Banks can always rely on the government to bail them out when the house of cards collapses.
With the passage of time, swamp-dwellers
like Eric Holder and Lois Lerner, knee-deep in the mud with congressional contempt
charges, continue to be financially enriched and will slowly be forgotten,
while more recognizable swamp royalty like Hillary Clinton get to run for
president.
Until Americans see
guilty members within the United States
government wearing orange jumpsuits and
serving time, the
investigations and congressional hearings are mere sideshow
spectacles to appease the masses.
So when it was revealed that the financial system was in reality a snake pit of corruption and conflicts of interest, it was a case of all hands on deck to provide the justification for the trillions of dollars made available to the very banks and financial institutions whose activities had sparked the crisis, while hundreds of millions of workers the world over were made to pay through wage cuts and austerity measures.
So when it was revealed that the financial system was in reality a snake pit of corruption and conflicts of interest, it was a case of all hands on deck to provide the justification for the trillions of dollars made available to the very banks and financial institutions whose activities had sparked the crisis, while hundreds of millions of workers the world over were made to pay through wage cuts and austerity measures.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN
MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN BARACK OBAMA!
This was not because of
difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary, Attorney
General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the Obama
administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because to do
so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Bank of England governor tells Jackson Hole conference: Existing financial system will not hold
One of the fictions most assiduously promoted by the ideological representatives of the capitalist economy is that those in charge of monetary and economic policy have a sound knowledge of the system over which they preside and a clear idea of what they are doing. Such operations assume great importance when events, such as the financial crash of 2008, reveal to masses of working people that this is not the case.
The collapse eleven years ago was preceded by assertions as to the “efficiency” of the market. A “great moderation” had been established in which the evils of the past had been finally conquered, with anyone who dared to differ being declared guilty of blasphemy against gods such as Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.
So when it was revealed that the financial system was in reality a snake pit of corruption and conflicts of interest, it was a case of all hands on deck to provide the justification for the trillions of dollars made available to the very banks and financial institutions whose activities had sparked the crisis, while hundreds of millions of workers the world over were made to pay through wage cuts and austerity measures.
The bailouts may have been regrettable, it was argued, but these measures were necessary to prevent something even worse. New regulations were being put in place to prevent a recurrence and after a period of “unconventional” measures—essentially the handout of virtually free money to the “malefactors of great wealth”—things would return to “normal.”
This piece of fiction was exposed at the conference of central bankers and financial experts held at Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week.
Reporting on the meeting, the Financial Times noted “there was a sense that things would never be the same again.” In an interview with the newspaper the president of the St Louis Federal Reserve, James Bullard said there had been a “regime shift” in economic conditions.
Its manifestations are all too apparent. The supply of ultra-cheap money, either through interest rate cuts or the purchases of financial assets by central banks, so-called “quantitative easing,” has failed to provide any significant stimulus to the real economy, inflation continues to remain below the target rate set by central banks of 2 percent and interest rates remain at historic lows.
So persistent is this phenomenon that the financial system has entered a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where some $16 trillion worth of bonds are trading at negative yields, meaning that an investor holding them to maturity would suffer a loss.
“Something is going on,” Bullard told the Financial Times, “and that’s causing a total rethink of central banking and all our cherished notions about what we think we’re doing. We just have to stop thinking that next year things are going back to normal.”
However much they seek to promote the illusion that they are in control, those in charge of the financial system do have to engage in a discussion over the mounting problems they confront and what might be done to alleviate them. And a couple of papers presented at the meeting were significant from that standpoint.
Over the past months, the realisation has begun to grow that trade war is not a passing phase but is now a permanent feature of economic and political life. This is coupled with the recognition that the role of the US dollar as the basis of stability for the financial system is now increasingly being called into question.
Mark Carney, the retiring governor of the Bank of England, told the conference the present international monetary system based on the US “won’t hold” and that a new international monetary system had to be constructed.
He noted that the US accounted for only 10 percent of global trade and 15 percent of global GDP but the dollar formed the basis for half of world trade invoices and two-thirds of global securities issuances. Movements in the dollar, therefore, were of fundamental importance to other economies even if they had few trade links with the US. They were forced to hoard dollars in order to guard against capital flight.
The dollar was just as important as in 1971 when US President Nixon removed it gold backing and ended the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency relations anchored by gold.
At that time US Treasury Secretary John Connally dismissed the concerns of other countries with the dictum “our dollar, your problem.” This had now broadened, Carney said, to “any of our problems is your problem.”
For decades the mainstream view had been that countries could achieve price stability and regulate economic growth by targeting inflation and adopting floating exchanges rates. This consensus was now “increasingly untenable.” This was because US developments now had “significant spillovers onto both the trade performance and the financial conditions of countries even with relatively limited direct exposure to the US economy.”
He said there was little that could be done in the short term and central bankers had to “play the cards they have been dealt as best they can.”
However, in the longer term “we need to change the game.” The international monetary system could not be reformed overnight but equally “blithe acceptance of the status quo is misguided.”
“Risks are building, and they are structural. As [the late economist] Rudi Dornbusch warned, ‘In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.’”
In the medium term he called for the International Monetary Fund to increase its resources and set up a global fund to deal with capital flight. In the longer term there needed to be multipolar global economy and consideration should be given to the establishment of a “synthetic hegemonic currency.” possibly through a network of central bank digital currencies, in order to “dampen the domineering influence of the US dollar on global trade” so that US shocks would not reverberate around the world as they do now.
In essence this is a modern-day version of the proposal advanced by the British representative John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 for the establishment of a global currency, bancor. At that time, the US asserted its power and insisted that the dollar, backed by gold, had to be the international currency. But since the removal of the gold backing in 1971 as a stable anchor, the global financial system has become increasingly impacted by movements in the US dollar.
“The deficiencies of the international monetary and financial system have become increasingly potent,” Carney concluded and that “even a passing acquaintance with monetary history suggests that this centre won’t hold.”
Similar warnings of financial instability were given in another paper presented by Stanford University economists Arvind Krishnamurthy and Hanno Lustig who pointed to the role played by dollar-denominated investments in providing global investors with safe assets.
They recalled the warnings by economist Robert Triffin in 1960 about the essential contradiction at the heart of the Bretton Woods system. Triffin pointed out that the expansion of global trade and finance depended on the continual outflow of US dollars. But this meant that this pool of dollars would outgrow the gold backing that was its anchor, leading to a crisis. That crisis erupted when Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility.
The authors noted that Triffin’s logic could be extended to the current situation. “The supply of safe dollar assets is no longer backed by gold; however, the supply is fueled by increases in public and private leverage. Will dollar leverage be supplied in a manner consistent with financial stability? The events of the last 15 years suggest that policy makers should pay close attention to this question.”
BANKS RAN THIS COUNTRY AND RAN
IT INTO THE GROUND FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY.
“The Federal Reserve is
a key mechanism for perpetuating this whole filthy system,
in which “Wall Street rules.” But its services in behalf
of the rich and the super-rich only compound the fundamental
and insoluble contradictions of capitalism, plunging the system
into ever deeper debt and ensuring that the next crisis will be
that much more violent and explosive.”
“Hundreds of thousands
of federal workers remain furloughed or forced to work without pay as the
partial government shutdown enters its third week, but the US central bank is
making clear that all of the resources of the state are at the disposal of the
financial oligarchy.”
“A decade ago, as the
financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the
storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in
mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had
required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October,
two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America,
needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller but
still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac, died.”
NICOLE GELINAS
Bank Money: ‘The Root of
All Evil’
Waste and corruption are the result of banks' privilege to create
money out of nothing
The one force that causes the most harm in
our economy also happens to be the least well-known and understood.
While the left blames greedy corporations
and individuals, and the right blames the government, it is in fact the
collusion between the government and private banks that leads to problems
like environmental degradation, unemployment, income inequality, and many more.
In the United States and most other
countries, the government grants private banks the right to create money out of
nothing and forces individuals to accept said money as legal tender and to use
it to pay their taxes.
The Coinage Act of 1965 states, “United States coins and
currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal
reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public
charges, taxes, and dues.”
Today, the “notes” are mostly electronic
credits in the form of bank deposits, but the same law applies. So much for
legal tender—what about creating money out of nothing? Don’t banks take savers’
deposits and then loan them out to borrowers?
The short answer is no. Instead of taking
in savings from companies and individuals, then waiting for a suitable
borrower, banks use a simple accounting trick to create new money whenever
someone applies for a loan.
Let’s assume you apply for a mortgage of
$450,000. Once it’s approved, the bank simply credits your account with
$450,000 in the form of a deposit, which you can then use to spend on your
house. This is the bank’s liability. On the bank’s asset side, it credits
itself with a loan of $450,000 to you, which you will pay back over the course
of 30 or so years, plus interest.
For this process, no savings are necessary.
The only thing the bank has to do from a regulatory perspective is keep a very
low fraction of its assets in cash or balances at the Federal Reserve (Fed), so
it can pay out some cash on demand if needed. This is often not more than 1
percent of its assets, hence the term “fractional reserve” banking.
The Root
The popular saying has it that money is the
root of all evil. However, the original quote from the Bible would be more
accurately applied to the process described above, wherein banks are allowed to
create money out of nothing and charge you interest for the trouble: “for
the love of money
is the root of all evil.”
Money itself, of course, cannot be evil. It
merely measures the value of goods and services produced and the value of
capital saved. However, under the bank money monopoly, the new money created
doesn’t measure production and savings, but actually changes them.
The creation of “money,” in the form of the
loan and deposit, required nothing to be produced and nothing to be saved. The
production only begins later, when the contractors start building the
house—although even that is not guaranteed, given that many mortgages or other
loans are used to buy up existing assets, which drives up prices.
Even loans that finance new construction
alter the economy in unnatural ways: bankers’ prejudice directs production
instead of consumer demand from their own savings. And the bank, which can
repossess the collateral unless the loan is repaid, gets something for nothing.
The principle at work here is pure love of
money—nothing more. The bank does not need to expend any effort but can “earn”
the interest on the loan, which is the same as a private tax on the money
supply. It is the equivalent of a few designated individuals being allowed to
keep a money press at home, which they could then use to print cash, make
loans, and charge interest against. Meanwhile, everyone else is forced to use
those printed loans to make investments. Clearly, this is not fair.
The Problem
The ease with which banks can create money
explains the recurring colossal blunders in risk management and loan creation,
of which the subprime crisis is only the most recent manifestation. Because
money is free, it makes sense for banks to loan out as much as possible. After
all, they don’t have to do anything to source the funds, but get to reap the
interest payments as the loans are repaid.
If the market for money were not completely
cartelized by the government for the banks, even this perverse mechanism would
have its limit, and would ultimately lead to the demise of the participating
banks—just as what played out in the 2008 crisis.
However, because banks, regarded as too big
to fail, collude with the government and sponsor politicians with campaign
contributions, they can always rely on the government to bail them out when the
house of cards collapses. This is not a problem of too little regulation, but
instead of the wrong kind of regulations, perpetrating a systematic theft of
public resources.
Banks
can always rely on the government to bail them out when the house of cards collapses.
Even this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Because the capital allocation process in this system is so flawed, the private
sector is encouraged to spend funds on inefficient and unnecessary vanity
projects—real estate is the most obvious, along with massive industrial
overcapacity.
Because big corporations have better access
to big banks, they have better access to this artificial “capital,” and they
can therefore crowd out smaller players that may be able to service their
communities better. Too much real estate development and industrial
overcapacity also put the most strain on environmental resources.
The process leads to the centralization and
bureaucratization of everything, not just the government. Big corporations,
paying lower interest charges than their smaller competitors, end up providing
the majority of goods and services. This is why we see the same brands and
chains everywhere.
Because the money supply “tax” needs to be
paid to private banks, corporations are constantly looking for ways to cut
costs, which often means firing people and replacing them with robots.
Workers and ordinary consumers, on the
other hand, get trapped. They have no choice but to meet high interest payments
on credit card loans and mortgages, while the prices of goods, and anything
they might invest in, shoot through the roof.
The Solution
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.
If banks did not have the privilege of creating money out of nothing, and
instead had to source their loans from real savings, their incentives would
change immediately. It would also help if there were no government bailouts.
In that case, investment would equal real
savings and would by definition be limited, because savings require a reduction
in consumption. This is harder to achieve than simply printing money. Resources
would, therefore, be economized. Opportunities for accumulating extravagant
wealth, while still present, would also be reduced, and there would be a
natural tendency toward a more even wealth distribution—not one engineered by a
centralized bureaucracy.
Honest
banking and honest money have existed before in history.
If banks and borrowers had skin in the
game, capital allocation decisions would be examined not according to the “love
for money” principle, but rather according to how productive the investment
would be.
More productivity means producing more with
less, thus saving natural resources. Less capital investment would mean more
room for humans to participate in the economic process. Prices for capital and
goods would be more stable.
This is not a dream, nor a vision of
Utopia. Honest banking and honest money have existed before in history. The
first step to solving this problem is to become aware of the problem.
This article is part of a special Epoch Times
series on the Federal Reserve. Click here to see all articles.
Views expressed in this article are the
opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch
Times.
$2,198,468,000,000:
Federal Spending Hit 10-Year High Through March; Taxes Hit 5-Year Low
(Getty Images/Ron Sachs-Pool)
(CNSNews.com) - The federal government spent $2,198,468,000,000
in the first six months of fiscal 2019 (October through March), which is the
most it has spent in the first six months of any fiscal year in the last
decade, according
to the Monthly Treasury Statements.
The last time the government spent more in the
October-through-March period was in fiscal 2009, when it spent
$2,326,360,180,000 in constant March 2019 dollars.
Fiscal 2009 was the fiscal year that
began with President George W. Bush
signing a $700-billion law to bailout
the banking industry in October 2008
and then saw President Barack Obama
sign a $787-billion stimulus law in
February 2009.
began with President George W. Bush
signing a $700-billion law to bailout
the banking industry in October 2008
and then saw President Barack Obama
sign a $787-billion stimulus law in
February 2009.
At the same time that the Treasury was spending the most it has
spent in ten years, it was also taking in less in tax revenue than it has in
the past five years.
In the October-through-March period, the Treasury collected $1,507,293,000,000
in total taxes. The last time it collected less than that in the first six
months of any fiscal year was fiscal 2014, when it collected $1,420,897,880,000
in constant March 2019 dollars.
The difference in the federal taxes taken in and the spending
going out resulted in a federal deficit of $691,174,000,000 for the first six
months of the fiscal year.
During those six months, the Department of Health and Human
Services spent the most money of any federal agency with outlays of $583.491 billion.
The Social Security Administration was second, spending $540.426 billion. The
Department of Defense was third, spending $325.518 billion. Interest on
Treasury securities was third, coming in at $259.687 for the six-month period.
Both individual and corporation income taxes were down in the
first six months of this fiscal year compared to last year. In the first six
months of fiscal 2018, the Treasury collected $736,274,000,000 in individual
income taxes (in constant March 2019 dollars). In the first six months of this
fiscal year, it collected $723,828,000,000.
In the first six months of fiscal 2018, the Treasury collected
$80,071,070,000 in corporation income taxes (in constant March 2019 dollars).
In the first six months of this fiscal year, it collected $67,987,000,000.
(Historical budget numbers in this story were adjusted to March
2019 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.)
(Table 3 from the Monthly
Treasury Statement,
seen below, summarizing federal receipts and outlaws for the past month and for
the fiscal year to date and compares it to the previous fiscal year.)
After Lehman's Collapse: A
Decade of Delay
Now that the 2018
midterms are over, folks can address the elephant in the room. If one tuned
into Fox Business midday on January 7, one heard legendary corporate raider
Carl Icahn dilate on the dimensions of the pachyderm, which he pegged at $250
trillion. That’s the size of worldwide debt. But can that be right -- it’s
more than eleven times the official U.S. federal government’s debt? And in case
you didn’t notice, it is a quarter of one quadrillion bucks. Pretty soon we’ll
be talking real money.
Icahn’s $250T quotation
for worldwide debt came out last year. On September 13, Bloomberg ran
“$250 Trillion in Debt: the World’s
Post-Lehman Legacy” by Brian Chappatta, who draws off data from the Institute of International Finance’s July 9 “Global Debt
Monitor,” (to read IIF reports, one must sign up). Chappatta wonders how the
world’s central bankers can “even pretend to know how to reverse what they’ve
done over the past decade”:
[Central banks] kept
interest rates at or below zero for an extended period […] and used bond-buying
programs to further suppress sovereign yields, punishing savers and promoting
consumption and risk-taking. Global debt has ballooned over the past two
decades: from $84 trillion at the turn of the century, to $173 trillion at the
time of the 2008 financial crisis, to $250 trillion a decade after Lehman
Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse.
Chappatta breaks global
debt down into four categories: financial corporations, nonfinancial
corporations, households, and governments. In every category, global nominal
debt rose from 2008 to 2018, with the debt of governments hitting $67T. In the
important debt-as-a-percentage-of-gross-domestic-product measurement, three of
the categories rose while only financial corporations fell, “leaving their
debt-to-GDP ratio as low as it has been in recent memory.” Global banks seem to
be “healthier and more resilient to another shock.” After reporting on
worldwide debt, Chappatta then looks at U.S. debt.
What’s interesting about
debt in America is that as a percentage of GDP, households and financial
corporations have sharply reduced their debt. It is only government in America
that has seen a sharp debt-to-GDP uptick, and it was quoted at more than 100
percent of GDP. That’s rather higher than for all government debt worldwide.
Besides the massive
racking up of debt over the last decade there’s something else that should
concern us: the massive creation of new money. One of the ways money is created
is when central banks engage in the “bond-buying programs” that Chappatta
refers to. We call such programs “quantitative easing.” When the Federal
Reserve buys assets, like treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, it needs
money. So the Fed just creates the money ex nihilo.
Since the U.S. isn’t the
only nation that has been busy buying bonds and creating money, one might
wonder just how much money there is in the world. In June of 2017,HowMuch put
out “Putting the World’s Money into
Perspective,” which is a nice little graphic that puts the category “All
Money” at $83.6T.
In November of
2017, MarketWatch ran “Here’s all the money in the world, in
one chart”
by Sue Chang, who in her short intro to the chart has some interesting things
to say about global money, including cryptocurrencies. She writes of “narrow
money” and “broad money” and pegs the latter at
$90.4T, (or what Sen. Everett Dirksen would call “real money”.) If you want to
examine Chang’s chart more closely, I’ve “excised” it here for your
convenience; don’t miss the notes on the right margin. (Because its depth is
13,895 pixels, you might want to just save the chart to your computer rather
than print it off.)
So, in addition to an
historic run-up in debt, there’s been a monster amount of new money created.
Chappatta calls it the “grandest central-bank experiment in history.” His use
of “experiment” is apropos, as one wonders whether the world’s central bankers and
their economists really know what they’ve been doing.
One ray of hope might
just be President Trump’s choice of Jerome Powell as Chairman of the Federal
Reserve, (Trump has such good instincts about people). One can get a sense of
the man from his January talk with David Rubenstein at the Economic Club of
Washington, D.C. (video and transcript). It’s refreshing that
Mr. Powell disdains the “Fed speak” used by his predecessors.
Chappatta’s article is
quite worth reading, and it’s not very long. The charts are user-friendly,
although animated ones are a bit “creative.” The last section, “China Charges
Forward,” is especially worthwhile.
This is the post-Lehman
legacy. To pull the global economy back from the brink, governments borrowed
heavily from the future. That either portends pain ahead, through austerity
measures or tax increases, or it signals that central-bank meddling will become
a permanent fixture of 21st century financial markets.
Given those
alternatives, let’s try a little austerity. But austerity would entail spending
cuts, and Congress has a poor history in that regard. In fact, since fiscal
2007, the year before the financial crisis, total federal spending has gone
from $2.72T a year to more than $4T. While austere citizens deleverage and get
their fiscal affairs in order, Congress shamefully borrows and spends like
never before.
