4 billion of debt relief for California homeowners and called Jamie Dimon, the chairman of JPMorgan Chase. She told him his side needed to come up with more money, much more. She ended up with $20 billion.
She won her Senate seat on the night Trump was elected. By then Harris was walking the line she’s on now: using “fearless” as a campaign slogan despite letting fear stop her from taking positions. Trump has been a productive foil for her, highlighting the value of her legal training, casting her discipline as flattering and calm rather than pinched and nervous.
In Washington, she hasn’t done much—let’s be honest, who in the Senate has in recent years? She introduced a few bills: one, with Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, to study reforming the cash-bail system; another, with 13 Democratic colleagues, to begin addressing the high mortality rates black women face in childbirth. She also introduced, with fellow Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker and Republican Tim Scott, a bill to make lynching a hate crime. This last one was classic Harris: tough on crime, seemingly progressive, entirely risk-free. It passed the Senate unanimously.
By 4:30 p.m., 1,000 people had packed into the gym of Charleston’s Royal Missionary Baptist Church, where the scoreboard read 2020 and AKA sorority sisters rolled in wearing full pink-and-green dress uniform. They are not even a little ambivalent about their candidate. She’s theirs; they love her. Who among us hasn’t been scarred by an early humiliation and retreated from hard decisions? They asked where the reserved AKA section was.
Backstage, Harris chatted her way through the photo line, a mainstay of the contemporary American political campaign: local officials and other VIPs get what is basically a school photo with the candidate—in this case, next to a state flag, backed by a royal-blue drape. She has an amazing ability to focus on the person right in front of her, even as a large and impatient crowd claps and shouts “KA-MA-LA” for her to come onstage.
“I ate with Rodney Scott today, so I’m happy,” Harris announced to cheers when she finally appeared. Microphone in hand, she slipped into a subtle southern accent. “We have to restore in our country truth and justice, truth and justice,” she said. The crowd, right there with her, called out: “Amen!” “That’s right!”
This Charleston event was a 1/20th-scale model of Harris’s campaign-kickoff rally in Oakland. There, Harris had clapped along with her 20,000 supporters as she made her way to the podium. Just the sight of a strong female candidate who was not Clinton came as a relief. Many Democrats remain traumatized by 2016, the matchup of a deliberate and dutiful woman, straining to mop up all messes, against an impetuous, state-trashing bully. But in dropping her guard a little, Harris has been trending away from Clinton and toward Michelle Obama—adopting a persona that’s less programmed, hipper, and more relaxed, all of which is more likable. Of course, we care intensely about likability, especially in our female candidates, so perhaps shucking the appearance of restraint is a prudent A-student decision as well.
Among the many lines Harris offerson the stump is: I intend to win this.You don’t quite expect to hear a woman say that.
Harris’s campaign is shorter on specifics than Clinton’s was (perhaps, again, in reaction to Clinton). It’s shorter on specifics than some of her fellow 2020 candidates’ campaigns, though she did lay out, in her Oakland speech, a basic platform, designed to appeal to a liberal base, not attract independents: Medicare for all; universal pre-K and debt-free college; a $500-a-month tax cut for low-income families; women’s reproductive rights; a path to citizenship for immigrants.
Then, at minute 32 of the speech, in a moment that managed to be both subtle and shocking, Harris addressed the thing almost nobody wants to say but everybody who is close to Harris thinks about: her personal risk. “As Robert Kennedy many years ago said, ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.’ He also said, ‘I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent president, but these are not ordinary times, and this is not an ordinary election.’
That line passed, and Harris moved on to pablum like “Let’s remember: In this fight we have the power of the people.” But Harris is a target. She knows it. Reports of hate crimes increased 17 percent during Trump’s first year in office. In late February, a Coast Guard officer was accused of plotting to kill Harris, along with 19 others, including journalists, activists, and Democratic politicians. The very fact of her campaign, Harris standing out there every day before crowds of thousands, presenting herself to the American people—some of whom will merely dissect her record; others of whom will see her female body and her brown skin, and want her dead—is bold and brave. “Through her career it’s been a very serious thing,” Harris’s close friend and adviser Debbie Mesloh told me. “She and I talked about it [regarding] Obama … The first day he had Secret Service. The first time I saw him in a bulletproof vest.” Even at the relatively small book talk Harris gave at the cozy Wilshire Ebell Theatre, in Los Angeles, a security guard stood behind her, not even off in the wings, visible to the audience the whole time.
After Harris finished speaking in Oakland, her family joined her onstage: her husband, Doug, who is white; her sister, Maya; Maya’s husband, Tony West, who is black (and currently the chief legal officer at Uber, formerly the third lawyer from the top in Obama’s Justice Department); Maya’s daughter, Meena; Meena’s partner and children. The family is beautiful and the family looks like the future—and not the future in which white nationalists win.
Alumnae of the AKA sorority, which Harris pledged at Howard University, turn out to her campaign events in pink-and-green dress uniform. (Phyllis B. Dooney)
It’s hard not to be ambivalent about a cautious person, particularly a person who has been working for you but holding back, saving for the future. In truth, it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about all the candidates. There are so many contenders, more of them popping up like white-haired crocuses every day. One is too old. (Well, two are too old.) One’s too mean to her staff. One said she was Native American and she’s not. One Instagrammed his trip to the dentist. So many Americans have conflicting desires for this election. They want a transformative leader who will push this country forward. They want a rescue, a captain to steady our faltering ship of state and restore the rule of law. Most of all, they want a winner—whoever that is, just tell them, they’ll vote that way. They want a sure thing. They need a sure thing. And then they feel scared and frustrated by all the options, because that’s not how the system works.
Among the many lines Harris offers on the stump is: I intend to win this. You don’t quite expect to hear a woman say that. But Harris has become very good at tapping into the emotions of a crowd of Democrats and delivering what they want to hear. The 2020 Democratic National Convention is 15 months off, though. Over the next year, the campaign is sure to get ugly—Trump hasn’t even given Harris a nickname yet. I asked her whether she thought that, as a black woman, she had an extra-narrow lane of acceptable behavior to maneuver in. “I don’t think so,” she said. Then she downgraded that sentiment. “I hope not.”
Has the United States dealt with its own racism and misogyny enough to elect a black woman president? There’s little rational basis for saying yes. But there was little rational basis for believing that a man named Barack Hussein Obama could win the White House either, let alone a huckster named Donald Trump.
That Friday night, on the 110-mile ride from Charleston to Columbia, South Carolina, Harris read recipes online. She flagged one for salted-caramel cookies and emailed it to Lily Adams, her communications director, who happens to be former Texas Governor Ann Richards’s granddaughter. (Adams later laughed and said, with genuine affection, “When do you think I’m going to bake these? I’m going to New Hampshire with you on Monday.”)
In the morning Harris, Maya, and Adams, and the whole rugby team of journalists, met up on Columbia’s Lady Street—yes, Lady Street—for some retail politics. First stop was Styled by Naida, a vintage-clothing store run by Naida Rutherford, who grew up in the foster-care system and was homeless before she steadied herself economically by hosting stylish garage sales. It was another ideal campaign stop: Rutherford, the success story, helped Harris pick out a hat and a black belt. Then, as Maya paid for the items, Harris noticed a brightly colored sequined coat, a chessboard of turquoise, purple, yellow, green, and sky blue. The jacket was just about the furthest fashion choice imaginable from Harris’s standard dark blazer. Still, Rutherford, a good saleswoman, encouraged Harris, a good candidate, to try it on, and Harris did. She looked in the mirror, the horde of journalists to her back. “This really would be perfect for the Pride parade,” she said.
A nice, unguarded human moment. The jacket was way too big, and she’ll almost certainly never wear it anywhere but the parade. But you’d have to be a monster—and a tone-deaf politician—not to want to support Rutherford. Harris bought the coat.

