Tuesday, October 22, 2019

RAND PAUL DECLARES THAT THE RISING SUPPORT FOR SOCIALISM IS 'MIND-BOGGLING' - SO ARE BOTTOMLESS BANKSTER BAILOUTS AND THE WALL STREET OPIOID DRUG DEALERS FOR PROFIT!



Exclusive — Rand Paul: Rising Support for Socialism Among American Youth Is ‘Mind-Boggling’

Volume 90%
3:51

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) called rising support for socialism among youth in America “mind-boggling,” in a recent exclusive interview with Breitbart News on his new book The Case Against Socialism.

Paul, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate and prominent libertarian, said he remembers in the 1970s and 1980s when Americans would never admit to being socialists, let alone a liberal. Today, he said, Democrats are openly running on socialist platforms, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
“It’s kind of mind-boggling, actually,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “We now live in a time where not only are people talking about socialism, they’re proudly running as a socialist.”
“I think it’s important for this generation to realize what socialism was in the last century and how [it] really invariably was associated with violence, with genocide, with famine, with horrible tragedy and you know, today’s youth seems to have forgotten that,” he said.
He said in China, as many as 40 million died during the Great Famine in the late 1950s, and today, in Venezuela, people are eating their pets.
“That is the end result of socialism, there is no food in the stores,” he said. “Venezuela has more oil than any other country in the world, they have more oil than Saudi Arabia, they were one of the richest countries, and now they’re in calamitous poverty.”
His book tells the story of a young woman in Venezuela in a gang that controls territory — six dumpsters where they can search for food.
“How did they get there? It’s almost, it’s mind-boggling. How do you even explain it?” he said.
He said he does not think America is ready for socialism, but pointed out that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — who does not call herself a socialist but is running on socialist policies — appears to be the Democrat frontrunner.
“The socialist doesn’t win, but the person who has all the same policies who doesn’t call herself a socialist, Elizabeth Warren, and right now is looking like the frontrunner, but she’s for most of the policies that Bernie Sanders is for and so that will be the question, will we elect someone with socialist policies?” he said.
Paul debunked the myth that there is socialism in Scandinavia.
“They’re not socialist in Scandinavia. They have private property, they have a private stock market, they don’t even have a minimum wage, prices go up and down, but they do have a big welfare state. So while they’re not socialist they have a big welfare state. They do have free college, free paid leave, all these sort of welfare goodies,” he said.
“It turns out in Scandinavia, the way they pay for free college and all this so-called free stuff is they tax the working class, and the middle class, extensively, so there’s a 25 percent sales tax, they call it a VAT, it’s on food, clothing, everything, you name it. Twenty-five percent so everybody pays that, including the poor. So that’s a pretty significant tax — 25 percent,” he said.
“They also have an income tax that’s 60 percent starting at $60,000. That’s way higher than the United States. So the dirty little secret of Scandinavia is you can have a welfare state but everybody’s got to pay taxes,” he said.
He said back in the U.S., Warren is promising Medicare-for-all without saying whether she would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for it.
“She won’t answer the question. Now Bernie has, he said we’ll raise taxes on the middle class but they’ll save money on their healthcare cause it’ll be ‘free,'” he said.
“Well Elizabeth Warren won’t answer that question, I think that’s going to be an important question for her, and we’ll see, and even the left and the establishment media and the left are going, ‘Elizabeth, how are you going to pay for this?’ and I think she’s boxed in a corner and eventually she’s going to have to admit — with massive middle class taxes.”

Follow Breitbart News’s @Kristina_Wong.



The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for perpetuating this whole filthy system, in which “Wall Street rules.” But its services in behalf of  the rich and the super-rich only compound the fundamental and insoluble contradictions of capitalism, plunging the system into ever deeper debt and ensuring that the next crisis will be that much more violent and explosive.


In 2008, this resulted in the most sweeping and 

systemic financial crisis since the Great 

Depression, prompting Fed Chairman Bernanke, 

New York Fed President Tim Geithner and 

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former 

CEO of Goldman Sachs) to orchestrate the largest 

bank bailout in human history.


"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 full significance of the bailouts of the financial system 

and the subsequent provision of trillions of dollars is clear. It 

has brought about the institutionalisation of a process, 

developing over the preceding decades, where the financial 

system, with the stock market at its centre, functions as a 

mechanism for the transfer of wealth to the heights of society.


"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...


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."

CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON, OBAMA or TRUMP?


The Clinton White House famously abolished

the Glass–Steagall legislation, which 

separated commercial and investment 

banking. The move was a 
boon for Wall 

Street firms and led to major bank mergers 

that some analysts say helped contribute to 

the 2008 financial crisis.

Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from 

Goldman Sachs, with CNN 
documenting a total of at least $7.7 

million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including 

Goldman Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 

from speeches to Goldman Sachs specifically, and her 

husband 
secured more than $1,550,000 from Goldman 

speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton 
collected over $500,000 

from three Goldman Sachs events.


Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.


It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest contribution to the nation before even taking office:  the political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt machine. J.R. Dunn

"Hillary will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."


Only Barack Obama has serviced banksters 

more than Hillary and Billary!