Congress’ solutions are
to bail out, prop up, and do whatever it takes to avoid reforming what it has
created. So they farm out their responsibilities to the Federal Reserve.
Indeed, in the July 17, 2012 meeting of the Senate Banking Committee (go
to the 53:50 point of this C-SPAN video), Chuck Schumer told
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke the following:
So given the political
realities, Mr. Chairman, particularly in this election year, I'm afraid the Fed
is the only game in town. And I would urge you to take whatever actions you
think would be most helpful in supporting a stronger economic recovery… So get
to work, Mr. Chairman. (Chuckles.)
So the Fed is “the only
game in town” because there are only monetary solutions for the economy, right?
There aren’t any fiscal solutions, as they would involve Congress, and Congress
is busy running for re-election, right? Sounds like you’re abdicating your
responsibilities, Chuck.
"The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for
perpetuating this whole filthy system, in
which "Wall Street rules."
Wall Street rules
The Federal Reserve
sent a clear message to Wall Street on Friday: It will not allow the longest
bull market in American history to end. The message was received loud and
clear, and the Dow rose by more than 700 points.
Responding to Thursday’s
market selloff following a dismal report from Apple and signs of a
manufacturing slowdown in both China and the US, the Fed declared it was
“listening” to the markets and would scrap its plans to raise interest rates.
Speaking at a
conference in Atlanta, where he was flanked by his predecessors Ben Bernanke
and Janet Yellen, both of whom had worked to reflate the stock market bubble
after the 2008 financial crash, Chairman Jerome Powell signaled that the Fed
would back off from its two projected rate increases for 2019.
“We’re listening
sensitively to the messages markets are sending,” he said, adding that the
central bank would be “patient” in imposing further rate increases. To
underline the point, he declared, “If we ever came to the conclusion that any
aspect of our plans” was causing a problem, “we wouldn’t hesitate to change
it.”
This extraordinary
pledge to Wall Street followed the 660 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial
Average on Thursday, capping off the worst two-day start for a new trading year
since the collapse of the dot.com bubble.
William McChesney
Martin, the Fed chairman from 1951 to 1970, famously said that his job was “to
take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” Now the task of the Fed
chairman is to ply the wealthy revelers with tequila shots as soon as they
start to sober up.
Powell’s remarks were
particularly striking given that they followed the release Friday of the most
upbeat jobs report in over a year, with figures, including the highest
year-on-year wage growth since the 2008 crisis, universally lauded as
“stellar.”
While US financial
markets have endured the worst December since the Great
Depression, amid mounting fears of a looming recession and a new
financial crisis, analysts have been quick to point out that there are no
“hard” signs of a recession in the United States.
Both the Dow and the
S&P 500 indexes have fallen more than 15 percent from their recent highs,
while the tech-heavy NASDAQ has entered bear market territory, usually defined
as a drop of 20 percent from recent highs.
The markets, Powell
admitted, are “well ahead of the data.” But it is the markets, not the “data,”
that Powell is listening to.
Since World War II,
bear markets have occurred, on average, every five-and-a-half years. But if the
present trend continues, the Dow will reach 10 years without a bear market in
March, despite the recent losses.
Now the Fed has stepped
in effectively to pledge that it will
allocate whatever
resources are needed to ensure that no
substantial market
correction takes place. But this means only that when the
correction does come, as it inevitably must, it will be all the more
severe and the Fed will have all the less power to stop it.
From the standpoint of
the history of the institution, the Fed’s current more or less explicit role as
backstop for the stock market is a relatively new development. Founded in 1913,
the Federal Reserve legally has had the “dual mandate” of ensuring both maximum
employment and price stability since the late 1970s. Fed officials have
traditionally denied being influenced in policy decisions by a desire to drive
up the stock market.
Federal Reserve
Chairman Paul Volcker, appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979,
deliberately engineered an economic recession by driving the benchmark federal
funds interest rate above 20 percent. His highly conscious aim, in the name of
combating inflation, was to quash a wages movement of US workers by triggering
plant closures and driving up unemployment.
The actions of the Fed
under Volcker set the stage for a vast upward redistribution of wealth,
facilitated on one hand by the trade unions’ suppression of the class struggle
and on the other by a relentless and dizzying rise on the stock market.
Volcker’s recession,
together with the Reagan administration’s crushing of the 1981 PATCO air
traffic controllers’ strike, ushered in decades of mass layoffs,
deindustrialization and wage and benefit concessions, leading labor’s share of
total national income to fall year after year.
These were also decades
of financial deregulation, leading to the savings and loan crisis of the late
1980s, the dot.com bubble of 1999-2000, and, worst of all, the 2008 financial
crisis.
In each of these
crises, the Federal Reserve carried out what became known as the “Greenspan
put,” (later the “Bernanke put”)—an implicit guarantee to backstop the
financial markets, prompting investors to take ever greater risks.
Since that time, the Federal Reserve has carried out its
most accommodative monetary policy ever, keeping interest rates at or near zero
percent for six years. It supplemented this boondoggle for the financial elite
with its multi-trillion-dollar “quantitative easing” money-printing program.
The effect can be seen in the ever more staggering wealth
of the financial oligarchy, which has consistently enjoyed investment returns
of between 10 and 20 percent every year since the financial crisis, even as the
incomes of workers have stagnated or fallen.
American capitalist
society is hooked on the toxic growth of social inequality created by the stock
market bubble. This, in turn, fosters the political framework not just for the
decadent lifestyles of the financial oligarchs, each of whom owns, on average,
a half-dozen mansions around the world, a private jet and a super-yacht, but
also for the broader periphery of the affluent upper-middle class, which
provides the oligarchs with political legitimacy and support. These elite
social layers determine American political life, from which the broad mass of
working people is effectively excluded.
In this intensifying
crisis, the working class must assert its independent interests with the same
determination and ruthlessness as evinced by the ruling class. It must answer
the bourgeoisie’s social counterrevolution with the program of socialist
revolution.
the depression is already
here for most of us below the super-rich!
Trump and the GOP created a fake economic boom on
our collective credit card: The equivalent of maxing out your credit
cards and saying look how good I'm doing right now.
*
Trump criticized
Dimon in
2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s economic
downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion to settle a case
and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I think is the worst
banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
*
"One
of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued
an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008
crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis”
was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that
effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of
the potential impact of central bank actions in driving
inequality between asset owners and labor."
*
"Overall,
the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of
financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the
massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now
extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial
conditions."
*
"It
is significant that what the Financial
Times described as a “tsunami of money”—estimated to reach $1
trillion for the year—has failed to prevent what could be the worst year for
stock markets since the global financial crisis."
*
"A decade ago, as the financial
crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied
158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-September
2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had required a
government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October, two of
the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America,
needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller
but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac,
died."
*
The
GOP said the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" would reduce deficits and
supercharge the economy (and stocks and wages). The White House says
things are working as planned, but one year on--the numbers mostly
suggest otherwise.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Finance’s Lengthening Shadow
The growth of nonbank lending
poses an increasing risk.
Economy, finance, and
budgets
CITY JOURNAL
A decade ago, as the financial crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-September 2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had required a government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October, two of the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America, needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac, died.
After the
crisis, the goal was to make banks safer. The 2010 Dodd-Frank law, coupled with
independent regulatory initiatives led by the Federal Reserve and other bank
overseers, severely tightened banks’ ability to engage in speculative ventures,
such as investing directly in hedge funds or buying and selling securities for
short-term gain. The new regime made them hold more reserves, too, to backstop
lending.
Yet the
financial system isn’t just banks. Over the last ten years, a plethora of
“nonbank” lenders, or “shadow banks”—ranging from publicly traded investment
funds that purchase debt to private-equity firms loaning to companies for
mergers or expansions—have expanded their presence in the financial system, and
thus in the U.S. and global economies. Banks may have tighter lending standards
today, but many of these other entities loosened them up. One consequence:
despite a supposed crackdown on risky finance, American and global debt has
climbed to an all-time high.
Banks
remain hugely important, of course, but the potential for a sudden, 2008-like
seizure in global credit markets increasingly lies beyond traditional banking.
In 2008, government officials at least knew which institutions to rescue to
avoid global economic paralysis. Next time, they may be chasing shadows.
The 2008 financial crisis vaporized 8.8 million American jobs,
triggered 8 million house foreclosures, and still roils global politics. Many
commentators blamed a proliferation of complex financial instruments as the
primary reason for the meltdown. Notoriously, financiers had taken subprime
“teaser”-rate mortgages and other low-quality loans and bundled them into
opaque financial securities, such as “collateralized debt obligations,” which
proved exceedingly hard for even sophisticated investors, such as the overseas
banks that purchased many of them, to understand. When it turned out that some
of the securities contained lots of defaulting loans—as Americans who never
were financially secure enough to purchase homes struggled to pay housing
debt—no one could figure out where, exactly, the bad debt was buried (many
places, it turned out). Global panic ensued.
The
“shadow-financing” industry played a role in the crisis, too. Many nonbank
mortgage lenders had sold these bundled loans to banks, so as to make yet more
bundled loans. But the locus of the 2008 crisis was traditional banks. Firms
such as Citibank and Lehman had kept tens of billions of dollars of such debt
and related derivative instruments on their books, and investors feared
(correctly, in Lehman’s case) that future losses from these soured loans would
force the institutions themselves into default, wiping out shareholders and
costing bondholders money.
The
ultimate cause of the crisis, however, wasn’t complex at all: a massive
increase in debt, with too little capital behind it. Recall how a bank works.
Like people, banks have assets and liabilities. For a person, a house or
retirement account is an asset and the money he owes is a liability. A bank’s
assets include the loans that it has made to customers—whether directly, in a
mortgage, or indirectly, in purchasing a mortgage-backed bond. Loans and bonds
are bank assets because, when all goes well, the bank collects money from them:
the interest and principal that borrowers pay monthly on their mortgage, for
example. A bank’s liabilities, by contrast, include the money it has borrowed
from outside investors and depositors. When a customer keeps his money in the
bank for safekeeping, he effectively lends it money; global investors who
purchase a bank’s bonds are also lending to it. The goal, for firms as well as
people, is for the worth of assets to exceed liabilities. A bank charges higher
interest rates on the loans that it makes than the rates it pays to depositors
and investors, so that it can turn a profit—again, when all goes well.
When the
economy tanks, this system runs into two problems. First, a bank’s asset values
start to fall as more people find themselves unable to pay off their mortgage
or credit-card debt. Yet the bank still must repay its own debt. If the value
of a bank’s assets sinks below its liabilities, the bank is effectively
insolvent. To lessen this risk, regulators demand that banks hold some money in
reserve: capital. Theoretically, a bank with capital equal to 10 percent of its
assets could watch those assets decline in value by 10 percent without
insolvency looming.
Yet
investors would frown on such a thin margin, and that highlights the second
problem: illiquidity. A bank might have sufficient capital to cover its losses,
but if depositors and other lenders don’t agree, they may rush to take their
money out—money that the bank can’t immediately provide because it has locked
up the funds in long-term loans, including mortgages. During a liquidity “run,”
solvent banks can turn to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding.
By 2008,
bank capital levels had sunk to an all-time low; bank managers and their
regulators, believing that risk could be perfectly monitored and controlled,
were comfortable with the trend. By 2007, banks’ “leverage ratio”—the
percentage of quality capital relative to their assets—was just 6 percent, well
below the nearly 8 percent of a decade earlier. Since then, thanks to tougher
rules, the leverage ratio has risen above 9 percent. Global capital ratios have
risen, as well. Many analysts believe that capital requirements should be
higher still, but the shift has made banks somewhat safer.
The
government doesn’t mandate capital levels with the goal of keeping any
particular bank safe. After all, private companies go out of business all the
time, and investors in any private venture should be prepared to take that
risk. The capital requirements are about keeping the economy safe. Banks tend to hold similar assets—various types of
loans to people, businesses, or government. So when one bank gets into trouble,
chances are that many others are suffering as well. A higher capital reserve
lessens the chance of several banks veering toward insolvency simultaneously,
which would drain the economy of credit. It was that threat—an abrupt shutdown
of markets for all lending, to good borrowers and bad—that led Washington to
bail out the financial industry (mostly the banks) in 2008.
But what if the financial industry, in creating credit, bypasses
the banks? According to the global central banks and regulators who make up the
international Financial Stability Board, this type of lending constitutes
“shadow banking.” That’s an imprecise, overly ominous term, evoking Mafia dons
writing loans to gamblers on betting slips and then kneecapping debtors who
don’t pay the money back on time, but the practice is nothing so Tony
Soprano-ish. The accountancy and consultancy firm Deloitte defines shadow
banking, wonkily, as “a market-funded credit intermediation system involving
maturity and/or liquidity transformation through securitization and
secured-funding mechanisms. It exists at least partly outside of the
traditional banking system and does not have government guarantees in the form
of insurance or access to the central bank.”
“Shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from
corporate bond markets to payday lending.”
In plain
English, “maturity and/or liquidity transformation” is exactly what a bank
does: making a long-term loan, such as a mortgage, but funding it with
short-term deposits or short-term bonds. Outside of a bank, the activity
involves taking a mortgage or other kind of longer-term loan, bundling it with
other loans, and selling it to investors—including pension funds, insurers, or
corporations with large amounts of idle cash, like Apple—as securities that
mature far more quickly than the loans they contain. The risks here are the
same as at the banks, but with a twist: if people and companies can’t pay off
the loans on the schedule that the lenders anticipated, all the investors risk
losing money. Unlike small depositors at banks, shadow banks don’t have
recourse to government deposit insurance. Nor can shadow-financing participants
go to the Federal Reserve for emergency funding during a crisis—though, in many
cases, they wouldn’t have to: pensioners and insurance policyholders generally
don’t have the right to remove their money from pension funds and insurers
overnight, as many bank investors do.
Understood
broadly, shadow banking is nothing new, encompassing everything from corporate
bond markets to payday lending. And much of it isn’t very shadowy; as a recent
U.S. Treasury report noted, the government “prefers to transition to a
different term, ‘market-based finance,’ ” because applying the term “shadow
banking” to entities like insurance companies could “imply insufficient
regulatory oversight,” when some such sectors (though not all) are highly
regulated. It isn’t always easy to separate real banks from shadow banks,
moreover. Just as before the financial crisis, banks continue to offer shadow
investments, such as mortgage-backed securities or bundled corporate loans,
and, conversely, banks also lend money to private-equity funds and other shadow
lenders, so that they, in turn, can lend to companies.
Such
market-based finance has its merits; sound reasons exist for why a pension-fund
administrator doesn’t just deposit tens of billions of dollars at the bank,
withdrawing the money over time to meet retirees’ needs. For people and
institutions willing, and able, to take on more risk, market-based finance can
offer higher interest rates—an especially important consideration when the
government keeps official interest rates close to zero, as it did from 2008 to
2016. Shadow finance also offers competition for companies, people, and
governments unable to borrow from banks cheaply, or whose needs—say, a
multi-hundred-billion-dollar bond to buy another company—would be beyond the
prudent coverage capacity of a single bank or even a group of banks.
Theoretically,
bond markets and other market-based finance instruments make the financial
system safer by diversifying risk. A bank holding a large concentration of
loans to one company faces a major default risk. Dispersing that risk to dozens
or hundreds of buyers in the global marketplace means—again, in theory—that in
a default, lots of people and institutions will suffer a little pain, rather
than one bank suffering a lot of pain.
But too much of a good thing is sometimes not so good, and, in this
case, the extension of shadow banking threatens to reintroduce the risks that
innovation was supposed to reduce. Recent growth in shadow banking isn’t
serving to disperse risk or to tailor innovative products to meet borrowers’
needs. Two less promising reasons explain its expansion. One is to enable
borrowers and lenders to skirt the rules—capital cushions—that constrain
lending at banks. The other—after a decade of record-low, near-zero interest
rates as Federal Reserve policy—is to allow borrowers and lenders to find
investments that pay higher returns.
The world
of market-based finance has indeed grown. Between 2002 and 2007, the eve of the
financial crisis, the world’s nonbank financial assets increased from $30
trillion to $60 trillion, or 124 percent of GDP. Now these assets, at $160
trillion, constitute 148 percent of GDP. Back then, such assets made up about a
quarter of the world’s financial assets; today, they account for nearly half
(48 percent), reports the Financial Stability Board (FSB).
Within
this pool of nonbank assets, the FSB has devised a “narrower” measure of shadow
banking that identifies the types of companies likely to pose the most systemic
risk to the economy—those most susceptible, that is, to sudden, bank-like
liquidity or solvency panics. The FSB believes that pension funds and insurance
companies could largely withstand short-term market downturns, so it doesn’t
include them in this riskier category. That leaves $45 trillion in narrow
shadow institutions and investments, a full 72 percent of it held in
instruments “with features that make them susceptible to runs.” That’s up from
$28 trillion in 2010—or from 66 percent to 73 percent of GDP.
Of that
$45 trillion market, the U.S. has the largest portion: $14 trillion. (Though,
as the FSB explains, separation by jurisdiction may be misleading; Chinese
investment vehicles, for example, have sold hundreds of billions of dollars in
credit products to local investors to spend on property abroad, affecting
Western asset prices.) Compared with this $14 trillion figure, American commercial
banks’ assets are worth just shy of $17 trillion, up from about $12 trillion
right before the financial crisis. Banks as well as nonbank lenders have grown,
in other words, but the banks have done so under far stricter oversight.
An analysis of one particular area of shadow financing shows the
potential for a new type of chaos. A decade ago, an “exchange-traded fund,” or
ETF, was mostly a vehicle to help people and institutions invest in stocks. An
investor wanting to invest in a stock portfolio but without enough resources to
buy, say, 100 shares apiece in several different companies, could purchase
shares in an ETF that made such investments. These stock-backed ETFs carried
risk, of course: if the stock market went down, the value of the ETF tracking
the stocks would go down, too. But an investor likely could sell the fund
quickly; the ETF was liquid because the underlying stocks were liquid.
Over the
past decade, though, a new creature has emerged: bond-based ETFs. A bond ETF
works the same way as a stock ETF: an investor interested in purchasing debt
securities but without the financial resources to buy individual bonds—usually
requiring several thousand dollars of outlay at once—can purchase shares in a
fund that invests in these bonds. Since 2005, bond ETFs have grown from
negligible to a market just shy of $800 billion—nearly 10 percent of the value
of the U.S. corporate bond market.
These
bond ETFs are riskier, in at least one way, than stock ETFs. Some bond ETFs, of
course, invest solely in high-quality federal, municipal, and corporate
debt—bonds highly unlikely to default in droves. Default, though, isn’t the
only risk: suddenly higher global interest rates could cause bond funds to lose
value (as new bonds, with the higher interest rates, would be more attractive).
And with the exception of federal-government debt, even the highest-quality
bonds aren’t as liquid as stocks; they have maturities ranging anywhere from
hours remaining to 100 years.
Investors
in bond-based ETFs, then, face a much bigger “liquidity” and “maturity”
mismatch risk. If the investors want to sell their ETF shares in a hurry, the
fund managers might not be able to sell the underlying bonds quickly to repay
them, particularly in a tense market. That’s especially true, since bond
markets are even less liquid than they were pre–financial crisis. Because of
new regulations on “market making,” banks will be highly unlikely to buy bonds
in a declining market to make a buck later, after the panic subsides.
Alook at a related type of debt-based ETF raises even bigger
mismatch concerns. “In 2017, investors poured $11.5 billion into U.S. mutual
funds and exchange-traded funds that invest in high-yield bank loans,” notes
Douglas J. Peebles, chief investment officer of fixed-income—bonds—at the
AllianceBernstein investment outfit. A high-yield bank loan is one that carries
particular risk, such as a loan to a company with a poor credit rating or to a
company borrowing money to merge with another firm or to expand; the “yield”
refers to the higher interest rate required to compensate for this risk. Rather
than keep this loan on its books, the bank is selling it, in these cases, to
the exchange-traded funds that are a rising component of shadow banking.