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That afternoon, Harris held another town hall, this time at Columbia’s Brookland Baptist Church, and sitting in her car in the church parking lot, waiting for the doors to open, was 77-year-old Gladys Carter. Carter had fought in the civil-rights movement. She was heartbroken and horrified by the turn her country had taken with Trump’s election, and she admired how Harris had handled Kavanaugh. But she had questions about criminal justice. “Some African Americans in my circle of friends have expressed concern about her actually imprisoning a lot of our people, more so than she did the others,” Carter said. “They say they have to really think hard before they’re able to trust her. She’s got to prove that she’s willing to come out and do some things differently.” At the same time, Carter felt that Americans have deeper, even more pressing problems—namely, our dangerous, lying president. Maybe a tough female prosecutor is our best hope. “This country has been controlled by white males for how many years? The way things are right now—they screwed it up.”
Harris made it home for dinner with her husband that evening. She slept in her own bed, in her own house, where she likes to relax by curling up on the couch in her sweatpants and reading more recipes. But by that night, social media had pounced on her brief moment of spontaneity, making fun of her sequined jacket, her amazing technicolor coat, harping on how stupid and frivolous it is for a woman to be trying on clothes on the presidential campaign trail.
It’s not easy out there. You can’t expect much forgiveness on Lady Street. Yet Harris, as ever, is playing the long game. She often repeats her most succinct one-line pitch to prospective voters: “We’re going to need somebody who knows how to prosecute the case against this president.”
She packed a bag for New Hampshire: all dark suits.

