Kamala Harris:
Medicare for All Includes Illegal Aliens
Harris, a guest on CNN's "State of the
Union," said "I support Medicare for all. It is my preferred
policy." She said she supports the bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Fourteen Democratic presidential hopefuls campaign at California convention
In the largest gathering of the 2020 presidential campaign so far, 14 of the declared Democratic candidates attended the California state Democratic Party convention in San Francisco over the weekend. They sought to combine bogus pledges of social reform with attacks on the Trump administration from the right, particularly on trade and on alleged Russian interference into US elections.
Notably absent from the convention was current frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden, who instead spent the weekend in Ohio to attend events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. It was widely understood, however, that Biden, who has adopted a more openly conciliatory posture to the Republicans, wanted to avoid provoking the ire of convention delegates and a potentially embarrassing rebuff.
Aside from the candidate appearances, delegates elected the state party’s new chair, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Rusty Hicks. Representing over 800,000 workers in over 300 local union chapters, the LA Fed, as it’s known, has presided over of betrayals of workers throughout the city and the county, most particularly in the healthcare and education fields. Hicks’ victory underscores the reactionary role of the unions in reinforcing the political monopoly of the capitalist two-party system and denying the working class any genuine political representation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also spoke at the convention. Her comments were interrupted by calls from assembled delegates to impeach President Trump. Many of the Democratic presidential candidates have openly called for impeachment, particularly after comments by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller last week in which he effectively called on the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings.
The two leading presidential contenders, Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, have thus far not called for impeachment, and Pelosi has downplayed suggestions that the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives might take such action, arguing that an impeachment that had no prospects of conviction at trial in the Republican-controlled Senate would only help Trump politically.
At the convention itself, Pelosi implied that Democrats should focus instead on winning the White House in 2020. She was joined over the weekend by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff who declared that impeachment proceedings were “destined for failure” without Republican support in the Senate.
Notably, there were no references made to suggestions, included those made by Trump himself, that he might seek to extend his term in office or even refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election.
The presidential candidates who spoke at the convention offered various types of vague reformist pabulum which will be rapidly abandoned once the party’s nominee is chosen, along with attempts to outflank Trump on the right, particularly in regard to the party’s anti-Russia campaign and the drive for internet and press censorship that goes along with it.
As could be expected, when questions of social inequality became unavoidable, the candidates took pains to couch the issue in entirely racial terms.
Failed Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke declared, “When we talk about justice in this country, it is squarely confronting the consequences of slavery and segregation,” he said. “Unless we do that, we will never repair the damage done and we will never stop revisiting these injustices on every successive generation.”
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is currently competing with Sanders to be the candidate of the fake-left opposition in the Democratic Party. “The racial wealth gap,” she claimed, “holds back families generation after generation.”
Warren fully supported the Obama Administration’s bailout of the auto industry, leading to severe wage cuts and job losses for hundreds of thousands of autoworkers, and eulogized recently deceased US war criminals such as President George H. W. Bush and Senator John McCain.
“The time for small ideas is over,” Warren argued in her speech. “Big problems call for big solutions. If we’re going to save our democracy, build an inclusive economy, clean up the corruption in Washington, we need big, structural change and yes, I have a plan for that.” Warren then outlined that her “plan” involved placing a wealth tax of 2 cents on the dollar for those whose fortunes exceeded $50 million, a levy on the super-rich that no Congress would ever impose, given the grip of big money on both corporate-controlled parties.
Like many of the other candidates present, Warren offered sops to the trade union bureaucracy, promising that a Warren administration would “make it easier for workers to join a union,” opening more channels through which union bureaucrats could extract dues money from workers and betray their future struggles.
The overall tone of the proceedings, however, was set by opening speaker Kamala Harris, former state attorney general and now US Senator from California, who spoke of the urgent need to continue the Democrat’s reactionary anti-Russia campaign. “Let’s talk about this so-called commander in chief [Trump],” she said. “He parrots Russia’s lies over the word of American intelligence and law enforcement leaders. He denies that Russia interfered in the election of the president of the United States. We need to begin impeachment proceedings and we need a new commander in chief.”