This new
demand has induced lending that otherwise wouldn’t exist—in many cases, for
good reason. “The quality of today’s bank loans has declined,” Peebles
observes, because “strong demand has been promoting lax lending and sketchy
supply. . . . Companies know that high demand means they can borrow at
favorable rates.” Further, says Peebles, “first-time, lower-rated
issuers”—companies without a good track record of repaying debt—are responsible
for the recent boom in loan borrowers, from fewer than 300 institutions in 2007
to closer to 900 today. The number of bank-loan ETFs (and similar “open-ended”
funds) expanded from just two in 1992 to 250 in June 2018.
Peebles
worries as well about the extra risk that this financing mechanism poses to
investors. “In the past, banks viewed the loans as investments that would stay
on their balance sheets,” he explains, but now that banks sell them to ETFs,
“most investors today own high-yield bank loans through mutual funds or ETFs,
highly liquid instruments. . . . But the underlying bank loan market is less
liquid than the high-yield bond market,” with trades “tak[ing] weeks to
settle.” He warns: “When the tide turns, strategies like these are bound to run
into trouble.”
The peril to the economy isn’t just that current investors could lose
money in a crisis, though big drops in asset markets typically lead people to
curtail consumer spending, deepening a recession. The bigger danger is a repeat
of 2008: fear of losses on existing investments might lead shadow-market
lenders to cut off credit to all potential new borrowers, even worthy ones.
Banks, because they’re dependent on shadow banks to buy their loans, would be
unlikely to fill the vacuum. “Although non-bank credit can act as a substitute
for bank credit when banks curtail the extension of credit, non-bank and bank
credit can also move in lockstep, potentially amplifying credit booms and
busts,” says the FSB. The porous borders between the supposedly riskier parts
of the nonbank financial markets—ETFs—and the less risky ones also could work
against a fast recovery in a crisis. Thanks to recent regulatory changes,
insurance companies, for example, are set to become big purchasers of bond ETF
shares.
Worsening
this hazard, just as with the collateralized debt securities of the financial
meltdown, many bond-based ETFs contain similar securities. Such duplication
could eradicate the diversification benefit that the economy supposedly gets
from dispersing risk. Contagion would be accelerated by the fact that
debt-based ETFs, like stock-based ETFs, must “price” themselves continuously
during the day, according to perceived future losses; this, in effect,
introduces the risk of stock-market-style volatility into long-term bond
markets. (Bond-based mutual funds, of course, have existed for decades, but
they did not trade like stocks and thus did not feature this particular risk.)
Via the plunging price of collateralized debt obligations, we saw, in 2008,
what happened to the availability of long-term credit when exposed to the
pricing signals of an equity-style crash, but those collateralized debt
obligations traded far less frequently than bond ETFs do today. Bond ETFs may
be more efficient, yes, in reflecting any given day’s value; that supposed
benefit could also allow a panic to spread more rapidly.
During
the last global panic, the answer to getting credit flowing again—so that
companies could perform critical tasks, such as meeting payrolls, before
revenue from sales came in—was to provide extraordinary government support to
the large banks. But even if one believes that such bailouts are a sensible
approach to financial crises—a highly tenuous position—how would the government
provide longer-term support to hundreds of individual funds, to ensure that the
broader market keeps functioning for credit-card and longer-term corporate
debt? This would greatly expand the government safety net over supposedly
risk-embracing financial markets—by even more than it was expanded a decade
ago.
“When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may
need shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.”
Unwise lending also harms borrowers. Private-equity firms, too, are
increasingly lending companies money, instead of just buying those firms
outright, their older model. As the Financial Times recently reported,
private-equity funds—or, more accurately, their related private-credit
funds—have more than $150 billion in money available for investment. They make
loans that banks won’t, or can’t, make, though this is leading banks to take
greater risks to compete. “It’s been great for borrowers,” says Richard Farley,
chair of law firm Kramer Levin’s leveraged-finance group, as “there are deals
that would not be financed,” or would not be financed on such favorable terms.
Competition
is usually healthy, and risky finance can spark innovation that otherwise
wouldn’t have happened. But easy lending can also make economic cycles more
violent. Even in boom years, excess debt can plunge firms that otherwise might
muddle through a recession deep into crisis, or even cause them to fail, adding
to layoffs and consumer-spending cutbacks. We can see this happening already,
as the Financial Times reports, with bankrupt
firms like Charming Charlie, an accessories store that expanded too fast; Six
Month Smiles, an orthodontic concern; and Southern Technical Institute, a
for-profit technical college.
The
numbers are troubling. The expansion of shadow banking has unquestionably
brought a pileup of debt. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets
Association, a trade group, estimates that U.S. bond markets, overall, have
swollen from $31 trillion to nearly $42 trillion since 2008. Federal government
borrowing accounts for a lot of that, but not close to all of it. The
corporate-bond market, for example, went from $5.5 trillion to $9.1 trillion
over the same decade. Corporations, in other words, owe almost twice as much
today in bond obligations as they did a decade ago. That’s sure to make it
harder for some, at least, to recover from any future downturn.
There are policy approaches to resolving these debt issues. An
unpopular idea would be to treat markets that act like banks, as banks—requiring
ETFs, say, to hold the same capital cushions and adhere to the same prudence
standards as banks. In the end, though, the bigger problem is cultural and
political. What we’re seeing, more than a decade after the financial crisis,
results from the government’s mixed signals about financial markets. On the one
hand, the U.S. government, along with its global counterparts, realized in 2008
that debt had reached unsustainable levels; that’s partly why it sharply raised
bank capital requirements. On the other hand, the government recognized that
the economy is critically dependent on debt. Absent large increases in workers’
pay, consumer and corporate debt slowdowns would stall the economy’s
until-recently modest growth. That’s why the U.S. and other Western governments
have kept interest rates so low, for so long.
Thus, we
find ourselves with safer banks but scarier shadows. Global debt levels are now
$247 trillion, or 318 percent, of world GDP, according to the Institute of
International Finance, up from $142 trillion owed in 2007, or 269 percent of
GDP. When both regular banks and shadow banks are tapped out, we may have to
invent shadow-shadow finance to take up the slack.
Nicole Gelinas is a City Journal contributing editor, a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall
Street—and Washington.
Decade after financial crisis
JPMorgan predicts next one’s
coming soon
Published
time: 13 Sep, 2018 14:00
© Ole Spata
/ Global Look Press
With the 10th anniversary
approaching of the catalyst for the last major global stock market crash – the
Lehman Brothers’ collapse – strategists from JPMorgan are predicting the next
financial crisis to strike in 2020.
Wall Street’s largest
investment bank analyzed the causes of the crash and measures taken by
governments and central banks across the world to stop the crisis in 2008, and
found that the economy remains propped up by those extraordinary steps.
According to the bank’s
analysis, the next crisis will probably be less painful, however, diminished
financial market liquidity since the 2008 implosion is a “wildcard” that’s
tough to game out.
“The main attribute of
the next crisis will be severe liquidity disruptions resulting from these
market developments since the last crisis,” the reports says.
Changes to central bank
policy are seen by JPMorgan analysts as a risk to stocks, which by one measure
have been in the longest bull market in history since the bottom of the crisis.
JPMorgan’s Marko
Kolanovic has previously concluded that the big shift away from actively
managed investing has escalated the danger of market disruptions.
“The shift from active to
passive asset management, and specifically the decline of active value
investors, reduces the ability of the market to prevent and recover from large
drawdowns,” said JPMorgan’s Joyce Chang and Jan Loeys.
The bank estimates that
actively managed accounts make up only about one-third of equity assets under
management, with active single-name trading responsible for just 10 percent or
so of trading volume.
JPMorgan referred to its
hypothetical scenario as the “great liquidity crisis,” claiming
that the timing of when it could occur “will largely be determined by
the pace of central bank normalization, business cycle dynamics, and various
idiosyncratic events such as escalation of trade war waged by the current US
administration.”
As US banks report record profits
Regulators, Congress move to
end all restraints on Wall Street speculation
On Tuesday, the US
House of Representatives passed a bill to exempt the vast majority of financial
firms from the Dodd-Frank bank regulations passed after the 2008 Wall Street
crash. This coincided with press reports that the Federal Reserve Board and
other bank regulators will announce as soon as next week proposals to gut the
provision of Dodd-Frank most hated by Wall Street—the so-called “Volcker Rule.”
The accelerating
offensive against even the most minimal restrictions on financial speculation
takes place in the context of surging bank profits and CEO pay. On Tuesday, the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the agencies that is preparing to
eviscerate the Volcker Rule, reported that US banks recorded record profits of
$56 billion in the first quarter of 2018, a 28 percent increase over the same
period last year.
As the tenth
anniversary of the September 2008 Wall Street crash approaches, the token
restrictions on the banks that were passed during the Obama administration are
being dismantled. These minimal measures, including increased capital reserve
requirements, annual “stress tests” and limited restrictions on risky
derivative trading, were mainly enacted to provide political cover for the
administration’s multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the financial institutions
responsible for the wholesale destruction of jobs, millions of home
foreclosures and the wiping out of retirement savings.
After eight years of
the Dodd-Frank bank “reform,” the American financial oligarchy exercises its
dictatorship over society and the government more firmly than ever. This
unaccountable elite will not tolerate even the most minimal limits on its
ability to plunder the economy for its own personal gain.
The Volcker Rule,
named after the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Paul Volcker, was
included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank act but not drafted and approved by the
regulatory agencies until 2013. It took effect only in 2015.
The rule ostensibly
bars commercial banks, which benefit from federally guaranteed retail deposits
and other government backstops, from speculating with bank funds, including
customers’ deposits, on their own account—a practice known as proprietary
trading. However, the rule incorporates huge loopholes allowing banks to
speculate with their own funds under cover of hedging their investments and
providing liquidity to the financial markets.
At the time of its adoption, the Wall Street Journal cynically but accurately
wrote: “Rest assured banks will find loopholes. And rest assured some of the
Volcker rule-writers will find private job opportunities to help with that
loophole search once they decide to lay down the burdens of government
service.”
No banks have been
cited for violating the rule since it took effect.
Nevertheless, top
Wall Street CEOs such as JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd
Blankfein have campaigned ferociously against the measure, denouncing it as an
arbitrary restriction on the financial markets and an impediment to economic
growth. Wall Street lobbyists have spent many millions of dollars bribing
politicians of both parties to weaken the rule to the point of complete
irrelevance.
In a speech to
international bankers in March, Randal Quarles, the Fed’s new vice chairman for
supervision, said, “We want banks to be able to engage in market making and
provide liquidity to financial markets with less fasting and prayer about their
compliance with the Volcker Rule.”
The plan is to make
the rule a dead letter through administrative changes in the language of the
regulation rather than by means of legislation. At the behest of the major
banks, federal regulators are preparing to widen even further the existing
loopholes, allowing the banks to carry out short-term trades with their own
funds and amass more speculative assets in the name of “market-making.” They
will also end requirements that the banks provide documentation to prove that
their activities comply with the rule, relying instead on assurances from the
bankers.
The banking bill
passed by the House on Tuesday increases the Dodd-Frank asset threshold for
financial firms to be considered “systemically important financial
institutions,” and thus subject to tighter regulatory oversight, from $50
billion to $250 billion. This is being presented by Democratic as well as
Republican backers as a matter of fairness to small and midsize banks. In fact,
the exemption covers such giant companies as American Express, SunTrust Banks and
Fifth Third Bank.
These companies will
no longer be subject to yearly Federal Reserve “stress tests” or higher capital
reserve requirements. The bill also exempts banks with less than $10 billion in
assets from the Volcker Rule and exempts banks that have granted fewer than 500
mortgages from reporting requirements.
Thirty-five House
Democrats joined all but one of the House Republicans to pass the measure,
which now goes to President Trump, who has pledged to sign it. The Senate
version was passed in March with broad Democratic support, including 11
Democratic co-sponsors. A total of 17 Senate Democrats voted for the bill.
Another aspect of the
attack on Dodd-Frank is the strangulation of the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau (CFPB). This agency, lacking any serious enforcement powers and fully
subordinate to the Federal Reserve, was set up under Obama-era legislation to
give the impression of government support for consumers victimized by illegal
or fraudulent banking practices. Despite its toothless character, it was
immediately targeted by Wall Street for destruction.
Under Trump, this
process is now well underway. The White House pressured the Obama holdover
Richard Cordray to resign as director of the CFPB and installed Mick Mulvaney,
Trump’s budget director, as acting head of the bureau to oversee its
dismantling. Mulvaney has halted investigations, imposed a hiring freeze,
stopped the agency from collecting certain data from banks and proposed cutting
off public access to a database of consumer complaints.
Despite
for-the-record verbal protests by Democratic politicians over the gutting of
bank regulations, the removal of restrictions on financial institutions is a
bipartisan policy. Trump’s scorched earth approach is an intensification of the
basic line of the Obama administration rather than a departure from it.
In 2011, the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations produced a 650-page report on the
financial crisis documenting in detail the fraudulent and illegal activities of
the major Wall Street banks, aided by corrupt and compliant federal regulatory
agencies and credit rating firms that had a vested interest in promoting the
banks’ subprime mortgage fraud and other swindles. At the time, the chairman of
the subcommittee, Michigan Senator Carl Levin, gave a press conference at which
he said the investigation had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed,
conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
Nevertheless, Obama
pursued a deliberate policy of shielding the big banks and their top executives
from criminal prosecution. Financial speculation and fraud continued unabated,
subsidized by the government’s policy of supplying the banks with virtually
free credit by means of near-zero interest rates and the Fed’s money-printing
“quantitative easing” program.
Despite a wave of
scandals, including the manipulation of the key Libor interest rate, JPMorgan’s
$6.2 billion “London Whale” derivative loss, money-laundering cases involving
some of the world’s biggest banks, and the forging of documents to facilitate
home foreclosures, not a single leading banker was criminally charged, let
alone jailed during the Obama years.
This was not because
of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the contrary,
Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013 that the
Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their CEOs because
to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
Meanwhile, government
policies favored the further consolidation of financial institutions, including
JPMorgan’s subsidized takeover of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, Bank of
America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo’s absorption of
Wachovia. As a result, the stranglehold of a handful of megabanks over economic
and social life in America is tighter than ever.
Who Can We Blame For The Great Recession?
|
This year
marks the tenth anniversary of the “Great Recession” and the media are trying
to determine if we have learned anything from it. The Queen visited the London
School of Economics after the “Great Recession” to ask her chief economists why
they hadn’t seen this disaster coming. They told her they would get back to her
with an answer. Later, they wrote her a letter saying that the best
economic theory asserts that recessions are random events and they had
successfully predicted that no one can predict recessions.
Still,
George Packer, a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine since 2003, thinks he
knows more than the LSE academics. He wrote the following in the August 27 print
issue:
"It was caused by reckless
lending practices, Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax government oversight
in the George W. Bush years, and deregulation of the financial sector in the
Bill Clinton years. The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality.
In good times and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle
class sank ever further into debt...
"In
February, 2009, with the economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month,
Congress passed a stimulus bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts,
aid to states, and infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists
of every persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not
a single Republican member of the House."
Typically,
journalists will defer to an expert on matters in which they aren’t trained,
which is most subjects. But Packer didn’t bother to ask an economist as the
Queen did. Had he done so, he would have received the same answer from
mainstream economists – recessions are random events and can’t be predicted. If
economists knew the causes of recessions they could predict them when they see
the causes present.
So where
did Packer get his “causes” for the latest recession? In the classic movie
Casablanca, the corrupt and lazy policeman Renault is “shocked” to find
gambling going on at Rick’s place and orders the others to round up the “usual
suspects.” That’s what Packer does. People have blamed greedy businessmen and
bankers for crises for centuries. Since the rise of socialism they added capitalism
and the politicians who support it. The only new suspect in the socialist line
up is inequality, even though inequality has varied little since 1900 and is
near its record low since then.
Had
Packer consulted the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he
wouldn’t have received much help. Keep in mind that mainstream economists think
recessions are random events. After the storm subsides, they can identify
likely contributors for the latest disaster, but those differ with each
recession. Recently Chicago Booth queried experts for the top contributing
factors of the latest recession. The top answer was
flawed regulations,
followed by underestimating risk and mortgage fraud.
The
“flawed regulations” excuse assumes that bitter bureaucrats who write the regulations
are wiser than the actual bankers and ignores the fact that banking is one of
the most regulated industries. One analyst described the recent recession as
the perfect storm of regulations so massive no one group could understand them
all and many of them working against other regulations.
Blaming
“underestimated risk” is good Monday morning quarterbacking. Everyone has 20/20
hindsight, or 50/50 as quarterback Cam Newton said. The same economists don’t
explain why banks that took similar risks didn’t fail or why what seems risky
now didn’t seem so risky in 2007. As for fraud, the amount was negligible and
is always there; why did it contribute to a recession this time? Sadly, the
correct answer to what caused the Great Recession– “Loose monetary policy” –
came in next to last among Chicago Booth’s experts.
Perspective
is vital. A magnifying glass can make a lady bug look terrifying. Let’s pull
back and put the latest recession in a broader context. There have been 47
recessions/depressions since the birth of the nation. Before the Great
Depression economists called crises “depressions” and since then they are
“recessions.” They’re the same thing; economists thought “recession” was less
scary.
Recessions
before the Great Depression were mild compared to it. It took the Federal
Reserve and the US government working together trying to “rescue” us to plunge
the country into history’s worst economic disaster. Journalists like Packer
have convinced people that the Great Recession of 2008 was second only to the
Great Depression, but if we combine the recessions of 1981 and 1982, separated
only by a technicality and six months, that recession would have been worse.
The Fed did not reduce interest rates after that recession because it was still
battling the inflation it has caused in the 1970s, yet the economy bounced back
and recovery lasted almost a decade.
I want to
drive home the fact that the three worst recessions in our history assaulted us
after the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
The best
explanation of the causes of recessions, because it enjoys the greatest
empirical support, is the Austrian business-cycle theory, or ABCT. Ludwig von
Mises and Friedrich Hayek are most famous for refining and expounding it, but
the English economists of the Manchester school were the first to write about
it. They discovered that expansions of the money supply through low interest
rates motivated businesses to borrow and invest at a rapid rate. That launches
an unsustainable boom because businesses are trying to deploy more capital
goods than exist. Banks raise rates to rein in galloping inflation and the boom
turns to dust.
Banks
don’t control interest rates today as they did in the past. That’s the Federal
Reserve’s job. The Fed generally reduces interest rates or expands the money
supply through “quantitative easing,” or buying bonds from banks, in order to
force an economy in the ditch to climb out. The recovery from the Great Recession remained on its feet for so long
because the Fed’s policy of paying interest on reserves at banks soaked up much
of the new money it created out of thin air. Also, much of the money went
overseas to buy imports or as investments.
The
lesson – don’t ask medical advice from your plumber or economics from a
journalist. And if you ask an economist, make sure he follows the Austrian
school.
NO PRESIDENT IN HISTORY SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS
THAN BARACK OBAMA!
“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of
financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs
($571,330),
UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
OBAMA and HIS
BANKS: THEIR PROFITS, CRIMES and LOOTING SOAR
This
was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the
contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013
that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their
CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
“Attorney
General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the disgraceful
scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
Why the swamp has little to fear
The midterm elections will either
halt or hasten the current soft coup whose aim is to overthrow a legally
elected President now being conducted by the swamp. And if the
history of Washington, D.C. corruption is any indication of what will happen
after the midterms, the swamp will survive regardless of its coup's success or
failure. But the efforts to expose the treasonous plot will fade
away into the dustbin of political history after being seen as just another
waste of time and taxpayer money. The seemingly endless parade of
corruption scandals and mind-numbing criminal activity will go on unabated and
continue to escalate to unimaginable heights because of an inescapable fact of
human nature.
In a Forbes 2015
article entitled "The Big Bank Bailout," author Mike Collins mentions
several ways to prevent another housing bubble crisis from destroying the world
economy when he writes, "But perhaps the best solution is to make the CEOs
and top managers of the banks criminally liable for breaking these rules so
that they fear going to jail. These people are not afraid to do it
again so if you can’t put some real fear in their heads, they will do it
again."