Kamala Harris Set To Raise Money With Former Wells Fargo Executive

The lobbying executive defended the bank during the fake accounts scandal. When Harris was California attorney general, she sued the bank for privacy violations.
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A former Wells Fargo executive who defended the bank during its massive fake accounts scandal is hosting a fundraiser for Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign on Saturday, according to an invitation obtained by HuffPost. 
The former executive, Miguel Bustos, worked from 2013 to 2017 as Wells Fargo’s senior vice president of government and community relations, where he oversaw lobbying and community outreach efforts in six western states: California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Montana and Utah.
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Bustos is hosting a fundraiser for Harris on Saturday night in San Francisco, timed to coincide with the city’s Pride Weekend celebrations and one day before the crucial second-quarter fundraising deadline.
The minimum donation for an attendee is $500, while “supporters” need to contribute $1,000 and “sponsors” who get a photo with Harris need to contribute the federal maximum donation of $2,800. 
The fundraiser lends ammunition to progressives, many aligned with the rival presidential campaigns of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who are skeptical of Harris’ willingness to take on Wall Street and the financial industry. 
In a statement, Harris spokesman Ian Sams defended the candidate’s record.
“She literally investigated Wells Fargo as Attorney General and won an $8.5 million settlement for Californians, and she’s the only major candidate in this race who’s actually prosecuted banks for screwing people over,” Sams said. “Her record of real action to take on bad corporate actors on behalf of consumers shows exactly who she would fight for as president.”
Sams is referring to an $8.5 million settlement that Harris and five district attorneys in the state reached with the bank in March 2016. The bank had violated state privacy laws by failing to “timely and adequately” disclose it was recording phone calls with members of the public. (The fine is equivalent to about .2% of Wells Fargo’s profit during the quarter the settlement was announced.) 
ASSOCIATED PRESSCalifornia Sen. Kamala Harris sued Wells Fargo when she was the state’s attorney general. Now, she’s raising money with one of its former executives.
But progressive critics have typically focused on Harris’ role in a more high-profile settlement: the national mortgage settlement that Harris, the Obama administration and other state attorneys general reached with Wells Fargo and the four other largest banks in America in 2012. Progressives have long said the $25 billion agreement didn’t go nearly far enough to punish the banks and help homeowners trapped by the foreclosure crisis in the wake of the Great Recession. No bank executive involved in the foreclosure fraud went to prison.
Wells Fargo’s highest-profile recent scandal was the fake accounts debacle. From 2009 to 2015, the company opened up more than 3.5 million fake bank and credit card accounts, leading nearly 200,000 customers to pay unnecessary fees. Warren aggressively investigated the bank, and the scandal led to the resignation of then-CEO John Stumpf, along nearly $3 billion in fines and settlement costs.
During the scandal, Bustos defended the bank when the city council of Vallejo, California, considered moving its accounts away from Wells Fargo. While Bustos admitted the bank had “made mistakes,” he also pleaded with the city council to stick with it.
“The one thing I learned in life is that no one is perfect, no one,” he said, according to a September 2017 article in the Vallejo Times-Herald. “But one thing I learned is that you have forgiveness and you have redemption. What we are asking is, you know what, work with us to be a better bank.”
The city council eventually voted to cut ties with Wells Fargo. 
Bustos’ LinkedIn profile says he is now the senior director of the center for social justice at GlideSF, a prominent progressive church in San Francisco. 
Harris’ presidential campaign, meanwhile, has received more than $16,000 from Wells Fargo employees, according to FEC records – including maxed-out donations from the company’s former chief compliance officer and an executive who oversaw the company’s credit card business. Harris also received $2,300 from Brenda Wright, a Wells Fargo executive whose position on San Francisco’s pension board sparked protests in 2013. 
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Kamala Harris' sincerity problem