Harris, a multi-millionaire, took a hard line
against defendants during her time as
district attorney and later California state
attorney general, helping to hide
exculpatory evidence from defense
attorneys. She blocked prosecution of
bankers in the wake of the 2008 financial
crisis, including current Trump Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and appealed
court rulings seeking to end the death
penalty.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg also spoke at the convention. The young mayor has received considerably favorable coverage in the bourgeois media, largely due to a talent for saying nothing and saying it very well—as well as his record as a special forces operative in Afghanistan.
“We can only look forward,” he said. “Now, if we want to defeat this president and lead the country into a new direction, we’ve got to be ready to transform our country and our democracy into something new and better.”
Buttigieg told the assembled audience that Democrats could not promise to bring the country back to the days of the 1990s and 2000s, as if those decades of war, austerity policies and stagnating living standards were somehow halcyon days for the working class.
Buttigieg also echoed an aspect of the anti-Russia campaign calling for increased cybersecurity and election security, meaning calls for further internet censorship and attacks on government whistleblowers such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. “We have to build a campaign on our values, values like freedom, security and democracy. We don’t enjoy security if we fail to confront cyber challenges, election security threats,” he said.
California has moved up its presidential primary from the traditional June date to March 3, the day dubbed “Super Tuesday” by the media, when 13 states will choose more than 1,400 delegates, better than one-third of the total.
More than 400 of those delegates will be from California, divided up among the state’s 53 congressional districts, but candidates must receive at least 15 percent of the total vote in a congressional district to win any delegates from that district. Based on present polling, only six candidates—Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—would pass that threshold.
Sanders was also present at the convention, although the level of excitement for his candidacy has notably diminished since his last presidential run in 2016, when the Vermont senator attracted tens of thousands to rallies around the country in which he railed against the “billionaire class” and the growth of social inequality, only to later fully support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the candidate of Wall Street and the Pentagon. A rally Sanders held in the nearby city of San Jose over the weekend was only attended by a few hundred supporters.
While Sanders has consistently polled in second place behind Biden, he has echoed the Trump administration’s condemnation of China and has otherwise joined in the administration’s nationalistic trade war campaign. Sanders’ railing against social inequality has only proven to be so much hot air meant to distract and disorient the growing political opposition among the working class.
In fact, while nearly all of the Democratic candidates took pains to mention the growth of social inequality and many of its attendant miseries, the word “socialism” and “capitalism” were not even mentioned, with the exception of former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, who railed against any hint of socialism in the 2020 election.
“Socialism is not the answer!” Hickenlooper railed, warning the delegates that they risk falling into a trap set for them by Trump. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to help reelect the worst president in history.” He also cautioned against fighting for universal health coverage. “We shouldn’t try to achieve universal coverage by removing private insurance for over 150 million Americans.”
Such anti-socialist rhetoric, however, does not prevent pseudo-left groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative from working within the Democratic Party and fostering illusions that this party of bourgeois reaction can be utilized to meet the interests of the working class.
Both the Democrats and Trump are desperately seeking to divert social discontent outwards and away from its actual source in the capitalist profit system, and against a foreign enemy. In Trump’s case, the bogeymen are immigrant workers and foreign trade rivals, particularly China. In the case of the Democrats, Russia is the main target. The result of the 2020 election will be fundamentally the same regardless of whether Trump or one of his Democratic rivals emerges victorious: a further accelerated drive towards war, attacks on democratic rights and authoritarian rule.
NO PRESIDENT SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS BEFORE AND
AFTER HIS PRESIDENCY THAT BARACK OBAMA.
Trump criticized
Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s
economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion
to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I
think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
“The
response of the administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even
before coming to power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the
bailouts, which he subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration
dominated by the interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser
Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal
connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate
boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial
firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the
financial crisis.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure
was a low point even within the disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL
GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
"One of the premier institutions of
big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the
eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been
exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand
over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial
kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen
McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“This
was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the
contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013
that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their
CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
"One of the premier
institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued
an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008
crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis”
was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that
effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of
the potential impact of central bank actions in driving
inequality between asset owners and labor."
