PETE BUTTIGIEG - DEDICATED SERVANT TO CORPORATE CRIMINALS - WHY ELSE WOULD JOE 'BRIBES' BIDEN WANT PETE IN HIS CABINET?

 The ultimate goal of the efforts was to impede and hobble the duly elected president; to subvert, sabotage, and undermine his agenda; and to ultimately expel him from office — by any means necessary — in the bowels of government, in the media and entertainment, in academia and education, in Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Business. 

On the policy front, the White House has rapidly undone almost all of Trump's reversals of Obama policies, while ratcheting up the Obama agenda with even more radical steps than Obama took in his first eight years of "fundamentally transforming" the country.  The border is open again.  The Keystone Pipeline is canceled.  Coal-mining and energy independence are out.  Subsidies to "green energy" and Big Tech are back.  So are Big Pork and the great party slush fund.

Barack Obama Has Now Been President Longer than FDR

By Ayad Rahim

This week, Barack Obama passed Franklin Roosevelt for the longest presidential tenure in American history.

What's that, you say? — president for longer than FDR?  But FDR was elected president four times; Obama was elected president two times.

Yes, all of that is true. That's why this record has an asterisk next to it.

For anyone with eyes to see, the current presidency is being run by Barack Obama. 

Even before this presidency began, its roots were laid in Obama's home in Washington.  Over the past couple of years, Obama House was the royal court for receiving, selecting, and anointing the party's standard-bearer for 2020.  Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris were Obama's favored candidates, and Obama House functioned as the campaign war room.  But Harris gained no traction, and she dropped out of the race on December 3, 2019, exactly two months before the Iowa caucuses. 

That left Warren — to face off against Bernie Sanders in the left-wing bracket of the sweepstakes.  The party had already determined, four years earlier, that Sanders was unsuitable as its standard-bearer, because he wielded an abrasive, in-your-face style of Marxism.  Obama himself expressed such sentiments more than once.  So the party scuppered his campaign in 2016.  But in 2020, Sanders was bettering Warren in the early primaries.

So, the Obama camp had to go to plan B — find somebody who was "presentable" to the public. 

In the first two contests of the nominating process, Joe Biden fared badly — maybe even worse than Harris would have done had she stayed in.  He finished a distant fourth in Iowa and a much weaker fifth in New Hampshire.  He was bumbling along on stage and on the hustings and going nowhere fast.  Obama didn't even like Biden — but Biden would have to do.  There weren't really many other options on hand.

So all the other candidates immediately dropped out, the Black vote in South Carolina and across the South was delivered to Biden, and he was anointed the nominee. 

We know the rest of the story: Biden was banished to the basement, the media carried the water for him and continued demonizing Trump, Big Swamp exploited and manipulated a virus, and big-city machines stopped counting the votes late on Election Night to figure out how many "votes" they needed to get their man over the finish line.

This leads us to the inauguration of Joe Biden as president.  On his first day in the White House, Biden expelled the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, as Obama had done on his first day in office.  (This was because Churchill was an imperialist and led the suppression of the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, during which, Obama said, his grandfather was tortured.  Trump brought the Churchill bust back on his first day in office.)

Then there are Biden's appointments.  They say personnel is policy.  Well, the old Obama gang is back, and at the center of the action is Susan Rice.  A foreign policy specialist (ambassador to the United Nations and then national security adviser under Obama), Rice was one of Biden's first appointments, as director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.  That's her official title, but her actual job is Obama's "messenger boy" in the White House and to cover any remaining tracks to past criminal activities.

Heading the White House press room is Jen Psaki.  She was Obama's communications director.  Anthony Blinken moves up a notch, from being Obama's deputy secretary of state to the top job at Foggy Bottom.  Obama's chairman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, is now secretary of the Treasury.

Anita Dunn, who had to resign from her top post in Obama's Department of Education because she'd praised Chairman Mao, is back.  Merrick Garland, whom Obama wasn't able to get into the Supreme Court in 2016, gets the consolation prize of attorney general — a "take that" from Obama.  Those are the most glaring of a slew of Obama retreads.  It wouldn't be surprising if Van Jones and Samantha Power get appointments soon, and David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel, and other members of the Chicago Mafia are major behind-the-scenes players.

