Thursday, August 15, 2019

AMERICA: Servant of Red China



Exclusive–Curtis Ellis: ‘Truly Frightening’ How U.S. Relies on China for Vital Industries

Chinese employees sew U.S. flags at a factory in Fuyang in China's eastern Anhui province on July 13, 2018. #
AFP/Getty Images
4:05

The country’s reliance on China for vital industries that are necessary for United States national security is “truly frightening,” says Curtis Ellis of America First Policies.

This week, President Trump’s administration announced that additional tariffs on China would be delayed until September for some imports and December for others. The plan is to set a ten percent tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports — including on imported cell phones, laptops, and computer monitors.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Ellis told Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour that it is “insane” how the U.S. relies, in some cases, almost exclusively on Chinese-made products that are vital to the country’s national security.
LISTEN:
MANSOUR: I got to say, Curtis, looking at this list … where the things we get 75 percent of them from China — that alone should make people worried. When we’re talking about all laptops, all cell phones, monitors, these are things that are really kind of important. These are the things that you need for your national security … we are reliant on this country that is right now beating up their protestors in Hong Kong … this country that imprisons its own people, that is a giant surveillance state, that steals our intellectual property, the list goes on and on. We’re dependent on them for things that are necessary for our national security — it’s ludicrous, it’s crazy. [Emphasis added]
ELLISIt is, it’s insane. It’s truly frightening and it’s insane. And it also shows how the goalposts have moved continually. The globalists keep moving the goalposts, keep making different excuses, shifting excuses for our relationship with China. At first it was, ‘Oh they’re going to make the cheap stuff. They’re going to make shoes, we don’t need to make shoes. They’re going to clothing, it’s a sunset industry, textiles.’ Then suddenly, buy IBM’s laptop division. I remember when that happened. The ThinkPad turned into Lenovo computers. I said ‘How can they let that happen?’ The U.S. government buys IBM computers, what’re we doing … letting those be made in China? [Emphasis added]
Ellis said those goalposts have quickly become a national trade policy where “everything that can be made in China, should be made in China.”
“You heard the people saying … the Democrats particularly were fond of this one ‘Well we’re going to go into green energy and that will mean millions of new jobs for Americans.’ Well, excuse me, if it’s cheaper to make laptops and it’s cheaper to make bricks in China, it’s going to be cheaper to make solar panels in China unless you have an affirmative program to stop that from happening,” Ellis said. “That’s what is going to happen. And low and behold, that’s what happened. There’s a trade case — China was convicted of stealing the technology that controls wind turbines and stealing the technology and subsidizing their solar panel industry to drive their American competitors out of business.”
“And all of our drugs, by the way, most of the ingredients that go into pharmaceuticals and medicines are made in China,” Ellis continued. “Again, there’s no need for that. We can make those here. The Chinese are not innately predisposed to have an advantage in making all of these things. Most of that could be made right here.”
Ellis said multinational corporations have been “complicit” in the economic dominance of China and the mass offshoring and outsourcing of American jobs, saying they “were more than happy to just ditch the American people, the American consumers and go to China where they could get subsidized factories, subsidized energy.”
For decades, free trade has helped gut working and middle class jobs and stripped whole middle American towns of their industries and livelihoods. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed and China was allowed to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO), nearly five million American manufacturing jobs and 50,000 manufacturing facilities have been eliminated from the U.S. economy. This mass elimination of working and middle class jobs due to free trade has coincided with a nearly 600 percent increase in trade deficits.
The most recent study by economists at the Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) finds that permanent 25 percent ariffs on all Chinese imports to the U.S. would create more than a million American jobs by 2024, Breitbart News reported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.


China, Not Russia, the Greater Threat
Ten weeks of protests, some huge, a few violent, culminated Monday with a shutdown of the Hong Kong airport.
Ominously, Beijing described the violent weekend demonstrations as "deranged" acts that are "the first signs of terrorism," and vowed a merciless crackdown on the perpetrators.
China is being pushed toward a decision it does not want to make: to use military force, as in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago, to crush the uprising. For that would reveal the character of President Xi Jinping's Communist dictatorship, as well as Beijing's long-term plans for this semi-autonomous city of almost 7.5 million.
Yet this is not the only internal or border concern of Xi's regime.
Millions of Muslim Uighurs in China's west are in concentration camps undergoing "re-education" to change their way of thinking on loyalty, secession and the creation of a new East Turkestan.
In June, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Philippine fishing boat, leaving its 22 crewmen to drown. The fishermen were rescued by a Vietnamese boat.
President Rodrigo Duterte's reluctance to resist China's fortification in the South China Sea of the rocks and reefs Manila claims are within its own territorial waters has turned Philippine nationalism anti-China.
China's claim to Taiwan is being defied by Taipei, which just bought $2.2 billion in U.S. military equipment including Abrams tanks and Stinger missiles.
Any Taiwanese declaration of independence, China has warned, means war.
While Taiwan's request to buy U.S. F-16s has not yet been approved, in a rare visit, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen stopped over in the U.S. recently, before traveling on to Caribbean countries that retain diplomatic relations with Taipei. Beijing has expressed its outrage at the U.S. arms sales and Tsai's unofficial visit.
The vaunted Chinese economy is growing, at best, at half the double-digit rate of a decade ago, not enough to create the jobs needed for hundreds of millions in the countryside seeking work.
And talks have been suspended in the U.S.-China trade dispute, at the heart of which, says White House aide Peter Navarro, are Beijing's "seven deadly sins" in dealing with the United States:
China steals our intellectual property via cybertheft, forces U.S. companies in China to transfer technology, hacks our computers, dumps into our markets to put U.S. companies out of business, subsidizes state-owned enterprises to compete with U.S. firms, manipulates its currency, and, despite our protests, ships to the USA the fentanyl drug that has become a major killer of Americans.
Such practices have enabled China to run up annual trade surpluses of $300 billion to $400 billion at our expense, and, says Navarro, have caused the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S.
Moreover, China has used the accumulated wealth of its huge trade surpluses to finance its drive for hegemony in Asia and beyond.
With President Donald Trump threatening 10% tariffs on $300 billion more in Chinese exports to the U.S., Xi must decide if he is willing to end his trade-war tactics against the U.S., which have gone on during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. If he refuses, will he accept the de-coupling of our two economies?
Only Trump has taken on the Middle Kingdom.
If the American people and Congress are willing to play hardball and accept sacrifices, we can win this face-off. The U.S. buys five times as much from China as we sell to China. The big loser in this confrontation, if we stay the course, will not be the USA.
For three years, the U.S. establishment has not ceased to howl about Russia's theft of emails of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.
Yet the greatest cybercrime of the century was Beijing's theft in 2014 of the personnel files of 22 million applicants and employees of the U.S. government, many of them holding top-secret clearances.
Compromised by this theft, said then FBI Director James Comey, was a "treasure trove of information about everybody who has worked for, tried to work for, or works for the United States government."
"A very big deal from a national security ... and counterintelligence perspective," said Comey. And Xi's China, not Putin's Russia, committed the crime. Yet America's elites appear to have forgotten this far graver act of cyberaggresion.
Undeniably, Russia is a rival. But Putin's economy is the size of Italy's while China's economy challenges our own. And China's population is 10 times that of Russia, and four times that of the USA.
Manifestly, China is the greater menace.
Are Americans willing to make the necessary sacrifices to force China to abide by the rules of reciprocal trade?
Or will Trump be forced by political realities to accept the long-term and ruinous relationship we have followed since granting China permanent MFN status in 2001?
This issue is likely to decide the destiny of our relations and the future of Asia, if not the world.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

Eight Things to Know About the Biden Family’s Culture of Corruption

14 Aug 2019386
10:50

The family of former Vice President Joe Biden has earned millions of dollars since the start of his political career, often from dealings with heavy political overtones.