Illustrated | Spencer Platt/Getty Images, Ethan Miller/Getty Images, tampatra/iStock, Tatomm/iStock
The Democratic presidential primary is pretty clearly a four-way race at this point. As per the Real Clear Politics poll average, Joe Biden is still out in front with 27 percent, with Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris tied for second with 14 percent, and Elizabeth Warren only a point behind them. The other 2,000 candidates are all down in the low single digits or lower.
Not long ago Harris was only doing half as well. Clearly she was the major beneficiary of the recent debates, especially her forceful confrontation with Biden over school desegregation. But afterwards, she backtracked on the issue, saying that in cases where school segregation is not the result of discriminatory laws, "any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered by a school district."
That is directly at odds with her debate statement that the "federal government must step in" when schools refuse to desegregate. It's not the first time Harris has given reason to believe her answers to thorny questions are less than sincere.
The Harris campaign seems to be trying to thread this needle by arguing that mandatory integration was necessary back in the bad old days of Jim Crow, but not today. "Federally mandated busing was essential in the '60s/'70s to force the integration of schools," Harris spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement, but today "we need a comprehensive approach[.]" Harris has not released a formal desegregation program of her own, though she says she supports the Fudge-Murphy plan which would provide $120 million in grants for voluntary integration.
But this historical distinction doesn't hold up, because segregation is not much better today than it was in the 1950s. Indeed, it has gotten considerably worse over the last few decades, as whites have moved out of cities and schools which got out from under court desegregation orders rapidly re-segregated themselves. White Americans generally loatheintegration, whether they're liberal or conservative — even those without school-age children, because wealthy white parents buying into "good" (read: white) school districts increases neighborhood property values, and thus integration might reduce them.
All this is why the Sanders campaign has a considerably more aggressive desegregation plan than Fudge-Murphy. In addition to more subsidies, he would bring back desegregation orders and end the ban on federal funding for busing, in addition to other measures. Warren and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, on the other hand, would indirectly address the problem by overhauling housing subsidies and regulations, allowing more low-income people to live in wealthier neighborhoods. (As my colleague Jeff Spross argues, ending the funding of schools by local property taxes altogether would be better still.)
But that isn't the only Harris backtrack from the debates. When moderators asked which candidates would get rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare-for-all, Harris raised her hand, only to clarify afterwardsthat "private insurance would certainly exist for supplemental coverage." She did the same herky-jerky move during and after a CNN town hall a few months ago.
Now, private insurance would probably exist in some small form under Medicare-for-all, but the vast bulk of private coverage would certainly be eradicated, if only because the Medicare coverage would be so much better. Canada, for instance, has a rump private insurance sector mainly because its Medicare system does not cover most vision, dental, or prescription drugs (which the Sanders bill would include). Insofar as Harris is trying to reassure private insurance companies or their customers, she is either not being straight about her favored policy, or she doesn't actually favor it.
Most disturbing of all, Harris has not been straight about her record as California's attorney general. She has boasted a great deal about her role in the national mortgage settlement of 2012, in which banks paid money to avoid mass prosecutions over the robosigning scandal.