$2,198,468,000,000:
Federal Spending Hit 10-Year High Through March; Taxes Hit 5-Year Low
(Getty Images/Ron Sachs-Pool)
(CNSNews.com) - The federal government spent $2,198,468,000,000
in the first six months of fiscal 2019 (October through March), which is the
most it has spent in the first six months of any fiscal year in the last
decade, according
to the Monthly Treasury Statements.
The last time the government spent more in the
October-through-March period was in fiscal 2009, when it spent
$2,326,360,180,000 in constant March 2019 dollars.
Fiscal 2009 was the fiscal year that began with President George
W. Bush signing a $700-billion law to bailout the banking industry in October
2008 and then saw President Barack Obama sign a $787-billion stimulus law in
February 2009.
JPMorgan shares climb after the bank posts
record earnings and revenue
3h
·
JPMorgan
reported first-quarter earnings results on Friday, kicking off another earnings
season for the largest US banks.
JPMorgan Chase reported record
first-quarter results on both the top and bottom lines Friday morning. Shares
climbed 2.3% in early trading to $108.68.
Here's how the results stacked up with Wall
Street's expectations as compiled by Bloomberg.
·
Adjusted net income: $9.18 billion versus $7.7 billion expected
·
Earnings per share: $2.65 versus $2.34 expected
·
Revenue: $29.85
billion versus $28.4 billion expected
·
Expenses: $16.4
billion versus $16.7 billion expected
"In the first quarter of 2019, we had
record revenue and net income, strong performance across each of our major
businesses, and a more constructive environment," CEO Jamie Dimon said in
the earnings release. "Even amid some global geopolitical
uncertainty, the US economy continues to grow, employment and wages are going
up, inflation is moderate, financial markets are healthy, and consumer and
business confidence remains strong."
A deeper look into the numbers showed the
trading and investment-banking businesses exceeded expectations, though trading
declined 17% from the year earlier:
·
FICC sales & trading revenue: $3.73 billion versus $3.67 billion
expected
·
Equity sales & trading revenue: $1.74 billion versus $1.73 billion
expected
·
Investment-banking revenue: $1.75 billion versus $1.63 billion
expected
"The
Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for perpetuating this whole filthy system,
in which "Wall Street rules."
Wall
Street rules
The Federal Reserve
sent a clear message to Wall Street on Friday: It will not allow the longest
bull market in American history to end. The message was received loud and
clear, and the Dow rose by more than 700 points.
Hundreds of thousands
of federal workers remain furloughed or forced to work without pay as the
partial government shutdown enters its third week, but the US central bank is
making clear that all of the resources of the state are at the disposal of the
financial oligarchy.
Responding to
Thursday’s market selloff following a dismal report from Apple and signs of a
manufacturing slowdown in both China and the US, the Fed declared it was
“listening” to the markets and would scrap its plans to raise interest rates.
Speaking at a
conference in Atlanta, where he was flanked by his predecessors Ben Bernanke
and Janet Yellen, both of whom had worked to reflate the stock market bubble
after the 2008 financial crash, Chairman Jerome Powell signaled that the Fed
would back off from its two projected rate increases for 2019.
“We’re listening
sensitively to the messages markets are sending,” he said, adding that the
central bank would be “patient” in imposing further rate increases. To
underline the point, he declared, “If we ever came to the conclusion that any
aspect of our plans” was causing a problem, “we wouldn’t hesitate to change
it.”
This extraordinary
pledge to Wall Street followed the 660 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial
Average on Thursday, capping off the worst two-day start for a new trading year
since the collapse of the dot.com bubble.
William McChesney
Martin, the Fed chairman from 1951 to 1970, famously said that his job was “to
take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” Now the task of the Fed
chairman is to ply the wealthy revelers with tequila shots as soon as they
start to sober up.
Powell’s remarks were
particularly striking given that they followed the release Friday of the most
upbeat jobs report in over a year, with figures, including the highest
year-on-year wage growth since the 2008 crisis, universally lauded as
“stellar.”