What Collins has honed
in on is accountability and punishment, the very things lacking in today's
dealings with the swamp. Just as the major banking institutions will
soon, if not already, re-enter into risky, corrupt, and illegal lending
practices because there was not a "smidgen" of accountability for the
trillions of dollars they lost in the housing bubble catastrophe, so too will
the past and presently unknown criminals within the IRS, FBI, and DOJ continue
to thumb their noses at the law.
What the American people have been
subjected to over the past 18 months since President Trump took office is a series
of crimes that have been painstakingly unearthed but little
else. "Earth-shattering," "bombshell," and
"constitutional crisis" are just some of the words and phrases used
by media outlets to describe the newest update regarding the many ongoing investigations. These
words are meant to shock the audience but no longer have the impact they once
did because of their overuse and because of the likely lack of any substantive
outcome. What Americans have seen are trials without consequences,
clear proof of guilt with no punishment. Draining
the swamp without any repercussions to the swamp creatures inside is like going
on a diet but eating the same foods.
Americans witnessed no accountability
regarding exhaustive investigations into the deadly circumstances surrounding
the swamp's gun-walking campaign named Fast and Furious, a program where U.S.
Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and hundreds of innocent Mexican citizens were
killed with guns the government sold to criminals. The swamp continued
on its power mission and attempted the deceitful confiscation of America's
health care with Obamacare, whose real aim was a redistribution of the nation's
wealth. After little pushback and the passage of
Obamacare, Americans witnessed Benghazi in 2012, and when nothing
was accomplished over the investigations of that tragedy, the swamp trampled on
the rights of conservatives in what became known as the IRS scandal of
2013. Nothing was done about that. And on and on, with
the swamp committing one bigger and bolder crime after the next with
impunity.
So we have arrived at the doorstep of
the Russian collusion investigation farce by first traveling through the swamp
of unsolved crimes perpetrated inside the Obama administration. With
the passage of time, swamp-dwellers like Eric Holder and Lois Lerner,
knee-deep in the mud with congressional contempt charges, continue to be
financially enriched and will slowly be forgotten, while more recognizable
swamp royalty like Hillary Clinton get to run for president.
Until Americans see
guilty members within the United States government wearing orange jumpsuits and
serving time, the investigations and congressional hearings are mere sideshow
spectacles to appease the masses.
More stiffing the little guy from haughty Kamala Harris
This characterization, from Thomas Lifson
last month, pretty well sums her up every time a Kamala Harris story comes to light:
Kamala Harris
is scary in her pathological ambition, moral flexibility, comfort with
deception, and sheer ruthlessness.
So here's a new one, from California watcher
Susan Crabtree atRealClearPolitics, reporting Harris's soapboxing at the
second presidential debate:
“So in my
background as attorney general of California, I took on the big banks who
preyed on the homeowners, many of whom lost their homes and will never be able
to buy another,” Harris said in late July during the second round of Democratic
debates in Detroit.
In fact, she
and several other state attorneys general were instrumental in negotiating a
$25 billion national settlement with five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to
provide debt relief and other financial services to struggling homeowners. But
in 2012, just months after Harris secured those funds along with the other
state AGs, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from
California’s portion of the settlement to pay off state budget shortfalls
incurred before the housing crisis.
Although
Harris initially spoke out against Brown’s diversion of the funds, she remained
silent on a subsequent court battle that began in 2014 – even after she left
the attorney general’s office and for the last year and a half while serving as
senator and during her presidential bid this year.
Which is pretty outrageous. Harris shook
down some banks in the name of "the people" and then like a crooked
lawyer, didn't give the "winnings" to the clients. Whoever got
wronged in this mortgage-lending mess didn't see a penny of the won cash. It all just went to other Democrat
priorities within the one-party state.
Sound like the kind of lawyer you'd want
to have if you got stiffed in some bank deal? Whatever this is, it's not the
doing of the consumer advocate she's now painting herself to be.
Any more than she's the prison-rights
advocate she claims to be - she threw thousands of them in jail for petty
offenses during her time as State Attorney General, kept people in jail beyond
their sentences in order to retain them to fight fires, and refused to disavow
false testimony from prosecutorial misconduct that would have freed prisoners.
She's never been about the little guy.
The mortgage-payout story shows two
distasteful things about Harris.
One, she plays the old California
political machine game (it probably happens in other crooked one-party states,
too) of amassing a vast pot of money for one purpose, a virtue-signaling
purpose, a purpose that press releases can be released on, and political
campaign speeches can be made ... and then spending the same pile of
cash on something thing else, something far less salable to the
voters, something that will cover up spending mismanagement or fatten pensions.
In California, this game is gotten away with all the time. Gas tax is approved
by voters to improve roads ... and ends up bankrolling bureaucrat and administrative
hiring sprees. Federal stimulus money is shoveled into the state for
shovel-ready bridges and road improvements --- and goes to cover municipal
budget holes brought on by mismanagement. Voters approve bond measures in
the name of hiring teachers and getting more school supplies for kids in
education -- and it goes to educrat pensions and union siphon-offs. Harris is
comfortable operating that way in taking on the big banks, shaking them down --
and just letting the money head elsewhere.
Two, she's still the teacher's pet of
Democrats, the sidling, sucking-up, get-along-to-go-along,
slept-her-way-to-the-top errand girl the more powerful Democrats like. Crabtree
reports that Harris first protested the diversion of the funds, and then went
silent. Why would she do that? Obviouly, she heard from more powerful
Democrats, the kind who could make or break her career. An Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez-style boat-rocker she was not. The money was won, the cash was
collected, the whole thing went to the government instead of the little
guys, and she went along.
Which pretty well tells us what kind of
leader she would be if heaven forbid she should win the presidency. In winning
the money and then allowing it to be diverted, she failed the little guys she
now says she was serving. And with that, she shows she's never
been about serving the people, she's about obeying the greater
interests of the Democratic political machine. No wonder she's so popular in those
circles - she's been kowtowing to these rich and powerful since the dawn of her
career. For voters, the real message, as she vows to take over their health
care, hand out reparations to black people, and offer free stuff for votes is
clear: That the cash she promises isn't going to get anywhere near
the little guys. Not even the illegal immigrants she's promising free health
care for can believe her.
“One,
Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer expects to get that
prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been sucking up for months for it,
and all signs point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala Harris. The
fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this point, after all those
years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe,
who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did.”
In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the settlement was at bottom
yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout and Tim Geithner's
backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner assistance program. As Dayen
writes, "more families lost their homes as a result of transactions
facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than those who got a
sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half of the dollar
value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be legally recovered in
the first place. She also declined
to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a
thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500
to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated
$2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
The problem with Harris instead
is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while
defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough
decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did. RYAN
COOPER
Obama
Doctor: Biden ‘Looked Frail’ when Confronted by Harris at Debate
27 Jul 201925
2:14
A former
doctor for President Barack Obama claimed that Joe Biden, the Democrat frontrunner,
“looked frail” when confronted by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) over his record on
civil rights at the first Democrat presidential debate last month.
Dr. David
Scheiner, who served as Obama’s personal physician for more than 20 years prior
to his election to the presidency, told the Washington Examiner on Friday that
after having watched the debate, he was worried about the 76-year-old former
vice president’s state of health.
The longtime
Obama physician even drew comparison between Biden’s faculties and those of
former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who appeared weak, frail, and
confused while testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee this week.
“Harris started attacking him and he looked frail to me,”
Scheiner said. “I sort of got the feeling he wasn’t very strong. It was
similar to the feeling I got when Republicans started attacking Mueller so
fiercely.”
Biden, who if
elected would be the oldest president ever inaugurated, is generally perceived
to have done poorly at the first debate. In particular, the former vice
president struggled to defend himself in the face of a fiery rebuke from Harris over his
recent praisefor segregationists and long
held opposition against busing to
integrate public schools.
Instead of
presenting an adequate rebuttal to Harris’s critiques, Biden attempted to
dismiss her outright by claiming she had mischaracterized his record. He then
proceeded to muddle his position on busing and inaccurately claim
he never offered praise for racists, before
conceding the argument by saying “my time’s up, I’m sorry.”
The poor
performance renewed existing concerns about the former vice
president’s capabilities as a candidate, and not just from
opponents. After the debate, Biden’s team was reportedly “freaking
out”
about the way he handled the encounter with Harris. Federal Election Commission
filings show his aides took the incident seriously enough to have hired a speech coach, best
known for his work with President Bill Clinton, one day after the debate.
Joe Biden admits it: Obama stiffed the deplorables
It's getting weird out there in these dog days of the Democratic
presidential nomination race ahead of the Big One in 2020.
Departing from his nonstop praise for President Obama, former vice
president Joe Biden came up with this doozy in his interview
with the New York Times. Here's the money quotes picked out by Breitbart:
Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted
"a lot of people were left behind" during his and President Barack
Obama's tenure in the White House.
Biden, who has pitched himself as the only
Democrat capable of winning back the white working class in 2020, made the
admission when being interviewed for a profile in The New York
Times that was published on Tuesday.
"A lot of people were left
behind," the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat
the recession. "In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we
paid enough attention to their plight."
So some kind of reality has dawned on him. He's noticed
the Obama-era meth addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by the Obama
"you didn't build that" agenda, but not quite enough to
recognize that a large portion of Trump voters were actually well
educated.
None of this makes Biden look like someone you'd like to elect
president.
Three possibilities are there for what is going on.
One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer
expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been
sucking up for months for it, and all signs point instead to Obama tilting
toward Kamala Harris. The fact that Obama failed to endorse
Biden at this point, after all those years of faithful service, was
quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe, who stood at Obama's side no matter
what he did. These
Biden remarks suggest that maybe he's realized this and is distancing
himself, even as the Breitbart report noted that he tried to soften the
blame. Nope, blame is blame, even with sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is trying to draw negative attention to Obama...to
deflect from all the stuff he didn't bother to do. According
to Breitbart:
Despite the confession, Biden stopped
short of laying the culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the president and
others were preoccupied by more pressing issues during their eight years in
office.
"Everything landed on the president's
desk but locusts," Biden said in describing the early days of the
administration. He added that Obama was so busy he "didn't have time
to breathe."
The former vice president attributed the
"lack of messaging" and Obama's reluctance to "promote his
successes."
Obama was busy? Where the heck was Joe,
then? Vice presidents are supposed to be there to do all the work
the president can't do, such as go to funerals. Biden declaring
Obama busy only raises the question about what Biden was doing. Was
he doing anything at all — other than meddling in the internal affairs of
Ukraine in the name of business deals? Biden, like Obama, had
his priorities — and helping deplorables wasn't one of them. So now
he's trying to pin the whole thing on Obama.
Third, it may just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy at
all, just bits and pieces and parts and particles, and he likes the sound of
his voice to interviewers. He's popping off and doing
gaffes. He doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to
him because of what it reveals. What could it
reveal? That he's bitter at Obama, that he was a lazy, shiftless,
do-nothing vice president, that he doesn't know what he's talking
about. What a picture of incompetence.
There aren't any other scenarios. Biden's remarks on
this, after years of effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of truth
coming out. Truth is not going to help old Joe.
Democrats Allow Communists to
Infiltrate Their Party Across the Nation
“Obama’s
new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the
anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said
that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the
“resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a
variety of groups organizing direct action against
Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features
lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”
*
“Professor
Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny
include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the
openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who
put Obama into power.”
*
We are all victims of the Obama cabal’s
collusion with Russia – President Trump’s voters and all Americans who believe
in our free and fair election process.
Meanwhile, Citigroup has promoted mass immigration as a
necessary component to growing the American economy in terms of increasing GDP.
THE RISE TO POWER OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA
'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used
words to describe the president: Pew Research Center
The larger
fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as
the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.
Joe
Biden Admits ‘A Lot of People Were Left Behind’ During the Obama Years
23 Jul 2019
2:55
Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted “a
lot of people were left behind” during his and President Barack Obama’s tenure
in the White House.
Biden, who has pitched himself as
the only Democrat capable of winning back the white working class in 2020, made
the admission when being interviewed for a profile in The New York Times that was
published on Tuesday.
“A lot of people were left behind,”
the frontrunner said when discussing the Obama
administration’s efforts to combat the recession. “In areas where people
were hard hit, I don’t think we paid enough attention to their plight.”
Despite the confession, Biden
stopped short of laying the culpability on Obama. Instead, he claimed the
president and others were preoccupied by more pressing issues during their
eight years in office.
“Everything landed on the
president’s desk but locusts,” Biden said in describing the early days of
the administration. He added that Obama was so busy he “didn’t have time
to breathe.”
The former vice president attributed
the “lack of messaging” and Obama’s reluctance to “promote his successes.”
“He told me that he had encouraged
Obama to promote his successes more — to “explain to people how we got where we
were now and why it happened” — but that Obama was resistant. “The president
said: ‘Joe, I’m not taking a victory lap. We have so much more work to do,’ ”
Biden recalled.”
According to Bide, those failures
helped lead to the rise and eventual election of President Donald
Trump. In 2016, voters without a college degree backed Trump over
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by a margin of 52 percent to 44
percent. The share was significantly larger among non-college educated whites
who broke for Trump by the largest margin since 1980—67 percent to 28 percent.
Although the numbers of such voters
are decreasing nationally,
non-college educated whites are still a sizable population in Pennsylvania,
Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio—states that put Trump over the top in the
electoral college.
Exit polling showed that
most of these voters, many of whom identify as conservative Democrats, were
inspired to join Trump’s movement because of his nationalist views on trade and
economics. Many especially felt left behind by the Democrats’ embrace of
globalization under President Bill Clinton and the “new economy” during Obama’s
tenure.
Biden’s admission about having
failed the white working class is surprising, considering he not only embraced
the same policies as both Obama and Trump, but has spent considerable time
positioning himself as Obama’s rightful heir.
Just last month, after a
disappointing performance in the first Democrat presidential debate,
Biden invoked Obama’s
legacy during an address in front of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/Push Coalition.
“My president gets much too little
credit for all that he did, he was one of the great presidents of the United
States of America and I’m tired of hearing about what he didn’t do,” Biden told
the audience.
Kamala Harris
stood up to big banks, with mixed results for consumers in crisis
·
·
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - In her presidential pitch to voters,
U.S. Senator Kamala Harris touts as a signature accomplishment the $20 billion
relief settlement she secured as California attorney general for homeowners hit
hard by the foreclosure crisis.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Kamala
Harris speaks to members of the American Federation of Teachers in Detroit,
Michigan, U.S. May 6, 2019. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/File Photo
Consumer advocates praise Harris for demanding more money from
the banks and for backing stronger protections for homeowners. But thousands of
people still lost their homes after not getting the help they needed, advocates
say.
The settlement’s uneven results leave Harris, one of more than
20 Democrats seeking the party’s nomination to run against President Donald
Trump in 2020, vulnerable to skepticism from voters dismayed by how it played
out and attacks from competitors for not being tougher on banks.
“If you’re running against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,
you have to be anti-bank,” said Steven Maviglio, a California Democratic
strategist who has advised two assembly speakers and a governor. “That would
possibly give them fodder if she catches fire.”
Warren and Sanders, who serve with Harris in the Senate, have
led the charge among progressives calling for aggressive regulation and oversight
of financial institutions. Warren has proposed making it easier to jail
executives whose companies commit wrongdoing.
Just two years into her first term as a senator, Harris, 54,
relies heavily on the campaign trail on her experience as an elected prosecutor
in California, including six years as attorney general in the aftermath of the
mortgage crisis.
In 2011, she famously walked away from the table when attorneys
general from other states were negotiating a settlement with the big banks that
would require them to help consumers harmed by foreclosure and predatory
lending practices.
Her bold move led to tough negotiations that more than
quadrupled the money promised to help Californians reduce the amount they owed
on their mortgages. A few years later, Harris also championed a Homeowners Bill
of Rights in California that helped protect consumers in the wake of the
crisis.
“Senator Harris fought hard on behalf of California homeowners,
and she secured the largest settlement of any attorney general in America,”
said Ian Sams, her campaign spokesman. “It was a big risk to press the banks
even further for a larger settlement, but she had the conviction to do it and
the toughness to win that fight.”
But consumer advocates who worked with California homeowners
during the mortgage crisis say the most vulnerable – limited English speakers,
the disabled, widows and minorities - had the least luck obtaining relief.
“What we heard repeatedly was people who should be getting loan
modifications weren’t getting them,” said Kevin Stein, deputy director of the
California Reinvestment Coalition, an association of about 300 nonprofit
consumer finance groups.
The state did not track individual consumers who applied for or
received help under the settlement, or gather information on ethnicity, income
or other circumstances. However, repeated detailed surveys of California
Reinvestment Coalition’s member organizations during the financial crisis
showed the difficulty credit counselors had obtaining help for their clients. The
surveys, seen by Reuters, highlight in particular the trouble faced by
disadvantaged groups.
About 150,000 homeowners received relief under the mortgage
settlement in California, according to a 2013 report by then-law professor
Katie Porter, who served as Harris’ monitor over the settlement proceeds.
Porter was elected as a Democratic congresswoman last year.
Advocates also say the state did not do enough to prosecute
banking executives for predatory practices.
“It is absolutely reprehensible that you can get thrown in jail
for stealing a box of Kleenex at the 7-11, but if you steal from people at a
multi-million dollar scale, nothing happens to you,” said Maeve Elise Brown,
executive director of Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, a legal assistance
group in Oakland.
LIMITED RELIEF
Sams said Harris brought numerous mortgage fraud cases,
including several against middlemen who profited from predatory loans. State
records show the attorney general’s mortgage fraud strike force filed 41 cases
during her tenure.
Of the roughly $18 billion offered to consumers to reduce what
they owed on loans, about $9.2 billion was used to forgive money lost when
people sold their homes for less than they owed, known as a short sale. Another
$4.7 billion was used to forgive some or all of the money owed on second
mortgages.
Putting nearly $14 billion toward short sales and second
mortgages allowed the banks to use settlement money to reimburse themselves for
money they might have lost anyway, said Bruce Marks, founder of the Neighborhood
Assistance Corporation of America, a national nonprofit home ownership and
advocacy organization that was active in California during the crisis.
Families still lost their homes under short sales. But Harris’
campaign said those sales helped thousands of homeowners who otherwise would
have faced foreclosure, a painful process that would have ruined their credit.
Harris’ efforts won praise from Warren, who in 2015 called the
then-Senate candidate “fearless” in taking on the big banks.
Marks said Harris stepped back once the big settlement was
negotiated, however, and failed to aggressively police the way the money was
used.
“That would give me pause supporting her,” Marks said.
California real estate economist Christopher Thornberg, an
expert on the financial crisis, credits Harris with bringing needed reforms to
the state’s mortgage and foreclosure systems.
But she politicized a complicated problem, he said. And because
the state did not keep track of individual consumers and what happened to them,
there is no way to know how well her solutions really worked.
“It was very impressive politically,” said Thornberg, director
of the University of California, Riverside, Center for Economic Forecasting and
Development. “But we don’t really know ultimately if she moved the needle.”
Kamala
Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank
FORMER
CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The
Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest
Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation.
“It’s a
decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill
shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.
“We went
and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office
made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take
a case wherever the facts lead us.”
Mnuchin is
Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury Department, and served as CEO of
OneWest from 2009 to 2015. In an internal memo published on Tuesday by The
Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney general’s office said they
had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by his bank during
that time, and predicted that further investigation would uncover many thousands
more.
But the
investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed
after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the
bank.
Harris’s
statement on Tuesday doesn’t explain how involved she was with the decision to
not prosecute, or why the decision was made. She also would not say whether the
revelations would disqualify Mnuchin for the position of treasury secretary.
“The hearings will reveal if it’s disqualifying or not, but certainly he has a
history that should be critically examined, as do all of the nominees,” Harris
told The Hill. She added that she would review the background and history of
all Trump cabinet nominees.