Then there are the rewards to the people who tried to sabotage the Trump campaign in 2016 and who took part in the "resistance" to his presidency.  Peter Strzok, his wife, and anybody else who made "sacrifices" in the effort are being compensated for their pain and suffering.

On the policy front, the White House has rapidly undone almost all of Trump's reversals of Obama policies, while ratcheting up the Obama agenda with even more radical steps than Obama took in his first eight years of "fundamentally transforming" the country.  The border is open again.  The Keystone Pipeline is canceled.  Coal-mining and energy independence are out.  Subsidies to "green energy" and Big Tech are back.  So are Big Pork and the great party slush fund.

China is no longer an enemy. Climate change is an existential threat again, and the Paris Accords take center stage.  The Iran nuclear deal is back on — actually, John Kerry never stopped negotiating with Iran.  And to curry favor with Iran, the administration is lifting sanctions against the country and has halted the sale of weapons to its Arab enemies that recently made peace with Israel.  As for Israel, the White House is stiffing the country, big time — especially as it has the wrong leaders.

Okay — so that makes this the beginning of a third term for Obama, but FDR was elected president four times.

To complete the set of four aces, we have to rewind the tape to 2016.  Obama was finishing his second term and handing off leadership of the Marxist revolution to Hillary Clinton.  On the Republican side, three candidates for president — Trump, Cruz, and Carson — were vehemently opposed to Obama, his policies, and the direction of the country.  So Obama spied on their campaigns.  Trump still won. 

But not only did Trump trump the swamp; he then actually tried to put the breaks on the Marxist revolution.  He took steps to reverse the regulatory state, and he allowed the economy to boom.  Worst of all, Trump bruised the swamp's ego.  He exposed it as arrogant, corrupt, and incompetent, and as the entrenched D.C. front of the Marxist revolution.

After he arrived in Washington, Trump quickly learned that Obama was running the "resistance" to his presidency — the government's opposition from within (in the summer of '16, Trump had informed the world that his campaign was being spied on). 

During Trump's four years in Washington, Obama ran the shadow government out of his D.C. home, probably exerting more influence over the wheels of government than the man in the Oval Office did.  Obama lined up whistleblowers, leaks to the press, and resistance to the president from within the government, including in the White House and the president's Cabinet.  He advised "the gang of four" and other radicals on policy and presentation. 

The ultimate goal of the efforts was to impede and hobble the duly elected president; to subvert, sabotage, and undermine his agenda; and to ultimately expel him from office — by any means necessary — in the bowels of government, in the media and entertainment, in academia and education, in Big Tech, Big Finance, and Big Business. 

So we ought to face reality.  As of this week, Obama has been running the show in Washington for 4,424 days — and counting — and he's not shy about letting us know it.

Ayad Rahim, a former journalist, is a bookseller and tutor in the Midwest.

Image: Gage

Buttigieg’s Former Firm Shells Out $573 Million to Evade Lawsuits Over Role in Opioid Crisis

Also busted for fixing bread prices in Canada

 
 
 

Andrew Stiles - FEBRUARY 4, 2021 11:50 AM

The controversial consulting firm where Pete Buttigieg worked after graduating from Oxford has agreed to pay $573 million as part of a multi-state legal settlement over its role advising major drug manufacturers during the opioid crisis.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Consulting giant McKinsey & Co. has reached a $573 million settlement with states over its work advising OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and other drug manufacturers to aggressively market opioid painkillers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal, reached with 47 states and the District of Columbia and expected to be publicly announced Thursday, would avert civil lawsuits that attorneys general could bring against McKinsey, the people said. The majority of the money will be paid upfront, with the rest dispensed in four yearly payments starting in 2022.

Buttigieg was recently sworn in as secretary of transportation, becoming the second openly gay individual to serve in a presidential cabinet. He worked at McKinsey from 2007 to 2010. One of Buttigieg's clients, the Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws, admitted to taking part in a scheme to artificially increase the price of bread over a 14-year period that included Buttigieg's tenure at McKinsey.

The Canadian price-fixing scheme became what young people refer to as a "meme" after New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Applebaum confronted Buttigieg over his role in the scandal during an interview in January 2020.