While US financial
markets have endured the worst December since the Great
Depression, amid mounting fears of a looming recession and a new
financial crisis, analysts have been quick to point out that there are no
“hard” signs of a recession in the United States.
Both the Dow and the
S&P 500 indexes have fallen more than 15 percent from their recent highs,
while the tech-heavy NASDAQ has entered bear market territory, usually defined
as a drop of 20 percent from recent highs.
The markets, Powell
admitted, are “well ahead of the data.” But it is the markets, not the “data,”
that Powell is listening to.
Since World War II,
bear markets have occurred, on average, every five-and-a-half years. But if the
present trend continues, the Dow will reach 10 years without a bear market in
March, despite the recent losses.
Now the Fed has stepped
in effectively to pledge that it will allocate whatever resources are
needed to ensure that no substantial market correction takes place. But
this means only that when the correction does come, as it
inevitably
must, it will be all
the more severe and the Fed will have all the less power to stop it.
From the standpoint of the
history of the institution, the Fed’s current more or less explicit role as
backstop for the stock market is a relatively new development. Founded in 1913,
the Federal Reserve legally has had the “dual mandate” of ensuring both maximum
employment and price stability since the late 1970s. Fed officials have
traditionally denied being influenced in policy decisions by a desire to drive
up the stock market.
Federal Reserve
Chairman Paul Volcker, appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979,
deliberately engineered an economic recession by driving the benchmark federal
funds interest rate above 20 percent. His highly conscious aim, in the name of
combating inflation, was to quash a wages movement of US workers by triggering
plant closures and driving up unemployment.
The actions of the Fed
under Volcker set the stage for a vast upward redistribution of wealth,
facilitated on one hand by the trade unions’ suppression of the class struggle
and on the other by a relentless and dizzying rise on the stock market.
Volcker’s recession,
together with the Reagan administration’s crushing of the 1981 PATCO air
traffic controllers’ strike, ushered in decades of mass layoffs,
deindustrialization and wage and benefit concessions, leading labor’s share of
total national income to fall year after year.
These were also decades
of financial deregulation, leading to the savings and loan crisis of the late
1980s, the dot.com bubble of 1999-2000, and, worst of all, the 2008 financial
crisis.
In each of these
crises, the Federal Reserve carried out what became known as the “Greenspan
put,” (later the “Bernanke put”)—an implicit guarantee to backstop the
financial markets, prompting investors to take ever greater risks.
In 2008, this resulted
in the most sweeping and systemic financial crisis since the Great Depression,
prompting Fed Chairman Bernanke, New York Fed President Tim Geithner and
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former CEO of Goldman Sachs) to
orchestrate the largest bank bailout in human history.
Since that time, the
Federal Reserve has carried out its most accommodative monetary policy ever,
keeping interest rates at or near zero percent for six years. It supplemented
this boondoggle for the financial elite with its multi-trillion-dollar
“quantitative easing” money-printing program.
The
effect can be seen in the ever more staggering wealth of the financial
oligarchy, which has consistently enjoyed investment returns of between 10 and
20 percent every year since the financial crisis, even as the incomes of
workers have stagnated or fallen.
American capitalist
society is hooked on the toxic growth of social inequality created by the stock
market bubble. This, in turn, fosters the political framework not just for the
decadent lifestyles of the financial oligarchs, each of whom owns, on average,
a half-dozen mansions around the world, a private jet and a super-yacht, but
also for the broader periphery of the affluent upper-middle class, which
provides the oligarchs with political legitimacy and support. These elite
social layers determine American political life, from which the broad mass of
working people is effectively excluded.
The Federal Reserve is
a key mechanism for perpetuating this whole filthy system,
in which “Wall Street rules.” But its services in behalf
of the rich and the super-rich only compound the fundamental
and insoluble contradictions of capitalism, plunging the system
into ever deeper debt and ensuring that the next crisis will be
that much more violent and explosive.
In this intensifying
crisis, the working class must assert its independent interests with the same
determination and ruthlessness as evinced by the ruling class. It must answer
the bourgeoisie’s social counterrevolution with the program of socialist
revolution.
the depression is already here for most of us below the
super-rich!