Senate
Democrats have vowed to put up a fight over Mnuchin — even creating a website
inviting homeowners to list their complaints against OneWest. And yet not one
senator has commented publicly on the leaked memo, which received media
coverage in Politico, Bloomberg, the New York Post, CBS News, Vanity Fair, CNN,
CNBC, and other outlets.
The
Intercept has reached out to half a dozen Senate Democratic offices, including
those of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and leading Mnuchin critics Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, receiving no response.
Sen. Tammy
Baldwin, D-Wisc., retweeted the story, as did the Twitter account of the
Democratic National Committee. But another DNC tweet just hours later hinted at
the bind Democrats are in when it comes to using the information against
Mnuchin. That tweet praised Harris’s swearing-in. Her decision not to prosecute
may make her new colleagues wary of pursuing it.
Progressive
groups have not been so reluctant. Three groups — the Rootstrikers project at
Demand Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Campaign, and the
California Reinvestment Coalition – have called for a delay of Mnuchin’s
confirmation hearing until he publicly discloses all settlements and lawsuits
OneWest has faced from its foreclosure-related activities, responds fully to
all questions submitted by members of the Senate Finance Committee, and
publicly discloses his role in obstructing the California attorney general
investigation, or any others.
The
California Reinvestment Coalition followed that up on Thursday by asking
OneWest to release the obstructed evidence, which involved loan files held by a
third party then known as Lender Processing Services (it’s now called Black
Knight Financial Services). “That’s something the Senate Finance Committee
should ask him for, prior to scheduling their hearing with him,” said Paulina Gonzalez,
executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition.
Mnuchin
has already declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Finance
Committee member Sherrod Brown, which Brown sent before the release of the
leaked memo.
After The
Intercept story was published, Mnuchin spokesperson Barney Keller called it
“meritless,” and highlighted OneWest’s completion of a foreclosure review with
the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (which involved completely
separate issues from the California inquiry) and what he claimed was OneWest’s
issuance of over 100,000 loan modifications to borrowers.
“Memos
like this belong in the garbage, not the news,” Keller said.
Meanwhile,
the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, an organizing group
that made headlines in 2010 by protesting on Mnuchin’s front lawn over
OneWest’s foreclosure practices, expressed disbelief that he could now become
treasury secretary. “My family lived first hand the fraud and unethical
behavior under his leadership when I was told to default before they could help
me, and (was) instead pushed into foreclosure,” said Peggy Mears, a OneWest
victim.
ACCE plans
to ask incoming California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to take up the
prosecution of OneWest based on the newly released evidence. And the group
vowed to fight the Mnuchin nomination. “No one who oversaw the defrauding of
thousands of homeowners should be allowed to serve watch over our country’s
money,” Mears said.
By David
Dayen
Kamala Harris’s Socialist Ties
Part 1: Red diaper baby
Democratic presidential primary front-runner Sen. Kamala
Harris (D-Calif.) recently told reporters at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that
she is “not a democratic socialist.”
The next question should have been obvious: “Well, then, what kind
of socialist are you?”
Harris has been surrounded by socialists and communists her entire
life—beginning with her staunchly Marxist father. Harris
is the older child of two 1960s Berkeley radicals: Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer
researcher from the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, and Donald J.
Harris, an economist from Jamaica.
Gopalan and Donald Harris were very active during the civil rights
and anti-Vietnam War protests of the era, often taking baby Kamala to protests
in a stroller, according to a recent article in San Jose daily newspaper
The Mercury News on the Harris family.
The couple separated after Donald Harris took a
professorship at the University of Madison–Wisconsin. Gopalan filed for
divorce in 1971 and won custody of her two daughters in 1973.
Kamala and her younger sister, Maya—now her presidential
campaign chair—regularly visited their father during school holidays.
In 1972, Donald Harris left the University of Madison–Wisconsin to
begin a visiting professorship of economics at Stanford University.
On Nov. 3, 1976, an article published in the Stanford Daily newspaper claimed that
more than 250 students were clamoring for more Marxist perspectives.
Shortly thereafter, a letter was published in the Stanford
Daily on Nov. 12, 1976, signed by the Stanford branch of the Union
for Radical Political Economics (URPE), with signatures from members Bill
Dittenhofer, Ari Cohen, Eric Berg, David O’Connor, Arthur Slepian, Sandy
Thompson, and Tracy Mott:
“The program in Marxian
economics would be much weaker than it is today if had it not been for massive
student efforts in the form of petitions, open meetings …
“[It] was only after a divisive
one and a one-half year struggle that the opposing elements in the department
gave into student pressure and conceded to ‘the appointment of
Prof. Donald Harris. Thus the presence of Marxian economists here simply
indicates the success of the student struggle. … The recent addition of course
offerings in Marxian economics is again a direct result of student pressure,
not departmental benevolence.”
After an 18-month campaign by the union, Harris was offered
and accepted a permanent professorship.
The URPE (which last year celebrated its
50th anniversary) began in 1968 as a spinoff of the radical Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS). URPE has overlapped considerably with America’s
largest Marxist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), since
its founding in 1982. One of professor Donald Harris’s Stanford supporters and
URPE letter signatories, Mott, is now a professor at the University of Denver, where he works
with local DSA activists.
During the summer and fall of 2006, the DSA’s Political
Action Committee helped DSA activists around the country host house parties to
raise funds that helped Bernie Sanders become the “sole socialist in the
U.S. Senate.”
According to DSA magazine Democratic Left: “Boulder,
Colorado, guests braved a downpour to attend the party at the home
of Leslie Lomas and hear a talk about giving money by economics
professor and socialist Tracy Mott.”
According to The Mercury News: “Several of his former
students said it wasn’t accurate to describe him [Donald Harris] as Marxist,
although ‘he might have been a lot more sympathetic to Marx than a lot of other
economists were at the time,’ said Tracy Mott.”
Mott was being disingenuous. Several Stanford Daily articles at
the time described Donald Harris as “Marxist,” and Mott and his friends made it
very clear that Harris was hired specifically for his radical ideology.
Donald Harris wrote papers such as “The Black Ghetto as Colony: A
Theoretical Critique” (1972) and “Capitalist Exploitation and Black Labor:
Some Conceptual Issues” (1978).
Harris’s Marxism was never questioned or denied at any stage of
his career.
URPE also was very close to the Institute for Policy Studies
(IPS), once the largest and most influential of the far-left think tanks
in Washington. Since its founding in 1963, the IPS has consistently followed a
pro-Marxist line on foreign policy, defense, and economic issues.
To put its policy recommendations into action, the IPS “built
networks of contacts among congressional legislators and their staffs,
academics, government officials, and the national media,” according to the book
“The War Called Peace: The Soviet Peace Offensive.”
The IPS also was on very close terms with representatives of
communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union.
In 1978, in an article in National Review, Brian Crozier, director
of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described IPS as the
“perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if
they were to originate openly from the KGB.”
In the 1988 book “Winning America: Ideas and Leadership for the
1990s,” edited by IPS leaders Marcus Raskin and Chester Hartman, the IPS and
DSA affiliate Sean Gervasi recommended a slate of radical colleagues as
potential appointees in a hoped-for new Democratic administration after the
1988 election.
Gervasi’s wish list including the following:
• Barry Bluestone—SDS founder, DSA affiliate, URPE member. Served
as a member of the senior policy staff of former Rep. Richard Gephardt
(D-Mo.).
• Gar Alperovitz—IPS, DSA, Brookings Institute.
• Robert Browne—SDS, IPS.
• Jeff Faux—DSA affiliate. Faux has worked as an economist with
the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity and the U.S. Departments of State,
Commerce, and Labor.
• Carol O’Cleireacain—DSA member, Brookings
Institute. In 2014, she became Detroit deputy mayor for economic policy, planning,
and strategy.
• Howard Wachtel—IPS, URPE member.
And, of course, Donald Harris, Marxist professor and Kamala
Harris’s father.
Republican George H.W. Bush won the 1988 election, so professor
Harris stayed on at Stanford until his retirement.
Ironically, Kamala Harris’s most formidable opponent in the
Democratic primary so far is Bernie Sanders, a favorite of professor Harris’s
old URPE and DSA colleagues.
When Sanders drops out of a very crowded Democratic primary, will
his supporters cross over to support Kamala Harris?
I believe they will. In fact, I believe it has already been
decided.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New
Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and
terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Before his first day in office
Barack Obama had sucked in more bribes from banksters than any president in
history.
During the economic meltdown
caused by Obama’s crony banksters, and Obama’s first two years in office, banks
made more money than eight years under pro-bankster administration of George
Bush.
Both of Obama’s Attorney
Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were chosen by the banks because they
were from law firms that had long protected big banks from their victims.
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or
convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate
committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute
the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on
the national economy.”
Joe Biden, the walking moron, was
selected by Obama also because of his ties and servitude to big banks!
OBOMB'S CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED
MORE
THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS IN AMERICAN HOME
VALUES AND NOW THEY'RE COMING BACK FOR MORE WITH THE
BANKSTES' RENT BOY BIDEN!
Decades of decaying capitalism
have led to this accelerating divide.
While the rich
accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages
and benefits have been
under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of
the population took in
70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017,
that fell to only 61
percent.
Pollak:
Barack Obama Wrote the Playbook on Political Division
22 Jul 2019721
4:13
Left-wing pundits have accused President
Donald Trump of using his tweets last weekend to launch a divisive re-election
campaign.
David Axelrod, former adviser to
President Barack Obama, tweeted: “With his
deliberate, racist outburst, @realDonaldTrump wants to raise the profile of his
targets, drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire
party. It’s a cold, hard strategy.”
That is debatable — but if so,
Axelrod should know; Obama did it first.
By 2011, Obama knew that re-election
would be difficult. The Tea Party had just led the Republicans to a historic
victory in the 2010 midterm elections, winning the House and nearly taking the
Senate. The economy was only growing sluggishly, and Obama’s stimulus had
failed to keep unemployment below eight percent, as projected. Moreover, the
passage of Obamacare had provoked a backlash against Obama’s state-centered
model of American society.
Facing a similar situation in the
mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton had “triangulated,” moving back toward the
middle, frustrating the GOP by taking up their issues, such as welfare reform.
But Obama rejected that approach.
Having watched his icon, Chicago mayor Harold Washington, settle for an
incremental approach when faced with opposition in the 1980s, only to die of a
sudden heart attack before fulfilling his potential, Obama chose the path of
hard-left policy — and divide-and-rule politics.
The first hint of his strategy
emerged during the debt ceiling negotiations in the summer of August 2011. As
Bob Woodward recounted in his book
about the crisis, The Price of Politics,
then-Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) had wanted to reach a “grand
bargain” with the president on long-term spending cuts. But Obama blew up that
agreement by demanding $400 billion in new taxes, to his aides’ surprise. Obama
wanted an opponent, not a deal. (Last week, Boehner told Breitbart News Tonight that
Obama’s decision was his worst disappointment in 35 years of politics.)
In the fall of 2011, a new left-wing
movement, Occupy Wall Street, was launched. A mix of communists, anarchists,
and digital pranksters, the Occupy movement cast American society as a
struggle between the “99 percent” and the “one percent.”
Obama and then-House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
embraced the movement — and failed to distance themselves from it even as
it collapsed into
violence, sexual assault, and confrontations with police.
Instead, Obama picked up on Occupy’s
themes and used them to shape his campaign.
In December 2011, Obama gave a speech at
Osawatomie, Kansas — a place steeped in radical
symbolism — at which he doubled down on his left-wing policies. He focused on
the issue of economic inequality, and attacked the idea that the free market
could lift the middle class to prosperity. “This isn’t about class warfare.
This is about the nation’s welfare,” he insisted.
Then, in the spring of 2012, Obama
made a controversial play on race. When a black teen, Trayvon Martin, was
killed in Florida during a scuffle with neighborhood watch volunteer George
Zimmerman, Al Sharprton — who was serving as an informal adviser to Obama at
the time — made the local crime story
into a national racial controversy. Obama, following Sharpton’s lead, weighed
in: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said at the time.
Poll numbers suggest that race
relations, which had been improving, dropped precipitously after that. But to
Obama, it was worth it: the campaign needed to find a way to motivate minority
voters. (Vice President Joe Biden did his part, telling black voters
that GOP nominee Mitt Romney was “gonna put y’all in chains.”)
Trump is pushing a non-racial,
nationalist message. But if he actually wanted to divide America for political
gain, he could learn from the master.
Joel B. Pollak
is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social
Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a
winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the
co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside
Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter
at @joelpollak.
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech
to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
America Created Just 20,000 Jobs in
February...and those all went to foreign born
Exclusive–Mo Brooks:
‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of
Americans’
Consequently, the pumping
of ultra-cheap money into the financial system, fueling speculation
and parasitism, together with ever-widening social inequality, is not
a temporary measure but must be made permanent.
The declining living
standards of the working class are feeding directly into the
retail apocalypse and mass layoffs of retail workers will only
exacerbate the issue.
Workers’ wages have seen
little to no growth in the last four decades, and any economic growth
experienced since 2008 has gone to
Biden defended the
wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth
inequality.
“US household net worth sees
biggest fall since crisis”
*
“Trump Touts Legal Immigration
System for ‘Our Corporations’ at Expense of
American Workers “– JOHN BINDER
Trump’s shift from a wage-boosting legal
immigration system to one that benefits corporations and their shareholders
coincides with recent big business lobby influence over his White House, at the
behest of advisers Jared Kushner and Brooke Rollins.
*
“Trump Abandons ‘America First’
Reforms: ‘We Need’ More Immigration to Grow Business Profits”
JOHN BINDER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech
to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
Despite a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just
holding on
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-recovery-that-never-happened-except.html
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP
Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the
10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout
on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social
unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions
in driving inequality between asset owners
and labor."
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
“Behind the ostensible government sits
enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no
responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul
the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first
task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Jim Carrey: America ‘Doomed’ If We Don’t Regulate Capitalism"
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
The father of US
Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin just completed the most
expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in
US history, spending over $91 million on a
three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin,
the founder of hedge fund Citadel,
recently dropped $238 million on a
penthouse in New York City, the most
expensive US home ever purchased. And
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man,
has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year
clock.
Decades of decaying
capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate
wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under
increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of
the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
"This is how they
will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires
who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked
with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the
cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing
but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our
communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
In 2014 the Russell Sage
Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net
worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36
percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they
are more than making that money back.
Between 2009 and 2012,
95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is
the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
Additionally,
Koch spokespeople at the donors’ conference said the network has its
sights set on pushing amnesty for millions of illegal aliens this year.
Biden
defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of
wealth inequality.
Obama's Wall Street cabinet
6 April 2009
A series of articles published over the weekend, based on
financial disclosure reports released by the Obama administration last Friday
concerning top White House officials, documents the extent to which the
administration, in both its personnel and policies, is a political instrument
of Wall Street.
Policies that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite
that were put in place over the past month by the Obama administration have fed
a surge in share values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to use
hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up
the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of
the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even more
brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions,
and the decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken
“mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value of
their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on
bonuses paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group
(AIG) and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he
will slash social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors
directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall
Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic
Council and Obama’s top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous
character of relations between the Obama administration and the American
financial elite.
Last year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of
D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7
million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received
government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each
from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with
$135,000. This is substantially more than double the earnings for an entire
year of high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the Obama
administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and
“unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest
revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr.
Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important
influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial
industry, including firms from which he recently received payments.”
Summers was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As
treasury secretary in the second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting
of basic financial regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes
that among his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten
regulation of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the
Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled
with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own
political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international
economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from
the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this
year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past
January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash
and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now senior
adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two consulting
firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another $3
million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of
between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was
paid $3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include
Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made
$227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily
promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under
federal receivership.
The presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to
second- and third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David
Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing
Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster
Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top
executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was
bailed out and seized by federal regulators in September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the president
for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford
Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment bankers
with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.
It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to high
posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort
to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of
cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the
appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades,
moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from
industry than from finance.
In the Obama administration such considerations have largely been
abandoned.
This will not come as a surprise to those who critically followed
Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as a critic
of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the
first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful
financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms
lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they
gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Friday’s financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of
American democracy. Elections have no real effect on government policy, which
is determined by the interests of the financial aristocracy that dominates both
political parties. The working class can fight for its own interests—for jobs,
decent living standards, health care, education, housing and an end to war.
“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are
employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
Biden
Lays Out Globalist Vision to Counter Trump’s America First Agenda: ‘I Respect
No Borders’
11 Jul 20194,419
6:14
Former Vice President Joe Biden laid out an extensive foreign policy
vision meant to counter President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda during
a speech in New York City on Thursday.
Biden,
who has been criticized by
former Obama administration colleagues for being on the “wrong” side of most
international issues, began his remarks by noting that American policies at
home and abroad are “deeply” intertwined.
“In
2019, foreign policy is domestic policy, in my view, and domestic policy is
foreign policy. They’re deeply connected,” the 76-year-old Democrat frontrunner
said. “A deeply connected set of choices we make about how to advance the
American way of life and our vision for the future.”
Arguing
that Trump’s “Twitter tantrums” and “embrace of dictators” had ruined America’s
standing in the eyes of other nations, Biden said his first actions as
president would focus on strengthening democracy. To that end, Biden said his
administration would remake the U.S. education system, expand the Voting Rights
Act, reform the criminal justice system, and implement more transparent
campaign finance laws.
“We
have to prove to the world the United States is prepared to lead, not just by
the example of our power but by the power of our example,” he said.
Biden
further pledged to improve America’s moral leadership by relaxing immigration
and asylum laws, protecting illegal aliens already in the country, and
reversing policies that prevent tax dollars from going to abortion providers
overseas .
“The
challenge of following this disastrous presidency will not be just to restore
the reputation of our credibility,” Biden said. “It will be to enact a
forward-looking foreign policy for the world as we find it today and as we anticipate
it will be tomorrow and years to come.”
The
centerpiece of that “forward-looking global” agenda, according to the former
vice president, would be renewed cooperation with other nations to tackle
“dangers” like climate change, nuclear proliferation, cyber warfare, and
terrorism.
“American
security, prosperity, and our way of life requires the strongest possible
network of partners and alliances working alongside one another,” Biden said.
“Donald Trump’s brand of ‘America First’ has too often led to America alone.”
If
elected, Biden promised to organize and host a “global summit for democracy” to
renew “the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world.”
The summit’s goal would be to push countries to fight corruption, advance human
rights, and fight back against authoritarianism, nationalism, and ill-liberal
tendencies.
“We
have to be honest about our friends that are falling short and forge a common
agenda to address the greatest threats to our shared values,” Biden said,
before outlining the private sector’s role.
“We’ll
challenge the private sector, including the tech companies and social media
giants, to make their own commitments,” he said. “I believe they have a duty to
make sure their algorithm and platforms are not misused to sew division here at
home or empower their surveillance states to be able to facility their
oppression and censorship in China or elsewhere.”
Despite
the lofty promises, the majority of Biden’s speech was dedicated to repudiating
Trump’s “America First Agenda,” which emphasizes national sovereignty and the
American worker over global interests.
“The
world is not organized itself,” the former vice president said. “If we do not
shape the norms and institutions that govern relations among nations, rest assured
that some nation will step into the vacuum, or no one will, and chaos will
prevail.”
In
order to have a foreign policy that placed the “America back at the head of the
table working” with allies and other nations, Biden urged the country to
recognize that working in tandem across national boundaries was
unavoidable.
“Let
me be clear, working cooperatively with other nations to share our values and
goals doesn’t make America as it seems to imply in this administration,
suckers,” he said. “It makes us more secure. Enables us to be more successful…
No country, even one as powerful as ours, can go alone in the challenge of the
21st century.
“I
respect no borders and cannot be contained by any walls,” Biden added, taking a
shot at Trump’s efforts to reassert control over the U.S.-Mexico border.