As Attorney General of California, I took on the five biggest Wall Street banks during the financial crisis. We won $20 billion for California homeowners and together we passed the strongest anti-foreclosure law in the United States of America.

In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost their homes as a result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be legally recovered in the first place. She also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
Back in the 2004 election, Republicans made great hay out of John Kerry's supposed flip-flopping. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with changing one's mind when new evidence comes to light.
The problem with Harris instead is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did.
Even attempting to fix the many crises afflicting the United States — from hideous inequality, to climate change, to structural racism, to a broken foreign policy — is going to take some steely resolve, not just talking a big game. So far Harris' is not promising on this front.

Barack Obama: A Lifelong Story of Russian Collusion




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Several U.S. presidents have genuinely colluded with Russia or the former Soviet Union, but none more so the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama. It’s no exaggeration to say that Obama owes his entire career to Russian collusion.
In March 2012, President Obama made his famous “off mic” remarks to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev replied, “I understand. I transmit this information to Vladimir.”
Was this some innocent remark, or was it just as it seems: a friend passing a message to a friend?
Obama has surrounded himself with pro-Moscow “friends” all his life. Why should he desert his friends just because he was president of the United States?
Just after Obama’s election to the presidency on Nov. 15, 2008, Sam Webb, then-chairman of the still pro-Moscow Communist Party USA, told his party comrades: “The left can and should advance its own views and disagree with the Obama administration without being disagreeable. Its tone should be respectful. We are speaking to a friend.”
A lifelong friend.

Frank Marshall Davis

The young Obama, when he was 10 or 11 years old, was introduced to the Hawaii-based poet Frank Marshall Davis by his maternal grandfather. Obama maintained a relationship with the septuagenarian Davis until he left Hawaii for Occidental College in Los Angeles at the age of 18.
Davis had joined the Communist Party USA in Chicago by 1943, at the latest. He was militantly pro-Soviet, writing poems in praise of both Stalin and the Red Army.
In 1948, Davis and his communist wife moved to Hawaii. According to Davis’s autobiography, he was recommended to the Hawaiian comrades by secret Communist Party USA members Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.
Before going underground in 1950, the Hawaiian Communist Party was one of the most dynamic in the United States at the time. The mainland put huge resources into the Hawaiian Communist Party because the Soviets wanted the U.S. military presence on the islands shut down. The Hawaiian communists were charged with agitating against the U.S. military bases at every opportunity.
FBI documents refer to information that Davis “was observed photographing large sections of the [Hawaii] coastline with a camera containing a telescopic lens.” The FBI information states: “Informant stated that DAVIS spent much of his time in this activity. He said this was the third different occasion DAVIS had been observed photographing shorelines and beachfronts. Informant advised that it did not appear he was photographing any particular objects.”
The FBI clearly suspected military espionage. Davis was placed on the “Security Index,” which meant he was marked for immediate arrest should war break out between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Alice Palmer

