Friday, August 2, 2019

GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS INDIFFERENT TO REP. ELIJAH CUMMING'S RAT INFESTED BALTIMORE

Democrat Indifference to Baltimore's Inner-City Decline Harms Minorities



The Democrat political stronghold of Baltimore has experienced squalor and crime for many years due to ineffective policies and indifference shown by many of the city's Democrat politicians.  Unfortunately, the serious problems in Baltimore are found in many inner cities throughout the country.  If Congressman Cummings would work together with President Trump, perhaps they could find effective solutions to the poverty and high crime all too common in the inner city in Baltimore and inner cities throughout America.
One of the few things President Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders agree on is the dismal situation in large parts of Baltimore.  President Trump has mentionedBaltimore's high crime and failing economy, while in 2015, Bernie Sanders referenced the poverty and failure of Baltimore's education system.
When it comes to poverty in Baltimore, both President Trump and Bernie Sanders are correct.  Baltimore has a very high poverty rate.  According to the U.S. Census, in 2017, the official poverty rate in the United States was 12.3%, while Maryland had a poverty rate of 9.3%.  In contrast, the poverty rate in the city of Baltimore was a staggering 22.4%.  According to a 2014 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, there is a strong correlation between poverty and violent crime, with those in households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) having over twice the rate of violent victimization as compared to high-income households.
A 2017 New York University report notes that there is a massive wealth disparity between blacks and whites in Baltimore, with a median household income of $33,801 for a black family as compared to $62,751 for a white family.  The U.S. Census makes clear that Baltimore is suffering, with a 2017 median household income of $46,641 and a per capita income of $28,488 (with an average of 2.48 people per household).  For generations, Democrat politicians in Baltimore have routinely failed their constituency, particularly their black constituents.
Worse yet, poverty is also correlated with significantly lower life spans.  According to the Baltimore Health Department in 2017, there is a 20-year gap in the life expectancy between the poor and wealthy neighborhoods of Baltimore.  In addition, a 2015 article in the Washington Post (echoed on Twitter by Bernie Sanders) reported that an astounding 14 Baltimore neighborhoods have shorter life expectancies than in North Korea.
President Trump was right to point out that Baltimore is dangerous.  Allstateranks Baltimore as the most dangerous of 200 U.S. cities for driving.  According to a Pew research article based on data from the FBI, in 2017, Baltimore had the second highest murder rate of any U.S. city with 55.8 per 100,000 residents, with St. Louis having the highest rate of 66.1 per 100,000 residents.  For comparison, Detroit, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge placed third, fourth, and fifth, respectively, with respective rates of 39.8, 39.5, and 38.3 out of 100,000 residents, far eclipsed by Baltimore.  Even worse, for better perspective, Baltimore's homicide rate is about 10.5 times the national average of 5.3 murders per 100,000 residents in 2017.
In October 2016, after a year-long investigation, the Baltimore Sun reported that "gun violence in Baltimore — and in cities across the nation — is concentrated in poor, predominantly black areas," adding that in the previous 5 years, 80% of Baltimore's homicides occurred in one quarter of Baltimore's neighborhoods.  A comparison of data on Baltimore's income by neighborhood and homicide rates by neighborhood bears out the connection between poverty and high homicide rates.  That would mean that in the most dangerous Baltimore neighborhoods, there is a substantially higher murder rate than the city average.
While Baltimore's high poverty rate — twice the national average — may account for a doubling in violent crime, the city fares so much worse than that.  In 2014, according to the federal government's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics, there was also a whopping 1,338.5 acts of violent crime per 100,000 residents in Baltimore.  Baltimore health officials estimate that as few as 0.5% of Baltimore's population is responsible for most of the violence.   This means that the overwhelming majority of residents in those Baltimore neighborhoods are innocent but must still put up with the high crime rate.
In 2014, Baltimore's homicide rate was 33.8 per 100,000 residents, which spiked by 21.5% to 55.4 per 100,000 residents in 2015.  A key driver in the spike in the murder rate in Baltimore was the threat of legal prosecution of police by the Obama administration.  Another driver was public outcry, involving protests and riots, in the wake of the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who fell into a coma and later died after being placed in a police van without a seatbelt.  USA Today reported that the result was a steep drop-off in police enforcement of crime and a spike in murders.  Increased usage of illegal drugs also leads to an increase in violent crime.  In 1999, Congressman Cummings made it clear that drugs are a major problem in Baltimore, referring to his district as a "drug-infested area."
Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders was correct to note that Baltimore's education system is failing its students.  According to a 2011 article in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore's education budget is $1.2 billion with an average of $15,564 per pupil, the fourth highest per student expenditure out of the largest 100 school districts nationwide.  However, only 15 of Baltimore City's 141 schools met federally mandated progress goals in reading and math.  In 2017, "Project Baltimore"found that one third of Baltimore's high schools had zero students proficient in math.  According to a 2018 article in the Baltimore Sun:
Baltimore City students scored near the bottom in reading and math compared to children in other cities and large urban areas on an important national assessment given in 2017.  In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced.  In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient and in eighth-grade math 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education.  That put Baltimore ahead of only Detroit and Cleveland, and sometimes ahead of Milwaukee and Fresno, Calif. — areas of the country that also suffer from high poverty and crime.
The bigger picture painted by these data is that poverty and drugs are a couple of the major drivers of high crime, where most of the crime is committed by a small minority of the population.  Aside from the crime rate, shorter life span and the high abortion rate linked to poverty further eviscerate inner city communities. 
President Trump has proven that he is interested in lifting up low-income areas of the country with opportunity zones designed to spur massive investment in these communities.  President Trump is also working to combat drugs, with particular emphasis on opioids, one of the drivers of high crime.  Unemployment is continuing to reach new lows under President Trump, including for black Americans.  It is high time for Democrats to join President Trump in a bipartisan manner to help disadvantaged communities in an effective way, not merely by throwing more money into the ineffective programs that Democrats have thus far advanced.
President Trump was correct to shine the national spotlight on Baltimore's woes, as decades of indifference and bad policy have proven ineffective in combating serious problems that must be addressed.  It is high time for Democrats to choose to shun indifference and failed policy rather than to shun President Trump and Republicans.  This can be a game-changer, benefiting disadvantaged Americans of all backgrounds and all political persuasions, and can deliver the salvation and freedom desperately desired and all too long denied.


Baltimore's Battered Face




West Baltimore is struggling to put on a happy face for the world in light of the controversy stirred by President Donald Trump. It is not easy and the grim reality is that the city is, and has been for decades, in a state of steady decline and decay. The descriptions of rats, violent crime, and urban blight are not hyperbole, but tragic truth.  
Democratic politicians and the liberal media went after the president with the Twitter hashtag #wearebaltimore, created to incite you to empathize with Baltimore as an individual or a group of individuals. So let’s take this anthropomorphic description of the city one step further. 
Baltimore has missing teeth, knocked out from beatings or rotted from years of decay. It is covered with scars, new and old, from stabbings, gunshots, and beatdowns. Baltimore has battered and broken facial bones, shadowing sucker-punched black eyes gazing out with a dull stare, hardened by endless dependency.
The missing teeth compare with rows of houses where some are occupied but many are not. There are many sections of West Baltimore where occupied homes are flanked on either side by abandoned and condemned buildings. TheBaltimore Sun chronicled the problem in a revealing article earlier this year, reporting that Baltimore has over 17,000 vacant houses and is struggling to get the problem under control. Where is Rep. Elijah Cummings? His silence is ear-shattering. My family has owned residential property in the Bolton Hill area of Rep. Cummings' district for more than 30 years and I am apprehensive that the continued neglect of the city will further metastasize and destroy my family's investment, just as it's destroyed that of other families.
Old scars and fresh wounds are evident to casual observers. Baltimore city has the highest murder rate among America’s big cities -- over 300 homicides each year. The Sun stated in September, 2018, that this “cycle of violence has gripped the city since 2015,” but the TV series “The Wire” which premiered in 2002, accurately depicted this “cycle of violence” in Baltimore much earlier. 
The broken and battered face of Baltimore reflects the city’s abundance of criminals, but many of the broken facial bones are the result of hard kicks and slams from a few corrupt officers in the Baltimore Police Department. In June, Arthur Williams, a former Baltimore police officer, was convicted of second-degree assault and misconduct for beating a citizen on the street. In 2014, Baltimore Officer Vincent E. Cosom Jr. was caught on a surveillance camerasucker-punching a citizen at a bus stop and was charged with assault and perjury.
The Baltimore Sun summarized the problem in the headline for its December 20, 2018 report,  “Corruption, turnover, violence: Baltimore Police Department faced many problems in 2018.” I strongly support law enforcement and know the Thin Blue Line stands between citizens and the anarchy and chaos of crime. But there are a few police in Baltimore who should not be in uniform and we need to recognize that in the totality of the problem. 
The dull stare of the city is hardened by Baltimoreans who are capable of working but choose to rely on government subsidies and perpetual welfare. We are a generous people who want to help our neighbors, and we do. But the ongoing abuse of public services destroys the hope of the human spirit and institutionalizes dependency. 
We see the greatest abuses from our elected officials in Baltimore city. Former mayor Shelia Dixon was fired for stealing Christmas gift cards from the city’s needy. Her successor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, ordered police to give “space” to rioters and looters to destroy parts of Baltimore during the 2015 riots. Last May, Mayor Catherine Pugh resigned amid a kickback scandal

And there’s Rep. Cummings, whose 23 years in Congress have brought only continued decay and nothingness. These and other liberal Democrats have demoralized the people of Baltimore and they are fleeing; Baltimore city has lost about 40% of its population since the 1960s. 

You can’t blame this on President Trump. He is guilty of the sin of unvarnished observation, but responsibility for this lies with Democrats who have controlled Baltimore city for decades. The last Republican mayor in Baltimore city wasTheodore McKeldin, who served when Lyndon Johnson was president. More than 50 years of liberal tyranny and oppression has successfully brought about a twisted dystopian reality in Baltimore and the world’s eyes are now on us. But it’s not because of President Trump; it’s because a half-century of liberal neglect gave the world something to look at, and it’s not pretty. 
Daren Williams is a lifelong resident of Baltimore County, Maryland, and a member of the New Journey Advisory Board.