With
that in mind, the former vice president committed to leading “an effort to
reimagine” America’s global priorities. At the top of his list was preventing
nuclear proliferation, which Biden hoped to accomplish by rejoining the
Iran Nuclear Deal and extending the New START
Treaty between the U.S. and Russia. Both are Obama-era
initiatives widely interpreted to have been negotiated to the detriment of U.S.
interests.
The
Iran Deal, which Trump abandoned soon after taking office, would have removed
sanctions and given the country millions in financial relief in exchange for
little oversight on their commitment to shutter their nuclear arsenal.
Likewise, the New START Treaty, which is still in effect until 2021, has
been criticized by
Trump for allowing Russia to violate its parameters.
Apart
from reentering the nuclear deal, Biden signaled he would further take pressure
off Iran by ending U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in
Yemen. The conflict has been brewing since 2014, when Houthi rebels,
backed by Iran, attempted to overthrow the Yemeni government. Saudi Arabia,
seeking to counter Iran’s influence in the Middle East, interceded to defend Yemen
through aerial bombardment.
Although the bombing likely staved off the collapse of the Yemeni government,
it has been blamed for civilian causalities. There is also debate in Congress
as to whether America’s support for the Saudis requires military authorization.
The
former vice president also lambasted one of Trump’s major political
accomplishments in opening communication with North Korea. Even though
Biden initially criticized Trump for having fallen “in love with a murderous
dictator in North Korea,” he nevertheless suggested his administration would do
a better job of convincing the country to denuclearize by teaming up with
China.
“I
will empower our negotiators to jumpstart a sustained coordinated campaign with
our allies and others including China to advance our shared objective,” he
said. “It is a shared objective.”
The
one issue Biden appeared to agree with Trump on was scaling down America’s
involvement in the Middle East.
“It’s
long past time we end the forever wars which have cost us untold blood and
treasure,” the former vice president said. “I have long-argued that we should
bring home the vast majority of our combat troops from the wars in Afghanistan
and the Middle East and narrowly focus on our mission to deal with Al-Qaeda and
ISIS in the region.”
Biden,
however, failed to mention that he had championed both the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars, even applauding President George W. Bush in 2002 for having chosen a
“course of moderation and deliberation.”
Kamala
Harris Takes Her Shot
No
other matchup would be as riveting—or as revealing—as Harris versus Trump. But
first she has to get through the primaries.
Sasha Arutyunova
TEXT SIZE
So here’s the plan:
Kamala is going to walk up to Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog BBQ from
the left. At 12:50 p.m., Rodney Scott will greet her. She’ll enter through the
side door and order at the second register, from the woman in the red shirt.
Kamala, Scott, and Maya Harris—that’s Kamala’s sister and campaign chair—will
sit and eat. Kamala will then exit through the front door and walk around back
to look at the smoker. She’ll reenter through the front, cross the dining room,
and exit through the side door to take reporters’ questions.
Rodney Scott’s Whole Hog, on the corner of King and Grove Streets
in Charleston, South Carolina, is perfect—the kind of fast-casual, deeply
American spot almost any voter can get behind: local pit master anointed by
Anthony Bourdain, outdoor seating under tasteful white Christmas lights, wooden
tables with wrought-iron legs, red stools. In the hour leading up to Kamala’s
arrival, men walking and biking slowly down Grove Street give way to police
cars, followed by unmarked cars. At T minus 10, the campaign’s 23-year-old
South Carolina communications director, Jerusalem Demsas, asks, “Can we get
Rodney out here?” She places Scott, handsome and regionally beloved, on his
mark to the left of the door. After Demsas leaves, Scott mutters, “People with
warrants must be running off the block.”
It’s all happening before you can even see her, so thick and
aggressive is the press: the 20-plus reporters with TV cameras, boom mics,
lenses larger than some dogs. Kamala shakes Scott’s hand; touches his arm;
smiles her big, open, I-am-so-happy-to-be-with-you-right-now smile. She’s
shorter, even in heels, than one expects. But she’s magnetic, authoritative,
warm—leaning in, nodding, gesturing with both hands, moving those hands from a
voter’s biceps or shoulder to a position of deep appreciation over her heart.
Kamala wends through the scrum of press, makes her way to the
counter, and finds the woman in the red shirt, who happens to be Scott’s wife.
Kamala greets her with a two-handed clasp (a simple shake would come across as
too formal and masculine). Then, right there, a decision needs to be made on
the fly: What is Kamala going to order?
Kamala Harris—the Democratic presidential hopeful and 54-year-old
junior senator from California—is a prosecutor by training. She knows well that
any misstep, anything you say or do, can and will be held against you. Her
fundamental, almost constitutional, understanding of this has made her
cautious, at times enragingly so.
Harris’s demographic identity has always been radical. She was San
Francisco’s first female district attorney, first black district attorney,
first Asian American district attorney. She was then California’s first female
attorney general, first black attorney general, first Asian American attorney
general. She was the second black woman, ever, to win a seat in the United
States Senate. But in office, she’s avoided saying or doing much that could be
held against her. As attorney general, she declined to support two ballot
measures to end the death penalty. She declined to support making drug
possession a misdemeanor. She declined to support legalizing pot. She declined
to support a ballot measure reforming California’s brutal three-strikes law.
The point is: She had power. She kept most of it in reserve. More important
than fixing the broken criminal-justice system, it seemed, was protecting her
status as a rising star. She had earned that reputation by the time the first
major profile of her was written: San
Francisco Magazine, 2007. The article also described her as
“maddeningly elusive.”
Growing up at
protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the
mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” She
wanted insider power, establishment power.
It takes Harris a minute, but she decides on a pulled-pork
sandwich, with corn bread and collard greens, and a banana pudding to split
with Maya. They sit and eat, ignoring the two dozen recording devices in their
faces, talking about Scott’s vinegar-based BBQ sauce and his recipe for banana
pudding—good territory for Harris, as she’s a serious cook. Nearby, there are a
few appalled customers, including a family that has driven 40 minutes to
celebrate the father’s birthday and has no idea what’s happening, no idea even
who Harris is, and would just like this rugby squad of reporters to move aside
long enough for their son to refill his drink. But for the most part, the
patrons are dazzled by Harris, whose star quality drew 20,000 people to her
kickoff rally in Oakland. The dynamism she displayed there made the event feel
like a cause, or a concert—Kamalapalooza—and gave her campaign significant
momentum. (Laurene Powell Jobs, the president of Emerson Collective, which is
the majority owner of The Atlantic, has provided financial support
to the Harris campaign.)
After 15 minutes, right on schedule, Harris sets down her napkin
and walks around back. She takes some photos near the smoker with Scott’s
family and looks deeply into the eyes of his adorable 10-year-old son. She
tells him she’s giving a speech later and she’d like him to let her know what he
thinks of it. Then she walks back through the restaurant and exits, as planned,
through the side door so she can gaggle with the press. (NB: Gaggle is
now a verb in American politics, meaning “to answer questions shouted at you by
a group of reporters.”)
Here, again, Harris is graciously, militarily on point. All good
politicians stick to a script, but Harris speaks like a woman who knows that
facts are ammunition. Everything you say can and will be used against
you. Just this week she’s been in the weeds, so to speak, with Reefergate, a kerfuffle
that arose when Harris was asked on the Breakfast Club radio
show what music she’d listened to when she smoked pot in college and she said
Tupac and Snoop Dogg. Social media erupted with gotchas, as those artists
didn’t release songs until after she’d graduated.
Harris’s spokesperson said that she’d been answering a different
question, about the music she listens to now, but even so The New York
Times, The View, MSNBC, and Fox & Friends all
picked up the story. Harris’s own father, who is Jamaican, flamed her on Jamaica
Global Online for insinuating that she supported legalized pot because she
was Jamaican: “My dear departed grandmothers … as well as my deceased parents,
must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation
and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with
the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The uproar caused the
former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to flip out on Pod Save America:
“Donald Trump is president … We cannot be talking about this fucking shit again
with the Democratic candidates.”
But Harris, today, gaggling, is in top form: We don’t need a
tragedy to enact commonsense gun reform. This economy is not working for
working people. Every American needs a path to success. We need to speak truth.
If Harris’s campaign has a mantra, that’s it: truth truth truth truth
truth. She delivers her talking points while dressed, as she always is, in
her uniform of dark suit, pearls, black heels. I know—you think I shouldn’t be
writing about her clothes. But the clothes themselves are a smart, cautious
play, one that Hillary Clinton, frankly, could have benefited from. If you wear
the same outfit every single day, pretty soon the haters will run out of snarky
things to say about your appearance and move on.
Among Harris’s core traits, arguably her Shakespearean-tragedy
trait, the one so central to her character that it has the potential to lift
her to the highest post in the land but could also take her down, is her
discipline. It is what has allowed her to play the long game, to protect her
future. It has also infuriated constituents over the years who wanted Harris to
take a stand and fight for them today, not when she reached a
higher office. Yet Harris, on the trail, seems bolder than she has in the past.
She’s declared that she’s for reparations, for the Green New Deal, for
decriminalizing sex work and legalizing pot. She comes across as a woman who is
cashing in her chips, taking all the political and social capital she was
safeguarding for all those years and putting it on the table, declaring that
her moment is now. She’s a black female prosecutor; we have a racist,
misogynist, possibly criminal president. All of that caretaking of her
political future—what was it for if not this?
By harris’s side, on the road, is not her husband, Doug
Emhoff, a Los Angeles lawyer she married in 2014, but her sister, Maya, who was
a top policy adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and,
before that, the vice president for democracy, rights, and justice at the Ford
Foundation and the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California. When
the world is following you with boom mics and long knives, Maya told me, “it’s
good to know there are people with you 100 percent. Ride or die. Not going
anywhere.”
Harris’s parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, met in
Berkeley, California, in the early 1960s, in the civil-rights movement. They’d
both come to the United States to study at UC Berkeley: Shyamala, at age 19,
from a Brahman family in India, to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology and
nutrition; Donald, from Jamaica, for a doctorate in economics. As with almost
everything else in her life, Harris has a set of stock stories she tells about
her upbringing, all of which are laid out in her heavily
vetted, surprise-free memoir, The Truths We Hold,
which was released two weeks before she announced her candidacy. (The big
vulnerable reveal in it is that Harris had to take the bar exam twice.) As a
girl, she loved the outdoors; her father yelled at her, “Run, Kamala! As fast
as you can. Run!” Her mother sang along to Aretha Franklin; her dad played
Thelonious Monk. They divorced when Harris was 7. Before that, the family
attended protests together. At one, Harris, a toddler, started fussing. Her
mother bent down and asked, “What do you want?”
Harris said, “Fweedom!”
Shyamala, the daughter of a diplomat father and a mother who
educated fellow Indian women about birth control through a bullhorn, was barely
5 feet tall, and formidable. She was supposed to return to India for an
arranged marriage. She refused. “She had literally no patience for mediocrity,”
Maya said. Her outlook was: “Be your best. If you’re going to do something, be
the best. Work hard, the whole way.” En route to becoming a
prominent breast-cancer researcher, she raised her girls primarily as a single
mother. She took Harris with her to her lab when necessary and directed her to
wash test tubes. She covered the kitchen in their small apartment with waxed
paper and made lollipops and other candy. If she bought gifts, she set up a
game in the style of Let’s Make a Deal. What do you want—Door No. 1
(the bedroom) or Door No. 2 (the kitchen)? Inside, the girls would find a blue
bike with tasseled handlebars or an Easy-Bake Oven. In Harris’s telling,
Shyamala didn’t coddle. If her children came home from school with a problem,
she would ask, “Well, what did you do?,” in order to push them to solve it
themselves. She raised her daughters in the black community, taking them to
Berkeley’s black cultural center, Rainbow Sign, where Maya Angelou read poetry
and Nina Simone sang. In 1971, when Harris was 7, Shirley Chisholm dropped by.
She was exploring a bid for president.
When I asked Maya about her relationship with her sister, Kamala
raised her eyebrows and cocked her head, like, This had better be good.
“Well, she’s a big sister and …” Maya paused and turned to Harris. “Are you
going to qualify that?”
Harris, laughing, declined. So Maya continued: “She was protective …
Maybe just a liiiiiiiittle bossy.” If there was a problem in
the schoolyard, Harris would assess the situation and make sure Maya was okay.
The two organized a children’s protest to overturn a no-playing policy in their
apartment building’s empty courtyard. Do I even need to say it? They won.
When Harris was in middle school, Shyamala took a post at McGill
University and moved with her daughters to Montreal. Harris attended high
school there. At Howard University, in Washington, D.C., she chaired the
economics society, argued on the debate team, and pledged the AKA sorority, the
first black sorority in the country, whose alumnae show up at Harris’s campaign
events in force, dressed in AKA pale pink and green, a squadron of extra aunts.
At UC Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, Harris “found her
calling,” as she writes in her memoir, and decided to become a prosecutor.
This was not an easy sell for her parents. Shyamala believed, as
Harris writes, that America had “a deep and dark history of people using the
power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” Among Shyamala’s
closest friends was Mary Lewis, a professor and public intellectual who helped
lead the black-consciousness movement in the Bay Area. Donald Harris,
meanwhile, had become an economics professor at Stanford University, the first
black man in his department and one of about 10 black faculty members total. He
was a left-leaning iconoclast who wrote and taught about uneven economic
development around the world, particularly across racial lines, long before
many Americans had ever heard the phrase income inequality.
Colleagues found his progressivism threatening—he was called “too charismatic,
a pied piper leading students away from neoclassical economics,” in The
Stanford Daily.
Yet growing up at protests, Harris writes, she’d seen the
mechanics of fighting for “justice from the outside.” That dynamic did not
appeal to her. She wanted insider power, establishment power. “When activists
came marching and banging on doors,” Harris writes, “I wanted to be on the
other side to let them in.” Shyamala interrogated this logic. As Harris says,
both in her book and in speeches, “I had to defend my choice as one would a
thesis.”
It was the choice of a woman who likes control. Even sitting with
Maya, post-barbecue, in a corridor of a black church in South Carolina before a
town hall—when Harris is laughing and slightly slouched in her chair, seemingly
relaxed—she’s a woman who maintains a tight grip on the narrative. No detail is
too small.
When Harris was
district attorney, if staffers tried to leave for the
evening before she thought they should, she shouted, “Well, I
guess justice has been done! Everybody’s going home.”
“I stay with her a lot when I’m in D.C.,” Maya says, trying to tell
me a story about how Harris likes to take care of people. (I experienced this
myself. I showed up that day with a cough, and Harris instantly offered me
cough drops and green tea.)
Harris corrects Maya, quietly but firmly: “Always.”
“Always … almost always,” Maya says. “Okay, mostly.”
Harris stands her ground: “Always.”
Maya—a Stanford Law School grad and one of the youngest people
ever appointed dean of a law school—drops the point.
Harris will talk about cooking, specifically and in great detail,
if you ask her. She’ll even get out her iPad and show you the recipes she’s
marked from The New York Times’ cooking section, which she reads in
the campaign van, after events, to relax. Chicken
Cacciatore With Mushrooms, Tomatoes, and Wine—what’s oppo
research going to do with that? I can tell you that her go-to dinner is roast
chicken and that she’s cooked almost every recipe in Alice Waters’s The
Art of Simple Food. In the kitchen, she’s a fundamentalist. “Salt, olive
oil, a lemon, garlic, pepper, some good mustard—you can do almost anything with
those ingredients.”
But turn the discussion to this moment in her life, to taking her
shot—how she’s going to both protect this opportunity and go all out; where the
line is between being too cautious and too open—and the specificity disappears.
First she pivots away from caution. “I wouldn’t say cautious as much as smart.
We have to be smart. We have to be strategic.” (This is a favorite move. For
more than a decade Harris has talked about being “smart” on crime rather than
“tough” or “soft.”) Then she turns to truth. “We have to speak truths, and in
speaking those truths, some people are surprised that I’m actually saying that
on a stage … So we have to push it.”
Lord knows we are all desperate for a president who values truth.
But that wasn’t what I was getting at. There are a great many truths in the
world. I wanted to know which ones were on her mind. Where is she going to be
bold? Where does she feel she needs to hold back?
“I guess a lot of how I decide [what to] talk about is based on
what people tell me they want to discuss,” Harris says. “Not so much what they
want to discuss as what are the concerns for them.” This is going nowhere.
“Certainly I do think in specifics. And when I’m in a smaller group where
there’s more latitude to have a real conversation …”
I have limited time. I drop the question and move on, which of
course was Harris’s goal.
It is truly a shame that Shyamala Gopalan isn’t here for this—her
two daughters together, Kamala running for president of the United States.
She died 10 years ago. She had colon cancer, and when the end was
near, Harris visited her in the hospital while running for attorney general.
“She was starting to tune things out. She’d stopped watching the news and
reading the paper, which was so unlike her, and she was tired. She was sleeping
a lot. And I was with her in the hospital. I was sitting next to her—here’s the
bed,” Harris says, motioning to her side, “and she was turned that way. We were
just spending time together. And she said, looking away, with her eyes closed,
I’m sure: ‘What’s going on with the campaign?’
“I said, ‘Well, Mommy, they said they’re gonna kick my ass.’ My
mother leaned over and looked at me and had the biggest smile. Just the biggest
smile on her face.”
Harris laughs. I ask what the smile meant. She says, “Bring it on.
Good luck to them.”
America—at least the blue parts—came to see
Harris as its potential savior in June 2017, when she
questioned then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions about
the Russia investigation. Sessions sat at a desk before the Senate Intelligence
Committee, his mouth pursed in a boyish smirk, his white hair looking as though
his mother had combed it for him, Harris regal on the dais above. Here was a
man thinking he was going to get away with something, as he nearly always had.
Then, in view of the world and this very smart black woman 18 years his junior,
he began to realize he was not.
Harris, detailed notes in hand, had no patience for his “I do not
recall”s and his long-winded responses to run out the clock. She just calmly
and repeatedly demanded an answer to her question: “Did you have any
communication with any Russian businessmen or any Russian nationals?” Her
mental clarity was terrifying.
Sessions broke down after three and a half minutes. “I’m not able
to be rushed this fast!,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in
September 2018, cemented many Americans’ belief that Harris was the woman to go
after Trump. “Have you discussed [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller or his
investigation with anyone at Kasowitz Benson Torres, the law firm founded by
Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer?”
Harris—who, like any good prosecutor, knows not to pose a question
to which she doesn’t already have the answer—asked this
nearly verbatim six times, shining a hot and unflattering spotlight on
Kavanaugh, who responded, in order, as capillaries appeared to burst all
over his face:
1. “Ah …”
2. “I’m not remembering, but if you have something …”
3. “Kasowitz? Benson? …”
4. “Is there a person you’re talking about?”
5. “I’m not remembering, but I’m happy to be refreshed or if you want to tell me who you’re thinking of …”
6. “Do I know anyone who works at that firm? I might know … I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.”
2. “I’m not remembering, but if you have something …”
3. “Kasowitz? Benson? …”
4. “Is there a person you’re talking about?”
5. “I’m not remembering, but I’m happy to be refreshed or if you want to tell me who you’re thinking of …”
6. “Do I know anyone who works at that firm? I might know … I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.”
Harris then said, “I think you’re thinking of someone and you
don’t want to tell us.” Finally Senator Mike Lee of Utah raised an objection
and stalled her line of questioning.
Historically, the prosecutor’s office has been a hard place to run
from on the left. You will never really be the progressive. By definition, you
are defending the state. On the stump, Harris reframes her prosecutorial role:
“My whole life, I’ve only had one client: the people,” which sounds nice coming
from the mouth of a public servant. What voter is not for that? Yet when Harris
entered a courtroom stating that she was there to argue “for the people,” she
was not the voice of the underdog. She was the voice of enforcement, the voice
of the law.
Jeff Adachi, the city’s longtime elected public defender (who died
of an apparent heart attack at age 59 not long after I interviewed him for this
article), met Harris when she was a first-year law student at Hastings. “Did
she always have the charm and ambition she’s known for today? Yeah,” he told
me. Adachi was “a little surprised,” he said, when Harris aligned herself “with
law enforcement and wanting to put people behind bars,” because “we had
probably talked about politics before and she was always seen as more of a
liberal progressive.” But there were very few prosecutors of color at the time,
and very few women, and, Adachi said, the prosecutor path was “seen as a
stepping stone to do something bigger or greater.”