Biden, the frontrunner among 2020 Democrats, often touts his middle-class bonafides on the campaign trail. Although Biden did not become a multi-millionaire until he left the White House in 2017, the same cannot be said of his family. In fact, several members of the Biden clan became immensely wealthy over the span of the former vice president’s 40-year political career.
Breitbart News is providing an in-depth breakdown of a few instances in which Joe Biden’s political career and his family’s financial interests seemed to intersect.
1. Joe Biden’s younger brother, James Biden, secured generous bank loans.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s upset election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his younger brother James was able to secure a series of generous bank loans to start a Delaware night club.
Although James Biden had no business experience and a net worth of less than $10,000 at the time, he was able to arrange more than $160,000 in start-up capital for the venture. When the nightclub proved to be unsuccessful, generating more than $500,000 of debt by 1975, James Biden and his business partners were thrown a life-line by a Pennsylvania bank that loaned him a further $300,000.
During the same time period James Biden was receiving the extensive lines of credit, Joe Biden was sitting on the Senate Banking Committee, which had purview over the financial sector. A specific jurisdiction of the committee was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which provides bailouts to banks if they should become over-leveraged.
2. Joe Biden’s top campaign contributor hired his youngest son Hunter right out of law school.
Shortly after Joe Biden was reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, his largest campaign contributor, the credit card issuer MBNA Corp., hired his son for an undisclosed role. The job raised eyebrows from good government groups because MBNA employees had just donated $63,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in what appeared to be a coordinatedmanner to sidestep federal campaign finance regulations.
Clouding the picture even further was that, at the time, Hunter Biden was a 26-year-old recent graduate of Yale Law School with no prior banking or business experience. Both father and son defended the job offer, claiming nothing improper had or would result because of the arrangement.
“Unfortunately, no matter where I went to work, some people would make an issue of it,” the younger Biden told the Delaware News Journal in November 1996 when the job was announced.
Despite his role being unknown at the time of his hiring, when Hunter Biden left the company in 1998 to join the Clinton-era Commerce Department it was as a senior vice president.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Joe Biden was championing bankruptcy reform legislation endorsed by financial interests and credit card companies like MBNA.
3. An MBNA executive purchased Biden’s house for the full asking price in a deal that appeared facilitated by the company. 
A senior MBNA executive purchased Biden’s 10,000 square foot colonial mansion in the Wilmington, Delaware, suburbs for the asking price of $1.2 million in February 1996. The sale garnered notice because larger and newer homes in the vicinity sold for less. The issue became a minor campaign problem for Biden’s reelection but was quickly dismissed when the senator provided local media appraisal forms showing his home was worth the value for what it was sold.
Byron York, however, investigated the matter in an exposé for the American Spectator and found that properties appraised around the same value in the vicinity had “sold for a good deal less” than at what they were valued on paper.
“In comparison, it appears [the MBNA executive] simply paid Biden’s full asking price,” York wrote. “And, according to people familiar with the situation, the house needed quite a bit of work; contractors and their trucks descended on the house for months after the purchase.”
As York also noted, it appeared that MBNA may have played a role in facilitating the purchase. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that “in 1996 MBNA reimbursed [the executive] $330,115 for expenses arising from the move.” Of that total, $210,000 “was to make up for a loss [the executive] suffered on the sale of his Maryland home.”
4. Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation. 
Throughout the early 2000s, Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll as a consultant while his father was writing and pushing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. The arrangement, which did not become public until after the law was passed, started in 2001 after Hunter Biden had left his position in the Commerce Dept. MBNA was paid monthly consulting fees, with some claiming they ranged upwards of $100,000, to advise the company on online banking issues.
The 2005 bankruptcy tightened regulations to make it extremely more difficult to declare bankruptcy. It was heavily favored by MBNA and other giants in the banking and finance sectors. Many consumer protection advocates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have claimed the bill benefited special interests at the expense of consumers. Some have even suggested the law only served to hasten and aggravate the recession of the late 2000s.
As previously reported by the New York Times, Biden worked against many of his own fellow Democrats in Congress to ensure the final version of the bill was free of provisions opposed by companies like MBNA.
Biden “was one of five Democrats in March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month,” the Times noted.
5. Joe Biden paid his family members with campaign cash.
During his failed 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden paid more than $2 million to his family members and their business. According to the Washington Times, the money went to a company that was a long-time employer of Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens. Biden also directed funds to a law firm started by his old campaign treasurer, which at the time also employed his youngest son Hunter.
6. James and Hunter Biden sought to monetize off Joe Biden’s political standing. 
In 2006, close to when Joe Biden assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launched his second presidential campaign, James and Hunter Biden purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global Advisors. Although neither man had a strong background in finance, James and Hunter Biden reportedly believed they could leverage Joe Biden’s political connections to their benefits.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James Biden purportedly told Paradigm’s senior leadership upon taking over the fund, as reported by Politico. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
Paradigm’s executives claim that James and Hunter Biden saw the hedge fund as a way to “take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money” to Joe Biden’s campaign account.
“We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” James Biden allegedly told Paradigm’s staff.
Hunter and James also tried to solicit labor unions to invest their pension funds in Paradigm by relying on Joe Biden’s long record of advocating in favor of collective bargaining.
The efforts proved to unsuccessful, though, with James and Hunter Biden choosing to strip and sell the company off by 2010 after a number of bad decisions, including partnering with a Ponzi scheme.
7. James Biden’s received a $1.5 billion contract to build houses in Iraq while Joe Biden was overseeing the region. 
After his foray into the world of high finance ended disastrously, James Biden joinedHillstone International LLC as a vice president in 2010. The company, a subsidiary of Hill International, at the time, was pursuing technology and construction projects around the globe.
Although the company had been losing money for some time, James Biden’s arrival resulted in something of a reversal in fortune. Within six months of James Biden joining the firm, Hillstone was the recipient of $1.5 billion dollar contract to build 100,000 houses in war-torn Iraq. The deal, which was never finalized because outside funding failed to materialize, quickly caught attention as Joe Biden was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy in the region.
Both the Obama White House and Hillstone denied Joe Biden had anything to do with the deal, pointing to the fact the contract was awarded through a South Korean group working to build homes in Iraq. Despite the denials, Irvin Richter, the founder of Hill International, did admit James Biden may have had something to do with the deal.
“Listen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” Richter told Fox Business in 2012 when discussing James Biden. “People who have important names tend to get in the door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama he would get in the door easier.”
Complicating matters was the fact James Biden was likely to get rich if the deal went through. Fox Business reported that a group of minority partners, which included James Biden, owned 49 percent of Hillstone. The other 51 percent was owned by the company’s parent group, Hill International. Given Hillstone’s profit breakdown structure, James Biden and the other minority partners would have been eligible to split more than $735 million after the deal was completed
8. Hunter Biden’s firm scored a $1.5 billion deal with the Bank of China only days after Joe Biden and his youngest son visited the country. 
Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends that Hunter Biden’s firm signed a multi-billion dollar with a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China only ten days after he visited the country with his father aboard Air Force Two.
In a SiriusXM Breitbart News Tonight radio interview from last year, Schweizer explained how the Biden-China deal unfolded:

“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” said Schweizer. “To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.”

Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend Beyond Chinese Spy

https://www.theepochtimes.com/feinsteins-ties-to-china-extend-beyond-chinese-spy_2616284.html

 

August 6, 2018 Last Updated: August 7, 2018
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein speaks during a Committee hearing on Cambridge Analytica and data privacy in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on May 16, 2018. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
News Analysis
Last week’s revelations that a Chinese spy served on the staff of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for almost 20 years, should be shocking no one.
The unidentified agent, who was in place as recently as five years ago, was Feinstein’s driver. He also served as a “gofer” in her Bay Area office and a “liaison to the Asian-American community.” He sometimes attended functions at the Chinese consulate, as a stand-in for the senator.
At the time the spy was discovered by the FBI, Feinstein was chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee. Feinstein says she forced the agent into retirement, but no other staff were informed of the circumstances behind his exit, and no charges were filed.
Feinstein had been warned two decades ago that she might be targeted by Chinese intelligence.
The senator issued a statement on March 10, 1997, that the FBI had warned her and five other senators that the Chinese government might try to “funnel illegal contributions to her campaign and other Congressional campaigns, but she said the information had not influenced her position or her vote on any issue,” according to The New York Times.
“[Feinstein] said that while ‘the information was vague and nonspecific,’ she had concluded that she should ‘be very cautious’ in dealing with Asian-American contributors,” the NY Times report stated.
Feinstein would obviously be of interest to Chinese intelligence for the classified information she might possess through her position on the intelligence committee.
She might also be the target of “influence operations”—a subtler approach, by which Chinese operatives would try to steer Feinstein into promoting policies that might benefit the Chinese regime.
According to the article, “For many years, Ms. Feinstein has tried to promote friendship and trade with China, and she has countered critics of the Chinese human-rights record by emphasizing what she described in a Senate speech last year as ‘major improvements in human rights’ there.”

Conciliatory to Communists

Feinstein’s conciliatory approach to communist governments began in the mid-1950s, when she served in the Stanford University student government.
Before her senior year, Dianne Goldman, as she was then known, traveled to Europe on a student trip led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The agenda included a possible meeting with Yugoslav communist revolutionary Marshal Josip Broz Tito.
In January 1955, a vigorous debate erupted on the Stanford student executive, over whether to support a proposed visit of seven Soviet journalists to the United States.
According to Stanford Daily reports of the time, executive member Sam Palmer asserted that “nothing can be lost in allowing them to come over.”
He was supported by both Goldman and Don Peck, who claimed that it was important to show “Russia that the United States is not an Iron Curtain country—that we are willing to let Communists enter.”
The ayes won, and Goldman went on to personally host the delegation from the Soviet Writers Union when they toured Stanford’s campus later that year.
Thirty years later, while serving as mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein issued an official city proclamation in support of that year’s World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Moscow.
This international propaganda event was organized by the Soviet-controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth and was supported in the United States by the Communist Party USA and similar groups.
Feinstein traveled to Moscow in December of that year as part of a trade delegation of 450 U.S. businessmen and public officials.
A little over a year later, on Jan. 27, 1987, Soviet Consul General Valentin Kamenev presented Feinstein with a Soviet streetcar: “A streetcar named desire.” Also present at the ceremony was Viktor Zhelezny, deputy chief of public transport for the Russian Republic.

Bridges to Communist China

Building bridges to the People’s Republic of China, however, seems to have been an even higher priority for Feinstein.
One of Feinstein’s first acts on becoming mayor of San Francisco in January 1979, was to visit Shanghai to establish sister-city relations.
The next apparent priority was re-establishing passenger airline service between China and the United States. Service was restored on Jan. 8, 1981, after a “32-year hiatus when a Boeing 747 with 139 Chinese passengers arrived exactly on time at San Francisco International Airport,” according to The New York Times.
Feinstein and Chinese Consul General Hu Ding-yi held a ribbon-cutting ceremony, “which included a cake, decorated with ‘CAAC [Civil Aviation Administration of China] Welcome to San Francisco,’ and two bottles of champagne.” Feinstein described the landing as “an historic and exciting occasion.”
Feinstein went on to visit Shanghai several times in her official capacity and built a close personal relationship with then-Mayor Jiang Zemin.
According to the San Jose Mercury: “He [Jiang] once invited her and her husband to see Mao Tse-tung’s bedroom in his old residence, the first foreigners to do so. Feinstein had entertained Jiang in San Francisco, dancing with him as he sang ‘When We Were Young.'”
This relationship proved fruitful in 1999, when President Bill Clinton was pushing to bring China into the World Trade Organization.
A visit to Washington that year by Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, which many had hoped would seal the deal, produced nothing. Relations got even worse after U.S. bombers accidentally destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade that May.
Feinstein, stepped in to offer assistance to the administration. She volunteered to use her personal relationship with now-Chinese regime leader Jiang, to get negotiations back on track.
In August 1999, the White House dispatched Feinstein to China, with a hand-written note to Jiang from President Clinton, urging a resumption of talks.
“Senator Feinstein played a critical role in paving the way for this critical trade agreement,” White House press officer Elizabeth Newman said.
Feinstein and Jiang met Aug. 16 in the Chinese coastal city of Dalian, where the senator handed over President Clinton’s letter.
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury in November 1999, Feinstein said, that she felt the only way China would enter into WTO negotiations again was with the backing of Jiang.
Feinstein said, in offering her services as an intermediary to Clinton and national security adviser Sandy Berger, “I said I’d be prepared to do it if they felt it would be helpful, and they said they did think it would be helpful and please do it.”
Jiang was “receptive and particularly pleased that Clinton had taken the time to personally write a note to him,’’ Feinstein said.
“I think he listened, and we had substantial discussions on the subject. … I was successful in getting the Chinese interested in beginning to resume negotiations on the subject,” Feinstein said in the November 1999 interview.

Human Rights

Significantly, Feinstein said she expected approval of the new trade status, which would remove the “annual congressional review that many believe continues to put pressure on China to reform its economy and human-rights record.”
In other words, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would get the trade status it coveted, without having to do anything of significance to improve its abysmal human-rights record.
China was admitted to the World Trade Organization and has used that trade access to build the world’s second-strongest economy, and a world-class military.
If anything, the CCP’s human-rights record is worse today. Certainly, their repressive technologies are far more powerful.
At the time, Feinstein’s colleague, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) expressed grave concerns about the deal.
“Once they get permanent (normal trade relations status), all leverage from the US on behalf of business is over because they have what they want permanently,” Pelosi said, in the San Jose Mercury article. “They have violated their agreements in terms of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, they have violated their agreements in terms of trade, they have violated their agreements on international covenants on human rights. Why is that we think they are then going to honor their commitments they make for WTO?”
All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government.
Feinstein has done more for the CCP than other any serving U.S. politician.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated who led Dianne Feinstein’s student trip to Europe. The trip was led by Stanford political science professor, James T. Watkins. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

ELIZABETH WARREN TAKES HUGE LEAD - WALL STREET'S BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS STILL WANT MORE OBAMANOMICS WITH BIDEN


Elizabeth Warren Takes Huge Lead in Iowa Poll

DES MOINES, IA - AUGUST 10: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks to a crowd at the Iowa State Fair on August 10, 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa. Twenty-two of the 23 politicians seeking the Democratic Party presidential nomination will be visiting the fair this week, six …
Sergio Flores/Getty Images
3:22

The tide may be turning in Iowa, where Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has taken a huge lead, according to an Iowa Starting Line-Change Research poll released Thursday.

The poll, taken August 9–11, surveyed 621 likely Iowa Democrat caucus-goers. Of those, 28 percent said they support Warren, putting her 11 points ahead of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Joe Biden (D), who garnered 17 percent support each.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) toppled Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) for fourth place, with 13 percent support to Harris’s eight. Both Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Beto O’Rourke (D) saw three percent support. The remaining candidates garnered two percent or less.
The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3.9 percent.
Warren – by far – has experienced the biggest jump in the Hawkeye State, seeing a 16 point gain since May.
As Iowa Starting Line pointed out:
May Poll (change to August)
Joe Biden: 24% (-7)
Bernie Sanders: 24% (-7)
Pete Buttigieg: 14% (-1)
Elizabeth Warren: 12% (+16)
Kamala Harris: 10% (-2)
Beto O’Rourke: 5% (-2)
This follows Sanders’ surge in the early primary state New Hampshire. A Gravis Marketing poll released last week showed the socialist senator leading the pack, six points ahead of Biden, who dropped to second place.
As Breitbart News reported:
Sanders leads the pack with 21 percent support, followed by Joe Biden (D) with 15 percent support, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) with 12 percent. Warren’s failure to capture second place is significant, as she and Sanders share similar far-left ideologies and represent New England states neighboring New Hampshire.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) came in with eight percent, one point above Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) seven percent support, further signifying the loss of the momentum she sufferred after the first Democrat debate.
However, Biden is still the fan favorite in South Carolina, another crucial early primary state.
As Breitbart News reported:
A survey released by Change Research and The Post and Courier on Wednesday shows Biden leading in South Carolina by double digits. Conducted between August 9 through August 12 by surveying 521 likely primary voters, the poll is one of the first out of the Palmetto State since the second Democrat presidential debate.
When stacked up against candidates in the field of 2020 Democrats, Biden takes first place with 36 percent support — an advantage of 19 points over his nearest challenger. Coming in second place was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) at 17 percent, although she narrowly beat out Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), who landed in third place with 16 percent support, for the spot.
Typically, a candidate who wins two of the three early primary states – New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina – tends to secure the nomination. However, it will make for an interesting primary if Sanders maintains his lead in the Granite State and Warren’s support grows in Iowa.