Trump Exposes the Real Rats



The score is three to one.
President Trump leads Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in being publicly called a “racist” in the past week.
Of course, Trump has been called all kinds of names since his successful 2016 campaign. But slurs don’t stick in the presence of truth.  And Trump keeps winning. 
But if Trump and Republican Party want to win in 2020 and beyond, they need to continue fearlessly addressing the issue of race and urban decay in all its painful ugliness.
The latest news cycle has Trump being called a “racist” for insulting a 13-term black congressman.
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland is one of many hypocritical Dems in need of a come-to-Jesus moment.  And Trump brought him to church.
For weeks if not months, Cummings and his comrades have been crying crocodile tears over alleged inhumane conditions for children being held by border control along our Southern border.
“None of us would have our children in that position,” Cummings screamed at the head of border control in a House hearing.  “They are human beings.”  
Cummings was upset by reports of children being held in cages, without showers and sleeping in their own feces.  Cummings emotional outburst on July 19 may have prompted Trump to take a swing back.
Trump called him a “brutal bully” and tweeted a reminded to Cummings about the condition of his own congressional district. 
“The border is clean, efficient & well-run, just very crowded. Cumming district is a disgusting rat and rodent infested mess,” tweeted the President at 4:14 AM.  (Does the President ever sleep?)
Trump went further to say that Cummings should address the issues in his own district, which he described as a “very dangerous and filthy place.”
Every news outlet pounced, calling Trump a racist.  One CNN commentator wastriggered to tears by the word “infested” which, he said, Trump uses only for Black people.  
These sanctimonious crybabies can call “racism” all day long.  But the truth prevails.
Baltimore ranks among the top ten most rat-infested cities in America, according to an annual nationwide study done by Orkin Pest Control.   Of course, all of the top ten, including Dallas-Fort Worth, are run by Democratic regimes.
I have witnessed piles of garbage, dead animals, old furniture, and rotting food in these neglected ghettos.  Part of the rat problem stems from the lack of sanitation services provided in Baltimore and other inner-city neighborhoods.  
Even Baltimore’s former mayor said her city smelled of rats and dead animals in front of TV cameras.  Catherine Pugh (no pun intended) would later have to resign for corrupt behavior. The current mayor of Baltimore, Jack Young, challenged Trump to send federal assistance.  Instead of funds, Trump should send a federal investigation. 
Shamefully, Democrats have maintained Cummings’ district since 1953 and nothing has gotten any better for black Baltimoreans.
Instead, things are actually worse.  Baltimore is ranked as one of the most violent cities in the nation.  The poverty rate is extremely high at 23.8 percent with 65 percent of the residents being African-American.
According tostatistica.com, the infant mortality rate in Mexico in 2017 is 11.5 per one thousand live births.  The City of Baltimore has a 12.2 infant mortality rate, according to the Maryland department of health in 2017.  
The important point is that Mexico's infant mortality rate is decreasing over the past 10 years while blacks in Baltimore are dying in infancy at an alarming rate.
Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was recently called a “racist’ by the socialist Squad of her party, defended Cummings as a “champion in the Congress and the country for civil rights and economic justice.”
How can there be an increase of civil rights and economic justice with the statistics listed above?
Cummings responded:
"Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors.” 
Neighbors?  Cummings certainly doesn’t live in the squalid and fetid city which he has represented since 1996.  He lives among the many wealthy black Balitmoreans.
Maryland has some of the most affluent black communities in the country. Prince George’s County is 63 percent black with a median annual income of over $110,000.  This educated and upwardly-mobile population would be a great place to encourage support for more conservative policies.  Sadly, only 8.4 percent of the county voted Republican in 2016.
But a far more urgent need is outreach to the rat-invested American inner cities.  Yes, Baltimore is full of rats, but some of those rats are on two legs. They are walking the streets doing voter registration en masse and pushing a new progressive collectivist socialist message.  These Soros-funded activists are on a mission to maintain the Black vote at any cost.  
As an independent journalist covering urban issues, I find myself in these nasty neighborhoods.  I see the liberal activists but I also hear the local folks openly support Trump’s economic success and immigration policy. 
In a pawnshop in Miami I heard several laborers saying they don’t care what people say about Trump.  They had just gotten construction jobs working at a local convention center, which they attributed to the Trump economy.
“We’ve been here 400 years,” yelled a man in a parking lot in front of Winn Dixie supermarket in Liberty City.  “Why do they get to come over the border and take our jobs!”
This enterprising man was selling mangoes out of a shopping cart to earn his daily bread. 
If we are to become one American people again, those enterprising and politically-aware urban residents need to be recognized.  They should not be forgotten because of their zip code nor their race. Even the worst communities can be restored, as well as the human beings within them. 
Urban-dwelling Americans simply need to be shown that they really don’t deserve the rats who represent them.
And President Trump is doing just that.
K. Barrett Bilali is an independent journalist based in South Florida and Rabat, Morocco.  He has been published in the Urban News Service, U.S. News and World Report and Quartz Africa.




Donald Trump: ‘Really Bad News’ Someone Broke into Baltimore House of Elijah Cummings

President Trump and Rep. Elijah Cummings. (Photos: Jabin Botsford/Washington Post via Getty Images; Salwan Georges/Washington Post via Getty Images)
Getty Images
1:20

President Donald Trump commented it was “really bad news” someone broke into the Baltimore house of Rep. Elijah Cummings early Saturday morning.

“Really bad news!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!”
The break-in took place several hours before Trump first criticized Cummings on Twitter on Saturday morning.
Trump accused Cummings of acting as a “brutal bully” to border patrol, pointing out that his Baltimore district was “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than government border facilities.
“His district is considered the Worst in the USA,” Trump wrote, calling it a “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess.”
“Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States,” he wrote. “No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!”
It is unclear where Cummings was on Saturday, but a spokesman told the Associated Pressthat he was in Baltimore on Monday.
Police are still investigating the incident, as there are reportedly no suspects in the case.












HOW MUCH WOULD YOU BET THAT THIS CLOWN WOULD VOTE FOR OBAMA ALL OVER AGAIN???


Charles Barkley Says Black People Who Vote for Democratic Party Are ‘Still Poor’

August 1, 2019 Updated: August 1, 2019


Charles Barkley, a former NBA star and now an NBA analyst on TNT, said after the Democratic presidential candidate debate on July 30 that political parties have been neglecting economic opportunities for black Americans. He also added that most black people he knows who have always voted Democratic are “still poor.”
In 2017, Barkley remarked that Democrats have “taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time,” and that “this is a wakeup call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.”
When Barkley was asked on July 30 whether he felt that “it’s different this time around,” he replied, “I do not.”
“I think all politicians take black folks for granted,” he told a Yahoo News reporter at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan, after the debate. “They talk to black folks every four years, and that’s about it, and then do nothing about it.”
“And both parties suck in that aspect, and that is not a Republican or Democratic thing, not a liberal or conservative thing. It’s an economic thing. Economic opportunity. And that’s what both parties’ been neglecting, especially the Democratic Party,” Barkley continued.
“Every black person I know has always voted Democratic, and with the exception of a few guys who can play sports, all those people are still poor,” he added.

Charles Barkley came into the spin room for a bit.
He likes Julián Castro.
Said both parties take black voters for granted.









Embedded video




Earlier in the interview, Barkley said that his top two choices so far are two Democrats: former Obama Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro; or South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. But he hasn’t made a formal choice “because I’m not sure if they’d get enough traction to be counted.”
The Yahoo News reporter followed up Barkley’s comments on black votes for Democrats with the question, “Whenever people say [President Donald Trump]’s racist he says black unemployment is at a record low. Do you think he’s a racist?”
Barkley responded, “I’m leery of calling people racist. He said some things that could be construed as racist. Some things he said are very wrong and flagrant. But I’m always leery of calling people racist. There’s some things he says that really need to be—especially when he has an opportunity to denounce white nationalism and things like that. He could do a much better job.”
Black voters constitute about 20 percent of all Democratic voters, according to 2018 data from the Pew Research Center, and they are known to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
Larry Elder, an attorney, best-selling author, and talk show host told The Epoch Times in February that he believes black people continue to vote for the Democratic Party due to the perception that racism continues to be a significant problem in the country.
“[W]e constantly hear about racism and racial injustice and those kinds of things because the Democratic Party needs black people to remain angry,” he said.
“Because the Democratic Party has not won the white vote since 1964. Blacks vote often around 95 percent or so for the Democratic Party, and the primary reason blacks pull the lever for the Democratic Party is this perception that racism remains a major problem in America,” he added.
Elder, who is also a contributor to The Epoch Times, noted that there were some points about the Democratic Party that some black Americans may not be aware of.
“Most black voters, by the way, have no idea about the racist history of the Democratic Party,” he said. “I didn’t know when I was in high school that Democrats founded the [Ku Klux] Klan.
“I didn’t know when I was in high school that Democrats voted against a 13th amendment that freed the slaves, the 14th Amendment they gave slaves citizenship, the 15th Amendment that at least on paper gave slaves the right to vote. Democrats voted against all of that stuff.
“I didn’t know when I was in high school that more Republicans, as a percentage of the party, voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats,” he said.
Elder said racism is not the most pressing issue for black Americans today.
“The number-one problem facing black America today is not racism,” he said. “The number-one problem is the growing number of black kids who are raised without fathers.”
Among black Americans, approximately 72 percent of children live with a single parent, most often the mother. Compared to those who grow up in intact homes, children from single-parent households are twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school, and more than twice as likely to be arrested for juvenile crime.
“Barack Obama said a kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, 20 times more likely to end up in jail. That is far and away the biggest problem facing this country,” Elder said.
Candace Owens, an American conservative commentator and political activist, told The Epoch Times in July that the core of the Democratic platform is focused on having people believe they have been oppressed and victimized.
“We have been sold and administered a victim mentality to our own detriment. And we were sold that by the left, by the Democrat Party. … We’ve been manipulated by the conversation about racism for so long,” Owens said.
Owens also believes that the biggest issue facing black America today isn’t racism but the lack of black fathers in the home.
Irene Luo contributed to this report.
Follow Mimi on Twitter: @MimiNguyenLy

West Baltimore: Death, Drugs, and Empty Homes

Residents talk about the culture of danger and crime, as well as slivers of hope
July 31, 2019 Updated: August 1, 2019


BALTIMORE—It could hardly feel more hip in downtown Baltimore, with the pedestrian bridges arching from pier to pier of the Inner Harbor, strewn with millennial mainstays such as Whole Foods, Shake Shack, and The Cheesecake Factory, overseen by the giant neon lights of the Hard Rock Cafe and traversed by sharp-dressed young men and women on app-rented electric scooters.
However, it’s only a 10-minute bus ride westward to one of the most depressed areas in America. There’s no buzz here. No scooters. In fact, on some blocks, there’s barely a living soul.
“You got to be really strong here,” said Danny (not his real name), an owner of a small grocery store in one of the most notorious West Baltimore neighborhoods.
Some blocks away, in the middle of the day, a man is sitting on the stairs in front of one of the row houses, thousands of which stand empty and neglected, as the city bleeds residents. He said if somebody stands there and talks to him, police think he’s selling drugs.
A man several blocks away intimated that he used to be a drug dealer. He said youth in the area are going ”crazy” because the government shut down recreation facilities long ago. Everybody used to comingle at those places, he said, and people had to behave themselves if they didn’t want to be kicked out. That actually helped people get along.
Now, he said, people are just depressed. Youth with nothing to do are killing each other. It was also a bad idea, he said, to combine elementary and middle schools, exposing younger children to bad influences from teenagers.