When Harris ran for district attorney, in 2003, she challenged
Terence Hallinan, her former boss, from the right. He was entangled in Fajitagate, a
preposterous scandal that involved three off-duty police officers beating up
two residents and then demanding their takeout fajitas. The public saw the
department as an unprofessional and incompetent bunch of good ol’ boys.
(Hallinan had a low conviction rate, and he did not help his reputation when he
handed members of the Fajitagate grand jury a blank indictment form and asked
them to fill in the names of the officers they thought should be charged.)
Harris enlisted her mother to stuff envelopes and brought an
ironing board to neighborhood campaign stops, to use as a portable table.
She wasn’t a natural. She felt awkward talking about herself with strangers.
She’d had a
much-discussed relationship with future San Francisco Mayor
Willie Brown, who was 31 years older and estranged from his wife. Brown was a
local kingmaker. Still, Harris did not assume that he would anoint her. During
the campaign, her longtime mentee Lateefah Simon took a BART train into the
Mission early one weekday. “It’s, like, 7:30 in the morning—legit,” she told
me. “I’m coming up the escalator and I see Kamala Harris, by herself, in a suit
at 16th and Mission.” The intersection then smelled like feces and was filled
with drug dealers. Simon looked at Harris like, Are you stupid? What
are you doing here, dressed like that, when people are still high from the
night before?
“I’m trying to win this race!” Harris told her.
“She had on pearls!,” Simon said.
Once in office, Harris got straight to work cleaning up Hallinan’s
mess. She painted the office walls, which no one had done in years. She
replaced the jam-prone copy machine. If staffers tried to leave for the evening
before Harris thought they should, she shouted, “Well, I guess justice has been
done! Everybody’s going home.”
She endured one major scandal, over a rogue tech in her crime lab.
The tech stole cocaine and mishandled evidence, which was bad enough. But then
Harris, likely thinking she could address the issue quietly, failed to follow
procedure and inform the defense lawyers in the cases involved. One thousand
cases had to be thrown out.
Nevertheless, in her first three years as DA, San Francisco’s
conviction rate rose from 52 to 67 percent. She even created a new category of
crime—truancy—and punished
parents who failed to send their children to school. Then, as now, no one
contested the link between high-school graduation and a person’s future in a
well-paying job as opposed to jail. Harris still talks about this. She stirs
outrage at America’s collective failure to invest in the education of other
people’s children, often citing the statistic that nearly 80 percent of all
prisoners are high-school dropouts or GED recipients. But is arresting a mother
whose life is so frayed that she can’t get her child to school the best way to
set that child on the path to success? Many, particularly in the black
community, answered no. They still do. “Identity politics is stupid,” says
Phoenix Calida, a co-host of The Black Podcast, “if you’re not
going to enact identity policy.”
Harris ran against the death penalty, and, in what was arguably
the first and last truly controversial decision she’s made in her political
career, she stuck to her position and did not seek capital punishment when a
San Francisco cop was killed in the line of duty several months into her
tenure. The pressure to reverse her campaign promise was intense. Senator
Dianne Feinstein, who’d served as San Francisco’s mayor from 1978 to 1988,
chastised Harris for not doing so at the slain
officer’s funeral.
Still, Harris kept her promise—and paid for it. No police union
endorsed her for 10 years. One plausible read of her political history suggests
that this experience, less than a year into elected office, taught her to fear
and avoid taking a stand.
“It doesn’t matter if
you’re black or not if your policies are not for
black people. And her policies are not supportive of black families,” Tanya
Faison, of Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, says.
Harris calls herself a progressive prosecutor, which she’s not,
though she did lift up individual lives. She started one of the first prisoner
reentry programs in the country, Back on Track. It helped young, first-time
drug offenders find jobs and services and earn high-school degrees. But Back on
Track served only 300 people; Harris never took the program to scale. She also
mentored young women, among them Lateefah Simon, who went from being a
high-school dropout to becoming a MacArthur genius-grant winner in 10 years,
which has got to be a record.
Simon now runs the Akonadi Foundation, in Oakland, dedicated to
eliminating structural racism. The two met when Simon was 22 years old, with a
4-year-old daughter. At the time, Harris was running a child-exploitation task
force; Simon showed up at a meeting to advocate for young women who’d been
trafficked by pimps and then charged with prostitution instead of being treated
as victims of rape. Harris listened to Simon, recognized her intelligence, and
took her potential seriously. “I was like, Who is this woman? No
one listens to us,” Simon told me. “People hate us. We’re garbage, in policy
and in public.”
Harris helped Simon raise money and throw events for her
organization. She insisted that Simon enroll in college, and when Simon said
that was impossible—she was already working and raising a daughter alone—Harris
talked about Maya, who’d had a daughter herself at age 17 and then graduated
from UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School. The powerful, polished black woman
who believed that Simon could be a powerful, polished black woman too blew
Simon’s mind: “This was before Olivia Pope!” But Harris’s role as DA took some
getting used to. “Why would you want to do that?” Simon asked. “I so deeply
knew what was happening with girls in the system, and the DA was our nemesis.
The DA and the pimp, right? The DA and the pimp.”
Harris’s race for California attorney general was extremely
tight—so tight that her opponent, Steve Cooley, gave a victory speech on
Election Night, which he had to retract the next day. She campaigned as a
progressive, figuring, perhaps, that many people think they support
criminal-justice reform more than they actually do. “They like these talking
points and these platitudes,” Phoenix Calida says. Let’s be smart on
crime. “But her tough-on-crime policies—nobody’s really gonna complain,
because they feel safe.”
Harris’s record in that office is marked more by what she didn’t
do than what she did. She did not support a ballot initiative reforming
California’s three-strikes law, which incarcerated people for life for petty
crimes (an interesting family moment, because Maya, while working at the ACLU
of Northern California, had championed a proposition to take three strikes
down). She did not join the fight against solitary confinement. She did not
support two state ballot propositions to end the death penalty (and when a
federal court in California struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional,
she appealed the decision). She did not support legalizing pot. She did not
advocate for reopening several high-profile cases, including a capital one
widely suspected to have resulted in a wrongful conviction. She did not
prosecute Steven Mnuchin, the CEO of OneWest Bank and Trump’s pick for Treasury
secretary, for more than 1,000 foreclosure violations. She did not take an aggressive
stance on officer-involved shootings—most notably, she did not endorse a bill
requiring independent investigations of them and declined to use the power of
the office to investigate the killing of Mario Woods, who was shot 26 times by
five police officers in 2015.
Harris has since taken strong progressive positions. But some of
her constituents still feel burned. “California has had the most police
killings, and we haven’t had any officers ever charged,” Tanya Faison, the lead
organizer for Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter chapter, told me. “That was on
her watch.” Sure, “it would be beautiful to have a black woman as the
president,” Faison continued. But “it doesn’t matter if you’re black or not if
your policies are not for black people. And her policies are not supportive of
black families.”
To be fair, while in office, Harris did institute implicit-bias
training for police officers. She did test a large backlog of rape kits. And
she did negotiate well with the nation’s five largest mortgage firms in the
aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. She walked away from an offer of $4
billion of debt relief for California homeowners and called Jamie Dimon, the
chairman of JPMorgan Chase. She told him his side needed to come up with more
money, much more. She ended up with $20 billion.
She won her Senate seat on the night Trump was elected. By then
Harris was walking the line she’s on now: using “fearless” as a campaign slogan
despite letting fear stop her from taking positions. Trump has been a
productive foil for her, highlighting the value of her legal training, casting
her discipline as flattering and calm rather than pinched and nervous.
In Washington, she hasn’t done much—let’s be honest, who in the
Senate has in recent years? She introduced a few bills: one, with Kentucky
Republican Rand Paul, to study reforming
the cash-bail system; another, with 13 Democratic colleagues, to begin
addressing the high mortality rates black women face in childbirth. She also
introduced, with fellow Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker and
Republican Tim Scott, a bill to make lynching a hate crime. This last one was
classic Harris: tough on crime, seemingly progressive, entirely risk-free. It
passed the Senate unanimously.
By 4:30 p.m., 1,000 people had packed into the gym
of Charleston’s Royal Missionary Baptist Church, where the scoreboard read 2020
and AKA sorority sisters rolled in wearing full pink-and-green dress uniform.
They are not even a little ambivalent about their candidate. She’s theirs; they
love her. Who among us hasn’t been scarred by an early humiliation and retreated
from hard decisions? They asked where the reserved AKA section was.
Backstage, Harris chatted her way through the photo line, a
mainstay of the contemporary American political campaign: local officials and
other VIPs get what is basically a school photo with the candidate—in this
case, next to a state flag, backed by a royal-blue drape. She has an amazing
ability to focus on the person right in front of her, even as a large and
impatient crowd claps and shouts “KA-MA-LA” for her to come onstage.
“I ate with Rodney Scott today, so I’m happy,” Harris announced to
cheers when she finally appeared. Microphone in hand, she slipped into a subtle
southern accent. “We have to restore in our country truth and justice, truth
and justice,” she said. The crowd, right there with her, called out: “Amen!”
“That’s right!”
This Charleston event was a 1/20th-scale model of Harris’s
campaign-kickoff rally in Oakland. There, Harris had clapped along with
her 20,000 supporters as she made her way to the podium. Just the sight of a
strong female candidate who was not Clinton came as a relief. Many Democrats
remain traumatized by 2016, the matchup of a deliberate and dutiful woman,
straining to mop up all messes, against an impetuous, state-trashing bully. But
in dropping her guard a little, Harris has been trending away from Clinton and
toward Michelle Obama—adopting a persona that’s less programmed, hipper, and more
relaxed, all of which is more likable. Of course, we care intensely about
likability, especially in our female candidates, so perhaps shucking the
appearance of restraint is a prudent A-student decision as well.
Among the many lines Harris offerson the
stump is: I intend to win this.You don’t quite expect to hear a
woman say that.
Harris’s campaign is shorter on specifics than Clinton’s was
(perhaps, again, in reaction to Clinton). It’s shorter on specifics than some
of her fellow 2020 candidates’ campaigns, though she did lay out, in her
Oakland speech, a basic platform, designed to appeal to a liberal base, not
attract independents: Medicare for all; universal pre-K and debt-free college;
a $500-a-month tax cut for low-income families; women’s reproductive rights; a
path to citizenship for immigrants.
Then, at minute 32 of the speech, in a moment that managed to be
both subtle and shocking, Harris addressed the thing almost nobody wants to say
but everybody who is close to Harris thinks about: her personal risk. “As
Robert Kennedy many years ago said, ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can
ever achieve greatly.’ He also said, ‘I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and
the difficulties of challenging an incumbent president, but these are not
ordinary times, and this is not an ordinary election.’ ”
That line passed, and Harris moved on to pablum like “Let’s
remember: In this fight we have the power of the people.” But Harris is a
target. She knows it. Reports of hate crimes increased 17
percent during Trump’s first year in office. In late February, a Coast
Guard officer was accused of plotting to kill Harris, along with
19 others, including journalists, activists, and Democratic politicians. The
very fact of her campaign, Harris standing out there every day before crowds of
thousands, presenting herself to the American people—some of whom will merely
dissect her record; others of whom will see her female body and her brown skin,
and want her dead—is bold and brave. “Through her career it’s been a very
serious thing,” Harris’s close friend and adviser Debbie Mesloh told me. “She
and I talked about it [regarding] Obama … The first day he had Secret Service.
The first time I saw him in a bulletproof vest.” Even at the relatively small
book talk Harris gave at the cozy Wilshire Ebell Theatre, in Los Angeles, a
security guard stood behind her, not even off in the wings, visible to the
audience the whole time.
After Harris finished speaking in Oakland, her family joined her
onstage: her husband, Doug, who is white; her sister, Maya; Maya’s husband,
Tony West, who is black (and currently the chief legal officer at Uber,
formerly the third lawyer from the top in Obama’s Justice Department); Maya’s
daughter, Meena; Meena’s partner and children. The family is beautiful and the
family looks like the future—and not the future in which white nationalists win.
It’s hard not to be ambivalent about a cautious
person, particularly a person who has been working for you but holding back,
saving for the future. In truth, it’s hard not to feel ambivalent about all the
candidates. There are so many contenders, more of them popping up like
white-haired crocuses every day. One is too old. (Well, two are too old.) One’s
too mean to her staff. One said she was Native American and she’s not. One
Instagrammed his trip to the dentist. So many Americans have conflicting
desires for this election. They want a transformative leader who will push this
country forward. They want a rescue, a captain to steady our faltering ship of
state and restore the rule of law. Most of all, they want a winner—whoever that
is, just tell them, they’ll vote that way. They want a sure thing. They need a
sure thing. And then they feel scared and frustrated by all the options,
because that’s not how the system works.
Among the many lines Harris offers on the stump is: I
intend to win this. You don’t quite expect to hear a woman say that. But
Harris has become very good at tapping into the emotions of a crowd of
Democrats and delivering what they want to hear. The 2020 Democratic National
Convention is 15 months off, though. Over the next year, the campaign is sure
to get ugly—Trump hasn’t even given Harris a nickname yet. I asked her whether
she thought that, as a black woman, she had an extra-narrow lane of acceptable
behavior to maneuver in. “I don’t think so,” she said. Then she downgraded that
sentiment. “I hope not.”
Has the United States dealt with its own racism and misogyny
enough to elect a black woman president? There’s little rational basis for
saying yes. But there was little rational basis for believing that a man named
Barack Hussein Obama could win the White House either, let alone a huckster
named Donald Trump.
That Friday night, on the 110-mile ride from Charleston to
Columbia, South Carolina, Harris read recipes online. She flagged one for
salted-caramel cookies and emailed it to Lily Adams, her communications
director, who happens to be former Texas Governor Ann Richards’s granddaughter.
(Adams later laughed and said, with genuine affection, “When do you think I’m
going to bake these? I’m going to New Hampshire with you on Monday.”)
In the morning Harris, Maya, and Adams, and the whole rugby team
of journalists, met up on Columbia’s Lady Street—yes, Lady Street—for some
retail politics. First stop was Styled by Naida, a vintage-clothing store run
by Naida Rutherford, who grew up in the foster-care system and was homeless
before she steadied herself economically by hosting stylish garage sales. It
was another ideal campaign stop: Rutherford, the success story, helped Harris
pick out a hat and a black belt. Then, as Maya paid for the items, Harris
noticed a brightly colored sequined coat, a chessboard of turquoise, purple,
yellow, green, and sky blue. The jacket was just about the furthest fashion
choice imaginable from Harris’s standard dark blazer. Still, Rutherford, a good
saleswoman, encouraged Harris, a good candidate, to try it on, and Harris did.
She looked in the mirror, the horde of journalists to her back. “This really
would be perfect for the Pride parade,” she said.
A nice, unguarded human moment. The jacket was way too big, and
she’ll almost certainly never wear it anywhere but the parade. But you’d have
to be a monster—and a tone-deaf politician—not to want to support Rutherford.
Harris bought the coat.
RELATED STORIES
That afternoon, Harris held another town hall, this time at
Columbia’s Brookland Baptist Church, and sitting in her car in the church
parking lot, waiting for the doors to open, was 77-year-old Gladys Carter.
Carter had fought in the civil-rights movement. She was heartbroken and horrified
by the turn her country had taken with Trump’s election, and she admired how
Harris had handled Kavanaugh. But she had questions about criminal justice.
“Some African Americans in my circle of friends have expressed concern about
her actually imprisoning a lot of our people, more so than she did the others,”
Carter said. “They say they have to really think hard before they’re able to
trust her. She’s got to prove that she’s willing to come out and do some things
differently.” At the same time, Carter felt that Americans have deeper, even
more pressing problems—namely, our dangerous, lying president. Maybe a tough
female prosecutor is our best hope. “This country has been controlled by white
males for how many years? The way things are right now—they screwed it up.”
Harris made it home for dinner with her husband that evening. She
slept in her own bed, in her own house, where she likes to relax by curling up
on the couch in her sweatpants and reading more recipes. But by that night,
social media had pounced on her brief moment of spontaneity, making fun of her
sequined jacket, her amazing technicolor coat, harping on how stupid and
frivolous it is for a woman to be trying on clothes on the presidential
campaign trail.
It’s not easy out there. You can’t expect much forgiveness on Lady
Street. Yet Harris, as ever, is playing the long game. She often repeats her
most succinct one-line pitch to prospective voters: “We’re going to need
somebody who knows how to prosecute the case against this president.”
She packed a bag for New Hampshire: all dark suits.
Kamala Harris Set To Raise Money With Former Wells Fargo
Executive
The lobbying
executive defended the bank during the fake accounts scandal. When Harris was
California attorney general, she sued the bank for privacy violations.
·
·
·
·
A former Wells Fargo executive who
defended the bank during its massive fake accounts scandal is hosting a
fundraiser for Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential
campaign on Saturday, according to an invitation obtained by HuffPost.
The former executive, Miguel Bustos, worked from 2013 to 2017 as
Wells Fargo’s senior vice president of government and community relations,
where he oversaw lobbying and community outreach efforts in six western
states: California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Montana and Utah.
REAL LIFE. REAL NEWS. REAL VOICES.
Help us tell more of the stories that matter
from voices that too often remain unheard.
Bustos is hosting a fundraiser for Harris on Saturday night in San
Francisco, timed to coincide with the city’s Pride Weekend celebrations and one
day before the crucial second-quarter fundraising deadline.
The minimum donation for an attendee is $500, while “supporters”
need to contribute $1,000 and “sponsors” who get a photo with Harris need to
contribute the federal maximum donation of $2,800.
The fundraiser lends ammunition to progressives, many aligned with
the rival presidential campaigns of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.), who are skeptical of Harris’ willingness to take on Wall
Street and the financial industry.
In a statement, Harris spokesman Ian Sams defended the candidate’s
record.
“She literally investigated Wells Fargo as Attorney General and
won an $8.5 million settlement for Californians, and she’s the only major
candidate in this race who’s actually prosecuted banks for screwing people
over,” Sams said. “Her record of real action to take on bad corporate actors on
behalf of consumers shows exactly who she would fight for as president.”
Sams is referring to an $8.5 million settlement that Harris and
five district attorneys in the state reached with the bank in March 2016. The
bank had violated state privacy laws by failing to “timely and adequately”
disclose it was recording phone calls with members of the public. (The
fine is equivalent to about .2% of Wells Fargo’s profit during the quarter the
settlement was announced.)
ASSOCIATED PRESSCalifornia Sen. Kamala Harris sued
Wells Fargo when she was the state’s attorney general. Now, she’s raising money
with one of its former executives.
But progressive critics have typically focused on Harris’ role
in a more high-profile settlement: the national mortgage settlement that
Harris, the Obama administration and other state attorneys general reached with
Wells Fargo and the four other largest banks in America in 2012. Progressives
have long said the $25 billion agreement didn’t go nearly far enough to punish
the banks and help homeowners trapped by the foreclosure crisis in the wake of
the Great Recession. No bank executive involved in the foreclosure fraud went
to prison.
Wells Fargo’s highest-profile recent scandal was the fake accounts
debacle. From 2009 to 2015, the company opened up more than 3.5 million fake
bank and credit card accounts, leading nearly 200,000 customers to pay
unnecessary fees. Warren aggressively investigated the bank, and the scandal
led to the resignation of then-CEO John Stumpf, along nearly $3 billion in
fines and settlement costs.
During the scandal, Bustos defended the bank when the city council
of Vallejo, California, considered moving its accounts away from Wells Fargo.
While Bustos admitted the bank had “made mistakes,” he also pleaded with the
city council to stick with it.
“The one thing I learned in life is that no one is perfect, no
one,” he said, according to a September 2017 article in the Vallejo
Times-Herald. “But one thing I learned is that you have forgiveness and you
have redemption. What we are asking is, you know what, work with us to be a
better bank.”