Long-serving Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer provided Obama’s entrée into electoral politics. Obama was Palmer’s chief of staff when she ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1994, then he took over her state Senate seat in 1996.
Palmer was a pro-Soviet propagandist.
In 1983, Palmer traveled to Czechoslovakia to the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council’s Prague Assembly. At the time, she served on the executive board of the Communist Party USA-dominated U.S. Peace Council.
In 1985, Palmer was part of a delegation of 16 African-American journalists to the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Palmer represented her own Chicago-based “Black Press Institute,” which was essentially a vehicle for disseminating Soviet propaganda to America’s black population.
The trip was organized by Don Rojas, then executive of the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ), in conjunction with the Black Press Institute, the National Alliance of Black Journalists, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association—the United States’ largest organization of owners of black newspapers.
American-educated Rojas was the former press secretary to Grenada’s late communist leader, Maurice Bishop.
Palmer told the Communist Party USA’s People’s Daily World:
“The trip was extraordinary because we were able to sit down with our counterparts and with the seats of power in three major capitals—Prague, Berlin and Moscow. We visited with foreign ministers, we talked with the editors of the major newspapers in these three cities. …
“It was a very unusual trip because we were given access. … Every effort was made to give us as much as we asked for. … We came back feeling that we could speak very well about the interest of the socialist countries in promoting peace.”
In March 1986, Palmer covered the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Congress in Moscow for the Black Press Institute.
In June 1986, the People’s Daily World published a Black Press Institute article by Palmer on the CPSU conference, entitled “An Afro-American Journalist in the USSR.” The article praised Soviet “central planning” and included such statements as:
“We Americans can be misled by the major media. We’re being told the Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low standard of living compared with ours, but actually they have reached a basic stability in meeting their needs and are now planning to double their production.”
Palmer was elected IOJ vice president for North America at the organization’s 10th Congress, held from Oct. 20–23, 1986, in Prague. She also traveled to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria during the same trip. Palmer’s duties were to include coordinating the activities of IOJ chapters in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
The IOJ was a Soviet front operation based in Prague, until its expulsion by the Czech government in 1995.

David Axelrod

A longtime friend of Obama, David Axelrod, led Obama’s 2008 and 2012 election campaigns and served as a senior adviser to the president.
In the 1940s, Axelrod’s mother, Myril Axelrod, wrote for the left-leaning New York magazine “PM.” Though not officially a communist publication, several Communist Party USA members worked on the paper.
PM’s Washington correspondent, I.F. Stone, was later identified as a Communist Party USA member and a Soviet intelligence agent.
One of PM’s writers, Earl Conrad, also wrote for the leftist magazine Negro Story, as did Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
While studying in Chicago, Axelrod was mentored by longtime Chicago journalist and activist David Canter.
Canter spent his childhood in the Soviet Union where his father, Harry Canter, former secretary of the Boston Communist Party, translated Lenin’s works from Russian into English. This work earned Harry Canter an audience with Stalin in 1932. After World War II, Harry Canter settled his family in Chicago, where he took over a radical paper called the Chicago Star—for sale because its owner, Frank Marshall Davis, was moving to Hawaii.
David Canter joined the Communist Party USA and would later become an associate of Obama.
By 1960, David Canter had teamed up with well-known Chicago Communist Party USA member LeRoy Wolins. The duo owned a company called Translation World Publishers, which specialized in publications from and about the Soviet Union. The company soon attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which suspected Canter and Wolins of being conduits for Soviet propaganda.
In a report prepared by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in May and July 1962, entitled “Communist Outlets for the Distribution of Soviet Propaganda in the United States,” David Canter was heavily quizzed about payments his company received from the Soviet Union.
After the U.S. government demanded that Translation World Publishers register as the agent of a foreign power, Canter de-registered the company.
The committee went on to find that:
“Translation World Publishers was an outlet for the distribution of Soviet propaganda … this publishing house was subsidized by Soviet funds and was created by known Communists to serve the propaganda interests of the U.S.S.R.”
In 1963/64, the Soviet Union actively tried to undermine Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, in favor of Democrat Lyndon Johnson.
In their 1989 book, “The KGB Against the Main Enemy—How the Soviet Intelligence Service Operates Against the United States,” the United States’ premier communist researcher, Herbert Romerstein, and former KGB officer Stanislav Levchenko examined Soviet attempts to blacken Goldwater’s name and other Soviet campaigns of the time:
“The false charge that Goldwater was a racist was only one of the smear campaigns used against his candidacy by the Soviets and their surrogates. The American Communists covertly assisted in this ‘active measures’ campaign.
“A 1963 booklet claimed that Goldwater was conspiring with the John Birch Society to organize a ‘putsch,’ or violent insurrection, to take over the United States in 1964. The booklet, ‘Birch Putsch Plans for 1964,’ contained no address for the publisher, Domino Publications. The author used the not-very imaginative pseudonym, ‘John Smith, as told to Stanhope T. McReady.’ There was nothing to tie this publication to the communists until an ad for the book appeared in the pro-communist National Guardian for April 25, 1963, listing the publisher as ‘Domino Publications, Suite 900, 22 West Madison Street, Chicago, Illinois.’
“This was in fact the address of Translation World Publishers, which was registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as an agent of the Soviet Union. The co-owners, LeRoy Wolins and David S. Canter, were identified by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as members of the Communist Party USA.”
Axelrod’s mentor was a Soviet-funded professional “black propagandist.” Axelrod used similar smear tactics to help Obama win a U.S. Senate seat in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 and 2012.