Women walk past a sign with a message to end gun violence in the Sandtown neighborhood of West Baltimore on Aug. 8, 2017. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

The government is more interested in giving opportunities to new immigrants than helping the people already here, he said. A few other locals expressed a similar sentiment.
Several blocks away, two young men, perhaps 18 years old, stood on a street corner with a younger boy, perhaps 13. It wasn’t clear what they were talking about, but it seemed one of the older ones was chastising the boy, telling him to work harder. A bunch of cash in the young man’s hand offered a clue. Danny explained that some young adults are making younger boys sell drugs for them, since the young ones are likely to get more lenient treatment when busted. He didn’t want his name published for fear of retaliation.
Three times somebody has tried to break into his store. Once, he punched a man who was trying to steal from him. The man left, called the police, and Danny was almost arrested himself.
“The city, they don’t do nothing. Not even the cops. Instead of helping you, they’re against you,” he said.
He showed a trash-strewn area behind his store used by drug addicts. Pointing to the debris on the ground, he explained that the small pieces of glass are crack cocaine vials. The small ones go for $10 each, the larger ones for $20—apparently common knowledge for a small business owner in the area.











Trash on a street in West Baltimore, Md., on July 30, 2019. (Petr Svab/The Epoch Times)

“I don’t like it here,” he said, his eyes welling with tears as he remembered his family that he left behind years ago in another city, another state.
Still, he has hope.

Crime in Baltimore

The city has long had a crime problem, but it was gradually getting better. In 2011, it saw 197 homicides—a shocking number given its modest size, but still the lowest since 1977.
That all changed on April 12, 2015. Six police officers failed to secure Freddie Gray, 25, in the back of a police van after his arrest for illegal knife possession. Gray’s neck was broken during the ride to the police station. A week later, shortly before Gray died at a hospital, activists gathered to protest in front of the police station. His name was used to bolster the narrative that police were killing black people out of racial prejudice on a national scale—an assertion that’s disputed by research.
In the weeks ahead, the protests escalated into riots. More than a dozen police officers were injured; some stores were looted and burned. Maryland Gov. Lawrence Hogan deployed the National Guard to the city and, for several days, imposed a curfew. The protests died down after State Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that the officers involved would be charged.
But something in the city changed. Homicides jumped from 15 in March to 22 in April and a whopping 42 in May, remaining unusually high thereafter. The body count reached 344 in 2015—a number only surpassed by the record year of 1993.
More recently, city leaders made a big deal of the crime wave’s abating in 2018, but the numbers are up again this year, on par with 2015’s carnage. Baltimore is, hands down, the most violent city with a population above 500,000.
Not all of Baltimore is like this, though. Many areas in the south, east, and north of the city are virtually free of such lawlessness.
On the contrary, the homicide rate in the West Baltimore zip code, with only about 25,000 residents, was 134.7 per 100,000 in 2018—more than 25 times the national average. With 25 slayings this year so far, the area is on pace for yet another record.
The most affected neighborhoods appear to be Carrollton Ridge (four homicides this year) and Franklin Square (five homicides) in the west and Sandtown-Winchester (six slayings this year) in the northwest.

Police

Much of the recent crime wave has been blamed on the police disengaging, jaded by a lack of support from city leadership. They still respond to 911 calls, but don’t go out of their way to intervene as much as before.
“What officers are doing is, they’re just driving looking forward,” Kevin Forrester, a retired Baltimore detective, told the USA Today in 2017. “They’ve got horse blinders on.”
After Gray’s death, the Obama Justice Department forced the city into a consent decree (pdf) that, among other things, demanded more detailed paperwork for every stop-and-frisk by the officers. It also forbade them from using only “boilerplate” language, such as “proximity to the scene of suspected or reported crimes” in the paperwork. Arrests for low-level crimes, such as disorderly conduct, now must be cleared with a supervisor first, “unless not practicable.”
The concern was that officers were stopping and arresting people for no good reason. It’s not clear, though, how much the increased administrative burden helped.
Moreover, training on how to conduct and document stops and arrests in line with the decree has only been planned for this year. The more substantive reforms, such as moving toward community policing, are set to begin next year or even further in the future. So far, it seems officers are just avoiding the paperwork by conducting fewer stops and arrests.











A person walks past a police car in Baltimore, Md., on July 28, 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Michael Harrison, who has been police commissioner since March, is the fourth person in the role since the beginning of 2018. He’s a veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, which he headed during that city’s own consent decree process.
He recently announced a “crime plan” for Baltimore that calls for focusing on areas where violent crime is concentrated, checking in more frequently with local businesses, engaging more with the community, cutting response time to a maximum of 10 minutes, and more.
The local police union slammed the plan as untenable. “There are not enough Officers to even respond to the number of calls to 911,” Sgt. Mike Mancuso, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3, said in a July 30 statement.
Since 2017, the department has lost more than 400 officers and other staff. That’s a major hit for a 3,000-strong agency.
“Any crime plan must begin with the stark reality of the current resources available, not the resources that are desired,” Mancuso said. “Those resources must certainly include Police Officers!”

Deeper Causes

It goes without saying that Baltimore’s problems go way beyond an understaffed police department. As with Chicago, the breeding ground for the violence in Baltimore was paradoxically fertilized by the arrests of prominent gang leaders in the past decade, according to Patrick Burke, a reporter and expert on gang violence. The perception of lawlessness during the 2015 riots then emboldened the gangs’ underlings to take matters into their own hands. With the top-down control dissolved, profit and personal grudges took priority as they went on to try and kill their foes. The downward spiral of vengeance ensued.
What makes the youth join gangs in the first place? Depression, isolation, and bad incentives, it seems. There’s really not much to do for young people in the city’s most troubled neighborhoods. Sports centers and hobby clubs are few. Schools don’t provide much hope, either. Less than 18 percent of Baltimore public school students are proficient in math. Only about 25 percent are proficient in English by the time they get to high school. (pdf).











A man sleeps on a bench in downtown Baltimore, Md., on July 28, 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Many children in the neighborhood are “not guided,” Danny said. “Nobody’s investing in them.”
The culture of gangs and drugs, on the other hand, is already generational and the opportunities abound.
The surroundings aren’t a pretty sight, either.

Empty Homes

The city has more than 16,000 uninhabitable houses, concentrated in the crime-ridden areas. Often decrepit eyesores, the deserted century-old row houses lend their blocks a bleak, forsaken air. They add to the crime too—a refuge to drug addicts, a hideout for criminals. And then there’s the fire hazard. The homeless often sneak in and use candles. While they tend not to care much for fire safety, they care even less while on drugs.
Fires abound, said David, a 15-year veteran of the city’s fire department, who declined to provide his last name. There’s been an arsonist-at-large in the area for a year as well, David said. Just a few days ago, that person set 11 vacant houses on fire in one night. Moreover, battling the blazes in these buildings is extra dangerous for the firefighters and injuries are common, he said. Just recently, a colleague of his was buried under a collapsed ceiling.
In the past, Baltimore’s declining population has been blamed on blockbusting real estate schemes, as well as the collapse of its steel industry and manufacturing. But those trains have long departed. Today, the residents just seem to be voting with their feet.











Buildings on a street in west Baltimore, Md., on July 30, 2019. (Petr Svab/The Epoch Times)

What to do about the empty houses then? “Fix them up and put people in them,” one of the locals suggested. But it’s not that simple.
Houses in the neighborhood are already dirt-cheap, going for as little as $6,000 for those that need substantial repairs. But rents are still surprisingly high, around $1,000 a month or more, utilities not included. Locals largely rent. With their credit low or nonexistent, they can’t quite put the money together to buy a home. And if they do, they’d rather move to the safer suburbs. Another factor is that the city’s property tax is more than twice as high as in surrounding counties and even further above the rest of the state, giving yet more incentive to leave to anybody lucky enough to climb into the middle class.
There are millennials moving in, interested in the urban lifestyle, but they huddle around the downtown area, where their jobs are.

Islands of Hope

Danny believes the city will turn around. Even his neighborhood, eventually.
“It’s getting better, but it takes time,” he said. “It’s going to be like Boston within maybe five years.”
He pointed to big players such as John Hopkins Hospital and the Maryland Institute College of Art that are buying and fixing real estate around their campuses. But they are expected to rent to their own staff, rather than locals. It’s also not clear whether the rejuvenation efforts will reach Danny’s neighborhood in the foreseeable future.
Some of the most dangerous people in the area are gone too, Danny said. But that’s because they either moved, went to prison, or were killed, he added.
To fix the fabric of the community itself is a different story. That’s not to say there aren’t people trying, though. The Wilkens Ave. Mennonite Church has run a food donation program for the past three years; a farmer from Pennsylvania drives in a truck of fruit and vegetables every week and locals pay $20 for the whole season or need to volunteer three times to get the food. Rather than dependency, the initiative promotes commitment and gratitude, not to mention a healthier diet.
The church has run a school too. It started in the 1990s to take in some of the children who were, at the time, often dropping out after sixth grade. It costs just $25 a month, due to outside donations. Here, the teachers care about the children learning, while at a public school, they didn’t, one of the students said.
The government is helping too, here and there. It tears down some of the worst abandoned houses, for instance. But it’s a months-long process. For the most part, locals were under the impression that City Hall was doing nothing for them.
One of the local prostitutes who roam the streets around the church once attended its service. Linda Johnson, a longtime member of the church, felt a calling to talk to her. She got to know the girl and eventually took her in. She fed her, cared for her, even performed an exorcism for the girl. After nine months, she left. Then later, she returned to the church to say thank you. She looked healthy and said she was able to get her children back.
“You need to acknowledge people,” Johnson said. “They’re worth something.”
Follow Petr on Twitter: @petrsvab












Charles Barkley Says Voting Democrat Has Not Elevated Black People

Charles Barkley
Getty Images
2:34

Broadcaster and former NBA star Charles Barkley slammed the Democrat Party in the wake of Tuesday’s debates, saying that the party has done little to elevate most blacks in America.