“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to  make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”

FOLLOWING THE CRIMES OF BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON BECOMES AMERICA’S ROAD TO REVOLUTION

 http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/bill-and-hillary-clintons-global.html


Transcripts released by WikiLeaks of Clinton speeches to Wall Street bankers, for which she received six-figure paychecks, show her praising  the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson- Bowles deficit-reduction commission, which called for sweeping cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs; a tax on employees’

Media silent on dismissal of DNC suit against Julian Assange

A federal court ruling last Tuesday dismissing a Democratic National Committee (DNC) civil suit against Julian Assange “with prejudice” was a devastating indictment of the US ruling elite’s campaign to destroy the WikiLeaks founder. It exposed as a fraud the entire “Russiagate” conspiracy theory peddled by the Democratic Party, the corporate media and the intelligence agencies for the past three years.
The decision, by Judge John Koeltl of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, rejected the smears that Assange “colluded” with Russia. It upheld his status as a journalist and publisher and dismissed claims that WikiLeaks’ 2016 publication of leaked emails from the DNC was “illegal.”
Despite the significance of the ruling, and its clear newsworthiness, it has been subjected to an almost complete blackout by the entire media in the US and internationally.
The universal silence on the court decision—extending from the New York Times (which buried a six-paragraph report on the ruling on page 25) and the Washington Post, to “alternative” outlets such as the Intercept, the television evening news programs and the publications of the pseudo-left—can be described only as a coordinated political conspiracy.
Its aim is to suppress any discussion of the court’s exposure of the slanders used to malign and isolate Assange, and to justify the unprecedented international pursuit of him over WikiLeaks’ exposure of US war crimes, surveillance operations and diplomatic conspiracies.
The New York Times, the Washington Post and other corporate outlets have relentlessly smeared Assange as a “Russian agent” and depicted him as the linchpin of a conspiracy hatched in Moscow to deprive Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton of the presidency in the 2016 US elections.
Now that their claims have been subjected to judicial review and exposed as a tissue of lies and fabrications, they have adopted a policy of radio silence. There is no question that if the court ruling had been in favour of the DNC, it would have been greeted with banner headlines and wall-to-wall coverage.
The response exposes these publications as state propagandists and active participants in the campaign by the Democratic Party, the Trump administration and the entire ruling elite to condemn Assange for the rest of his life to an American prison for the “crime” of publishing the truth.
The editors and senior writers at these outlets, such as New York Timeseditorial page editor James Bennet, are in constant contact with the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Behind the scenes, they work out an editorial line that will advance the interests of the Wall Street banks and the military-intelligence apparatus. At the same time, they decide what news and information they will hide from the American and world population.
The efforts by the mainstream news outlets to bury the ruling presents a clear example of the type of media manipulation that has led millions of people to seek alternative sources of news on the internet, of which WikiLeaks is itself an example.
Judge Koeltl’s decision made plain the anti-democratic and dictatorial logic of the DNC case against Assange. He warned: “If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC’s political, financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet.” This, he stated, would “override the First Amendment” protection to freedom of the press mandated by the US Constitution.
Koeltl’s finding was an absolute vindication of Assange and WikiLeaks’ 2016 publications exposing the attempts by the DNC to rig the Democratic Party primaries against self-declared “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders in favour of Hillary Clinton.
The judge found these releases, together with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election.”

Exclusive – Rand Paul Makes 

‘The Case Against Socialism’: 

‘History is Replete With 

Examples of Socialism Gone 

Awry’
Alex Wong/Getty Images
 15 Oct 2019Washington, D.C.6
14:35

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is out with a new book, The Case Against Socialism, and explained his case and vision in a lengthy exclusive interview on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Sunday this weekend.