Eight Things to Know About the Biden Family’s Culture of Corruption





10:50

The family of former Vice President Joe Biden has earned millions of dollars since the start of his political career, often from dealings with heavy political overtones.

Biden, the frontrunner among 2020 Democrats, often touts his middle-class bonafides on the campaign trail. Although Biden did not become a multi-millionaire until he left the White House in 2017, the same cannot be said of his family. In fact, several members of the Biden clan became immensely wealthy over the span of the former vice president’s 40-year political career.
Breitbart News is providing an in-depth breakdown of a few instances in which Joe Biden’s political career and his family’s financial interests seemed to intersect.
1. Joe Biden’s younger brother, James Biden, secured generous bank loans.
In the wake of Joe Biden’s upset election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his younger brother James was able to secure a series of generous bank loans to start a Delaware night club.
Although James Biden had no business experience and a net worth of less than $10,000 at the time, he was able to arrange more than $160,000 in start-up capital for the venture. When the nightclub proved to be unsuccessful, generating more than $500,000 of debt by 1975, James Biden and his business partners were thrown a life-line by a Pennsylvania bank that loaned him a further $300,000.
During the same time period James Biden was receiving the extensive lines of credit, Joe Biden was sitting on the Senate Banking Committee, which had purview over the financial sector. A specific jurisdiction of the committee was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which provides bailouts to banks if they should become over-leveraged.
2. Joe Biden’s top campaign contributor hired his youngest son Hunter right out of law school.
Shortly after Joe Biden was reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, his largest campaign contributor, the credit card issuer MBNA Corp., hired his son for an undisclosed role. The job raised eyebrows from good government groups because MBNA employees had just donated $63,000 to Joe Biden’s reelection campaign in what appeared to be a coordinatedmanner to sidestep federal campaign finance regulations.
Clouding the picture even further was that, at the time, Hunter Biden was a 26-year-old recent graduate of Yale Law School with no prior banking or business experience. Both father and son defended the job offer, claiming nothing improper had or would result because of the arrangement.
“Unfortunately, no matter where I went to work, some people would make an issue of it,” the younger Biden told the Delaware News Journal in November 1996 when the job was announced.
Despite his role being unknown at the time of his hiring, when Hunter Biden left the company in 1998 to join the Clinton-era Commerce Department it was as a senior vice president.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Joe Biden was championing bankruptcy reform legislation endorsed by financial interests and credit card companies like MBNA.
3. An MBNA executive purchased Biden’s house for the full asking price in a deal that appeared facilitated by the company. 
A senior MBNA executive purchased Biden’s 10,000 square foot colonial mansion in the Wilmington, Delaware, suburbs for the asking price of $1.2 million in February 1996. The sale garnered notice because larger and newer homes in the vicinity sold for less. The issue became a minor campaign problem for Biden’s reelection but was quickly dismissed when the senator provided local media appraisal forms showing his home was worth the value for what it was sold.
Byron York, however, investigated the matter in an exposé for the American Spectator and found that properties appraised around the same value in the vicinity had “sold for a good deal less” than at what they were valued on paper.
“In comparison, it appears [the MBNA executive] simply paid Biden’s full asking price,” York wrote. “And, according to people familiar with the situation, the house needed quite a bit of work; contractors and their trucks descended on the house for months after the purchase.”
As York also noted, it appeared that MBNA may have played a role in facilitating the purchase. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that “in 1996 MBNA reimbursed [the executive] $330,115 for expenses arising from the move.” Of that total, $210,000 “was to make up for a loss [the executive] suffered on the sale of his Maryland home.”
4. Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll while Joe Biden was writing bankruptcy reform legislation. 
Throughout the early 2000s, Hunter Biden remained on MBNA’s payroll as a consultant while his father was writing and pushing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. The arrangement, which did not become public until after the law was passed, started in 2001 after Hunter Biden had left his position in the Commerce Dept. MBNA was paid monthly consulting fees, with some claiming they ranged upwards of $100,000, to advise the company on online banking issues.
The 2005 bankruptcy tightened regulations to make it extremely more difficult to declare bankruptcy. It was heavily favored by MBNA and other giants in the banking and finance sectors. Many consumer protection advocates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have claimed the bill benefited special interests at the expense of consumers. Some have even suggested the law only served to hasten and aggravate the recession of the late 2000s.
As previously reported by the New York Times, Biden worked against many of his own fellow Democrats in Congress to ensure the final version of the bill was free of provisions opposed by companies like MBNA.
Biden “was one of five Democrats in March 2005 who voted against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month,” the Times noted.
5. Joe Biden paid his family members with campaign cash.
During his failed 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden paid more than $2 million to his family members and their business. According to the Washington Times, the money went to a company that was a long-time employer of Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens. Biden also directed funds to a law firm started by his old campaign treasurer, which at the time also employed his youngest son Hunter.
6. James and Hunter Biden sought to monetize off Joe Biden’s political standing. 
In 2006, close to when Joe Biden assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launched his second presidential campaign, James and Hunter Biden purchased a hedge fund called Paradigm Global Advisors. Although neither man had a strong background in finance, James and Hunter Biden reportedly believed they could leverage Joe Biden’s political connections to their benefits.
“Don’t worry about investors,” James Biden purportedly told Paradigm’s senior leadership upon taking over the fund, as reported by Politico. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”
Paradigm’s executives claim that James and Hunter Biden saw the hedge fund as a way to “take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money” to Joe Biden’s campaign account.
“We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” James Biden allegedly told Paradigm’s staff.
Hunter and James also tried to solicit labor unions to invest their pension funds in Paradigm by relying on Joe Biden’s long record of advocating in favor of collective bargaining.
The efforts proved to unsuccessful, though, with James and Hunter Biden choosing to strip and sell the company off by 2010 after a number of bad decisions, including partnering with a Ponzi scheme.
7. James Biden’s received a $1.5 billion contract to build houses in Iraq while Joe Biden was overseeing the region. 
After his foray into the world of high finance ended disastrously, James Biden joinedHillstone International LLC as a vice president in 2010. The company, a subsidiary of Hill International, at the time, was pursuing technology and construction projects around the globe.
Although the company had been losing money for some time, James Biden’s arrival resulted in something of a reversal in fortune. Within six months of James Biden joining the firm, Hillstone was the recipient of $1.5 billion dollar contract to build 100,000 houses in war-torn Iraq. The deal, which was never finalized because outside funding failed to materialize, quickly caught attention as Joe Biden was overseeing the Obama administration’s policy in the region.
Both the Obama White House and Hillstone denied Joe Biden had anything to do with the deal, pointing to the fact the contract was awarded through a South Korean group working to build homes in Iraq. Despite the denials, Irvin Richter, the founder of Hill International, did admit James Biden may have had something to do with the deal.
“Listen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” Richter told Fox Business in 2012 when discussing James Biden. “People who have important names tend to get in the door easier but it doesn’t mean success. If he had the name Obama he would get in the door easier.”
Complicating matters was the fact James Biden was likely to get rich if the deal went through. Fox Business reported that a group of minority partners, which included James Biden, owned 49 percent of Hillstone. The other 51 percent was owned by the company’s parent group, Hill International. Given Hillstone’s profit breakdown structure, James Biden and the other minority partners would have been eligible to split more than $735 million after the deal was completed
8. Hunter Biden’s firm scored a $1.5 billion deal with the Bank of China only days after Joe Biden and his youngest son visited the country. 
Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends that Hunter Biden’s firm signed a multi-billion dollar with a subsidiary of the state-owned Bank of China only ten days after he visited the country with his father aboard Air Force Two.
In a SiriusXM Breitbart News Tonight radio interview from last year, Schweizer explained how the Biden-China deal unfolded:
“In December of 2013, Vice President Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a visit to Beijing, China,” said Schweizer. “To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.”