The former Phoenix Suns star was in the audience during the July 30 Democrat presidential debates, but the former player was not impressed by what he saw telling reporters that “every black person I know has always voted Democratic,” but most are “still poor” despite that support.
Barkley went on to slam the Democrats for ignoring minorities, saying, “It’s an economic thing, and that’s what both parties have been neglecting, especially the Democratic Party,” according to Yahoo News.
“Every black person I know has always voted Democratic, and with the exception of a few guys who can play sports, all those people are still poor,” Barkley continued.
The TNT commentator added that he said the same thing in 2017 and no progress has occurred.
Despite the Democrat’s failure, Barkley exclaimed that both parties “suck” at delivering for black voters.
“I think all politicians take black folks for granted. They talk to black folks every four years, and that’s about it and then do nothing about it. Both parties suck in that aspect,” he added.
The former player was also not a fan of the debate format.
“You can’t really judge anybody by seeing them on television, especially when you’ve got 20 people. Nobody gets a word in edgewise. That’s really unfortunate,” he said.
Barkley thought that his network could handle the debates better than CNN.
“We can do a much better job [of the debates], especially CNN,” he said. “We could do a much better job of doing like an individual night where we have plenty of time.”
But after saying that, Barkley joked that he hoped his boss, Jeff Zucker, who was standing only a few feet away, would not fire him for the comments.
BLOG: BOTH JULIAN CASTRO

AND PETE BUTTIGIEG ARE 

FOR AMNESTY AND MORE 

JOBS FOR "CHEAP" LABOR 

ILLEGALS... WHO TAKE 

JOBS FROM BLACK  

AMERICANS!!!
As far as which candidate he favored, Barkley ultimately suggested was leaning toward supporting either former Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro or South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
One thing he was not fond of was the constant proclamations from Democrats that Donald Trump is a racist.
“‘I’m leery of calling people ‘racist.’ He says some things that can be construed as ‘racist.’ Some things he’s said are very wrong and flagrant,” Barkley insisted.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.


Democrats Promise to 

Welcome Illegal 

Migrants ‘Like One of 

Our Own’








TIJUANA, MEXICO - JANUARY 06: Honduran migrants climb over the U.S.-Mexico border fence along on January 6, 2019 in Tijuana, Mexico. The U.S government is going into the third week of a partial shutdown with Republicans and Democrats at odds on agreeing with President Donald Trump's demands for more money …
Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images
4:13

Democrats in the July 30 CNN Democrat debate promised to welcome foreign migrants, and none mentioned migrants’ economic damage to blue-collar Americans’ wages and rents.

“Immigrants don’t diminish America, they are America,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who told Fox News in February 2019 that “we need workers” because unemployment was too low for business groups. “We have people all over the country who simply want to work and obey the law,” she said about the nation’s population of illegal immigrants. 
We need to expand legal immigration,” said Sen. Liz Warren. “We need to create a path for citizenship, not just for ‘dreamers’ but for grandmas, and for people who have worked in the farms and students who have overstayed their visas.”
She reaffirmed her promise to end decriminalization of illegal migration: “We cannot make it a crime when someone comes here.”
Migrants are Americans and should not be criminalized, argued Montana Gov. Steve Bullock. “You don’t have to decriminalize everything [but] what you have to do is have a president in there with the judgment and decency to treat someone who comes to the border like one of our own,” he said. 
“If [migrants] are seeking asylum, of course, we want to welcome them. We’re a strong enough country to be able to welcome them,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan. 
“Americans wants comprehensive immigration reform … [with] protections for ‘Dreamers,’ [and] making sure we have a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented,” claimed Pete Buttigieg, using the establishment’s code phrase for mass amnesty.  
Buttigieg also reaffirmed his promise to decriminalize illegal migration, saying: “If fraud is involved, that is suitable for the criminal statute — if not, then it should be handled under civil law.”
His White House would stop “criminally prosecuting families and children for seeking asylum and refuge,” promised Beto O’Rourke. “Asylum” is a legal term, complete with legal tests and deportation rules, but the term “refuge” suggests O’Rourke is making an open-ended promise of welcome. 
O’Rourke also promised to decriminalize illegal migration: “I expect people who come here to follow our laws, and we reserve the right to prosecute them if they do not.”
“If a mother and a child walk thousands of miles on a dangerous path, in my view, they are not criminals,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. “They are people fleeing violence.”
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes roughly 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers and spouses — plus roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housingcosts, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

Democrat Sen. Schumer gives thumbs-up to detained illegals, urges all migrants be sent to Catholic Charities, then urges more border loopholes. Yet in NY, employers still are not raising wages to compete for US workers amid the flood of migrant labor. http://bit.ly/30NbwCE 














2020 ElectionImmigrationPoliticsAmerican jobsDemocrat debateillegal immigration




Stacey Dash: Obama 'Bamboozled' Us - BUT THEN THAT'S WHAT PSYCHOPATHS DO!

AFTER DESTROYING THE DEMOCRAT PARTY and the AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, OBAMA NOW VOWS TO BUILD A PRO-MUSLIM DICTATORSHIP FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS AND OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS.



Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media. 

*

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First” agenda.

AMERICA'S SORRY STATE


“And the causes are complicated. A big part of the story is the ascendency of corporate America at the same time that Americancommunities were being defenestrated.”

It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards.

America's Sorry State


11:50 AM, MAR 16, 2017 | By JONATHAN V. LAST
  
Art Credit: Thomas Fluharty
A few years ago I wrote a piece where I asked whether or the '00s had been worse than the '70s. At the time, I thought it was a close call, one that could go either way. Today, I'm not so sure.
I'd point you to two recent pieces that you simply have to read in order to understand America as it exists now. The first is by my colleague Christopher Caldwell, writing about the opioid epidemic over at First Things. It's an amazing, magisterial piece.
In taking full measure of where we are and how we got here, Caldwell argues that the scope of the problem we face is difficult to fully comprehend:
Salisbury, Massachusetts (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1638, and the opium crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The town lost one young person in the decade-long Vietnam War. It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years. Last summer, Huntington, West Virginia (pop. 49,000), saw twenty-eight overdoses in four hours. Episodes like these played a role in the decline in U.S. life expectancy in 2015. The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises. . . .

A heroin scourge in America's housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000. The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his soul ballad "Freddie's Dead." The crack epidemic of the mid- to late 1980s was worse, with a death rate reaching almost two per 100,000. George H. W. Bush declared war on drugs. The present opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 people per 100,000, and that is without the fentanyl-impacted statistics from 2016. In some states it is far worse: over thirty per 100,000 in New Hampshire and over forty in West Virginia.

And the causes are complicated. A big part of the story is the 
ascendency of corporate America at the same time that American  communities were being defenestrated. 

But it also has something to do with a culture that can't say no to anything, that doesn't believe in taboo, that feels the need to excuse and expunge and relieve people of agency.

 Again, go read Caldwell's piece. It's amazing.

The other blockbuster essay comes from my friend Nick Eberstadt in the new issue of Commentary.(And by the by, if you haven't subscribed to Commentary, you should. It's a truly great magazine.) In "Our Miserable 21st Century" Eberstadt takes a more general, 30,000-foot view of modern America. He examines reams of data—on finances, income, health, social mobility, and more—and the picture he paints is one of a nation in serious trouble. Decline, even.

Take economic growth: Economists now 
believe that the potential growth rate for the 
United States—that is, the rate at which the economy would grow at full employment—is  just 1.7 percent. Which means that the long-term growth rate is under 1 percent. The work rates for the population have similarly been revised downward. The rosy unemployment numbers you hear on the news are based on the assumption that the percentage of Americans in the labor force will never again be as high as it was in 2001. 
BLOG: DURING OBAMA'S EIGHT YEARS of OPEN BORDERS, 2/3 OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN OR ILLEGALS!

Here's Eberstadt:

As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation's work rate today were back  up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers.

They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

What's worse, this collapse of work post-2000 has coincided with an explosion of wealth for the wealth-holders.

There's no way for these opposing trends to lead to either economic or cultural or political stability.

It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards. Where geographic mobility is in its third straight decade of decline and social mobility is collapsing, too. In 1977, the average 30-year-old was almost a sure bet to be earning more money than his parents were making at the same age—he had an 86 percent chance. Today, his odds are just about even-money—51 percent.

Like I said, go read Eberstadt's sensational piece. This is the America of 2017. Donald Trump isn't Reagan. And morning isn't coming.

UNDER BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA, TWO-THIRDS OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL.



Poverty has become more concentrated under Obama

By Nancy Hanover

2 May 2016

Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level. Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the Brookings Institution.



Stacey Dash: Obama 'Bamboozled' Us: Actress and Fox News cultural pundit Stacey Dash said on Thursday that President Barack Obama was elected because Americans believed the first black president could heal racial divides in the country but the opposite has happened.

Published on CNS News (http://www.cnsnews.com)

Stacey Dash: Obama 'Bamboozled' Us

(CNSNews.com) – Actress and Fox News cultural pundit Stacey Dash said on Thursday that President Barack Obama was elected because Americans believed the first black president could heal racial divides in the country but the opposite has happened.

“I think he bamboozled us,” Dash said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. “I think we all got blacked into it.

“We all voted for him because we believed, ‘Yes, it’s time to have a black president. He is going to unite us in a very profound way,’” Dash said.
“What did he do? The exact opposite,” she said.
CNSNews.com asked Dash about Obama’s election and the hope that he would heal racial divides and why the country now seems more divided than ever.

“I think that’s the case, because I think he bamboozled us,” Dash said. “I think we all got blacked into it.


“We all voted for him because we believed, ‘Yes, it’s time to have a black president. He is going to unite us in a very profound way,’” Dash said.

“What did he do? The exact opposite,” she said.

CNSNews.com also asked Dash what the next president should do to improve race relations.

“So what’s the next guy going to have to do?” Dash said. “He’s going to have to unite us in a very profound, blatant, hardcore way.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “It’s going to be war. It is.

“It’s going to be war, because there’s going to be people who say, ‘Oh no, white people, I don’t want to have anything to do with them,’ and ‘black people, I don’t want anything to do with them,’ and we the people, who do want to be united have to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to educate you,’ because I believe education is the big integrator,” she said.