In the interview, Paul said that from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao Zedong’s China to Fidel Castro’s Cuba to Pol Pot’s Cambodia to Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, socialism has worse than failed in every single country it has been attempted. And while he says that modern American socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) claim “they don’t want that kind of socialism” that results in “authoritarianism, genocide, and famine,” there is no case where socialism has ever worked and it always ends up there.
“I think that’s one of the questions that comes up very quickly is some people are incredulous you even have to make the case because history is replete with examples of socialism gone awry, socialism devolving into authoritarianism, genocide, and famine,” Paul said in a half-hour special that aired Sunday evening on Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel.
“The 20th century really is the history of the failure of socialism, from Hitler’s Nazi or nationalist socialism to Stalin’s Bolshevik socialism to Mao’s socialism to Pol Pot. Really, time and time again, millions of people have died at the hands of despotic rulers,” Paul said. “Some would say today’s socialists like AOC and Bernie don’t want that kind of socialism, but actually there was a time when Bernie was very sympathetic to Castro as well as Chávez. This seems to be the pattern for today’s socialists is that they’re very, very open to socialism until they find out that it’s replaced by authoritarianism and until they find out it’s been replaced by poverty.”
Paul points to Venezuela as a key recent historical example of socialism “gone awry.”
“This is true in Venezuela in particular,” Paul said. “All the American left was in love, even people who didn’t claim to be socialists, were in love Chávez and claimed he was reducing poverty, but in the end in Venezuela it’s become so desperate that the average person has lost 20 pounds not because they intended to but for lack of food. Venezuela was once one of the richest countries—probably the richest country—in South America. They still have more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, but there’s still shortages of food. The common people can’t eat. You see people like their leader, Maduro—their socialist leader—becoming more and more overweight; he’s probably added something like 50 pounds while the average person is losing 20 pounds. So I think you see example after example of socialism not working and devolving into state violence, but I think even more important though is we now—you think most people would know that, but what we have now is polls showing people today, especially youth, think socialism might be a good idea. You have some polls showing over 50 percent of young people thinking we ought to try socialism. So my wife and I got together and wrote this book thinking gosh, we have to remind them of the history of socialism, but we also have to remind them that socialism historically has also devolved into violence.”
Socialism, Paul argues, has taken over the Democrat Party, fueled by an angry presidential primary battle that has resulted in a “bidding war” of sorts between that party’s leaders attempting to outdo each other.
“I think it’s become a kind of a bidding war among the presidential candidates on the Democrat side,” Paul said. “One person will offer free college, and the other person will say, ‘No, free college and free benefits for paid leave,’ and then another one will say, ‘What about Medicare for All?’ So it just goes on and on and on, in sort of a bidding war on the left for who can offer more free stuff. But there needs to be an examination of who really pays for so-called ‘free stuff.’ This is one of the big lies we point out in The Case Against Socialism, is that Bernie and AOC say, ‘Oh the top one percent will pay for all this.’ But when you add it up, there’s just not enough money. What they have proposed on the top one percent would maybe bring in $50 billion, but their spending desires are closer to $60, $70, or even $80 trillion. So there’s definitely a mismatch and a math problem for these people.”
In addition to the mathematical and historical issues with socialism, Paul argues, current socialists using Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden to argue socialism works are false analogies.
“But even worse, they point to the so-called socialism of Scandinavia and say, ‘Oh yeah, we used to like Chávez, we used to like Castro, we used to like the Sandinistas, but now what we really like is Scandinavian socialism,’” Paul said. “So we examine that, my wife and I did a great deal of research and we examined Scandinavian socialism and what we came up with is interestingly they are not socialist. They have private property; most of the businesses are owned privately. They have a private stock exchange. In fact, the prime minister of Denmark when Bernie kept saying, ‘Denmark is this great socialist nation,’ the prime minister actually came out and said, ‘Bernie, you need to pipe down; we’re not a socialist country.’ In fact, he almost got alarm in his voice because he was worried people might not come there to do business anymore because they might think they were a socialist nation. Most of the indexes of freedom, trade, and capitalism actually rank the Scandinavian countries quite high. So really what Bernie is selling is a bill of goods here. They will then argue that the Scandinavian countries have a lot of free stuff—they do have a lot of free stuff, welfare, and state goodies that come with big government, but the interesting thing with Scandinavia is it’s much different than Bernie and AOC say. What happens in Scandinavia is the working class pay a huge amount of taxes. The working class pay a 25 percent sales tax on everything, including food, and the working class and middle class also pay income tax, whereas many in our country on the lower end are excluded from the income tax, whereas what you find over there is even at $60,000 you have a 60 percent income tax. So, really, I think it’s important that we explode the myths of American socialists that Scandinavia is socialist but also explode the myth that you can have all this free stuff and the only people that pay are the top one percent in America. There’s just not enough money, and it’s just not true.”
Paul is troubled by a rising interest in socialism among America’s youth, as evidenced by some increased support for the radical and failed ideology in recent polling, and is concerned that American young people are not learning this history in school. While he thinks some of it is just a natural tradition of Americans being more leftist when they are young and becoming more conservative as they get older, he is concerned that some of what is happening is due to a lack of education on the historical failures of socialism and misconception about what socialism really entails—government control of the means of production.
“I think there’s always been a trend for young people to be more liberal—or more open to socialism—you know the old saying was, ‘If you don’t believe in liberal policies before age 30 you don’t have a heart, but if you don’t believe in conservative polices after age 30 you don’t have a brain,’” Paul said. “There is some truth to it. When you’re younger, you live on your parents’ dole. In many ways, you are a dependent who has not necessarily seen the working world or seen what it’s like and seen that paying taxes is necessary. So I do think people become more conservative over time. It’s also true that the polls that show younger people and millennials leaning toward socialism, when they ask these young people ‘What is socialism?’ only 16 or 17 percent of them can actually answer what socialism is and socialism is traditionally defined as the state owning the means of production and you don’t have private property—there is collective ownership of things. For most young people, if they’re just reading one sentence on Twitter, I guess they’re not reading much history. Some of it is a misconception, but some of it also is a function of our schools in that I think there’s a sort of unified groupthink in schools that teaches kids that things are sort of unfair out there and that it’s a rotten world and the government is going to make things more equal and more fair. So I think some of them want to see government-enforced equality, but we make the case in The Case Against Socialism that if you want equality of outcomes you would have to have equality police.”