Trump and the GOP created a fake
economic boom on our collective credit card: The equivalent of
maxing out your credit cards and saying look how good I'm doing right
now.
*
Trump criticized
Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s
economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion
to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I
think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
*
"One of the premier
institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued
an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008
crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis”
was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that
effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of
the potential impact of central bank actions in driving
inequality between asset owners and labor."
*
"Overall, the reaction to the decision
points to the underlying fragility of financial markets, which have become
a house of cards as a result of the massive inflows of money from the
Fed and other central banks, and are now extremely susceptible
to even a small tightening in financial conditions."
*
"It
is significant that what the Financial
Times described as a “tsunami of money”—estimated to reach $1
trillion for the year—has failed to prevent what could be the worst year for
stock markets since the global financial crisis."
*
"A decade ago, as the
financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers,
the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in
mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had
required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By
October, two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank
of America, needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape
failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington
Mutual and IndyMac, died."
*
The GOP said the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" would reduce
deficits and supercharge the economy (and stocks and wages). The White
House says things are working as planned, but one year
on--the numbers mostly suggest otherwise.
Obama's Wall
Street cabinet
6 April 2009
A series of articles published over
the weekend, based on financial disclosure reports released by the Obama
administration last Friday concerning top White House officials, documents the
extent to which the administration, in both its personnel and policies, is a
political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies that are extraordinarily
favorable to the financial elite that were put in place over the past month by
the Obama administration have fed a surge in share values on Wall Street. These
include the scheme to use hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to
pay hedge funds to buy up the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto
Task Force’s rejection of the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and
its demand for even more brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’
health benefits and pensions, and the decision by the Financial Accounting
Standards Board (FASB) to weaken “mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit
banks to inflate the value of their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on bonuses
paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and
other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he will slash
social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors
directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall
Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence Summers,
director of the National Economic Council and Obama’s top economic adviser,
highlights the politically incestuous character of relations between the Obama
administration and the American financial elite.
Last year, Summers pocketed $5
million as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in
the world, and another $2.7 million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms
that have received government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from
Citigroup and $67,500 each from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman
Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman Sachs
executives, Summers walked away with $135,000. This is substantially more than
double the earnings for an entire year of high-seniority auto workers, who have
been pilloried by the Obama administration and the media for their supposedly
exorbitant and “unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically to the
flagrant conflict of interest revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times
noted on Saturday: “Mr. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council,
wields important influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled
financial industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.”
Summers was a leading advocate of
banking deregulation. As treasury secretary in the second Clinton
administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic financial regulations dating
from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among his current responsibilities
is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the Wall Street
insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled with
multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own political
career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy national
security adviser for international economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and
received more than $7.4 million from the bank from January of 2008 until he
entered the Obama administration this year. This included a $2.25 million
year-end bonus handed him this past January, within weeks of his joining the
Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far been the
beneficiary of $45 billion in cash and over $300 billion in government
guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s
top strategist and now senior adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million
last year from two consulting firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that
will garner him another $3 million over the next five years. His disclosure claims
personal assets of between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national security
adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm
whose major clients include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity
firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the
White House Military Office, made $227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the
California bank that heavily promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last
summer and was placed under federal receivership.
The presence of multi-millionaire
Wall Street insiders extends to second- and third-tier positions in the Obama
administration as well. David Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the
Federal Housing Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of
Long and Foster Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens
served as a top executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage
lending giant that was bailed out and seized by federal regulators in
September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for
deputy counsel to the president for economic policy, is a top executive at the
insurance giant Hartford Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its
top advisers two investment bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing
and asset-stripping.
It is not new for leading figures
from finance to be named to high posts in a US administration. However, there
has traditionally been an effort to demonstrate a degree of independence from
Wall Street in the selection of cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential
aides, often through the appointment of figures from academia or the public
sector. In previous decades, moreover, representatives of the corporate elite
were more likely to come from industry than from finance.
In the Obama
administration such considerations have largely been abandoned.