Federal Lawsuit: Joe Biden’s Brother Accused of Defrauding Rural Healthcare Company

Christina Jamison/NBC NewsWire
5 Aug 2019670
7:02

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, is being accused of defrauding a Tennessee rural healthcare company.

A lawsuit filed in federal court late last month alleges James Biden, who has a history of murky financial dealings, and his associates deceived and defrauded two Tennessee businessmen.
Michael Frey and his business partner, Dr. Mohannad Azzam, brought the suit claiming James Biden and his associates promised and failed to line up investors for their rural healthcare enterprise. Instead, the suit alleges, James Biden urged the two men to borrow $10 million from a hedge fund manager involved in the deal and then proceeded to pass their idea off as his own to a conglomerate of Turkish investors.
“The lawsuit takes direct aim at Biden, painting him as a con artist who uses his ties to his brother — now a Democratic candidate for president — to lure his victims,” the Knoxville News Sentinel reported.
According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court, Frey and his wife developed a business model to take over rural hospitals and retrofit them to not only offer traditional hospital care, but also drug addiction and mental health treatment. After incorporating the enterprise as Diverse Medical Management, they brought on Azzam, “who contracted with nursing homes to provide medical care for seniors.”
The business model was lucrative enough that by 2017, Frey and Azzam were actively pitching it to investors and hospitals across the country. One investor particularly taken with the idea was Americore Health, an operator of rural hospitals.
At the behest of Americore CEO, Grant White, Frey and Azzam were urgd to pitch their business plan to rural hospitals in Kentucky. It was at one such meeting where the two men met James Biden, who identified himself as a “principal” at Americore.
Not long after their initial encounter, James Biden introduced the men to Michael Lewitt, a hedge fund manager and well-known “credit strategist.” Around this time, Americore made plans to buy Diverse Medical for the sum $7 million.
Despite the deal, Americore quickly fell behind on its scheduled payments to Frey and Azzam. It was then that James Biden and Lewitt, as detailed in the lawsuit, hatched a plan to oust White and sell Americore along with Diverse Medical to a third company called the Platinum Group.
Biden or Lewitt’s role within the Platinum Group is unclear. The organization, which is little-known and has no social media presence, is likely a holding company specifically set up for the purchase of Americore.
Frey and Azzam appear to have been uncomfortable with turn the deal took, especially the notion of removing White. The men, though, went along with the plan after being told a payout was “imminent.”
“They repeatedly assured (Frey) that investment capital originating from and flowing through foreign entities was not only certain, but was imminent,” documents filed by Frey and Azzam’s attorney state.
James Biden is alleged to have put the men at ease by playing up his political connections.  The lawsuit reads:
Biden promised (Frey’s) Intensive Outpatient Model would play an integral role in health care policy at the highest levels of the United States government.
Since the deal had evolved to include the purchase of Americore, Frey and Azzam were encouraged to take a $10 million loan — part of which would came from Lewitt’s hedge fund — to expand their business. Frey and Azzam claim the loan was taken with the understanding it would be repaid by money brought in from new investors.
Throughout the entire process, the suit states, James Biden was promising investment capital was forthcoming. As more time elapsed and new investors failed to materialize, Frey and Azzam became suspicious they were being set up. Those feelings only intensified when James Biden inadvertently sent Frey a text message about their company meant for someone else in November 2018.
“We can wrap a/c into Frey’s entity further diluting them both in the process? After we take control of both. Just a thought,” the purported text from James Biden reads, as included in the lawsuit. “We must have complete control, too many moving pieces. Jim.”
When asked to explain, James Biden demurred and requested more information on Diverse Medical and the range of healthcare services offered. Even though they provided the information, Azzam and Frey’s suspicions were only further heightened.
The final breakdown in the relationship occurred when the men learned that Biden and Lewitt had left them out of the picture when selling the deal in Turkey. Although, Azzam and Frey knew their business model was being pitched to the “Qatar Investment Authority in Turkey,” they were unaware the documents presented to investors by James Biden and Lewitt were scrubbed clean of the Tennessee businessmen. The lawsuit says:
On January 23, Platinum Group … and Biden submitted a White Paper … outlining ‘Platinum Group Diverse Medical Management (PGDMM)’s business model. What the investors were not told, however, was that this white paper was drafted by (Frey and Azzam) and sent to Biden … Platinum Group simply replaced all references to Plaintiffs with PGDMM, a non-existent entity.
When Frey and Azzam attempted to reassert control over their business, the lawsuit alleges that Lewitt demanded repayment of the money his hedge fund loaned them.
It is unclear if the lawsuit will progress or if James Biden and Lewitt will choose to settle given the high-profile nature of the allegations and the impact they may pose to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
This is not the first time that James Biden’s business dealings have raised eyebrows. As Breitbart News reported on Friday, the younger-Biden received “unusually generous” bank loans to open a night club during the 1970s while his brother sat on the Senate Banking Committee. The ample terms under which the loans were issued drew attention and concerns about influence peddling given James Biden’s lack of business experience and paltry net worth.
The former vice president’s younger brother is not member of the Biden clan to come under fire for leveraging political connections to secure lucrative business deals recently. In Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News, revealed that in 2013 “Hunter Biden’s firm signed a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China just 10 days after Joe and Hunter Biden flew to China aboard Air Force Two.”
Schweizer also detailed how Hunter Biden secured a seat on the board of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), which invested in a Chinese company that was indicted for engaging in a “nuclear power conspiracy against the United States.”
“When you have the motive of greed and when you don’t worry too much about ethics, it’s very easy to come up with creative ways to enrich yourself, and one of those is what we call ‘American princelings,” Schweizer told Breitbart News Tonight last year. “The term ‘princelings’ is really a term that’s been widely used in China and in the West to talk about China, where in communist China, if you want to get deals done, if you want to get favors from the government, you basically do business with their children, and these children of communist party officials are called the princelings.”

 

 

'Middle class Joe' Biden cashed in to the tune of $15 million after leaving vice presidency

 

Joe Biden has released his tax returns as part of the Democrats' campaign to force the release of President Trump's tax returns.  Access to those returns, with hundreds, probably thousands of pages each year, would enable them to niggle-to-death every detail.  It's an obvious trap intended to distract and mire a president who has accomplished an astounding list of achievements, starting with reversing the "new normal" of stagnation that Obama assured us would require a "magic wand" to reverse.
But it turns out that Biden has made himself and his wife, "Doctor Jill Biden" (with a doctorate in education), into multimillionaires in just over two years.  Even NPR sees the problem for his image:
Former Vice President Joe Biden has referred to himself as "middle class Joe" throughout his political career, and used to regularly joke about being the "poorest person on Congress."
Those terms no longer apply.
Biden and his wife, Jill, have together earned more than $15 million since Biden left office. That's according to tax returns and other financial disclosure forms released by Biden's campaign on Tuesday. The bulk of the Bidens' earnings come from book sales and paid speaking engagements — two routine sources of income for former high-ranking public officials.
The documents show Biden has earned far more than the rest of the 2020 presidential field, with the likely exception of billionaire Tom Steyer, who entered the race Tuesday.
I don't know about you, but I prefer my rich politicians to have made their money before they enter what is laughably called "public service."
I still don't think Biden will be the nominee.  But if he does cop the Dems' crown, the phoniness of his claims to be an ordinary guy will be self-evident.
Of Biden can be said what originally was said of the early missionaries who came to Hawaii and bought up land: "They came to do good, and did very well, indeed."