Paul further explains the left’s hypocrisy when it comes to a “fairness police” that he says would be necessary under a socialist system to ensure “equal outcome” by noting that it cuts against core American beliefs of “equal protection under the law.”
“You would have to have a fairness police that is going to show up with truncheons to make people fair again because any time you sort of advocate for equal outcome you basically push to make everyone equal all the time, the world is not that way,” Paul said. “You have unequal talents, some people work harder than others, some people are luckier, some people are taller, some people are smarter, some people are faster—there’s all kinds of reasons why there are not equal outcomes. But the irony is if you want to have equal outcomes the law and the government actually has to treat people unequally. You think the left would think this through, and they would realize that the whole idea of equal protection under the law—that everybody should be treated the same—is a principle that the left prided themselves in and almost everyone prides themselves in now and yet if you have equal outcomes you won’t have equal protection under the law. You actually will have to law that will treat people in an unequal way.”
Part of why Paul said there is a rush to socialism in America’s youth is a legitimate concern with political corruption in America, something grassroots movements on both the left and the right have felt for many years. There is, he said, a political, cultural, and financial elite that seems to ordinary Americans to be above the rest of society when it comes to the law and because of that corruption people challenge the system—on both sides of the political aisle. He is concerned, however, that the left’s pandering with socialism would only make the system worse because it would empower more cronyism and more corruption if ever implemented, whereas conservatives’ vision of less government cuts into the ability of bad actors to act badly.
“I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Both left and right, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movement, they’re all sort of unhappy about—myself included—about crony capitalism, about people who manipulate government and manipulate the law to have an unfair advantage,” Paul said. “It’s not just that they’re selling something that people want and have become successful like Sam Walton, it’s things like some of the big pharmaceutical companies and things that come to Washington and manipulate government to enrich themselves and then abuse the rules to enrich themselves more and more. So yes I think both sides—both right and left—see this. I remember when the bankers were bailed out in 2009, these very wealthy bankers and very wealthy banks that had made rotten decisions. In the end, the poor homeowner was kicked out of his house or her house but the banks were bailed out. So the Occupy Wall Street movement was offended by that and so was the Tea Party. The real difference is the answer. It’s one thing to be angry about crony capitalism. For those on the left, it’s because crony capitalism is a failure they think we should try socialism. For those of us on the right, or the Tea Party movement, we look at crony capitalism and say that’s too much government—that’s people abusing government.”
Paul added that the right’s vision is more effective in solving the problems of corruption because it takes the power away from that handful of people who would wield it dishonorably. And that is exactly the problem with socialism, he said, as evidenced by all its historical failures: Bad actors rise up and inevitably wield said power unfairly in what ends up benefitting the few at the top and screwing over the many throughout society.
“We decided that what we wanted was less government, more of a government restrained and restricted and limited by the Constitution and less crony capitalism in a sense that what we wanted to inject was more of a free market and more voluntary transactions,” Paul said. “So it is sort of ironic that both right and left are both motivated by the same problem we see, and they come up with very different solutions and I think that’s why the book we have The Case Against Socialism is so important is because it’s about choices. It’s about voters in our country who get to think about what kind of economic system we want. And I guess our point in the book is we don’t think it’s an accident that throughout history every time socialism has been tried it has wound up in genocide and famine. The stories from Mao’s China, the stories from Pol Pot in Cambodia, the stories currently from Venezuela, I mean they are horrifying stories. People are eating their pets in Venezuela. People need to know this. The other side will complain and say that’s not real socialism, that’s a bunch of kleptocrats. And yet that’s the people who are elected, that’s their party label—they are from the socialist party—and again the apologists for socialism say ‘oh that’s not what we really want. These people now are just thugs.’ But why is it time and time again socialism devolves into thuggery? So, I think this is an important and timely book and I hope it will get the readership necessary to shape and influence some of the next generation.”
Paul added that he’s looked at experts and historical analysis to question whether socialism inevitably ends up in authoritarian regimes intent on genocide and famine, or if that just keeps happening accidentally. He argues that the experts like Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek have examined this very question and found that under socialism, ruthlessness prevails in leadership and violence becomes necessary for implementation.
“People keep getting back to this idea of whether it’s an inevitability to have this kind of authoritarianism and violence or whether it’s an accident,” Paul said. “Hayek and others looked at this, and they said it shouldn’t be looked at as a one-off or accidental in history that socialism devolves into violence because if you ultimately want to collectivize the farms as Mao did or Stalin did, if you want to take property from people, there is a point at which they will resist. Really, the leader that exhibits that most ruthless character is the one who’s able to take the land because it ultimately does require, as Lenin and others said, you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelette. The thing is is ultimately this is what happens. You end up choosing a few leaders; they get selected by the rest of the socialists because they are the most ruthless and willing to actually use the violence necessary to take the property. But really, our kids need to learn this history and read about it. Pol Pot was not that long ago in Cambodia with the killing fields and just hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of bodies piled in mass graves. In a very short period of time they expelled virtually everybody from the cities and ultimately millions of people were killed. This is the kind of thing that people say, ‘Oh that’s not what I want.’”
But, Paul argues, if Americans vote for socialist leadership, what ultimately happens next is evident throughout history.
“But if you’re for socialism, if you’re for the collectivization of ownership, if you believe that the collective is more important than the individual, ultimately this is what happens,” Paul said. “If you don’t think the individual is important and you disdain individual rights, then it’s sort of like it’s okay to have drone-like slaves because then what you’re about is the hive and you’re not really concerned about the individual. Our country was founded on something completely different, individual liberty. Our bill of rights is directed toward individuals not toward classifications and these are important traditions but I think it’s not being taught in school. Today’s sort of Twitter society is short attention span and not reading. I think it’s important to have the ammunition out there and we’re hoping that The Case Against Socialism will be that ammunition to help people make an informed decision and hopefully prevent America, as President Trump said, from ever becoming a socialist nation.”