“If we educate you, then unity will come, and until we understand that, unless we’re united, we will never be a great country until we understand that we’re in this conundrum,” Dash said.

Source URL: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/stacey-dash-obamas-election-and-race-relations-he-bamboozled-us-we-all-got

WHO ASSAULTED THE AMERICAN ELECTION OF 2016?
PUTIN or BARACK OBAMA?

The Obama’s Lay the Grounds for a third-world Muslim-style dictatorship funded by open borders advocate George Soros.


“Mark Levin called Obama’s effort “police state” tactics, and suggested that Obama’s actions, rather than conspiracy theories about alleged Russian interference in the presidential election to help Trump, should be the target of congressional investigation.”
*
Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY) “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was.”


THE OBAMA WAR ON AMERICA: His OFA Party is Dedicated to Destroying American and Building the Obama Muslim-style dictatorship funded by crony banksters.



Daniel Greenfield, the award-winning Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, believes (OBAMA'S POLITICAL PARTY) “OFA will be far more dangerous in the wild than the Clinton Foundation ever was.”
*
"Obama is no fool and he understands -- having encouraged Black Lives Matter and the war on police and law enforcement, having facilitated ballooning welfare rolls and doubling student debt to $1.35 trillion, having presided over a flood of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border, and having pushed unprecedented deficit spending that added nearly a trillion dollars annually to the federal debt and doubling that debt in eight years to $20 trillion -- that the U.S. is nearer collapse than at any previous time. And every Marxist knows that socialist transformation first requires collapse of the old order."

*

PSYCHOPATH!
THE LEGACY of BARACK OBAMA: MUSLIM PSYCHOPATH AND BANKSTER RENT BOY WHO CAME NEAR TO CREATING A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP BY SABOTAGING AMERICA’S HOMELAND SECURITY AND FUNDING THE MEXICAN FASCIST RACIST PARTY of LA RAZA.




The WSWS has reported several times that during Obama’s administration the wealth of the richest 400 Americans grew from $1.57 trillion to $2.4 trillion and the stock market enjoyed one of its most successful runs in history.

Wikileaks exposes Obama’s bankster-infested

 

administration!



BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!
 “Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock  purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.”

MUCH MORE HERE:


“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for 
the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping 
executive pay at bailed-out firms.”


“So when Clinton was hobnobbing with  Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while  investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged in prison.”

CRONY BANKSTER LOOTING OF AMERICA
 THEIR GOLDEN AGE OF PLUNDER IS NOT OVER!



NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS NOR INFESTED HIS ADMIN WITH BANKSTER CRONIES MORE THAN OBAMA!

*
And while the Obama administration worked systematically to bail out the banks and make the financial oligarchy richer than ever, shielding the architects of the Great Recession from criminal prosecution, it did impose fines for some of the banks’ grossest swindles, including the sale of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities, the rigging of key global interest rates such as the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), drug money laundering, illegal home foreclosures and other illicit activities.

BARACK OBAMA , HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE LA RAZA

MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….

There’s more than one way to destroy America’s white middle class!



HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in 
Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.

March 6, 2017

Obama, president of 'historic firsts'...and not in a good way



Now that the #Obamagate wiretapping scandal is on us, with voters wondering "did he or didn't he" bug the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, as the latter charged Saturday, it's worth it to look at the president's style of governing.  The estimable Doug Ross of Director Blue has a list of historic "firsts" of the Obama presidency, most of which show abuse of power in a pattern so repetitive it's impossible not to think this could go farther.
You can be the judge of whether or not Obama had it in him to bug the candidacy of Trump.  But check out Doug's list to see what Obama's leadership character pattern amounts to.
As an old journalist buddy of mine from the foreign correspondent front in Africa said upon his return to the states: "I spent 20 years in the jungles here, serving my country in a way ... only to return home to an African dictator."  He saw the pattern then.  Ross's list might show the pattern to many more.

President Barack Obama's Complete List of Historic Firsts [Updated]

Yes, he's historic, alright (new items denoted 
by ••• prefix). You can bookmark this link 

Law and Justice
• First President to Violate the War Powers Act (Unilaterally Executing American Military Operations in Libya Without Informing Congress In the Required Time Period - Source: Huffington Post)
• First President to Triple the Number of Warrantless Wiretaps of U.S. Citizens (Source: ACLU)

• First President to Refuse to Tell the Public What He Did For Eight (8) Hours After Being Informed That a U.S. Ambassador Was Facing Imminent Death During a Terror Attack (Source: Mediate)
• First President to Lie About the Reason For an Ambassador's Death, Blaming it on an Internet Video Rather Than What He Knew to be the Case: the Al Qaeda-linked Terror Group Ansar al-Sharia (Source: House Oversight Committee, et. al.)
• First President to Have an Innocent Filmmaker Thrown in Jail After Lying About the Cause for a Deadly Attack on U.S. Diplomats, Using the Filmmaker as a Scapegoat (Source: CNN)

• First President to Use the IRS to "Unfairly Target Political Enemies" as Well as pro-Catholic and pro-Jewish Groups (Source: Sen. Ted Cruz)
• First President to Unlawfully Seize Telephone Records of More than 100 Reporters to Intimidate and/or Bully Them (Source: Associated Press)
• First President to Witness a Single Cabinet Secretary Commit Multiple Hatch Act Violations Without Acting, Speaking Out, Disciplining or Firing That Person (Source: New York Times)

• First President to Systematically Release Detained Illegal Aliens Charged With Homicide Into the U.S. Population (Source: USA Today)
• First President to Release 40,000 Illegal Aliens with Serious and/or Violent Criminal Records Inside the U.S. (Source: 
Judicial Watch)
• First President to Create Secret Police Units Inside Government Agencies to Block Lawful Investigations by Inspectors General (Source: 
Associated Press)


• First President to Have His Attorney General Held in Criminal Contempt of Congress For His Efforts to Cover Up Operation Fast and Furious, That Killed Over 300 Individuals (Source: Politico)
• First President to Issue Unlawful "Recess-Appointments" Over a Long Weekend -- While the U.S. Senate Remained in Session (against the advice of his own Justice Department - Source: United States Court of Appeals)

• First President to Sue States for Enforcing Voter ID Requirements, Which Were Previously Ruled Legal by the U.S. Supreme Court (Source: CNN)

• First President to Encourage Racial Discrimination and Intimidation at Polling Places (the New Black Panthers voter intimidation case, Source: Investors Business Daily)
• First President to Refuse to Comply With a House Oversight Committee Subpoena (Source: Heritage Foundation)
• First President to Arbitrarily Declare an Existing Law Unconstitutional and Refuse to Enforce It (Defense of Marriage Act - Source: ABC News)

• First president to appoint a convicted cop killer's advocate to the Department of Justice (Source: Investor's Business Daily)
• First Administration to Be Ruled by a Federal Judge as Aiding and Abetting Human Trafficking (Source: 
Federal District Court Judge Andrew S. Hanen)
• First President to Demand a Company Hand Over $20 Billion to One of His Political Appointees (BP Oil Spill Relief Fund - Source: Fox News)
• First President to Have a Law Signed By an 'Auto-pen' Without Being "Present" (Source: The New York Times)

Scandals
••• First President to wiretap the opposing party's presidential campaign - Source: Herman Cain
• First President to 
publicly announce an enemies list (consisting of his opponents campaign contributors; and to use the instrumentalities of government to punish those on the list - Source: Heritage Foundation)
• First President to Attempt to Block Legally-Required 60-Day Layoff Notices by Government Contractors Due to His Own Cuts to Defense Spending -- Because The Notices Would Occur Before the Election. (Source: National Journal)
• First President to Intentionally Disable Credit Card Security Measures (in order to allow over-the-limit donations, foreign contributions and other illegal fundraising measures - Source: Power Line)

• First President to send 80 percent of a $16 billion program (green energy) to his campaign bundlers and contributors, leaving only 20% to those who did not contribute. (Source: Washington Examiner)
• First President to issue an Executive Order implementing a "Racial Justice System", a system that tries to achieve "racially equivalent outcomes" for crimes (Source: Daily Caller)

• First President to Use the EPA to Punish Political Enemies and Reward Political Allies (Source: Competitive Enterprise Institute)
• First President to Send Millions in Taxpayer Dollars to His Wife's Former Employer (Source: White House Dossier)


• First President to have the EPA conduct hazardous experiments on the ill, infirm and elederly to push a radical environmental agenda, in a manner not dissimilar to the Third Reich's inhuman medical experiments (Source: 
The EPA Office of the Inspector General).
• First President to be Accused by His Own Party of Ordering the CIA to Spy on Congress (Source: 
Washington Post)
• First President to allow deadly Ebola disease-ridden patients to enter the U.S., refusing to restrict travel from infected countries like other Western allies (Source: New York Daily News)

• First president to order his EPA to unilaterally overturn a Federal Statute (changing the borders of Wyoming established by an act of Congress, Source: Casper Star-Tribune).
• First president to systematically delay enacting a wide variety of controversial rules until after a presidential election (Source: 
Washington Post)
• First president to have Politifact designate one of his statements "Lie of the Year" (Source: 
Politifact)

• First President to Strip Inspectors General of Ability to Investigate Corruption and Fraud in the Federal Government (Source: 
Washington Times).
• First President to Create a Secret Racial Database of Americans in Order to Determine "Inequities" in Housing, Employment, Banking, etc. (Source: 
New York Post).
• First President to Intentionally Release Thousands of Illegal Alien Rapists and Child Molesters into the U.S. Instead of Deporting Them (Source: 
Boston Globe••• First President to Tell Killers 'They Are Product of Racist Criminal Justice System' (Source: Sheriff David Clarke)
• First President to be Named by the Associated Press to Have Operated the Least Transparent Administration in History (since the advent of the Freedom of Information Act; Source: 
Associated Press)
• First President to Have Its Own Watchdogs Report That More Than $125 Billion in Fraudulent/Improper Payments Were Made by the Federal Government (Source: 
Associated Press)

Economy
• First President to Move America Past the Dependency Tipping Point, In Which 51% of Households Now Pay No Income Taxes (Source: Center for Individual Freedom)

••• First President "who did not deliver a single year of 3.0 percent-plus economic growth" (Source: Louis Woodhill, RealClearMarkets.com)••• First President to See U.S. Economic Growth Downgraded to Largest 1-Year Drop Ever for an Advanced Economy (Source: Washington Free Beacon)