This will not come as a surprise to
those who critically followed Obama’s election campaign. While he postured
before the electorate as a critic of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force
for “change,” he was from the first heavily dependent on the financial and
political backing of powerful financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms lavishly backed his
presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they gave to his Republican
opponent, Senator John McCain.
Friday’s financial disclosures
further expose the bankruptcy of American democracy. Elections have no real
effect on government policy, which is determined by the interests of the
financial aristocracy that dominates both political parties. The working class
can fight for its own interests—for jobs, decent living standards, health care,
education, housing and an end to war.
///
“Records show that four out of
Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants -
Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and
Citigroup ($358,054).”
OBAMA and HIS BANKS: THEIR PROFITS,
CRIMES and LOOTING SOAR
CRONY KING OBAMA: CURL: The Obamas
live the 1% life
OBAMAnomics:
FROM THE MAN THAT HATED AMERICAN BUT
LOVED AMERICAN BANKSTERS:
OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED LA RAZA DEM
THE GLOBALIST LEGACY OF A SOCIOPATH
Obama warns against “cynicism” at
Ohio State commencement address
7 May 2013
At a commencement address on Sunday
at Ohio State University, President Barack Obama counseled students not to be
“cynical” about government and politics.
There was an almost comically
absurd element to Obama’s remarks, delivered with his characteristic demagogy
and attempted gestures at profundity. In
his first four years in office, along with the first months of his second term,
Obama proceeded to systematically repudiate every campaign pledge and to
deflate every illusion that, with the assistance of a highly coordinated
marketing campaign, led millions of people, including a large number of young
people, to vote for him in 2008.
The Obama administration handed trillions of dollars to the
banks; has overseen a massive attack on public education; is leading the campaign
to slash Social Security and Medicare, the core federal retirement and health
care programs; expanded the war in Afghanistan, led a war against Libya, and is
preparing a new war in Syria; and has asserted the right to kill anyone,
anywhere, including US citizens, without due process.
After this record of service to the
corporate elite, he declares: “When we turn away and get discouraged and
cynical… we grant our silent consent to someone who will gladly claim it.
That’s how we end up with lobbyists who set the agenda; and policies detached
from what middle class families face every day; the well-connected who publicly
demand that Washington stay out of their business—and then whisper in
government’s ear for special treatment that you don’t get.”
The references to the “whispers” of
the wealthy and well-connected is particularly rich, coming only a week after
Obama nominated Penny Pritzker for commerce secretary. The selection of Pritzker—a longtime Obama confidant, billionaire
heiress and owner of a private equity company—only underscores the fact that
the administration is a government of, by and for the financial aristocracy.
She will be the wealthiest person ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.
Previous to his appointment of
Pritzker, Obama appointed Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC), one of the main financial regulators. White made millions of
dollars as an attorney for banks responsible for the financial crisis,
including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO, Jamie Dimon, called
White the “perfect choice” to head the SEC.
Practically every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal
connections to the ruling class, many having come directly from corporate
boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive at a major financial
firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail, for their role in the
financial crisis.
As a whole, Obama’s speech was
characterized by a complete separation from the actual conditions facing the
graduates he spoke to, who confront joblessness, falling wages, and a lifetime
in debt. “You have every reason to believe that your future is bright,” he told
his audience. “You’re graduating into an economy and a job market that is
steadily healing.”
He added later, “The trajectory of
this great nation should give you hope.” Really? This is under conditions in
which over 11 percent of college graduates are unemployed a year after getting
out of school, and another 16.1 percent simply drop out of the labor force,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of those who do find a job
are paid barely enough to get by, let alone pay off student loans. Wages for
young adults are falling faster than any other part of the population, and are
down by 6 percent in the past four years.
Most of the students that Obama
addressed Sunday will be so burdened with debt that they will delay or have to
completely put off starting a family or buying a home.
It is not surprising that Obama
should neglect to dwell on this disastrous situation, because his
administration bears responsibility for it. In the government-sponsored
restructuring of the auto industry, the White House insisted that the wages of
new-hires be slashed in half, setting the stage for vast reduction of wages
throughout the economy.