Valerie Jarrett

The “other half of Obama’s brain,” Valerie Jarrett was a longtime Obama family friend and the president’s closest adviser through his entire eight years in the White House.
FBI documents show that Jarrett’s maternal grandfather, Chicago businessman and Housing Authority Chairman Robert Taylor, was “in contact” with alleged Soviet spy Alfred Stern “on a number of occasions.” At one point, the pair were actually in business together. Under investigation by the FBI, Stern fled the country in the late 1950s through Mexico to the Soviet Union before settling in Czechoslovakia.
Jarrett’s father, James Bowman, was also accused of associating with Stern.
FBI files also reveal, “Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students,” according to Judicial Watch.
Another document in the files was a note from J. Edgar Hoover to FBI officials in Denver instructing them to investigate “James Edward Bowman” for his connections to other suspects.
The Judicial Watch report explained, “According to Bowman’s government file, the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that ‘has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line’ and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington, D.C., and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists.”
Jarrett’s father-in-law, prominent Chicago journalist Vernon Jarrett, was a leader of the Communist Party USA youth wing, American Youth for Democracy, in 1946.
In early 1948, the communist-controlled Packinghouse Workers went on strike in Chicago. Vernon Jarrett served on the publicity committee of the communist-run “Citizens’ Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers,” alongside none other than fellow journalist and comrade Frank Marshall Davis.
Vernon Jarrett was also a fan of Obama. He watched his career from its early stages and became an influential supporter.
In 1992, Obama worked for the ACORN offshoot Project Vote to register black voters in aid of the Senate campaign of Carol Moseley Braun, who also had strong Communist Party USA ties.
Obama helped Moseley Braun win her Senate seat, then took it over himself in 2004, backed by the same communist/socialist alliance that had backed Moseley Braun.
Commenting on the 1992 race, Vernon Jarrett wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times on Aug. 11, 1992:
“Good news! Good news! Project Vote, a collectivity of 10 church-based community organizations dedicated to black voter registration, is off and running. Project Vote is increasing its rolls at a 7,000-per-week clip. … If Project Vote is to reach its goal of registering 150,000 out of an estimated 400,000 unregistered blacks statewide, ‘it must average 10,000 rather than 7,000 every week,’ says Barack Obama, the program’s executive director.”