• First President to Increase Food Stamp Spending By More Than 100% in Less Than Four Years (Source: Sen. Jeff Sessions)

• First President to Abrogate Bankruptcy Law to Turn Over Control of Companies to His Union Supporters (Source: Wall Street Journal)
• First President to Propose Budgets So Unreasonable That Not a Single Representative From Either Party Would Cast a Vote in Favor (Sources: The Hill, Open Market)
• First President Whose Economic Policies Have the Number of Americans on Disability Exceed the Population of New York (Source: CNS News)

• First President to Sign a Law Requiring All Americans to Purchase a Product From a Third Party (Source: Wall Street Journal)
• First President to Sue States For Enforcing Immigration Laws Passed by Congress (Source: The Arizona Republic newspaper)
• First President to See America Lose Its Status as the World's Largest Economy (Source: Peterson Institute)


• First President to Attempt to Bully a Major Manufacturing Company Into Not Opening a Factory in a Right-to-Work State (Boeing's facility in South Carolina - Source: Wall Street Journal)
• First President Since 1872 to See the U.S. Economy Sink From 1st to 2nd Largest in the World (Source: 
Financial Times).
• First President to Conceal Food Stamp Data From Public Scrutiny (Source: 
Judicial Watch: "8th Circuit Says USDA Can’t Keep Hiding Food Stamp Data")

• First President to Leave the American Middle Class No Longer the World’s Richest (Source: 
The New York Times)
• First President to Retaliate Against a Rating Agency for Downgrading the United States Debt (Source: 
Investor's Business Daily)
• First President to Expand the Regulatory State to an Unprecedented Degree ("New record: Feds issued 56 regs for every new law, 3,659 in 2013", Source: 
Washington Examiner)

Energy Policy
• First President to Endanger the Stability of the Electric Grid by Shutting Down Hundreds of Coal-Fired Plants Without Adequate Replacement Technologies (Source: National Electric Reliability Corporation - PDF)

National Security and World Affairs
• First President to Openly Defy a Congressional Order Not To Share Sensitive Nuclear Defense Secrets With the Russian Government (Sources: ABC News, Rep. Michael Turner)
• First President to Leak Highly Classified Military and Intelligence Secrets to Hollywood In Order to Promote a Movie That Could Help His Reelection Campaign (Source: Judicial Watch)

 
First President to Renounce the Monroe Doctrine of National Security in the Western Hemisphere (Source: Wall Street Journal)
 
First Nobel Peace Prize Winner to State "I'm Really Good At Killing People" (Regarding His Drone Strikes) (Source: Business Insider)
 
First President to Snub the Vatican by Closing U.S. Embassy (Source: Washington Times, "Obama’s call to close Vatican embassy is ‘slap in the face’ to Roman Catholics")

• First President to Directly Violate the Law Regarding Prisoner Swaps with the Taliban, Bypassing Congressional Review (Source: 
The New York Times)
• First President to Invite a Leader of the Terrorist Group the Muslim Brotherhood to a Meeting in the White House (Source: 
Washington Free Beacon)
• First President to Out a CIA Station Chief in an Active Military Zone (Source: 
CBS News)••• First President to Spy on Congress and its Communications With Israel to Ensure its Political Effort to Fund and Arm the Terror State of Iran Would Continue Unimpeded (Source: Rep. Pete Hoekstra)••• First President to stop a defense authorization bill as leverage to further his domestic spending agenda (Source: Wall Street Journal)••• First President to install black screens on the windows of the White House to prevent a visiting foreign dictator from seeing protesters (Source: Marion Smith)••• First President to have a complaint filed against him by over 50 CentCom intelligence analysts for falsifying data around Islamic terror groups for political purposes (Source: Daily Beast)

• First President to Negotiate a Deal to Transfer $150 Billion to the World's Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism (Source: 
Gatestone Institute)
• First President to Operate His National Security Infrastructure So Incompetently That an Enemy of the United States was Able to Steal the Personnel Records of all Four Million Government Employees (Source: 
CNN).
• First President to Operate His National Security Infrastructure So Incompetently That His Secretary of State Created Her Own Private Email Servers to Evade Public Open Records Laws (Source: 
The Verge)


• First President to force Israel and Saudi Arabia to admit secret diplomacy for the first time in Order to Protect Themselves from the Policies of the United States (Source: 
Jerusalem Post)
• First President to 
send $200 million to a terrorist organization (Hamas) after Congress had explicitly frozen the money for fear it would fund attacks against civilians (Sources: American Thinker, The Independent [UK])

Miscellania
• First President to Insert Himself into White House Biographies of Past Presidents (Source: The New York Times)
• First President to Secretly Party With Known Domestic Terrorists (Source: 
Gawker) 
• First President to so inflame racial tensions that the first major league baseball game in U.S. history had to be cancelled due to riots (Source: 
Baltimore Sun).


But remember: he 
will not rest until all Americans have jobs, affordable homes, green-energy vehicles, and the environment is repaired, etc., etc., etc.
 

Judicial Watch: Only Crimes in Russia Scandal Are from ‘Obama Gang’













AFP

by LEE STRANAHAN6 Mar 2017

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Government transparency activist group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Department of the Treasury (DOT) seeking records related to the investigation of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michel Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Breitbart News spoke exclusively to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who said, “We’ve been looking into this story for months now and the only crimes connected to this Russian scandal we’ve been able to find so far are the illegal leaks of information and the violations of privacy by the Obama gang.”
Judicial Watch filed a FOIA on January 25, 2017 and only filed the lawsuit after the agencies failed to respond. The FOIA request was for “Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the investigation of retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak between October 1, 2016 and the present.”
The suit claims that “Defendants are violating FOIA by failing to search for and produce all records responsive to Plaintiff’s requests or demonstrate that the requested records are lawfully exempt from production.”
In a prepared statement, Tom Fitton commented:
President Trump is on to something. The Obama-connected wiretapping and illegal leaks of classified material concerning President Trump and General Flynn are a scandal. Judicial Watch aims to get to the truth about these crimes and we hope the Trump administration stands with us in the fight for transparency.
The lawsuit points out that on January 23, 2017, CNN reported that the government was investigating Flynn, former national security adviser to President Trump, and said:
The calls were captured by routine US eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats, according to the intelligence and law enforcement officials. But the officials said some of the content of the conversation raised enough potential concerns that investigators are still looking into the discussions, amid a broader concern about Russian intelligence-gathering activities in the United States.
The officials all stressed that so far there has been no determination of any wrongdoing.
Radio host Mark Levin has outlined a sequence of events — expanded on by Breitbart News — that shows how, starting in June 2016, the Obama administration filed requests with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications targeting Donald Trump and several advisers. Just prior’s to CNN’s report cited by Judicial Watch, theNew York Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Treasury Department were monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign.

"Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation's capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. Trump."


"Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media."



March 6, 2017
The Enablers of Obama’s Wiretapping Scandal
As the news of the potential wiretapping of the Trump campaign has finally found its way into the headlines and the never-ending leaks emanating from the Obama Administration holdovers continue to be exploited, whatever national chaos and retribution that may ensue rests not only on the shoulders of the perpetrators but on enablers in a sycophantic mainstream media and a feckless Republican Party.
Since 1989 and the election of George H.W. Bush, the vast majority of Republicans elected to national office have chosen to worship the twin gods of civility and compromise rather than vigorously defend and promote liberty, free enterprise and limited government.   Meanwhile, their political adversaries, the Democratic Party and the Left (now one and the same) had no such compunctions as they were determined to achieve their ends regardless of the means.  Among the means were endless intimidation, extortion and ridicule of the Republicans in Congress or either of the two George Bushes. All this without fear of retaliation or even the slightest hint of a vigorous defense or response.
In conjunction with their accomplices in the mainstream media, Democrats quickly ascertained that any outrageous accusation on their part, such as that Republicans are determined to starve children, would eventuate in the near complete surrender of any opposition to their proposed policies -- all of which are now embedded in American society.  Further, rather than support their colleagues in the Party who were oftentimes the victims of specious and malicious accusations, the spineless elites in the Republican Party sacrificed their members on the altar of civility and faux integrity.
Having experienced so much success with these tactics, it is little wonder that after nearly three decades the Democrats’ overconfidence could be their potential long-term downfall.
That eventual bridge too far may well be the wiretapping of the Trump campaign by the Obama Administration and the putting in place of the apparatus for the subsequent leaking of hitherto confidential information by the Obama holdovers in an effort to delay, marginalize, or destroy the Trump Administration.
Apparently, Barack Obama and his minions were supremely confident that Hillary Clinton would win.  Or if by any remote chance she did not, the assumption seemingly was that Trump and the Republicans would be their usual spineless selves and succumb to the customary intimidation tactics and would never retaliate once in office.  Additionally, the Democrats could count on the mainstream media never exposing their treachery.
Despite all their voluminous opposition research and Trump’s own words, the Obama-Clinton cabal, brimming with overconfidence, refused to accept the reality that he was not a prototypical Republican or someone easily extorted.   Any cursory review of his business career and tactics would have disabused them of that mindset.  Had Obama not been so arrogant, he would have realized if his administration pushed for the wiretapping of his political rival in a contested election campaign that Hillary had better damn well win or Trump could and would retaliate once in office.  As the President of the United States can declassify and make public anything he so chooses, Obama’s allies in the media would not be able to sweep the potential scandal under the rug.
That hypothetical eventuality may have come to pass as President Trump has decided to use the power of his office to expose the potential duplicity and unscrupulous behavior of the Obama Administration in the wiretapping of his campaign.  A story first reported last November in an expose by the website Heat Street and followed up by The Guardian (UK) in January.    
There is another component in this intrigue that is part and parcel of the overall Obama deviousness. 