 

‘Middle Class Joe’ Is Actually Multi-Millionaire Joe

Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
9 Jul 2019911
4:39

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who often pitches himself as “Middle Class Joe” on the campaign trail, is a multi-millionaire, according to his most recent tax returns.

On Tuesday, Biden’s presidential campaign released three years worth of tax filings showing the Democrat frontrunner and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, earned more than $15.6 million since leaving the White House. The majority of the couple’s income came from a book deal — estimated to be worth $8 million — and lucrative speaking engagements.
In 2017, Biden’s first year out of elective office since 1973, the couple earned more than $11 million. This was exponentially more than the $396,552 both reported making in 2016. The following year, the couple’s annual income decreased slightly to $4. 58 million.
Biden’s political standing appears to be the reason for the couple’s new found wealth. The returns show that Biden earned $9.49 million in 2017 through CelticCapri Corp., a shell company named after the couple’s Secret Service code names.
CelticCapri, which was incorporated in Delaware only days after Biden left office, serves as the main vehicle for the former vice president’s public engagements. In 2018, Biden was paid $2.73 million through the company for appearances and speeches all across the country. In total, over the two year period, Biden made 49 speeches with some generating honorariums upwards of $249,000.
Not to be outdone, Jill Biden also cashed in on her public persona. The former second lady delivered 18 speeches between 2017 and 2018, earning on average $36,000 per event. Giacoppa Corp., the former second lady’s shell company named after her family’s original last name, reported paying her more than $557,00 in 2017 and $506,000 in 2018 for such engagements.
Rounding out the couple’s income was Biden’s pension from the U.S. Senate and the vice presidency which generated $241,00 in 2017 and more than $190,000 in 2018. Biden also earned a six figure salary from the University of Pennsylvania. The former vice president leads the university’s Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C., a position that paid more than $371,000 in 2017 and more than $405,000 in 2018.
The couple’s income for both 2017 and 2018 put them squarely within the top one one percent of economic earners, a threshold set at $480,930 by the IRS. In fact, the former vice president’s income was the largest of any of his fellow 2020 Democrats.
Biden’s ascension into the economic elite comes relatively late in life. For the majority of his political career, Biden was one of the poorest members of Congress. The couple’s income barely edged above $300,000 until Biden’s first year in the vice president’s office, when he became eligible to to receive social security and his governmental pension.
Despite waiting so long to break into the one percent, the Bidens appear to have comfortably transitioned into their new lifestyle. Last month, it was disclosed the couple now resides in a 11,750 square foot Georgian-style mansion overlooking the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia. Biden rents the house, which once belonged to the late-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, even though he owns two properties within driving distance in his home state of Delaware. One of those is a recently purchased $2.7 million vacation house on the Atlantic Ocean.
Some signs of the couple’s prior lifestyle, however, appear to have remained in tact. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, Biden’s charitable giving has only slightly increased. According to the most recent tax returns released, Biden gave 1.4 percent of his income to charity in 2016. The following year, when the couple reported making 11 million, they donated just around 9.2 percent to charity. The percentage fell significantly in 2018 to six percent, even though the couple earned more than $4.58 million.
Since signaling his intention to run for president, Biden has sought to regain some of the working-class appeal that was exhibited in his early career.
“I know I’m called Middle-Class Joe. It’s not meant to be a compliment. It means I’m not sophisticated. But I know what made this country what it is: ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” the former vice president said last year.

Before his first day in office Barack Obama had sucked in more bribes from banksters than any president in history.

During the economic meltdown caused by Obama’s crony banksters, and Obama’s first two years in office, banks made more money than eight years under pro-bankster administration of George Bush.

Both of Obama’s Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were chosen by the banks because they were from law firms that had long protected big banks from their victims.

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

Joe Biden, the walking moron, was selected by Obama also because of his ties and servitude to big banks!

OBOMB'S CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED MORE 

THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICAN HOME 

VALUES AND NOW THEY'RE COMING BACK FOR MORE WITH THE BANKSTES' RENT BOY BIDEN!


Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide.

While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages

and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of

the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017,

that fell to only 61 percent.


Obama paid $600,000 for a single speech

 
In the two years since leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama has spent his time raising and solidifying his position in the uppermost echelons of the top one percent of Americans. Obama has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public speaking events and made deals worth millions with multiple companies.
Despite his quip, made during the depths of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has amassed so much wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a speech in South Africa last year.
Since he left office, the former president has given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate audiences for hundreds of thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same year he left office, Obama was officially recognized as one of the top ten highest paid public speakers in the US.
Photo of former president Barack Obama. (Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Just last month, Obama was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is Colombia’s largest marketing and business event of the year and one of the largest in Latin America. Simply titled, “A conversation with President Barack Obama,” his talk purportedly addressed “influential growth strategies” in marketing and other aspects of the marketing economy.
Colombia is infamous for the corruption prevalent in its public sector and military, 
which costs the country $17 billion a year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its GDP. 
Colombia exports half of the world’s cocaine and its drug cartels have been known
to have a hand in the government. Corruption and drug money are so rampant that
Colombia’s Inspector General likened it to “the new cartel.”
While Obama warns of the danger of “exploding inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted to him for one night in Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household in the US makes in a year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in Colombia.
Notably, Obama’s purse was nearly triple the amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious speeches to Goldman Sachs that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall Street stooges. Former President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech when he toured Latin America in 2005.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing 
between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent, spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
Under Obama’s watch the stock markets soared as the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149 percent. Meanwhile, the “war on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with Obama becoming the first president to spend every day of his two terms at war, much to the delight of the military-industrial complex.
As the wars raged on and the financial oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing mountain of wealth being concentrated at the top of society, real wages stagnated and an unprecedented opioid overdose crisis spun out of control. Rising numbers of “deaths of despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among the working class, resulted in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in the modern era.
In addition to monetary rewards for his service to the financial elite and military-intelligence apparatus, Obama has been lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as Richard Branson. Obama was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island where the pair were seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s exclusive resort.
Michelle Obama has also benefited after the family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed a $65 million book deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their political memoirs. Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of 2018 with over 10 million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals with Netflix and Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and promoting diversity in entertainment.
Obama’s lucrative post-White House career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and financial elite epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US government and the private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive bribery for services rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him with open arms.

They Destroyed Our Country
“They knew Obama was an unqualified crook; yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)”
THE RISE TO POWER OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA
'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the president: Pew Research Center
The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.

OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA -WHY WALL STREET, ILLEGALS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and the 1% LOVE HIM, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS THE SHAFT TO PAY FOR HIS CRONY CAPITALISM
CEO pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm separating the rich and super-rich from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than 11 percent between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of the Obama “recovery”—while the incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually shrank.
Meanwhile, Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED

OBAMA AND BIDEN: SERVANT OF THE 1% 

Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth 

The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.


The report found that the growth of global inequality has accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.

Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.

THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY

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


Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.

THE CRONY CLASS:

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama-Biden and their bankster regime than Bush.



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

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

Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.

INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES




Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.

THE REAL ECONOMY:
US “retail apocalypse” expected to exceed annual high with more than 1,100 store closures announced in one day.
The declining living standards of the working class are feeding directly into the retail apocalypse and mass layoffs of retail workers will only exacerbate the issue. Workers’ wages have seen little to no growth in the last four decades, and any economic growth experienced since 2008 has gone to the wealthiest of the wealthy.
Why do all global billionaires want wider open borders, amnesty and no E-VERIFY?
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
AMERICA: THE ECONOMY IS RIGGED BY CONGRESS SO THE RICH BECOME SUPER RICH.
The American middle class gets the tax bills for Wall Street’s crimes and bottomeless bailouts!