Council for a Livable World

Established in 1962 by former Hungarian communist sympathizer and alleged Soviet spy Leo Szilard, the Washington-based Council for a Livable World (CLW) has done huge damage to the U.S. military—all to the benefit of Moscow.
The CLW’s modus operandi is to fund leftist senators and congressmembers, then lobby them hard for defense cuts and disadvantageous arms reduction treaties with the Soviet Union/Russia.
The CLW claims to have had an early influence on both Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden.
“Council for a Liveable World has a history of helping to elect new candidates who can make a difference in the Senate, such as a little-known state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama and a 29-year-old Joe Biden in his first statewide contest,” the CLW wrote in 2012.
The CLW helped fund Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate race. Obama has also been pictured (circa mid-1990s) alongside longtime CLW leader Massachusetts-based socialist Jerome Grossman.
CLW Executive Director John Isaacs wrote in Grossman’s eulogy: “Now, as an aside, we have a dictum at Council for a Livable World. If we support a candidate in his or her first major political contest, he or she will always remember who was with them at the beginning. That has been true with such political figures—(he says modestly)—as President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden.”
In October 2007, the CLW praised Sen. Obama “for his pledge to pursue a world without nuclear weapons and to improve U.S.–Russian relations.”
At a speech at DePaul University, Obama stated: “Here’s what I’ll say as president: America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons. … We’ll work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, and to dramatically reduce the stockpiles of our nuclear weapons and material.”
As the Soviet Union/Russia has cheated on every single arms-reduction treaty with the United States, Obama was effectively proposing unilateral U.S. disarmament.
Former Sen. Gary Hart, then chairman of the CLW, applauded Obama’s pledge.
“By placing the issue of the elimination of nuclear arsenals at the center of his foreign policy, Sen. Barack Obama has performed a great public service and deserves attention and respect from all those who see this issue as crucial to our times and who have been watching and waiting for strong leadership and courage,” Hart said in a statement.
In June 2013, President Obama used a speech in Berlin to outline plans for further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal “if Russia agrees to pare back its weapons at the same time.”
According to the New York Times:
“Resuming a drive toward disarmament that he had largely shunted aside over the past two years, Mr. Obama will propose trimming the number of strategic warheads that each of the two big nuclear powers still maintains by up to a third, taking them below the 1,550 permitted in the treaty he signed with Russia in his first term, a senior administration official said. That would leave each country with just over 1,000 weapons.
“Mr. Obama will also declare that he will work with NATO allies to develop proposals for major cuts in tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by the existing treaty. Russia, which has far more tactical nuclear weapons deployed than the United States and Europe do, has firmly resisted such cuts. There are fears that its tactical weapons are in parts of Russia where they risk being seized by terrorist groups.
“Mr. Obama will also announce that he will host a final nuclear security summit meeting in the United States just before he leaves office. …
“’The most important thing he could do is lay out the broad agenda for the next three and a half years,’ said John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy group.
“In addition to further reductions, Mr. Isaacs said, there are several policy changes Mr. Obama could take that would move the country further away from cold war-style national security. He said the president could take nuclear weapons off high alert and change nuclear doctrine to say that the only purpose of such weapons would be as a deterrent.”
Under the Obama administration, while America disarmed, Moscow pulled well ahead of the United States in virtually every realm of nuclear and conventional weaponry.
The situation has gotten so bad that President Donald Trump had to unilaterally withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (which Russia has continually cheated on) in order to give the U.S. military some chance of catching up to Moscow.

How Many Russian Agents Do You Know?

Most Americans don’t personally know any Russian agents. Most Americans aren’t surrounded by friends and advisers who know Russian agents.
Obama has been surrounded by pro-Moscow communists and probable Soviet agents his entire life. Several of his political enablers also have Soviet/Russian connections.
How unlucky can one guy get?
Obama’s economic, social, and military policies damaged the United States in a myriad of ways. Many of his military and foreign policies also directly or indirectly benefited Moscow.
Despite a lifetime of radical associations, Obama never had to undergo any form of a security background check to serve in the Illinois State Senate, U.S. Senate, or the White House. It’s highly unlikely he could have passed a security check to drive a school bus, let alone serve as the leader of the Free World.
Imagine what a two-year, multimillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded investigation into Obama’s Russian ties might uncover.
If Obama was a fully recruited agent of Moscow, tasked with giving Russia a significant military advantage over the United States, and economically weakening and socially dividing the nation, how would he have conducted his presidency (or his post-presidency) any differently?
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.


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