 On January 12, 2017, a week before Trump was inaugurated, in a dramatic reversal of a longstanding policy, Obama issued an executive order allowing the NSA to share with 16 other agencies, filled with Obama holdovers, vast amount of data gathered on private American citizens. Data collected without warrants, court orders or congressional authorizations.  Thus, assuring that innumerable leaks, such as those surrounding General Mike Flynn and others in the Trump Administration, could occur. 
The wiretapping and the deliberate strategy to undermine one’s successor are perhaps the most egregious political actions by any president in American history, far surpassing Watergate or the Teapot Dome scandals.  In fact, they are tactics that would have been applauded by some of the despots of the past century.
Complicit in this skullduggery is the mainstream media.  For the past forty years, they have been virtually unquestioning in their dealings with the Democrats while vilifying the Republicans at every turn.  They became, in essence, the Praetorian Guard for the Democratic Party, allowing its members to get away with virtually anything.  The latest example is the mainstream media’s willfully choosing to ignore the wiretapping reports already in the alternative and foreign media while gleefully accepting the leaks in their collusion with the Democratic Party elites. 
There is little doubt that the media in this nation is now more polarized than ever.   As its traditional income sources evaporate, the mainstream media is increasingly dependent on web traffic for advertising revenue.  Therefore, the incentive is either to produce and promote sensationalism or publish stories tailored for a specific audience regardless of the overall veracity in reporting.
Jonah Goldberg at National Review recently explored this phenomenon (as he noted the following at the Washington Post):
(Ben Domenech) told me the Post has a giant screen on the wall of the newsroom that displays in real-time their web traffic.  Ben noted that nearly all the most read stories were anti-Trump.  He asked whether we can rely on the press to be objective when market incentives are for Trump-bashing all the time.
The media in the United States is now split between the anti-Trump and pro-Trump venues.  During the previous 8 years, the mainstream media was almost exclusively pro-Obama primarily because of ideology and today they are almost exclusively anti-Trump primarily because of revenue.  As a counterweight, there is now a significant pro-Trump media, chiefly on the internet, which also relies on web traffic for their livelihood.  The schism is now a fait accompli and will not be reversed anytime soon.  Unfortunately, the anti-Trump media is still dominant but seemingly hellbent on losing that status, as they have tossed to the wind many years ago any pretense of objectivity.

Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media. 

Judicial Watch: Only Crimes in Russia Scandal Are from ‘Obama Gang’








AFP

by LEE STRANAHAN6 Mar 2017

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Government transparency activist group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Department of the Treasury (DOT) seeking records related to the investigation of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michel Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Breitbart News spoke exclusively to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who said, “We’ve been looking into this story for months now and the only crimes connected to this Russian scandal we’ve been able to find so far are the illegal leaks of information and the violations of privacy by the Obama gang.”
Judicial Watch filed a FOIA on January 25, 2017 and only filed the lawsuit after the agencies failed to respond. The FOIA request was for “Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the investigation of retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak between October 1, 2016 and the present.”
The suit claims that “Defendants are violating FOIA by failing to search for and produce all records responsive to Plaintiff’s requests or demonstrate that the requested records are lawfully exempt from production.”
In a prepared statement, Tom Fitton commented:
President Trump is on to something. The Obama-connected wiretapping and illegal leaks of classified material concerning President Trump and General Flynn are a scandal. Judicial Watch aims to get to the truth about these crimes and we hope the Trump administration stands with us in the fight for transparency.
The lawsuit points out that on January 23, 2017, CNN reported that the government was investigating Flynn, former national security adviser to President Trump, and said:
The calls were captured by routine US eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats, according to the intelligence and law enforcement officials. But the officials said some of the content of the conversation raised enough potential concerns that investigators are still looking into the discussions, amid a broader concern about Russian intelligence-gathering activities in the United States.
The officials all stressed that so far there has been no determination of any wrongdoing.
Radio host Mark Levin has outlined a sequence of events — expanded on by Breitbart News — that shows how, starting in June 2016, the Obama administration filed requests with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications targeting Donald Trump and several advisers. Just prior’s to CNN’s report cited by Judicial Watch, theNew York Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Treasury Department were monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign.


PERHAPS THE FILTHY SAUDIS WILL BUY UP ALL THEIR BOY'S BOOKS!  THE OBOMB SERVED THEIR INTERESTS FOR 8 YEARS!

“Under Obama, not a single leading banker was prosecuted for the 

criminal activities that led to the biggest financial disaster and 

deepest slump since the 1930s, destroying the jobs, life savings 

and living standards of tens of millions of workers in the US and 

around the world.”


"Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5 million— is a small price to pay for 

the contribution the former president made to enriching the already 

fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s geopolitical interests 

around the world and continuing the assault on the wages, benefits and 

living standards of the working class."


IT LOOKS LIKE THE OBAMA'S WILL SUCK IN MORE LOOT 


THAN THE CLINTONS AND THEIR PHONY PAY-TO-PLAY 


CHARITY FOUNDATION DID.

"A month ago we commented on a study that concluded “the Obamas could earn as much as $242.5 million from speeches, book deals and pensions.” That study estimated a book deal for the couple would be worth $40 million. The Obamas have topped that by $25 million, or 62.5 percent. This pushes their estimated post-White House earnings toward the $300 million mark."
The Obamas sign reported $65 million book deal
The Obamas sign reported $65 million book deal
By David Walsh 
2 March 2017
Executives at Penguin Random House, the global publishing giant, announced Tuesday that the firm had reached an agreement to publish books by former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama. Vanity Fair commented, “The couple will write their books separately but sold the book rights jointly.”
The Financial Times reported that Penguin Random House had won a record-breaking auction between publishing houses and will buy the two books for more than $65 million. It is not known which one of the company’s numerous imprints will publish them. The previous record for a presidential memoir belonged to Bill Clinton—$15 million.
In a press release, Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle (the publisher is owned 53 percent by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann) explained: “We are absolutely thrilled to continue our publishing partnership with President and Mrs. Obama. With their words and their leadership, they changed the world, and every day, with the books we publish at Penguin Random House, we strive to do the same. Now, we are very much looking forward to working together with President and Mrs. Obama to make each of their books global publishing events of unprecedented scope and significance.”
A month ago we commented on a study that concluded “the Obamas could earn as much as $242.5 million from speeches, book deals and pensions.” That study estimated a book deal for the couple would be worth $40 million. The Obamas have topped that by $25 million, or 62.5 percent. This pushes their estimated post-White House earnings toward the $300 million mark.
As we noted in early February, Obama is being paid for the services he rendered the financial oligarchy during his two terms in the White House. Sixty-five million dollars—or even $267.5 million—is a small price to pay for the contribution the former president made to enriching the already fabulously rich, defending the American ruling elite’s geopolitical interests around the world and continuing the assault on the wages, benefits and living standards of the working class.
The man who promised “change” and whose election was termed a “transformative event” by the American pseudo-left proved to be an implacable defender of big business.
The WSWS has reported several times that during Obama’s administration the wealth of the richest 400 Americans grew from $1.57 trillion to $2.4 trillion and the stock market enjoyed one of its most successful runs in history.
Now Obama plans to vacation with billionaires, play golf and “cash in.”
The announcement of the $65 million deal has not been accompanied in the media by any criticism, much less shame or revulsion, nor are the Obamas presumably embarrassed in the slightest. On the contrary, the media and Obama’s admirers treat the book deal for the most part as a tremendous accomplishment, something to be immensely proud of, just as the news anchors now gloatingly report record share prices or billion-dollar box office successes.
Political life in the US has reached a stage at which the representatives of the immensely wealthy are immensely wealthy themselves, or the immensely wealthy rule directly, as in the case of Donald Trump. Official American politics is a closed-in, sealed-off universe of money and privilege.
The Chicago Tribune pointed out some years ago that, after completing his term in office, “Thomas Jefferson was forced to sell his 6,000-volume book collection to the government—forming the core of the Library of Congress—to pay off his creditors; his debt-ridden successor, James Madison, pleaded in vain for a loan from the new Bank of the United States; and the next president, James Monroe, was so impoverished upon his death in New York that his family could not afford to send his remains back to his native Virginia.”
None of those ex-presidents requested a pension. “In these early years, with the revolution against King George still a fresh memory, a lifetime government sinecure smacked too much of royal privilege.”
Now we have this, according to the New York Times: “Speculation about the Obamas’ books and how much they would sell for have been circulating in the industry in recent weeks, as executives at the top publishing houses met separately with the former president and first lady. Some publishing executives who followed the bidding process said that the opening offers for Mr. Obama’s book alone were in the $18 million to $20 million range.”

BLOG: THE HISTORY OF A PSYCHOPATH - THE MAN THAT YELLED "HOPE & CHANGE" AND BECAME GEORGE BUSH'S THIRD AND FOURTH TERMS ON STEROIDS!
If Barack Obama were to write an honest book, it would be worth something. If he were to reveal the forces that picked him up at a relatively early age, seeing in him a marketable political commodity (both white and black, liberal and conservative, foreign and American), and how those forces assembled and packaged him and carried him into the White House, well, that would be valuable.
Of course, that will never happen. The new book will no doubt be even more repugnant than the last one, The Audacity of Hope (2006). As we observed in our review of that work on the WSWS in February 2007, “Is there a single honest or original thought in Barack Obama’s new book? If so, it does not immediately come to mind.”
We wrote that Obama’s work was “a calculated effort, from its title to its final page, designed to demonstrate his readiness to take the reins of political power in the US. That is to say, while Obama directs portions of his book toward sections of the more well-heeled and complacent Democratic Party faithful, those most inclined to wishful thinking, the audience that primarily concerns him consists of the powerful corporate, financial and media figures who organize and ultimately shape the campaigns of the two major parties’ candidates.”
But Obama’s new memoir will have so much more to cover up or ignore: the multi-billion dollar Wall Street bail-out, the halving of auto workers’ pay, the illegal drone strike murders of thousands, the unprecedented growth of social inequality, the reactionary health care initiative, the disastrous wars or interventions in Libya, Syria, Yemen … And one could add, the election of Trump itself, the fitting climax to two terms during which Obama disappointed, disillusioned and angered tens of millions, opening the door to the most sinister administration in American history.
The Times editors, of course, have only one thing on their collective mind, or rather two, race and money: “A frank discussion of his [Obama’s] time in the White House, and of issues like race relations in America, could reach an even wider audience, becoming a worldwide blockbuster. Penguin Random House, a global publishing house with more than 250 imprints, has worldwide rights to the books, which means the company can make a good deal of money overseas and in translation.”
Meanwhile, contrary to the Obamas and their apologists, Penguin Random House and the corrupt media, great numbers of people will be disgusted by the $65 million payoff and the profound discrediting of the entire American political system, with its ultimately revolutionary implications, will continue apace.


SOARING POVERTY AND UNEMPLOYMENT  UNDER OBAMA’S OPEN

 

BORDERS POLICIES.