Applebaum epically accused the former mayor of Indiana's fourth-largest city (South Bend) of having served "on the front lines of corporate downsizing" and "corporate price fixing," causing Buttigieg to lash out with rage. The noble journalist, he dangerously alleged, was trafficking in "bullshit."

Applebaum's unassailable retort—"You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices"—will go down in history as one of the greatest achievements in American journalism.

The U.S. Economy Is Rigged

By Milton Ezrati

Though the populist tide seems to have ebbed, it will rise again, and soon.  The problem that ignited populist sentiment in the first place, whether on the left or the right, remains: the country’s economic and financial system has failed much of the population and is rigged to the benefit of a government-business elite.  Resistance to this inequity elevated Trump and pulled the Democratic Party to the left and will continue to roil American politics until things change.

The economy’s “rigging” has developed gradually over time and often from the best of intentions. When politicians, corporate executives, pundits, journalists, academics and activists alike propose ways to make society more just or efficient or globally competitive, they invariably call for some kind of government-corporate cooperation.  Such calls always seem to offer an answer for the public good, but in practice these arrangements inevitably drift into a self-serving collusion among those charged to cooperate. 

Economic and financial history over the past few decades offers ample evidence of this building trend.  An especially stark illustration emerged during the 2008-09 financial crisis.  Prior to that trouble, Washington had enlisted the cooperation of most major financial institutions in broadening home ownership among less affluent Americans.  Desirable as such a goal is, it required the risky practice of lending mortgage money to people with a questionable ability to repay it.  To help cooperating institutions, regulators allowed banks to shed that risk through questionable financial devices, such as credit default swaps and the securitization of bundles of these risky loans. In 2007, when these sub-prime borrowers began to fail on their mortgage obligations and this house of cards began to collapse, Washington sprang into action, to save, it claimed, the financial system, but as it turned out, also to protect its corporate partners. 

The fate of Bear Stearns is instructive.  When this New York-based global investment bank first showed signs of having trouble in 2008, Washington could easily have arranged an emergency loan to protect those who depended on Bear’s ability to meet its obligations.  Though Washington had arranged such rescues before, this time it refused.  It surely was no coincidence that this broker-dealer had always been a disruptive and uncooperative agent in financial markets.  Notable is how Bear Stearns some years earlier had refused to join a Federal Reserve effort to arrange such emergency loans for the failing investment firm, Long-Term Capital Management, whose top executives, not coincidentally, had exceptionally good Wall Street, Washington, and academic connections.  Instead, Washington forced Bear to sell itself at a bargain price to J.P. Morgan, a firm notably cooperative with Washington.

For the companies that had cooperated with the government agenda, Washington only offered help.  Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to channel some $430 billion in tax money to aid Citibank, Chase, and other, less obstreperous banks who could boast of their cooperation with Washington’s earlier mortgage lending push.  TARP also assisted Goldman Sachs, so renowned for its links to Washington that Wall Street wags refer to it as “Government Sachs.”  Because TARP funds could only go to banks, and because Goldman at the time lacked a commercial banking license, the authorities rushed a license through for it.  But when it came to Lehman Brothers, a firm that despite its long pedigree was well outside the collusive establishment, Washington allowed it to go bankrupt.  Then the government, in a remarkably novel move, effectively nationalized the insurer AIG.  This firm, too, had a less-than-cooperative reputation.  The takeover also allowed Washington to settle AIG’s outstanding credit default swap dispute with Goldman Sachs in Goldman’s favor.

Washington could have approached this crisis in a less chaotic, more systematic way.  It actually had a model from the savings and loan crisis of the 1990s.  But an orderly, equitable approach would have made it impossible for the authorities to protect its partners, as it clearly did.  And this embarrassment from the 2008-09 financial crisis is only one illustration of how the rigged system works.  Evidence abounds in earlier years in relations between Washington and Big Tech and the auto industry and oil, and other major corporate groups as well.

The system’s practices remain in place. For all Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp,” he failed to dismantle the rigging.  On the left, there is a scrap of hope that Biden will attack these structures along lines laid out for him by Bernie Sanders.  But that is hardly likely from a man who has spent his entire adult life embedded in the system.  Without any real effort to address the inequities of this rigged system, an angry, messy politics will persist and very well become messier over time.