Obama sought to paint opposition to
the government’s violation of democratic rights as right-wing hysterics.
“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of
government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity,” Obama said.
“They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should
reject these voices.”
This comes from a president who has
personally overseen the illegal assassination of thousands of people, including
at least three American citizens, in weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. The
assertions of executive power have been systematically expanded, going beyond
those claimed even by the Bush administration. The specter of a police
state—the response of the ruling class to growing social opposition—is in fact
lurking around the corner.
The moribund state of American
politics, of which the Obama administration is a principal expression, is,
according to the president, the fault of the American people. “Democracy
doesn’t function without your active participation,” he admonished. If
politicians “don’t represent you the way you want… you’ve got to let them know
that’s not okay. And if they let you down, there’s a built-in day in November
where you can really let them know that’s not okay.”
Such limp efforts to encourage
illusions in the viability of the “democratic process” in the United States
will not go very far. The experience of the past four years has not passed in
vain. Millions of people, including many of those in the audience at Ohio
State, are drawing the quite justified, if “cynical,” conclusion that the
entire political and economic system is rotten to the core.
Mounting evidence of international collusion in Libor
rigging - THE RAPE OF THE ECONOMY BY THE BANKSTERS
Mounting evidence of international collusion in Libor
rigging
OBAMA'S AND HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS AT WORK:
JPMorgan’s
investment arm, which includes its energy group, collects $14 billion annually;
in comparison, six months’ worth of fines would amount to a paltry $180
million.
THERE IS A REASON WHY THE BANKSTERS INVESTED HEAVILY IN
OBAMA’S CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION!
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).
Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the Best-Managed Banks'
By Mary Bruce | ABC OTUS News – 2 hrs 31 mins ago
Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the …
Lou Rocco / ABC News
Just hours after a
top JPMorgan Chase executive retired in the wake of a stunning $2 billion
trading loss, President Obamatold the hosts of ABC's "The View" that
the bank's risky bets exemplified the need for Wall Street reform.
*
JPMorgan Chase investigated for manipulating California
energy market
By Oliver Richards
23 July 2012
The California Independent Systems Operator (CalISO), the
nonprofit organization that coordinates the state’s electricity market, has
alleged that JPMorgan Chase& Co. manipulated the state’s energy market,
resulting in at least $73 million in improper payments—costs passed along to
the state’s energy consumers.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been
exploited by the Obama administration and both big business parties to hand
over trillions in pension funds and other public assets to the financial
kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our
entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become
a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen
McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“This
was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the
contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013
that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their
CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
OBAMANOMICS
TO SERVE BANKSTERS
AND
GLOBAL BILLIONAIRES
"One of the premier institutions of
big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the
eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout
on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social
unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions
in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."
BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND THE RICH PARTNER WITH TRUMP TO FIGHT …
economic equality.
*
*
"JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who was known as Barack Obama’s
favorite banker and who has been a major donor to
the
Democratic Party, centered his annual letter to shareholders on a
denunciation of socialism."
*
BANKSTER SOCIALISM
Dimon’s bank received tens of billions
of dollars in government bailouts and many billions more from the
Obama administration’s ultra-low interest rate and “quantitative
easing” money-printing policies. He told his shareholders that
“socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption” and “authoritarian
government,” and would be “a disaster for our country.”… UNLESS IT IS
SOCIALISM FOR BANKSTERS AND WALL STREET!
*
"This paved the way for the elevation of
Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling
oligarchy."
*
"The
very fact that the US government officially acknowledges a growth of
popular support for socialism, particularly among the nation’s youth,
testifies to vast changes taking place in the political consciousness of
the working class and the terror this is striking within the ruling
elite. America is, after all, a country where anti-communism was for
the greater part of a century a state-sponsored secular religion. No
ruling class has so ruthlessly sought to exclude socialist
politics from political discourse as the American ruling class."
*
Socialism
haunts the American ruling class In the two months since Donald Trump
vowed in his State of the Union Address that “America will never be a socialist
country,” the right-wing demagogue president and the Republican Party have
embraced anti-socialism as the defining theme of their campaign in the 2020
elections.