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/millions-of-americans-legals-unemployed.html


AMERICA’S TWISTED ROAD TO REVOLUTION:

 

Fighting back Wall Street’s Looting and Rule


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/09/america-nation-ruled-wall-streets.html



AMERICA’S ECONOMIC ARMAGEDDON

The Impact of  OBAMA-CLINTONIMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH


Under Obama-Clintonomics, the rich became VERY rich and we got the tax bills for their bailouts and crimes! Trump and his Goldman Sachs regime will double the numbers of rich and quadruple the number of LEGALS living in poverty."Secondly, for eight years Russian businesses and businessmen closely aligned with Putin pumped millions into the Clinton Foundation slush fund, paid her husband a half-million dollars for a single speech, and got in return a substantial portion of our uranium assets when, as Secretary of State, Hillary okayed their purchase."
HILLARY CLINTON: SERVANT TO (paying) DICTATORS
HER PUTIN CONNECTION



March 26, 2017

Obama Did Wiretap Trump: It’s Like Putting Together a Russian Nesting Doll

Matryoshkas are Russian nesting dolls. Inside each doll are several others, smaller but identically shaped characters, until you get to the smallest one inside. Studying what we have learned of the timeline -- and we still don’t have the entire story -- we see Wikileaks, the smallest, at the core, and Obama as the largest piece in what is the most historically outrageous misuse of the people and institutions of government for partisan advantage.
Wikileaks
During the campaign, Wikileaks posted a number of email messages from the DNC -- largely Podesta, but Hillary as well. The communications (not well reported, but, in any event, more embarrassing tittle tattle) had been on unsecured accounts, poorly guarded and easily accessed because of carelessness on the part of the Hillary team. Assange, who published them, denied the source of this information was Russian hackers. This now has been confirmed by the heads of our intelligence community, but the Clinton camp claim that the Russians did it set the stage for the notion that her opponent was the favored candidate of the Russians.
Apart from the fact that our intelligence services have denied the claim, there are a number of reasons to believe that the Russians would have preferred Hillary to Trump. For one thing, Russia is in terrible financial shape and relies on its sales of oil and gas to Europe to stay afloat. Is it sensible to believe that the Russians would prefer Trump, who made clear he wanted to vastly increase U.S. oil and gas production, over Hillary, who gave every indication of keeping it down and the worldwide price of oil and gas higher? (I can’t imagine -- for the same reason -- that Iran and OPEC wouldn’t prefer her as well.) Why you do suppose the Russians have been funding “green” groups in Europe -- and possibly here -- who oppose fracking?
Secondly, for eight years Russian businesses and businessmen 

closely aligned with Putin pumped millions into the Clinton 


Foundation slush fund, paid her husband a half-million dollars 


for a single speech, and got in return a substantial portion of 


our uranium assets when, as Secretary of State, Hillary okayed 


their purchase. 
Finally, John Podesta, chair of Hillary’s presidential campaign wasclosely aligned with Russian interests. His brother was hired by the Russians to lobby for the uranium sale. He was on the board of a company closely aligned with Putin.
As the crack investigative reporter Richard Pollock notes:
John Podesta, national chairman of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, may have opened himself up to a Russian “influence campaign” designed to temper his views of the Kremlin, The Daily Caller News Foundation (TheDCNF) Investigative Group has learned.
Influence campaigns are conducted by many governments -- including the United States -- with the aim of influencing decision makers in other countries to realign their geopolitical worldviews more closely to the influencing country.
Some national security experts interviewed by The DCNF wonder if Podesta may still be a target of Russian influence. They trace the campaign back to his company board membership, in which one-third of the board were top Russian businessmen with direct ties to the Kremlin.
The last time Podesta talked negatively about Russia was Dec. 18, 2016, when he charged in an NBC “Meet the Press” interview the 2016 election was “distorted by the Russian intervention.”
The former Clinton national campaign chairman has since been silent, even as other former top Clinton aides, such as Robby Mook, Brian Fallon and Jim Margolis have repeatedly aimed high-decibel rhetoric at President Donald Trump about Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential race.
[snip]
Podesta’s silence is particularly striking, according to retired Air Force Col. James Waurishuk.
“We haven’t heard very much from Podesta lately, particularly on the subject of Russia’s interference in the elections,” Waurishuk told the DCNF. He served on the National Security Council and worked on “information operations” for military intelligence.
The suggestion is that he’s staying out of it because the Russians want this chatter about their influence silenced.
In any event, Russia has now been cleared of the claim, yet in the recesses of the dimmer voters’ minds the charge remains a cogent explanation of why their candidate lost the election.
The National Security Agency and the FISA
The NSA engages in global monitoring for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. It does by passive means (signals Intelligence) and active means like physically bugging systems and through subversive software. It assists and coordinates SIGINT elements at other government organization like the DIA.
Domestic communications can be intercepted under two circumstances: in the first instance to protect us against sabotage or international terrorism or sabotage. In such a case, when authorized by the president through the attorney general, it can be done without a court order provided that it is for only one year and only to acquire foreign intelligence information and there is real likelihood that a U.S. person is a party to the communication. Even then it must be done in such a way to minimize the impact on the U.S. person. The attorney general must report such surveillance under seal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and report their compliance to both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Surveillance can also be done on a court order from FISA when the attorney general persuades the court that there is probable cause (i.e. a reasonable suspicion) that the target is a “foreign power” or an “agent of a foreign power” and the minimization requirements for information pertaining to U.S. persons will be followed. Such orders may be approved for 90 days,120 days, or a year.
FISA court authorization is almost always granted. Reliable reports indicate that the Obama administration sought authorization in July of last year when Trump appeared a likely opponent (the application is still secret) and it was denied. These reports also state that a pared-down application was sought in October and granted by the court. We have no idea on what basis the Department of Justice sought these warrants nor who the purported target was.
From the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, we learned this week that Trump team’s conversations were caught in the surveillance, that for over nine months this was never reported to his committee. Moreover, it is public knowledge that three days before the inauguration in January, for no legitimate purpose, President Obama authorized wide distribution of the surveillance reports to 16 other agencies, the names of U.S. persons involved in the conversations were not redacted, the contents were of no intelligence value and they were widely leaked -- a perfectly predictable consequence of spreading the raw data so widely in contrast to normal redaction and dissemination patterns. Suspicious minds like mine think may well be to further hamper the incoming administration by leaks designed to embarrass members of his team. Nunes also reported the post-election spying “had nothing to do with Russia.”  By January 20, for example, the New York Times reported that Trump had been wiretapped.
We learned this week from Nunes’ work that the investigation is continuing.
On his own Mike Rogers, head of NSA, met privately with Trump shortly after the inauguration. We have no details of their discussion, but my guess is he told him what had happened and how. At the moment, Rogers appears to be the sole white hat in our intelligence network. But he may not be the only one, which, I think, would mean a number of former Obama officials have to be looking for lawyers.
Tom Lipscomb, a former reporter and online friend, thinks the white hats in the intelligence community fed the truth about the wiretapping directly to Trump so he could weed out from their ranks the Obama confederates. Like him, I think the Trump tweet that he was wiretapped was smart. He’s giving “fair warning to what is coming,” and the claims that Trump was engaged in some “crazy conspiracy” are evaporating just as had the earlier nonsense that he and the Russians were conspiring via Wikileaks.
Christopher Steele and John McCain
Christopher Steele is a former British intelligence agent of dubious character and credibility. He had been hired early by the Clinton camp to dig up dirt on Trump. When Hillary ended that agreement, unnamed Republicans engaged him to continue, and when they stopped paying him, the FBI -- for as yet unexplained reasons -- took him up. His “dossier” is preposterous, based on accounts to his aides from unnamed and thus unverifiable sources. In the rare instance when they provide recognizable details, they have been proven false. As incredible as the “dossier” was, it was used to tar Trump with salacious nonsense and to further encourage the ridiculous notion that he and his team were Russian agents.
There are three different versions of how John McCain, a bitter #NeverTrumper always seeking media cuddles and enamored by globalization, came to get the dossier -- he says, in December.  In one version, he got it from a member of the McCain Institute, in other published accounts he dispatched someone abroad to get it, and in a third he first heard of it from a former British ambassador while at a meeting in Halifax. That he’s offered various tales in itself suggests some dissembling on his part. Nevertheless, he concedes he widely distributed the scurrilous dossier to the media and members of Congress. He was either a useful dupe of those determined to bring down Trump or a willing partner of theirs. Right now, he’s flailing about abroad, attacking the president and moaning that Trump hasn’t yet met with him.
The Media
John Nolte, writing for the Daily Caller, highlights how it is apparent that the media knew of the spying operation and later covered it up:
“Of course the media knew what the Obama administration had done. First off, when they thought the news would hurt Trump, the national media publicly reported on the fact that the Obama administration had spied on Team Trump. It was only after that knowledge became a liability for Precious Barry that the media pretended otherwise. In other words, they LIED.”
Jim Geraghty at National Review cites a specific example of the media-leaker waltz:  
On January 12, the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote:
According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is a leak of classified information. Michael Flynn was not, as far as we know, a target of any U.S. government surveillance. He was one of the figures whose conversations was “incidentally” recorded, presumably as part of the regular monitoring of Kislyak.
People within the U.S. government are not supposed to take the information that is incidentally recorded and then run to David Ignatius because they don’t like the American citizen who was recorded. That’s not the purpose of our domestic counterintelligence operations. Even if Flynn had violated the Logan Act -- which, as we all know, no one has never been prosecuted for violating -- there are legitimate avenues for dealing with that, namely going to law enforcement and a prosecutor.
(Invoking the Logan Act in this circumstance is particularly nonsensical, because the interpretation Ignatius floats would criminalize just about any discussion between a presidential candidate, a president-elect or his team and any representative of a foreign government on any matter of importance. If you ask a foreign official if his country would make a concession on Issue X in exchange for a U.S. concession on Issue Y, BOOM! Call out the SWAT teams, we’ve got a Logan Act violation!)
There are a lot of reasons not to like Michael Flynn, but that doesn’t change the fact that somebody broke the law and leaked classified information in an effort to get him in trouble. That is wrong and that is illegal, and Nunes is right to point out we’re going down a dangerous road when information collected by U.S. intelligence agencies about American citizens starts getting strategically leaked for partisan purposes.
No matter how many dolls are hidden in the nest -- Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch -- it is undeniable that they all fit under the big one -- Obama. It was he who authorized the surveillance and multiagency distribution of intelligence -- in Bob Woodward’s reading, “highly classified gossip” -- about political opponent Trump and his team -- invading their privacy in violation of the law. If you were inclined to want Americans to lose faith in their intelligence community and media you couldn’t have done a better job than they did themselves. The Russians didn’t have to do a thing.


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