The city council eventually voted to cut ties with Wells
Fargo.
Bustos’ LinkedIn profile says he is now the senior director of the
center for social justice at GlideSF, a prominent progressive church in San
Francisco.
Harris’ presidential campaign, meanwhile, has received more than
$16,000 from Wells Fargo employees, according to FEC records – including
maxed-out donations from the company’s former chief compliance officer and an
executive who oversaw the company’s credit card business. Harris also received
$2,300 from Brenda Wright, a Wells Fargo executive whose position on San
Francisco’s pension board sparked protests in 2013.
Kamala Harris' sincerity problem
Illustrated | Spencer Platt/Getty Images, Ethan Miller/Getty
Images, tampatra/iStock, Tatomm/iStock
The Democratic presidential
primary is pretty clearly a four-way race at this point. As per the Real Clear Politics poll average, Joe Biden is still out in front
with 27 percent, with Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris tied for second with 14
percent, and Elizabeth Warren only a point behind them. The other 2,000
candidates are all down in the low single digits or lower.
Not long ago Harris was only
doing half as well. Clearly she was the major beneficiary of the recent
debates, especially her forceful confrontation with Biden over school
desegregation. But afterwards, she backtracked on
the issue, saying that in cases where school segregation is not the result of
discriminatory laws, "any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered
by a school district."
That is directly at odds with her
debate statement that the "federal government must step in" when
schools refuse to desegregate. It's not the first time Harris has given reason
to believe her answers to thorny questions are less than sincere.
The Harris campaign seems to be
trying to thread this needle by arguing that mandatory integration was
necessary back in the bad old days of Jim Crow, but not today. "Federally
mandated busing was essential in the '60s/'70s to force the integration of
schools," Harris spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement, but
today "we need a comprehensive approach[.]" Harris has not released a
formal desegregation program of her own, though she says she supports the Fudge-Murphy plan which would provide $120
million in grants for voluntary integration.
But this historical distinction
doesn't hold up, because segregation is not much better today than it was in
the 1950s. Indeed, it has gotten considerably
worse over the last few decades, as whites have moved out of
cities and schools which got out from under court desegregation orders rapidly
re-segregated themselves. White Americans generally loatheintegration,
whether they're liberal or
conservative — even those without school-age children, because wealthy white
parents buying into "good" (read: white) school districts increases
neighborhood property values, and thus integration might reduce them.
All this is why the Sanders
campaign has a considerably more aggressive desegregation
plan than Fudge-Murphy. In addition to more subsidies, he would
bring back desegregation orders and end the ban on federal funding for busing,
in addition to other measures. Warren and former Housing and Urban Development
Secretary Julián Castro, on the other hand, would indirectly
address the problem by overhauling housing subsidies and
regulations, allowing more low-income people to live in wealthier
neighborhoods. (As my colleague Jeff
Spross argues, ending the funding of schools by local property taxes
altogether would be better still.)
But that isn't the only Harris
backtrack from the debates. When moderators asked which candidates would get
rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare-for-all, Harris raised her hand,
only to clarify
afterwardsthat "private insurance would certainly exist for
supplemental coverage." She did the same herky-jerky move during
and after a CNN town hall a few months ago.
Now, private insurance would
probably exist in some small form under Medicare-for-all, but the vast bulk of
private coverage would certainly be eradicated, if only because the Medicare
coverage would be so much better. Canada, for instance, has a rump private insurance
sector mainly because its Medicare system does not cover most vision, dental,
or prescription drugs (which the Sanders bill would include).
Insofar as Harris is trying to reassure private insurance companies or their
customers, she is either not being straight about her favored policy, or she
doesn't actually favor it.
Most disturbing of all, Harris
has not been straight about her record as California's attorney general. She
has boasted a great deal about her role in the national mortgage settlement of
2012, in which banks paid money to avoid mass prosecutions over the robosigning
scandal.
As Attorney General of California, I took
on the five biggest Wall Street banks during the financial crisis. We won $20
billion for California homeowners and together we passed the strongest
anti-foreclosure law in the United States of America.
In reality, as David Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the
settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on top of the TARP bailout
and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a fake homeowner
assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost their homes as a
result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage settlement than
those who got a sustainable loan modification to save them." Nearly half
of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt that could not be legally
recovered in the first place. She also declined
to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered
over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank.
(OneWest donated $6,500
to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated
$2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
Back in the 2004 election,
Republicans made great hay out of John Kerry's supposed flip-flopping. And to
be clear, there is nothing wrong with changing one's mind when new evidence
comes to light.
The problem with Harris instead
is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive audiences while
defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to make tough
decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she did.
Even attempting to fix the many
crises afflicting the United States — from hideous inequality, to climate
change, to structural racism, to a broken foreign policy — is going to take
some steely resolve, not just talking a big game. So far Harris' is not
promising on this front.
Barack Obama: A Lifelong
Story of Russian Collusion
Commentary
Several U.S. presidents have genuinely
colluded with Russia or the former Soviet Union, but none
more so the 44th president of the United States, Barack
Obama. It’s no exaggeration to say that Obama
owes his entire career to Russian collusion.
In March 2012, President Obama made his
famous “off mic” remarks to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: “This is my
last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev replied,
“I understand. I transmit this information to Vladimir.”
Was this some innocent remark, or was it
just as it seems: a friend passing a message to a friend?
Obama has surrounded himself with
pro-Moscow “friends” all his life. Why should he desert his friends just
because he was president of the United States?
Just after Obama’s election to the
presidency on Nov. 15, 2008, Sam Webb, then-chairman of the still pro-Moscow
Communist Party USA, told his party comrades: “The
left can and should advance its own views and disagree with the Obama
administration without being disagreeable. Its tone should be respectful. We
are speaking to a friend.”
A lifelong friend.
Frank Marshall Davis
The young Obama, when he was 10 or 11
years old, was introduced to the Hawaii-based poet Frank
Marshall Davis by his maternal grandfather. Obama
maintained a relationship with the septuagenarian Davis until he left Hawaii
for Occidental College in Los Angeles at the age of 18.
Davis had joined the Communist Party USA in
Chicago by 1943, at the latest. He was militantly pro-Soviet, writing poems in
praise of both Stalin and the Red Army.
In 1948, Davis and his communist wife moved to Hawaii. According to Davis’s autobiography, he was
recommended to the Hawaiian comrades by secret Communist Party USA
members Paul Robeson and Harry Bridges of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.
Before going underground in 1950, the
Hawaiian Communist Party was one of the most dynamic in the United States at
the time. The mainland put huge resources into the Hawaiian Communist Party
because the Soviets wanted the U.S. military presence on the islands shut down.
The Hawaiian communists were charged with agitating against the U.S. military
bases at every opportunity.
FBI documents refer to information that
Davis “was observed photographing large sections of the [Hawaii] coastline with
a camera containing a telescopic lens.” The FBI information states: “Informant
stated that DAVIS spent much of his time in this activity. He said this was the
third different occasion DAVIS had been observed photographing shorelines and
beachfronts. Informant advised that it did not appear he was photographing any
particular objects.”
The FBI clearly suspected military
espionage. Davis was placed on the “Security Index,” which meant he was marked
for immediate arrest should war break out between the United States and the
Soviet Union.
Alice Palmer
Long-serving Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer provided Obama’s entrée into electoral politics. Obama was
Palmer’s chief of staff when she ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1994, then
he took over her state Senate seat in 1996.
Palmer was a pro-Soviet propagandist.
In 1983, Palmer traveled to Czechoslovakia
to the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council’s Prague Assembly. At the time,
she served on the executive board of the Communist Party USA-dominated U.S.
Peace Council.
In 1985, Palmer was part of a delegation of
16 African-American journalists to the Soviet Union, East Germany, and
Czechoslovakia. Palmer represented her own Chicago-based “Black Press
Institute,” which was essentially a vehicle for disseminating Soviet propaganda
to America’s black population.
The trip was organized by Don Rojas, then executive of the International Organization of Journalists (IOJ),
in conjunction with the Black Press Institute, the National Alliance of Black
Journalists, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association—the United
States’ largest organization of owners of black newspapers.
American-educated Rojas was the former
press secretary to Grenada’s late communist leader, Maurice Bishop.
Palmer told the Communist Party USA’s
People’s Daily World:
“The trip was extraordinary because we were
able to sit down with our counterparts and with the seats of power in three
major capitals—Prague, Berlin and Moscow. We visited with foreign ministers, we
talked with the editors of the major newspapers in these three cities. …
“It was a very unusual trip because we were
given access. … Every effort was made to give us as much as we asked for. … We
came back feeling that we could speak very well about the interest of the
socialist countries in promoting peace.”
In March 1986, Palmer covered the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Congress in Moscow for the Black Press
Institute.
In June 1986, the People’s Daily World published
a Black Press Institute article by Palmer on the CPSU conference, entitled “An
Afro-American Journalist in the USSR.” The article praised Soviet “central
planning” and included such statements as:
“We Americans can be misled by the major
media. We’re being told the Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low
standard of living compared with ours, but actually they have reached a basic
stability in meeting their needs and are now planning to double their
production.”
Palmer was elected IOJ vice president for
North America at the organization’s 10th Congress, held from Oct. 20–23, 1986,
in Prague. She also traveled to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria during the same
trip. Palmer’s duties were to include coordinating the activities of IOJ chapters
in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
The IOJ was a Soviet front operation based
in Prague, until its expulsion by the Czech government in 1995.
David Axelrod
A longtime friend of Obama, David Axelrod, led Obama’s 2008 and 2012 election campaigns and served as a senior
adviser to the president.
In the 1940s, Axelrod’s mother, Myril Axelrod, wrote for the left-leaning New York magazine “PM.” Though not
officially a communist publication, several Communist Party USA members worked
on the paper.
PM’s Washington correspondent, I.F. Stone, was later identified as a Communist Party USA member and a Soviet
intelligence agent.
One of PM’s writers, Earl Conrad, also
wrote for the leftist magazine Negro Story, as did Obama’s mentor, Frank
Marshall Davis.
While studying in Chicago, Axelrod was
mentored by longtime Chicago journalist and activist David Canter.
Canter spent his childhood in the Soviet
Union where his father, Harry Canter, former secretary of the Boston Communist
Party, translated Lenin’s works from Russian into English. This work earned
Harry Canter an audience with Stalin in 1932. After World War II, Harry Canter
settled his family in Chicago, where he took over a radical paper called the
Chicago Star—for sale because its owner, Frank Marshall Davis, was moving to
Hawaii.
David Canter joined the Communist Party USA
and would later become an associate of Obama.
By 1960, David Canter had teamed up with
well-known Chicago Communist Party USA member LeRoy Wolins. The duo owned a company called Translation World Publishers, which
specialized in publications from and about the Soviet Union. The company soon
attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which
suspected Canter and Wolins of being conduits for Soviet propaganda.
In a report prepared by the House Committee
on Un-American Activities in May and July 1962, entitled “Communist Outlets for
the Distribution of Soviet Propaganda in the United States,” David Canter was
heavily quizzed about payments his company received from the Soviet Union.
After the U.S. government demanded that
Translation World Publishers register as the agent of a foreign power, Canter
de-registered the company.
The committee went on to find that:
“Translation World Publishers was an outlet
for the distribution of Soviet propaganda … this publishing house was
subsidized by Soviet funds and was created by known Communists to serve the
propaganda interests of the U.S.S.R.”
In 1963/64, the Soviet Union actively tried
to undermine Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, in favor of
Democrat Lyndon Johnson.
In their 1989 book, “The KGB Against the
Main Enemy—How the Soviet Intelligence Service Operates Against the United
States,” the United States’ premier communist researcher, Herbert Romerstein,
and former KGB officer Stanislav Levchenko examined Soviet attempts to blacken
Goldwater’s name and other Soviet campaigns of the time:
“The false charge that Goldwater was a
racist was only one of the smear campaigns used against his candidacy by the
Soviets and their surrogates. The American Communists covertly assisted in this
‘active measures’ campaign.
“A 1963 booklet claimed that Goldwater was
conspiring with the John Birch Society to organize a ‘putsch,’ or violent
insurrection, to take over the United States in 1964. The booklet, ‘Birch
Putsch Plans for 1964,’ contained no address for the publisher, Domino
Publications. The author used the not-very imaginative pseudonym, ‘John Smith,
as told to Stanhope T. McReady.’ There was nothing to tie this publication to
the communists until an ad for the book appeared in the pro-communist National
Guardian for April 25, 1963, listing the publisher as ‘Domino Publications,
Suite 900, 22 West Madison Street, Chicago, Illinois.’
“This was in fact the address of
Translation World Publishers, which was registered under the Foreign Agents
Registration Act as an agent of the Soviet Union. The co-owners, LeRoy Wolins
and David S. Canter, were identified by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities as members of the Communist Party USA.”
Axelrod’s mentor was a Soviet-funded
professional “black propagandist.” Axelrod used similar smear tactics to help
Obama win a U.S. Senate seat in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 and 2012.
Valerie Jarrett
The “other half of Obama’s brain,” Valerie Jarrett was a longtime Obama family friend and the president’s closest
adviser through his entire eight years in the White House.
FBI documents show that Jarrett’s
maternal grandfather, Chicago businessman and Housing Authority Chairman Robert Taylor, was “in contact” with alleged Soviet spy Alfred Stern “on a number of occasions.” At one point, the pair were actually
in business together. Under investigation by the FBI, Stern fled the country in
the late 1950s through Mexico to the Soviet Union before settling in
Czechoslovakia.
FBI files also reveal, “Bowman was also a
member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and
Medical Students,” according to Judicial Watch.
Another document in the files was a note
from J. Edgar Hoover to FBI officials in Denver instructing them to investigate
“James Edward Bowman” for his connections to other suspects.
The Judicial Watch report explained,
“According to Bowman’s government file, the Association of Internes and Medical
Students is an organization that ‘has long been a faithful follower of the
Communist Party line’ and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in
Washington, D.C., and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated
with fellow Communists.”
Jarrett’s father-in-law, prominent Chicago
journalist Vernon Jarrett, was a leader of the
Communist Party USA youth wing, American Youth for Democracy, in 1946.
In early 1948, the communist-controlled
Packinghouse Workers went on strike in Chicago. Vernon Jarrett served on the
publicity committee of the communist-run “Citizens’ Committee to Aid
Packing-House Workers,” alongside none other than fellow journalist and comrade
Frank Marshall Davis.
Vernon Jarrett was also a fan of Obama. He
watched his career from its early stages and became an influential supporter.
In 1992, Obama worked for the ACORN
offshoot Project Vote to register black voters in aid of the Senate campaign
of Carol Moseley Braun, who also had
strong Communist Party USA ties.
Obama helped Moseley Braun win her Senate
seat, then took it over himself in 2004, backed by the same communist/socialist
alliance that had backed Moseley Braun.
Commenting on the 1992 race, Vernon Jarrett
wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times on Aug. 11, 1992:
“Good news! Good news! Project Vote, a
collectivity of 10 church-based community organizations dedicated to black
voter registration, is off and running. Project Vote is increasing its rolls at
a 7,000-per-week clip. … If Project Vote is to reach its goal of registering
150,000 out of an estimated 400,000 unregistered blacks statewide, ‘it must
average 10,000 rather than 7,000 every week,’ says Barack Obama, the program’s
executive director.”
Council for a Livable
World
Established in 1962 by former Hungarian
communist sympathizer and alleged Soviet spy Leo Szilard, the Washington-based Council
for a Livable World (CLW) has done huge damage to the
U.S. military—all to the benefit of Moscow.
The CLW’s modus operandi is to fund leftist
senators and congressmembers, then lobby them hard for defense cuts and disadvantageous
arms reduction treaties with the Soviet Union/Russia.
The CLW claims to have had an early
influence on both Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden.
“Council for a Liveable World has a history
of helping to elect new candidates who can make a difference in the Senate,
such as a little-known state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama and a
29-year-old Joe Biden in his first statewide contest,” the CLW wrote in 2012.
The CLW helped fund Obama’s 2004 U.S.
Senate race. Obama has also been pictured (circa mid-1990s) alongside longtime
CLW leader Massachusetts-based socialist Jerome Grossman.
CLW Executive Director John Isaacs wrote in Grossman’s eulogy: “Now, as
an aside, we have a dictum at Council for a Livable World. If we support a
candidate in his or her first major political contest, he or she will always
remember who was with them at the beginning. That has been true with such political
figures—(he says modestly)—as President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph
Biden.”
In October 2007, the CLW praised Sen. Obama “for his pledge to pursue
a world without nuclear weapons and to improve U.S.–Russian relations.”
At a speech at DePaul University,
Obama stated: “Here’s what I’ll say as president:
America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons. … We’ll work with
Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, and
to dramatically reduce the stockpiles of our nuclear weapons and material.”
As the Soviet Union/Russia has cheated on
every single arms-reduction treaty with the United States, Obama was
effectively proposing unilateral U.S. disarmament.
Former Sen. Gary Hart, then chairman of the
CLW, applauded Obama’s pledge.
“By placing the issue of the elimination of
nuclear arsenals at the center of his foreign policy, Sen. Barack Obama has
performed a great public service and deserves attention and respect from all
those who see this issue as crucial to our times and who have been watching and
waiting for strong leadership and courage,” Hart said in a statement.
In June 2013, President Obama used a speech
in Berlin to outline plans for further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal
“if Russia agrees to pare back its weapons at the same time.”
“Resuming a drive toward disarmament that
he had largely shunted aside over the past two years, Mr. Obama will propose
trimming the number of strategic warheads that each of the two big nuclear
powers still maintains by up to a third, taking them below the 1,550 permitted
in the treaty he signed with Russia in his first term, a senior administration
official said. That would leave each country with just over 1,000 weapons.
“Mr. Obama will also declare that he will work
with NATO allies to develop proposals for major cuts in tactical nuclear
weapons, which are not covered by the existing treaty. Russia, which has far
more tactical nuclear weapons deployed than the United States and Europe do,
has firmly resisted such cuts. There are fears that its tactical weapons are in
parts of Russia where they risk being seized by terrorist groups.
“Mr. Obama will also announce that he will
host a final nuclear security summit meeting in the United States just before
he leaves office. …
“’The most important thing he could do is
lay out the broad agenda for the next three and a half years,’ said John
Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, an advocacy
group.
“In addition to further reductions, Mr.
Isaacs said, there are several policy changes Mr. Obama could take that would
move the country further away from cold war-style national security. He said
the president could take nuclear weapons off high alert and change nuclear
doctrine to say that the only purpose of such weapons would be as a deterrent.”
Under the Obama administration, while
America disarmed, Moscow pulled well ahead of the United States in virtually
every realm of nuclear and conventional weaponry.
The situation has gotten so bad that President
Donald Trump had to unilaterally withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces Treaty (which Russia has continually cheated on) in order to give the
U.S. military some chance of catching up to Moscow.
How Many Russian Agents Do
You Know?
Most Americans don’t personally know any
Russian agents. Most Americans aren’t surrounded by friends and advisers who
know Russian agents.
Obama has been surrounded by pro-Moscow
communists and probable Soviet agents his entire life. Several of his political
enablers also have Soviet/Russian connections.
How unlucky can one guy get?
Obama’s economic, social, and military
policies damaged the United States in a myriad of ways. Many of his military
and foreign policies also directly or indirectly benefited Moscow.
Despite a lifetime of radical associations,
Obama never had to undergo any form of a security background check to serve in
the Illinois State Senate, U.S. Senate, or the White House. It’s highly
unlikely he could have passed a security check to drive a school bus, let alone
serve as the leader of the Free World.
Imagine what a two-year,
multimillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded investigation into Obama’s Russian ties
might uncover.
If Obama was a fully recruited agent of
Moscow, tasked with giving Russia a significant military advantage over the
United States, and economically weakening and socially dividing the nation, how
would he have conducted his presidency (or his post-presidency) any
differently?
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and
public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched
radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on
mainstream politics.
No comments:
Post a Comment