Before Paul’s interview with Breitbart News, he had appeared on The View opposite, among others, Ana Navarro—the frequent critic of President Donald Trump—who shut Paul down when he was explaining what socialism was and why it was bad and why it failed in Venezuela. Paul, when asked about Navarro’s silencing of him, told Breitbart News that exposing socialism does not fit Navarro’s “narrative” of hateful opposition to President Trump—something shared by the other hosts of The View—so she would rather just not discuss these inconvenient truths at all.
“It doesn’t really fit their narrative,” Paul said. “People like Ana Navarro hate President Trump and they blame everything and they blame the poor dialogue and crassness in Washington and crass dialogue between right and left—they blame it all on the president, and yet really people like Ana Navarro and others on The View who shout and scream over everybody, really they’re adding to that poor dialogue. They’re setting a poor example for everyone with the sort of yelling and screaming, but the particular point we were trying to explain to her was the leaders in Venezuela are socialist. The leaders of their party identify as the socialist party. She was like, ‘No they’re thugs, they’re thugs. They’re not socialists.’ And I tried to calmly make the point to her that, well, they are socialists and they are thugs—and that’s precisely our point. When the government is controlled centrally by a few people, by one political party—the socialists—and you get central planning where you don’t have the freedom to decide what and how much to produce and consumers don’t get to choose, when a few people control things, you have much more of a susceptibility to kleptocracy, to thieves, to stealing and lying and enriching yourselves.”
Paul added that leftist anti-Trump personalities like Navarro “demean themselves” by opposing allowing “intelligent debate” on these issues.
“That’s what keeps happening [socialism failing] over and over again, and that’s what she doesn’t understand and so many on the left refuse to understand is that there is a tendency or maybe even something that is inherent to socialism that leads to thuggery,” Paul said. “People like her don’t want to see the lessons of Mao, the lessons of Stalin, the lessons of Hitler—they weren’t accidents of history, they were the natural conclusion of socialism. Maduro and Chávez are the natural conclusion to socialism. Then she was like, ‘Oh, President Trump is misusing this and saying that if the Democrats win you’ll get socialism.’ Then I said, and I don’t think she liked it, I said, ‘You know, if you vote for a socialist you might get socialism.’ And it’s like really? That sounds obvious to me. Bernie says he is a socialist—I think we’d get socialism [if he wins]. AOC says she’s a socialist. I would think we might socialism if these people ever get in charge of the government. So it’s sort of a bizarre situation, but they sort of demean themselves by being intolerant of allowing intelligent debate.”
While much of the interview focused on the issues of socialism and Sanders in particular, Paul added that the new Democrat frontrunner Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is really no different than Sanders when it comes to socialist ideology—just that she’s better at hiding it from the public than Sanders which is why she’s ascendant in the polls.
“I think there’s really not a dime’s worth of difference between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,” Paul said. “They stand for the same policies and ultimately hers is a socialist platform also. You’re right, though, she’s like most liberals of the last several decades where they were always smart to try to hide their socialism from the public. And I think in the end, most of the major policies that have come out—Elizabeth Warren has rushed to support. So I don’t know that you can claim, maintain, or support that there’s much of a difference in policies between Bernie Sanders’ socialism and Elizabeth Warren.”
What’s particularly troubling, though, Paul said, is the evidence that socialism has won the day inside the Democrat Party as a whole. Ocasio-Cortez is now calling the shots and really running the House of Representatives now, not Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as evidenced by the Democrats’ lunging towards impeachment of President Trump. How the media and political class have gone after President Trump, versus the kid glove treatment of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, is exactly the kind of unfair double standard that Paul argues leads people to question the fairness of the political and economic system in America.
“I think they’re off the reservation now as far as impeachment goes,” Paul said. “[Pelosi] announced she was for it before she saw any transcripts of the phone call. And, the way I see it is I don’t think there’s anybody from either party who hasn’t threatened Ukraine’s aid and told them they have to investigate corruption. [Former Vice President Joe] Biden was there threatening it years ago, if they didn’t quit investigating his son’s company—the company that was paying him $50,000 a month—I think most Americans, when they hear that, just on the face of it, that some 30-year-old kid is on the board of an international company getting $50,000 a month, and his dad is traveling to Ukraine all the time, and his dad sort of tells them, ‘Guess what, you get no more money unless you fire this prosecutor.’ The prosecutor has actually now testified that he was investigating the company that was paying Hunter Biden. It just doesn’t pass the smell test. People are going to wonder and say, ‘Well, Pelosi is going to impeach the president over accusations he did something like this even though it doesn’t sound like he was willing to trade or do anything.’ But even if the accusations were accurate, they sound very similar to what Biden’s been accused of but yet nobody blinked an eye or accused Biden of doing something untoward that he should be impeached for. But I think the American people ultimately do want fairness, and they’re going to balk at treating Trump differently than Biden is treated. So if the American people perceive the actions of both to be similar, but that the Democrats are only willing to go after a Republican, I think it ends up becoming a partisan thing that I think people in the end are going to think was motivated by politics not by principle or justice.”
Paul added that this double standard is exactly why Americans on both sides of the aisle are “disturbed” by America’s political, financial, and cultural elites. He also explained that the ultimate irony of all this kleptocracy by the Bidens is that it has cleared the way for the rise of Warren, a socialist herself, and the question is whether she will be able to sufficiently hide her socialism.
“People get disturbed by it on both sides,” Paul said. “Really, they get disturbed by what’s going on. But, I think really that ultimately it’s going to be very, very hard and the irony is that while they thought this was going to bring Trump down, the irony is this is bringing Biden down. His numbers were already falling because he doesn’t seem to be on the ball as much as he used to, he doesn’t seem to have maybe what it takes to intellectually get through the questions of the day during the debates, and so I think that was already bringing him down but the association with the scandal and his son and all the money that went to his son, I think that’s what’s bringing him down. I agree with you that Elizabeth Warren is surging to the top, and the question will be: Will she run away from all the stuff she supports with Bernie, ultimately, or will the tag of socialism and the stain of socialism stick to her as well? We plan on being out there and talking about socialism over the next year and making the actual positions of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are well known and that the disaster of socialism is something our kids will hopefully know enough about to resist it.”
LISTEN TO RAND PAUL ON BREITBART NEWS SUNDAY:

"The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for 

perpetuating this whole filthy system, in 


which "Wall Street rules."



Wall Street rules

 
The Federal Reserve sent a clear message to Wall Street on Friday: It will not allow the longest bull market in American history to end. The message was received loud and clear, and the Dow rose by more than 700 points.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain furloughed or forced to work without pay as the partial government shutdown enters its third week, but the US central bank is making clear that all of the resources of the state are at the disposal of the financial oligarchy.
Responding to Thursday’s market selloff following a dismal report from Apple and signs of a manufacturing slowdown in both China and the US, the Fed declared it was “listening” to the markets and would scrap its plans to raise interest rates.
Speaking at a conference in Atlanta, where he was flanked by his predecessors Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, both of whom had worked to reflate the stock market bubble after the 2008 financial crash, Chairman Jerome Powell signaled that the Fed would back off from its two projected rate increases for 2019.
“We’re listening sensitively to the messages markets are sending,” he said, adding that the central bank would be “patient” in imposing further rate increases. To underline the point, he declared, “If we ever came to the conclusion that any aspect of our plans” was causing a problem, “we wouldn’t hesitate to change it.”
This extraordinary pledge to Wall Street followed the 660 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday, capping off the worst two-day start for a new trading year since the collapse of the dot.com bubble.
William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman from 1951 to 1970, famously said that his job was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.” Now the task of the Fed chairman is to ply the wealthy revelers with tequila shots as soon as they start to sober up.
Powell’s remarks were particularly striking given that they followed the release Friday of the most upbeat jobs report in over a year, with figures, including the highest year-on-year wage growth since the 2008 crisis, universally lauded as “stellar.”
While US financial markets have endured the  worst December since the Great Depression, amid mounting fears of a looming recession and a new financial crisis, analysts have been quick to point out that there are no “hard”  signs of a recession in the United States.
Both the Dow and the S&P 500 indexes have fallen more than 15 percent from their recent highs, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ has entered bear market territory, usually defined as a drop of 20 percent from recent highs.
The markets, Powell admitted, are “well ahead of the data.” But it is the markets, not the “data,” that Powell is listening to.
Since World War II, bear markets have occurred, on average, every five-and-a-half years. But if the present trend continues, the Dow will reach 10 years without a bear market in March, despite the recent losses.
Now the Fed has stepped in effectively to pledge that it will 
allocate whatever resources are needed to ensure that no 
substantial market correction takes place. But this means only that when the correction does come, as it inevitably must, it will be all the more severe and the Fed will have all the less power to stop it.
From the standpoint of the history of the institution, the Fed’s current more or less explicit role as backstop for the stock market is a relatively new development. Founded in 1913, the Federal Reserve legally has had the “dual mandate” of ensuring both maximum employment and price stability since the late 1970s. Fed officials have traditionally denied being influenced in policy decisions by a desire to drive up the stock market.
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979, deliberately engineered an economic recession by driving the benchmark federal funds interest rate above 20 percent. His highly conscious aim, in the name of combating inflation, was to quash a wages movement of US workers by triggering plant closures and driving up unemployment.
The actions of the Fed under Volcker set the stage for a vast upward redistribution of wealth, facilitated on one hand by the trade unions’ suppression of the class struggle and on the other by a relentless and dizzying rise on the stock market.
Volcker’s recession, together with the Reagan administration’s crushing of the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, ushered in decades of mass layoffs, deindustrialization and wage and benefit concessions, leading labor’s share of total national income to fall year after year.
These were also decades of financial deregulation, leading to the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, the dot.com bubble of 1999-2000, and, worst of all, the 2008 financial crisis.
In each of these crises, the Federal Reserve carried out what became known as the “Greenspan put,” (later the “Bernanke put”)—an implicit guarantee to backstop the financial markets, prompting investors to take ever greater risks.
In 2008, this resulted in the most sweeping and 

systemic financial crisis since the Great 

Depression, prompting Fed Chairman Bernanke, 

New York Fed President Tim Geithner and 

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the former 

CEO of Goldman Sachs) to orchestrate the largest 

bank bailout in human history.
Since that time, the Federal Reserve has carried out its most accommodative monetary policy ever, keeping interest rates at or near zero percent for six years. It supplemented this boondoggle for the financial elite with its multi-trillion-dollar “quantitative easing” money-printing program.
The effect can be seen in the ever more staggering wealth of the financial oligarchy, which has consistently enjoyed investment returns of between 10 and 20 percent every year since the financial crisis, even as the incomes of workers have stagnated or fallen.
American capitalist society is hooked on the toxic growth of social inequality created by the stock market bubble. This, in turn, fosters the political framework not just for the decadent lifestyles of the financial oligarchs, each of whom owns, on average, a half-dozen mansions around the world, a private jet and a super-yacht, but also for the broader periphery of the affluent upper-middle class, which provides the oligarchs with political legitimacy and support. These elite social layers determine American political life, from which the broad mass of working people is effectively excluded.
The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism 
for perpetuating this whole filthy system, 
in which “Wall Street rules.” But its services in 
behalf of  the rich and the super-rich only 
compound the fundamental and insoluble 
contradictions of capitalism, plunging the 
system into ever deeper debt and ensuring that 
the next crisis will be that much more violent 
and explosive.
In this intensifying crisis, the working class must assert its independent interests with the same determination and ruthlessness as evinced by the ruling class. It must answer the bourgeoisie’s social counterrevolution with the program of socialist revolution.

 

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.”
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section

 


*
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."


Ten years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers

Ten years ago on this day, the global capitalist system entered its most far-reaching and devastating crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A decade later none of the contradictions which produced the financial crisis has been alleviated, much less overcome. Moreover, the very policies carried out to prevent a total meltdown of the financial system, involving the outlay of trillions of dollars by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks, have only created the conditions for an even bigger disaster.
The immediate trigger for the onset of the crisis was the decision by US financial authorities not to bail out the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers and prevent its bankruptcy. There is considerable evidence to suggest that this was a deliberate decision by the Federal Reserve to create the necessary conditions for what they knew would have to be a massive bailout, not just of a series of banks but the entire financial system.
The previous March, the Fed had organised a $30 billion rescue of Bear Stearns when it was taken over by JP Morgan. But as the Fed’s own minutes from that time make clear the Bear Stearns crisis was just the tip of a huge financial iceberg. The Fed noted that “given the fragile conditions of the financial markets at the time” and the “expected contagion” that would result from its demise it was necessary to organise a bailout. As Fed chairman Ben Bernanke later testified, a sudden failure would have led to a “chaotic unwinding” of positions in financial markets. The bailout of Bear Stearns was not a solution but a holding operation to try to buy time and prepare for what was coming.
While the demise of Lehman was the initial trigger, the most significant event was the impending bankruptcy, revealed just two days later, of the American insurance firm AIG, which was at the centre of a system of complex financial products running into trillions of dollars.
Due to the interconnections of the global financial system, the crisis rapidly extended to financial markets around the world, above all across the Atlantic to Europe where the banks had been major investors in the arcane financial instruments that had been developed around the US sub-prime home mortgage market, the collapse of which provided the immediate trigger for the crisis.
The value of every crisis, it has been rightly said, is that it reveals and starkly lays bare the underlying socio-economic and political relations that are concealed in “normal” times. The collapse of 2008 is no exception.
In the twenty years and more preceding the crisis, particularly in the aftermath of the liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991, the bourgeoisie and its ideologists had proclaimed not only the superiority of the capitalist “free market” but that it was the only possible socio-economic form of organisation. Basing themselves on the false identification of the Stalinist regime with socialism, they maintained that its liquidation signified that Marxism was forever dead and buried. In particular, Marx’s analysis of the fundamental and irresolvable contradictions of the capitalist mode of production had proved to be false. According to the central foundation for what passed for theoretical analysis, the so-called “efficient markets hypothesis,” a financial meltdown was impossible because with the development of advanced technologies all information had been priced into decision making and so a financial collapse was impossible.
Rarely have the nostrums of the bourgeoisie and its ideologists been so graphically exposed.
Two days after the crisis erupted, President George W. Bush declared “this sucker’s going down.” Later, the high priest of capitalism and its “free market,” the now bewildered former head of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, testified to the US Congress that he had been completely confounded because markets had failed to behave according to his “model” and its assumptions.
The crisis also exposed in full glare another of 

the central myths of the capitalist order—that 

the state is somehow a neutral or independent

organisation committed to regulating social 

and economic affairs in the interests of society

as a whole.
It confirmed another central tenet of Marxism, expounded more than 170 years ago, that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”
This was exemplified in the naked class response to the financial meltdown. The plans, already developed by the Fed and other authorities to cover the losses of the financial elite, whose speculative and in many cases outright criminal activities had sparked the crisis, were put into operation.
In the lead-up to the presidential election of November 4, Wall Street swung its support behind Obama—with the media promoting him as the candidate of “hope” and “change you can believe in”—over McCain. The Democrats had committed themselves to the bailout, securing the passage of the $700 billion TARP asset-purchasing program through Congress. This massive increase in the national debt of the United States was authorised with virtually no debate.
Of course, a new political fiction was immediately advanced. It was necessary to bail out Wall Street first, the public was told, in order to assist Main Street. However, this lie was rapidly exposed. The crisis was the starting point for a massive assault on the working class. While bankers and financial speculators continued to receive their bonuses, millions of American families lost their homes. Tens of millions were made unemployed.
In the following year, the rescue operation organised by the Obama administration of Chrysler and General Motors, with the active and full collaboration of the United Auto Workers union, resulted in the development of new forms of exploitation, above all through the two-tier wages system, paving the way for even more brutal systems such as those pioneered by Amazon.
This was the other side of a Wall Street bailout—a massive restructuring of class relations in line with the edict of Obama’s one-time chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to “never let a serious crisis go to waste” because it provides “an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
The same class response was in evidence elsewhere. After the initial effects of the crisis had been overcome, the European bourgeoisie initiated an austerity drive forcing up youth unemployment to record levels. In Britain workers have endured a sustained decline in real wages not seen in more than a century.
The most egregious expression of this class logic has been seen in Greece with the imposition of poverty levels last seen in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The numerous bailout operations were never aimed at “rescuing” the Greek economy and its population but directed to extracting the resources to repay the major banks and financial institutions.
The crisis revealed the real nature of bourgeois democracy. The euro zone and the European Union were exposed as nothing more than a mechanism for the dictatorship of European finance capital. As one of the chief enforcers of its diktats, the former German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, declared, in the face of popular opposition, “elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.”
As the working class in every country confronts stagnant and declining wages, falling living standards, the scrapping of secure employment and attacks on social services, leading to mounting health and other problems, innumerable reports and data chart the development of a global system in which wealth is siphoned up the income scale.
According to the latest Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report some 255,810 “ultra-high net worth” individuals, with a minimum of $30 million in wealth, now collectively own $31.5 trillion, more than the bottom 80 percent of the world’s population—comprising 5.6 billion people. Overall the wealth of this cohort increased by 16.3 percent in 2016–17, rising by 13.1 percent in North America, 13.5 percent in Europe and 26.7 percent in Asia.
The full significance of the bailouts of the financial system and the subsequent provision of trillions of dollars is clear. It has brought about the institutionalisation of a process, developing over the preceding decades, where the financial system, with the stock market at its centre, functions as a mechanism for the transfer of wealth to the heights of society.


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.”



Watch–Josh Hawley Rips ‘Aristocratic Elite’ for Engineering U.S. Economy Against American Middle Class


JOHN BINDER
 16 May 2019184
6:00

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) ripped what he called the country’s “new aristocratic elite” for engineering the United States economy against the American middle class.

For his first major speech on the Senate floor, Hawley slammed the “big banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media,” whom he said have created an economic structure in which they, the well-connected, benefit while the American working and middle class increasingly struggle to get ahead.
Hawley said:
The chattering class often tells us that all of this—the jobs, the despair, the loss of standing—is the result of forces beyond anyone’s control. As if that’s an excuse to do nothing. But in fact, it’s not true. [Emphasis added]
Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic eliteBig banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the world. [Emphasis added]
They operate businesses or run universities here, but their primary loyalty is to their own agenda for a more unified, progressive—and profitable—global order. These modern aristocrats often claim to be a meritocracy. And many of them truly believe they are. What they don’t see, or won’t acknowledge, is that the society they have built works mainly for themselves. They’ve effectively run this country for decades. And their legacy is national division and national decline. [Emphasis added]
Defending the needs of the American middle class against a growingly powerful “aristocratic elite” is the “crisis of our time,” Hawley asserted.
“After years of sacrifice, the great American middle is being pushed aside by a new, arrogant aristocracy,” Hawley said. “The new aristocrats seek to remake society in their own image: to engineer an economy that works for the elite but few else, to fashion a culture that is dominated by their own preferences.”
“This town has embraced a politics of elite values and elite ambition rather than building opportunities to thrive in the great and broad American middle. This has left middle America—the great American middle class—under siege: battling the loss of respect and work, the decline of home and family, an epidemic of loneliness and despair,” Hawley continued. “This is the crisis of our time.”
Specifically, Hawley blasted multinational corporations for outsourcing American middle class jobs overseas — wreaking economic, cultural, and social havoc on rural and small town American communities in the process — and both political establishments for treating American citizens as mere consumers.
“In places like the one where I grew up, in middle Missouri, good-paying jobs that you can raise a family on are going away,” Hawley said. “The jobs go overseas or south of the border or to cities on the coasts. And once-vibrant towns decline, taking with them the network of schools and neighborhoods and churches that make up middle class life.”
Hawley continued:
Rural America has been particularly hard hit. Rural Americans’ life expectancy has not just leveled off, its actually dropped, and for women without a high school degree, that drop has been staggering. In some rural places, residents struggle with outright deprivation. [Emphasis added]
My home state contains some of the poorest counties in America, all in rural places that once boasted thriving small towns. As those communities struggle, want sets in. But the crisis reaches well beyond economics. [Emphasis added]
The message that Washington has sent our whole society is loud and clear: our elites are the people who matter—and those who aspire to join them. Everyone else is unimportant or backwards. And millions of Americans are left with the sense that the people who run this country view them with nothing but contempt and value them as nothing but consumers. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, working and middle class Americans have been hit the hardest from decades-long political consensus between the Republican establishment and Democrats. 

Recent 
research revealed that while coastal, elite metropolis cities have flourished in the last decade, small town and rural American communities have suffered depopulation, mass job loss, and continued economic strain since the Great Recession.
For instance, by 2016, elite zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While it only took about five years for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost by the recession, it took “at risk” regions of the country a decade to recover, and “distressed” U.S. communities are “unlikely ever to recover on current trendlines,” the report predicts.
Economic growth among the country’s middle-class counties and middle-class zip codes has considerably trailed national economic growth. For example, between 2012 and 2016, there were 4.4 percent more business establishments in the country as a whole. That growth was less than two percent in the median zip code and there was close to no growth in the median county.
While America’s working and middle class have been subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country annually — the billionaire class has experienced historic salary gains.
A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the country’s top 0.01 percent have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent of wage earners. Between 1979 and 2017, working and middle class Americans’ wages grew by only 22 percent. On the other hand, the plutocrat class saw their salaries grow by more than 155 percent over the same period.
Likewise, free trade deals like NAFTA — supported by Republicans and Democrats — as well as China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) has eliminated nearly five million American manufacturing jobs across the country, devastating steel towns and U.S. autoworkers. One former steel town in West Virginia lost 94 percent of its steel jobs because of NAFTA, with nearly 10,000 workers in the town being displaced from the steel industry.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.


Internal Boeing Messages Suggest Company Knew of 737 Max Issues in 2016

The Associated Press
Ted S. Warren/AP
2:25


A series of internal Boeing messages between test pilots suggests that the aircraft manufacturer knew of issues facing the 737 Max fleet, later involved in two disastrous crashes, as early as 2016.

According to a report by the Seattle Times, a series of internal messages by Boeing test pilots suggests that the company was aware in 2016 of the flaws in the 737 Max that led to two fatal crashes.
In the leaked exchange, 737 Chief Technical Pilot Mark Forkner told another technical pilot that the 737 Max was “running rampant” on him in the Boeing flight simulator.
“It’s running rampant in the sim on me,” 737 Chief Technical Pilot Mark Forkner wrote to Patrik Gustavsson, who would succeed him as chief technical pilot. “I’m levelling off at like 4000 ft, 230 knots and the plane is trimming itself like craxy. I’m like, WHAT?” (Spelling errors in the original.)
“Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” Forkner added.
The exchange focuses on problems with the MCAS system, the same system that played a crucial role in the crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, both of which crashed, killing everyone on board.
In another message, sent prior to that exchange, Forkner asked regulators to remove mentions of the MCAS system from pilot manuals. “Are you OK with us removing all reference to MCAS from the FCOM (Flight Crew Operating Manual) and the training as we discussed, as it’s completely transparent to the flight crew and only operates WAY outside of the normal operating envelope,” Forkner wrote in March 2016.
Forkner left Boeing before the crashes and the subsequent grounding of the 737 Max fleet by nations around the world. Forkner is now a pilot with Southwest Airlines.
Breitbart News reported this week that Boeing is eager to return the 737 Max fleet to the air. The aircraft manufacturer is currently fighting off lingering public concern that the fleet is not suitable for commercial travel.
Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.



Report: Boeing Instant Messages Suggest Company Misled FAA

BURLINGAME, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 13: A United Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft lands at San Francisco International Airport on March 13, 2019 in Burlingame, California. The United States has followed countries around the world and has grounded all Boeing 737 Max aircraft following a crash of an Ethiopia Airlines …
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
1:14

Boeing has turned over instant messages from 2016 that suggest the company may have misled the Federal Aviation Administration about a safety system on the 737 Max, according to a report from Reuters.

The FAA said on Friday that Boeing had told it about the message this week but they had been discovered “some months ago,” Reuters reported.
“Sources told Reuters the Boeing internal messages raised questions about the performance of the so-called MCAS anti-stall system that has been tied to the two fatal crashes in five months. Boeing declined to immediately comment,” the news agency said.
“The FAA is also disappointed that Boeing did not bring this document to our attention immediately upon its discovery,” the agency said in a statement to CNBC. “The FAA is reviewing this information to determine what action is appropriate.”
Shares of Boeing fell 4 percent when the news broke on Friday.
Boeing’s chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, was removed as chairman of the company’s board last week. He is scheduled to testify before Congress on October 30.



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