Here Are the 2020 Democrats Who Want to
Impeach Trump
Source:
AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
Since Mueller’s press
conference on Wednesday, a total of 12 nominees have called for President
Trump’s impeachment. Here’s the breakdown on where all the 23 nominees stand:
Called
For Impeachment
Cory
Booker: “Robert Mueller’s statement makes it clear: Congress has a
legal and moral obligation to begin impeachment proceedings immediately.”
Pete
Buttigieg: “This is as close to an impeachment referral as it gets.
Robert Mueller could not clear the president, nor could he charge him—so he has
handed the matter to Congress, which alone can act to deliver due process and
accountability.”
Julián
Castro: “I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Congress to open
up impeachment hearings against President Trump.”
Kirsten
Gillibrand: "So far, President Trump has stonewalled Congress. In
doing so, he has left us with only one option: for Congress to begin
impeachment proceedings.”
Kamala
Harris: “What Robert Mueller basically did was return an
impeachment referral. Now it is up to Congress to hold this president
accountable. We need to start impeachment proceedings. It's our constitutional
obligation.”
John
Hickenlooper: “I think we have to begin an impeachment inquiry and that
doesn’t mean we’re going to impeach President Trump tomorrow or maybe ever, but
I think we do have an obligation to follow where the facts lead.”
Wayne
Messam: “I believe the President should be placed under impeachment
proceedings and let the weight of the full report carry out the justice the
American people deserve.”
Seth
Moulton: “Mueller did his job. Now it’s time to do ours.
Impeachment hearings should begin tomorrow.”
Beto O’Rourke: “There must be consequences,
accountability and justice. The only way to ensure that is to begin impeachment
proceedings.”
Tim
Ryan: "I do believe we need to move forward with the
impeachment process... I don't want to. I know what this is going to do to the
country. I take no joy in this at all."
Bernie
Sanders: “This president must be held accountable, and I believe
that the Judiciary Committee should begin impeachment inquiries.”
Elizabeth
Warren: “Mueller’s statement makes clear what those who have read
his report know: It is an impeachment referral, and it’s up to Congress to act.
They should.”
Not
Called For Impeachment
Michael
Bennet: “Let’s let the process go forward and see where it takes
us.”
Joe
Biden: “Congress must do everything in its power to hold this
Administration to account. That is what Congress is doing and should do:
continue to investigate.”
Steve
Bullock: “I think we should have the full
investigations...oversight that’s occurring right now.”
Bill
de Blasio: “I think we should continue the investigations in the
Congress ... and I believe they will eventually lead to impeachment.”
John
Delaney: “If we continue to allow this President to be unchecked
and manipulate the truth, we will forever alter our Democracy for the worse.”
Tulsi
Gabbard: “I don’t think that we should defeat Donald Trump through
impeachment.”
Jay Inslee: “Congress needs
to get to the bottom of what’s going on here. Impeachment should not be off the
table.”
Amy
Klobuchar: “If the House brings the impeachment proceedings before
us, we will deal with them.”
Eric
Swalwell: “I’m confident that he’s going to be removed, whether it’s
by the voters in November 2020 or by Congress. We’re near the end of Donald
Trump.”
Andrew
Yang: “My focus is on beating Donald Trump at the ballot box and
solving the problems that got him elected in the first place.”
Marianne
Williamson: “Really rich when candidates talk
about impeachment as though “This is about doing the right thing and politics
should have nothing to do with it!’ You do realize they’re even saying that has
everything to do with politics, right?”
Calls to impeach
President Trump have been met with stalling by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even
as more
than 50 House Democrats have come out in favor of impeachment.
Adding to this list is House Majority Whip James Clyburn, who on Sunday told
CNN that he believes Trump will eventually be impeached. Pelosi
is hesitant to begin impeachment proceedings as she does not wish to trigger a
political backlash against Democrats, and does not believe that a
Republican-controlled Senate would move to remove Trump after a
Democratic-controlled House impeached him.
No comments:
Post a Comment