Wealth concentration increases in US.



The latest research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have seen their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the population has suffered a major decline.
The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER

Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.

BILLIONAIRE BETO “BETOMATIC” O’ROURKE PROCLAIMS AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION INVADING “UNREGISTERED” DEMOCRAT VOTING ILLEGALS.
No word on America’s homeless, housing or jobs crisis for Legals!
Joe Biden Fundraises with Wall Street During Donald Trump Rally

CHARLIE SPIERING
  18 Jun 201984
1:34

Former Vice President Joe Biden attended a fundraiser with Wall Street donors during President Donald Trump’s campaign kickoff rally in Florida on Tuesday.

It was the fourth New York City fundraiser for Joe Biden in about 24 hours.
The fundraiser was hosted by Eric Mindich, the CEO of Eton Park Capital Management with about 100 donors including Stephen Scherr, the executive vice president and chief financial officer of Goldman Sachs, H. Rodgin Cohen the senior chairman at Sullivan & Cromwell as well as former Clinton and Obama officials
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
“You know what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people,” he said. “Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done.”
Biden warned that if Trump won re-election, he would “literally fundamentally change the nature of who we are and how we function.”
Biden boasted that Obama leaned on him to help bring members of Congress together during their administration.
“Folks, I believe one of the things I’m pretty good at is bringing people together,” he said. “Every time we had trouble in the administration, who got sent to the Hill to settle it? Me. No, not a joke. Because I demonstrate respect for them.”

Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.

AMERICA: THE RICH GET MUCH RICHER AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS BLUDGEONED…. Illegals get the jobs!

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Why do the billionaire class all want wider open borders and hordes more “cheap” labor illegals? It’s all about keeping wages depressed for greater profits!

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“Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic elite. Big banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the world” Sen. Josh Hawley 

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"This is how they will destroy America from within.  The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants.  They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of 
our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human 
traffickers.  These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
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"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now."  ----  Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com

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“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
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"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."

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Graph from the Economic Policy Institute

Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
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Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019


While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.

At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
By Gabriel Black
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The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.

Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.

America Created Just 20,000 Jobs in February...and those all went to foreign born
Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
Consequently, the pumping of ultra-cheap money into the financial system, fueling speculation and parasitism, together with ever-widening social inequality, is not a temporary measure but must be made permanent.
The declining living standards of the working class are feeding directly into the retail apocalypse and mass layoffs of retail workers will only exacerbate the issue. 
Workers’ wages have seen little to no growth in the last four decades, and any economic growth experienced since 2008 has gone to 

Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
“US household net worth sees biggest fall since crisis”
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“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.
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“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.


NO PRESIDENT SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS BEFORE AND AFTER HIS PRESIDENCY THAT BARACK OBAMA.

Trump criticized Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
“The response of the administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even before coming to power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the bailouts, which he subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration dominated by the interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”

Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the financial crisis.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com

“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  

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

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.

JPMorgan shares climb after the bank posts record earnings and revenue


3h
Jamie Dimon arriving to testify before Congress. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters
·         JPMorgan reported first-quarter earnings results on Friday, kicking off another earnings season for the largest US banks.
JPMorgan Chase reported record first-quarter results on both the top and bottom lines Friday morning. Shares climbed 2.3% in early trading to $108.68.
Here's how the results stacked up with Wall Street's expectations as compiled by Bloomberg.
·         Adjusted net income: $9.18 billion versus $7.7 billion expected
·         Earnings per share: $2.65 versus $2.34 expected
·         Revenue: $29.85 billion versus $28.4 billion expected
·         Expenses: $16.4 billion versus $16.7 billion expected
"In the first quarter of 2019, we had record revenue and net income, strong performance across each of our major businesses, and a more constructive environment," CEO Jamie Dimon said in the earnings release. "Even amid some global geopolitical uncertainty, the US economy continues to grow, employment and wages are going up, inflation is moderate, financial markets are healthy, and consumer and business confidence remains strong."
A deeper look into the numbers showed the trading and investment-banking businesses exceeded expectations, though trading declined 17% from the year earlier:
·         FICC sales & trading revenue: $3.73 billion versus $3.67 billion expected
·         Equity sales & trading revenue: $1.74 billion versus $1.73 billion expected
·         Investment-banking revenue: $1.75 billion versus $1.63 billion expected

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


Wall Street rules

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

 

 

 

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


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

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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.
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"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."  
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"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."

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"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."
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"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."
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The GOP said the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" would reduce deficits and supercharge the economy (and stocks and wages). The White House says things are working as planned, but one year on--the numbers mostly suggest otherwise. 



Obama's Wall Street cabinet

6 April 2009
A series of articles published over the weekend, based on financial disclosure reports released by the Obama administration last Friday concerning top White House officials, documents the extent to which the administration, in both its personnel and policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite that were put in place over the past month by the Obama administration have fed a surge in share values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to use hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even more brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions, and the decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken “mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value of their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on bonuses paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he will slash social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council and Obama’s top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous character of relations between the Obama administration and the American financial elite.
Last year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with $135,000. This is substantially more than double the earnings for an entire year of high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the Obama administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and “unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.”
Summers was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As treasury secretary in the second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic financial regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now senior adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another $3 million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under federal receivership.
The presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to second- and third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was bailed out and seized by federal regulators in September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the president for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.
It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to high posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades, moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from industry than from finance.
In the Obama administration such considerations have largely been abandoned.
This will not come as a surprise to those who critically followed Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as a critic of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Friday’s financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of American democracy. Elections have no real effect on government policy, which is determined by the interests of the financial aristocracy that dominates both political parties. The working class can fight for its own interests—for jobs, decent living standards, health care, education, housing and an end to war.


“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

OBAMA and HIS BANKS: THEIR PROFITS, CRIMES and LOOTING SOAR


CRONY KING OBAMA: CURL: The Obamas live the 1% life

OBAMAnomics:
FROM THE MAN THAT HATED AMERICAN BUT LOVED AMERICAN BANKSTERS:



OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED LA RAZA DEM

THE GLOBALIST LEGACY OF A SOCIOPATH
Obama warns against “cynicism” at Ohio State commencement address
7 May 2013
At a commencement address on Sunday at Ohio State University, President Barack Obama counseled students not to be “cynical” about government and politics.
There was an almost comically absurd element to Obama’s remarks, delivered with his characteristic demagogy and attempted gestures at profundity. In his first four years in office, along with the first months of his second term, Obama proceeded to systematically repudiate every campaign pledge and to deflate every illusion that, with the assistance of a highly coordinated marketing campaign, led millions of people, including a large number of young people, to vote for him in 2008.
The Obama administration handed trillions of dollars to the banks; has overseen a massive attack on public education; is leading the campaign to slash Social Security and Medicare, the core federal retirement and health care programs; expanded the war in Afghanistan, led a war against Libya, and is preparing a new war in Syria; and has asserted the right to kill anyone, anywhere, including US citizens, without due process.
After this record of service to the corporate elite, he declares: “When we turn away and get discouraged and cynical… we grant our silent consent to someone who will gladly claim it. That’s how we end up with lobbyists who set the agenda; and policies detached from what middle class families face every day; the well-connected who publicly demand that Washington stay out of their business—and then whisper in government’s ear for special treatment that you don’t get.”
The references to the “whispers” of the wealthy and well-connected is particularly rich, coming only a week after Obama nominated Penny Pritzker for commerce secretary. The selection of Pritzker—a longtime Obama confidant, billionaire heiress and owner of a private equity company—only underscores the fact that the administration is a government of, by and for the financial aristocracy. She will be the wealthiest person ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.
Previous to his appointment of Pritzker, Obama appointed Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), one of the main financial regulators. White made millions of dollars as an attorney for banks responsible for the financial crisis, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, called White the “perfect choice” to head the SEC.
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the financial crisis.
As a whole, Obama’s speech was characterized by a complete separation from the actual conditions facing the graduates he spoke to, who confront joblessness, falling wages, and a lifetime in debt. “You have every reason to believe that your future is bright,” he told his audience. “You’re graduating into an economy and a job market that is steadily healing.”
He added later, “The trajectory of this great nation should give you hope.” Really? This is under conditions in which over 11 percent of college graduates are unemployed a year after getting out of school, and another 16.1 percent simply drop out of the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of those who do find a job are paid barely enough to get by, let alone pay off student loans. Wages for young adults are falling faster than any other part of the population, and are down by 6 percent in the past four years.
Most of the students that Obama addressed Sunday will be so burdened with debt that they will delay or have to completely put off starting a family or buying a home.
It is not surprising that Obama should neglect to dwell on this disastrous situation, because his administration bears responsibility for it. In the government-sponsored restructuring of the auto industry, the White House insisted that the wages of new-hires be slashed in half, setting the stage for vast reduction of wages throughout the economy.
Obama sought to paint opposition to the government’s violation of democratic rights as right-wing hysterics. “Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity,” Obama said. “They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”
This comes from a president who has personally overseen the illegal assassination of thousands of people, including at least three American citizens, in weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. The assertions of executive power have been systematically expanded, going beyond those claimed even by the Bush administration. The specter of a police state—the response of the ruling class to growing social opposition—is in fact lurking around the corner.
The moribund state of American politics, of which the Obama administration is a principal expression, is, according to the president, the fault of the American people. “Democracy doesn’t function without your active participation,” he admonished. If politicians “don’t represent you the way you want… you’ve got to let them know that’s not okay. And if they let you down, there’s a built-in day in November where you can really let them know that’s not okay.”
Such limp efforts to encourage illusions in the viability of the “democratic process” in the United States will not go very far. The experience of the past four years has not passed in vain. Millions of people, including many of those in the audience at Ohio State, are drawing the quite justified, if “cynical,” conclusion that the entire political and economic system is rotten to the core.
Mounting evidence of international collusion in Libor rigging - THE RAPE OF THE ECONOMY BY THE BANKSTERS

Mounting evidence of international collusion in Libor rigging

OBAMA'S AND HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS AT WORK:


JPMorgan’s investment arm, which includes its energy group, collects $14 billion annually; in comparison, six months’ worth of fines would amount to a paltry $180 million.

THERE IS A REASON WHY THE BANKSTERS INVESTED HEAVILY IN OBAMA’S CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION!

Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).

Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the Best-Managed Banks'

By Mary Bruce | ABC OTUS News – 2 hrs 31 mins ago

Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the …

Lou Rocco / ABC News

Just hours after a top JPMorgan Chase executive retired in the wake of a stunning $2 billion trading loss, President Obamatold the hosts of ABC's "The View" that the bank's risky bets exemplified the need for Wall Street reform.

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JPMorgan Chase investigated for manipulating California energy market

By Oliver Richards
23 July 2012

The California Independent Systems Operator (CalISO), the nonprofit organization that coordinates the state’s electricity market, has alleged that JPMorgan Chase& Co. manipulated the state’s energy market, resulting in at least $73 million in improper payments—costs passed along to the state’s energy consumers.

OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com

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



OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE BANKSTERS 

AND GLOBAL BILLIONAIRES



"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  
BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND THE RICH PARTNER WITH TRUMP TO FIGHT … economic equality.


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

BANKSTER SOCIALISM

Dimon’s bank received tens of billions of dollars in government bailouts and many billions more from the Obama administration’s ultra-low interest rate and “quantitative easing” money-printing policies.  He told his shareholders that “socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption” and “authoritarian government,” and would be “a disaster for our country.”… UNLESS IT IS SOCIALISM FOR BANKSTERS AND WALL STREET!

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"This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling oligarchy."
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"The very fact that the US government officially acknowledges a growth of popular support for socialism, particularly among the nation’s youth, testifies to vast changes taking place in the political consciousness of the working class and the terror this is striking within the ruling elite. America is, after all, a country where anti-communism was for the greater part of a century a state-sponsored secular religion. No ruling class has so ruthlessly sought to exclude socialist politics from political discourse as the American ruling class."
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Socialism haunts the American ruling class In the two months since Donald Trump vowed in his State of the Union Address that “America will never be a socialist country,” the right-wing demagogue president and the Republican Party have embraced anti-socialism as the defining theme of their campaign in the 2020 elections.


Wall Street Warms Up to Elizabeth Warren: ‘She’s the Smartest,’ ‘Most Policy-Oriented’ Democrat

22 Jul 201968
4:14

Wall Street is warming up to the idea of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) being the Democrat nominee for president against President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, interviews with executives and bankers reveal.

Politico report details how Wall Street insiders are becoming comfortable with Warren as the potential nominee to go up against Trump and his “America First” agenda:
I think she is going to get the nomination because she’s the smartest, she’s charismatic and she’s the most policy-oriented,” said one former top executive at a large Wall Street bank who, like several interviewed for this story, declined to be quoted on record saying anything nice about Warren. “Wall Street is very good at accommodating itself to reality and if the reality is the party is going to be super-progressive, they may not like Warren but she’s a better form of poison than Bernie.” [Emphasis added]
“If she were the nominee, there will certainly be people who will say that Donald Trump represents everything that I’m against,” said Orin Kramer, a hedge fund manager who is raising money for Buttigieg. “And they will find stuff that they like about her and will vote for her.” [Emphasis added]


BLOG: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY OF CRONY CAPITALISM IS THE PARTY OF BANKSTERS AND BOTTOMLESS BANKSTER BAILOUTS... AND NO PRISON TIME! 
Former adviser to President Obama and investor Robert Wolf told Politico that the financial industry has changed over the last few decades and that Wall Street-types are vastly more aligned with the Democrat establishment than Trump’s GOP.
“I don’t think the stereotypes of the industry serve the same purpose as they used to,” Wolf said. “People who work in corporate America and financial services may have the same views that she does on 95 percent of the issues such as income inequality, student loans, climate change, and others.”
Wall Street and Warren have at least one major policy initiative in common: A full repeal of Trump’s illegal and legal immigration reforms.
This month, Warren released her immigration platform that includes increasing overall legal immigration to the U.S. to provide business with an even greater flow of foreign workers to hire over Americans, as well as a decriminalization of illegal immigration, an amnesty for all illegal aliens in the country, and an end of Trump’s reforms such as his immigration ban from terrorist-sponsored countries and reduction of the refugee resettlement program.
Like Warren, Wall Street executives have railed against Trump’s immigration agenda — demanding that his zero-tolerance policy at the U.S.-Mexico border be ended and opposing his travel ban.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has supported amnesty for illegal aliens since at least 2016 when he announced support for the infamous “Gang of Eight” amnesty, saying, “Let them stay and let them build companies.”
Last month, Dimon said amnesty for illegal aliens was necessary to grow the economy, saying, “If we do these policies right, America will be growing a lot faster.”
Some of the top multinational banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — have come out against Trump’s travel ban that effectively stopped all immigration from a handful of foreign countries that sponsor terrorism.
“This is not a policy we support, and I would note that it has already been challenged in federal court, and some of the order has been enjoined at least temporarily,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote in a letter at the time. “Let me close by quoting from our business principles: ‘For us to be successful, our men and women must reflect the diversity of the communities and cultures in which we operate … Being diverse is not optional; it is what we must be.'”
Meanwhile, Citigroup has promoted mass immigration as a necessary component to growing the American economy in terms of increasing GDP. A report released by executives last year championed migration into the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Germany.
For decades, the big business lobby, Wall Street, and donor class have said mass immigration is crucial to growing GDP in the U.S. though research has shown that increasing legal immigration levels to an enormous ten million admissions a year would only grow GDP by about 2.5 percent. Meanwhile, Trump’s low-migration, high-wage economy has translated to 3.2 percent annual economic growth.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder