JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has supported amnesty for illegal aliens since at least 2016 when he announced support for the infamous “Gang of Eight” amnesty, saying, “Let them stay and let them build companies.”
Last month, Dimon said amnesty for illegal aliens was necessary to grow the economy, saying, “If we do these policies right, America will be growing a lot faster.”
Some of the top multinational banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — have come out against Trump’s travel ban that effectively stopped all immigration from a handful of foreign countries that sponsor terrorism.
Rigged: Inside the 72 Hours Establishment Democrats Took it from Bernie, Gave it to Biden
19:46
In the time of span of 72 hours, between the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, establishment Democrats rushed to consolidate behind former Vice President Joe Biden in a transparent effort to thwart the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
The machinations started on Saturday, only minutes after polls closed in the Palmetto State. Biden, who had flopped in the first three nominating contests, was declared the instantaneous winner after exit polls showed a rout, thanks to strong support from black voters.
Even though the margin of victory remained unknown for hours, many in the media and pundit class jumped to claim South Carolina had resuscitated the former vice president’s hopes for the nomination. None espoused that argument more so than Terry McAullife, a former governor of Virginia and one time chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Shortly after South Carolina was called, McAullife appeared on CNN, where he serves as a political commentator, to discuss the results. Instead of offering insight, however, the former governor took the opportunity to endorse Biden live on the air.
“I’ve thought long and hard about this,” McAullife told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “For me it’s an electability issue … I’m going all in on Joe Biden, I think he has the best shot of beating [President] Donald Trump.”
The endorsement was not totally unexpected, as McAullife’s wife was already a well known bundler for the former vice president. It did, however, strike many as overly partisan, especially given that McAullife also used the live-TV endorsement to urge Democrats to consolidate behind Biden.
“I’m hoping, tomorrow actually, some of the candidates decide to get out,” McAullife said, right after having suggested Sanders would cripple down ballot Democrats. “If you do not have a pathway, let[‘s] not wait until Super Tuesday.”
When pressed as to whom he meant, the former governor specifically confessed he was talking about Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
“I don’t want to tell people they should get out, because they’ve worked for a year,” McAullife said. They’ve gotten a lot of support, but I think Pete [Buttigieg] and Amy [Klobuchar] and Tom Steyer need to make that decision for themselves.”
Even as the former governor spoke, the Democtat field was already shrinking. Steyer, who had poured more than $252 million into his underdog campaign, was informing staffers of his decision to exit the race after placing third in South Carolina.
Neither Steyer’s exit nor McAullife’s endorsement surprised many, but it did signal what lay ahead.
First, Biden’s looming cash crunch was likely to disappear thanks to McAullife’s fundraising prowess, honed during his tenure at the helm of the DNC. Second, and more importantly, McAullife’s backing ensured that Biden no longer had to fear losing Virginia, a state both Sanders and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg had high hopes for on Super Tuesday. The latter seemed to be proven when several high-ranking Virginia officials announced their backing of Biden on Saturday night, including Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), a power broker within the commonwealth’s black community.
With Virginia appearing to be a lock and money no longer a problem, other establishment Democrats began to fall in line behind Biden. Most notably, Sunday saw former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announce her endorsement. Wasserman Schultz, apart from being a Florida congresswoman, had infamously been forced to resign her DNC post after it was revealed she worked to the benefit of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primaries.
The list of endorsements grew larger on Monday with the addition of former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Reid’s endorsement was perplexing, since he had pointedly refused to support Biden during his own state’s presidential caucuses two weeks earlier.
All told, prior to South Carolina, Biden only had the backing of one high-profile member of the establishment, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC). After winning the Palmetto State’s primary, the former vice president found himself as the clear favorite among establishment Democrats.
Obama’s Role?
While the endorsements were flooding in for Biden, something strange was happening among the candidates themselves. Buttigieg, who had shown every indication of remaining in the race through Super Tuesday, shocked many by exiting the race.
“Tonight I am making the difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the presidency,” Buttigieg told supporters on Sunday. “I will do everything in my power to ensure that we have a new Democratic president come January.”
The move came only hours after Buttigieg had spoken with two of the Democrat Party’s prior White House occupants. Earlier on Sunday, Buttigieg met with former President Jimmy Carter in Georgia. Although the confines of that meeting have not been made public, the former mayor was reportedly seeking counsel about whether he should stay in the race.
Later that same evening, Buttigieg took part in a phone call with former President Barack Obama. Also on the line was Biden, who lobbied for the former mayor’s endorsement, according to The New York Times.
“Obama did not specifically encourage Buttigieg to endorse Biden,” the Times reported. “But Obama did note that Buttigieg has considerable leverage at the moment and should think about how best to use it.”
Obama allegedly implored Buttigieg to consider that his endorsement “could reshape the Democratic primary … creating a more formidable centrist challenge to Mr. Sanders’ progressive movement.”
Buttigieg, for his part, seems to have agreed, but wanted some time to think through the decision. As the former South Bend mayor contemplated, Klobuchar opted to act. The senator, who was competing with Buttigieg and Biden to be the moderate alternative to Sanders, ended her campaign abruptly on Monday and endorsed the former vice president.
Klobuchar’s exit, which occurred directly after a campaign rally in Utah, took many by surprise, including top staffers. Confounding many is that Klobuchar, by her own admission, was focused on continuing her bid at least until after her home state of Minnesota voted on Super Tuesday.
In a conference call informing supporters of her departure, Klobuchar refused to provide a rationale for her departure or endorsement of the former vice president.
“I’ve been so proud that people have been willing to pitch in and help each other and so that’s why this is a really hard thing to do today,” the senator said on the call, before adding it was “best” for the country that she withdrew in favor of Biden.
After the call, the former vice president’s campaign announced that Klobuchar would appear at a rally with Biden in Texas later that night. Shortly after the news broke, Buttigieg swiftly threw his support behind Biden and also jumped on a plane to the Lone Star State.
“I’m looking for a leader, I’m looking for a president, who will draw out what’s best in each of us,” the former South Bend mayor said in Texas on Monday. “We have found that leader in vice president, soon-to-be president, Joe Biden.”
Joining Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Biden on the stage in Texas was former congressman Beto O’Rourke. The failed Senate and presidential candidate was there to offer a last-minute endorsement of Biden.
The convenient timing of all three endorsements sparked speculation that someone high up within the Democrat establishment had arranged for the field to coalesce behind Biden. Many believe that figure is none other than Obama himself, especially given the former president’s call with Buttigieg and his ties to O’Rourke.
Warren Refuses to Yield
As the establishment was orchestrating a united front behind Biden, Sanders was facing the opposite predicament on the left.
Despite winning the first three nominating contests, Sanders faced a crushing defeat in South Carolina on Saturday. His long-standing inability to connect with black voters, an increasingly vital part of the Democrats’ constituency, seemed to only accentuate the fears many held about his candidacy.
Posing a bigger problem, at least in the short-term, for Sanders was the fact that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was refusing to yield the progressive lane. Since jumping into the race, Warren had attempted to brand herself as a toned-down version of Sanders. Instead of promising a full-blown political revolution, like the Vermont septuagenarian, Warren vowed to bring radical economic change—while simultaneously pledging an affinity for capitalism.
“Inequality is going to break this country. We can’t sustain a democracy, we cannot sustain an America of opportunity with growing inequality,” Warren told MSNBC in April 2019. “We’ve got to have some great ideas to push back, big ideas to push back against it, big structural change.”
The differences, though, were mostly of style. In terms of policy, the two were nearly indistinguishable. On the campaign trail, both thundered about the need for a Green New Deal, some version of Medicare for All, and a wealth tax.
Sanders, for his part, seemed to tolerate Warren’s presence in the contest until the shadow of a brokered convention began to loom. Earlier this year, when it became apparent the Democratic field was unlikely winnow, given the DNC’s proportional delegate allocation system, Sanders and Warren began to spar openly.
Warren irked Sanders’ base after refusing to drop out and back him prior to Super Tuesday. Sanders supporters, many of whom remain notoriously suspicious of the Democrat establishment given its overt attempts to quash their candidate in 2016, cried foul. While the Democrat elite appeared to deliver marching orders to back Biden, Warren stood defiant, remaining in the race, knowing that her presence would split progressive loyalties.
In January, Warren kicked off the brawl by accusing Sanders of stating, during a 2018 meeting, that he did not believe a woman could win the presidency. Sanders vigorously denied the allegation, claiming Warren had misremembered his remarks. Neither side was willing to back down from the version of events, leading to a heated confrontation after a Democratic presidential debate in Iowa.
The flare-up has only served to underscore the perception among the Sanders faithful that Warren holds personal ambition over progressive principles. That idea materialized during the 2016 primaries, when Warren appeared to side with establishment Democrats over her longtime friend.
Warren, in particular, refused to endorse Sanders over Clinton in 2016. The decision is credited by some to Clinton’s narrow victory in that year’s Massachusetts primary. The minuscule two percentage points that separated Clinton and Sanders in that race has led many a “Bernie Bro” to wonder if Warren’s intervention could have made a noticeable difference and perhaps changed the outcome of the 2016 nominating contest as a whole.
That history, coupled with Warren’s refusal to exit the 2020 race despite failing to win a single primary, has led some to question if the Massachusetts Democrat is in the race to win, build her own political stature, or assist the establishment in blocking a Sanders nomination. Those arguments bubbled over on Super Tuesday when Warren and Sanders split the progressive vote, allowing Biden to score plurality victories in key Super Tuesday states such as Texas, Massachusetts, Maine, and Minnesota.
The DNC Makes a Preemptive Strike
The Democrat establishment, perhaps sensing the oncoming complaints from Sanders supporters, appeared to launch a preemptive strike on Tuesday.
Just hours before polls closed, former interim-DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile lashed out when confronted during a Fox News appearance about claims the primary was being “rigged” against Sanders. Brazile, who infamously was caught feeding Clinton town hall questions during the 2016 primaries, told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) “go to hell” for weighing in on the Democrat race.
“I want to talk to my Republicans,” Brazile stated. “First of all, stay the hell out of our race … and for people to use Russian talking points to sow division among Americans, that is stupid… go to hell!”
The former DNC chair proceeded to argue that “we’re not trying to prevent anyone from becoming the nominee.”
“If you have the delegates and win, you will win,” Brazile said. “This notion that somehow or another that Democrats are trying to put hurdles or roadblocks before one candidate, that’s stupid.”
“I know what’s going on,” she added, suggesting claims about the primary being “rigged” against Sanders are a talking point of both the GOP and Russia.
That narrative is currently serving as a firewall for the establishment. Instead of easing concerns of Sanders supporters, establishment Democrats easily dismiss them in the same fashion as Brazile, suggesting that progressives are repeating talking points cunningly crafted by the GOP and Russia.
Sanders allies have been anything but relieved by Brazile’s comments. Marianne Williamson, a one-time presidential contender turned Sanders-backer, openly claimed on Tuesday that Biden’s sudden rise was more of a “coup,” than a “resurrection.”
Biden’s Super Tuesday Blowout
With the establishment united behind his candidacy, Biden blew away the competition on Super Tuesday. The former vice president won resoundingly across the board, winning ten contests to only four for Sanders. The breadth of Biden’s victory was all the more astounding because of the shallow infrastructure he had in many of the states prior to the establishment coalescing.
In Virginia, where McAullife’s endorsement likely made a big impact, Biden carried every single county, save for one, despite only spending $233,000. Bloomberg, on the other hand, poured more than $18 million into the state but failed to meet the threshold required to capture a single delegate. Overall in the commonwealth, Biden ran more than 43 percentage points ahead of Bloomberg and at least 30 points ahead of Sanders. The results are even more impressive when taken within the context that Biden only made a handful of appearances in Virginia, having spent most of his time in South Carolina and the other early nominating contests since jumping into the race.
A similar story played out in Minnesota and Texas, where the last-minute endorsements from Klobuchar and O’Rourke helped swing the states to Biden. Exit polling shows that those who took part in early voting tended to favor Sanders, while those who cast ballots on the day were overwhelmingly in favor of the former vice president. That disparity has led some to argue that establishment Democrats disenfranchised thousands of citizens by pushing the field to consolidate and denying early voters a say in the primary contest.
The impact of consolidation was probably most noted in smaller Super Tuesday states, like Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Maine. In each of those, Biden scored easy victories, despite spending little time or money courting voters there.
Sanders Takes it in Stride
Sanders, admittedly aware of the efforts against him, is failing to fight back with a political vengeance so desperately desired by his most ardent supporters.
On Monday, when his rivals began dropping out and endorsing Biden, Sanders struck a lackadaisical tone, telling reporters that he was “not surprised” by the flood of endorsements for Biden.
“The economic establishment, Wall Street, and drug companies and the insurance companies and the fossil fuel industry, they don’t want me to win,” the senator told reporters. “Many of the establishment Democrats don’t want us to win.”
Even after his campaign was thwarted on Super Tuesday, Sanders seemed detached from the threat facing his campaign, yet acknowledged the organized effort to take him down.
On Wednesday, Sanders told reporters that Bloomberg’s departure from the race and subsequent endorsement of Biden confirmed suspicions the establishment was trying to stop his movement.
“I suspect we will see, you know, a lot of money coming into Biden’s campaign,” Sanders told the press, upon news of Bloomberg’s exit. “Probably a lot of negative ads attacking me. That’s what we’re taking on.”
Sander’s aloofness is nothing new. Although the senator fancies himself the leader of the movement, he has done little to fight the very political establishment standing in the way of his path to the presidency. It is a phenomenon causing some Sanders supporters to fear a repeat of 2016.
During that contentious primary campaign, the self-described Democrat socialist fought Clinton in the various primaries and caucuses across the country. Even though Sanders lambasted Clinton daily on the campaign trail as part of the failed status quo, he endorsed the former secretary of state, who, to this day, has continued to criticize her competitor.
Clinton offered a trove of political scandal, including the Uranium One dealings detailed in Clinton Cash—a 2015 book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News. Questions surrounding the operations of the Clinton Foundation festered throughout the primary process, yet Sanders largely refused to weaponize them.
“I intend to do everything I can to make certain she will be the next president of the United States,” Sanders said at the time, demonstrating his willingness to consolidate the Democrat base and ignore the political red flags of his competitors.
Given his history, many fear Sanders will refuse to stand up to Biden in the same manner. Even Democrats admit that Biden provides no shortage of baggage. Nevertheless, Sanders has refused to take advantage of the controversies swirling around the former vice president, including his family’s shadowy business ventures pertaining to Hunter Biden. Instead, Sanders has discouraged his supporters for booing at the mention of Biden’s name and has referred to the former vice president, on more than one occasion, as a “decent guy.”
“And I mean this very sincerely, Joe Biden is a friend of mine,” Sanders told supporters during a recent rally in Minnesota. “I have known Joe for a long time.”
In the rare moments that Sanders has criticized Biden, it has usually been over policy, like the Iraq War or free trade—critiques that clearly had little impact on Super Tuesday voters.
What is more, Sanders has refused to issue any ultimatums, whether it be a third-party run or the outright refusal to endorse the eventual nominee. He has already promised to “be there” for Biden if he wins the nomination, once again bringing flashbacks of his decision to succumb to Clinton in 2016.
The Vermont senator has demonstrated that he is capable of upping his rhetoric when it comes to an opponent like Trump. In the past, Sanders has accused the president of being not only a racist, but also a sexist, fraud, and pathological liar.
When it comes to competitors on the left, however, Sanders has exhibited an unwillingness to fight—igniting fears that it will be all too easy for the Democrat establishment to steamroll his hopes of forging a political revolution yet again.
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much
worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack
Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead
restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering
white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and their
apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from
the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a
tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of
respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while
20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32
percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong
is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control
resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these
mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that
bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that
corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the
corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal
political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent
supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly
control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was
declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of
the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant
Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract
thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s
ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other,
corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods
like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the
rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious
resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a
return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological
project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an
article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”
Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976
article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up
that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that
particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can
achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism
that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United
States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had
prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic
boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the
lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and
argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent
problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries
like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When
that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was
clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and
all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection
Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of
those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social
contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a
functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent
standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story
through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn.
Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on
personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it
was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In
other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral
picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were
freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal
social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their
factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even
destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the
hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off
financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the
General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago
Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little
success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had
been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up
naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of
steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top
Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their
companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their
companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at
bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men.
Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by
devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism
industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as
the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a
return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated
to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad
guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who
has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad
people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions
for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about
lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United
States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech
in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is
just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing,
then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal society.
Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers dependent
on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one hand
and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless
Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting
the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far
too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United
States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.”
But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States
like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the
U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality,
poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the
real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S.
welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American
people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare
eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below
the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens
mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be
without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street
pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people
noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence
unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the
price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a
splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance
public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the
Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the
Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
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 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
A key factor in Obama’s
newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A
number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and
investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large
investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations.
According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency,
Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing between
[Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed
the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial
crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest
redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent,
spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
“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.
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.”
Income inequality grows four
times faster under Obama than Bush …. we bankroll Mexico's welfare state
in our borders as the number of Americans (Legals) sink into poverty! Illegals
also get all the jobs!
The study
noted that, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the US undertook policies
“during the New Deal [that] permanently reduced income concentration until the
1970s.” In contrast, the study noted a striking absence of any measures to
reign in social inequality in the present crisis. Far from it, the Obama
administrations’ bank bailouts, austerity program and wage-cutting policies
have vastly expanded the prevalence of social inequality.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM
THE FED'S OLD BOY NETWORK
By Attorney Jonathan Emord
Author of "The Rise of Tyranny" and
"Global Censorship of Health Information"
December 19, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, performed an enormous
service for the American public when it sued the Federal Reserve and the
Clearing House Association LLC, an institution created by several of the
nation’s largest banks, to force disclosure of secret loans made by the Federal
Reserve principally to the six largest U.S. banks but also to certain foreign
banks. The treasure trove of evidence ultimately obtained by Bloomberg reveals
that while the public Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailed out leading
Wall Street firms for the whopping sum of $700 billion, the Fed at the same
time doled out some $7.77 trillion (an astronomical sum equal to have the gross
domestic product). To make matters worse, the Fed expanded its emergency
discount lending program, giving tens of billions more to the same banks at an
interest rate of 1%, while the prime lending rate stood at over 3%. The
banks getting these funds often turned them into profit centers, lending out
proceeds from them at higher interest rates and pocketing the difference,
profiting on federal largesse.
The President and his top economic advisers bought the “too
big to fail” concept, the notion that regardless of how profligate,
irresponsible, even criminal, heads of the leading financial institutions in
America had been, it would be worse for the nation if those institutions were
to collapse. Consequently, while pushing a legislative agenda of public
bail-outs, the Obama Administration maintained a secret program of
multi-trillion dollar loans, including billions at below market interest rates.
The principal recipients of the funding were JPMorgan, Bank of America,
Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan
Stanley.
The General Accounting Office audit of the Federal Reserve
revealed that some $16 trillion was supplied in secret loans from the Federal
Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The largest single
recipients were Citigroup ($2.5 trillion); Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion);
Merrill Lynch ($2 trillion); Bank of America ($1.3 trillion); Barclays PLC
($868 billion); Bear Stearns ($853 billion); Goldman Sachs ($814 billion); the
Royal Bank of Scotland ($541 billion); JP Morgan Chase ($391 billion); and
Deutsche Bank ($354 billion).
Bloomberg discovered that while top banks were touting in
their press releases during the crisis that they had fiscal soundness, their
balance sheets were made up primarily of federal funds, most from the Federal
Reserve. Moreover, while many banks paid back the TARP funds, they most often
did so in reliance on the secret receipts of tens of billions of dollars in
Federal Reserve money (in other words, the pay back was in that sense a
charade: federal money paid back federal loans). In short, the
Administration was complicit in the orchestration of a massive fraud on the
American public, making it seem that the banks largely responsible for the
financial crisis were weathering the storm of their own accord when in fact
they were on board the good ship U.S. Taxpayer.
Meanwhile, the bad lending and financial dealing practices
that helped produce the financial crisis have been largely kept in place,
underwritten by the federal government. The top banks suddenly realized that
far from having to suffer ignominy and defeat for their abuses, they would be
kept alive by a seemingly endless flow of federal cash. Indeed, the feds
accepted as collateral for loans securities of virtually no worth and other
properties that would never support private commercial lending. By propping up
the major banks despite their irresponsible lending practices, the federal
government has given them a privileged financial status whereby private lenders
will give them terms far more favorable than their smaller competitors because
they understand the federal government will not let them fail. Economist call
this safety net a “moral hazard” (effective federal underwriting for heightened
risk taking that permits these lenders to profit at above market rates of
return in speculative investing without suffering financial liability for
loss). The amounts doled out by the federal government to the banks could
have paid off as much as one tenth of all of the delinquent mortgages,
Bloomberg determined.
Rather than be forced to take their losses on their enormous
junk portfolios and interbank lending practices, the top six banks were allowed
to keep the junk portfolios, maintain their dubious lending practices, and turn
to the Federal Reserve for money on demand whenever problems arose. Repeatedly
when the banks should have gone under due to poor lending practices and grossly
speculative profiteering, they were complimented by the Federal Reserve,
rescued, and then allowed to tout the falsehood that their success came from
sharp management rather than from secret loans. At the same time, these banks
and others have shut down commercial lending for small businesses nationwide.
The “too big to fail” justification for the massive federal
welfare dole to the top six United States banks was based on a faulty premise.
Without question the demise of the leading banks would entail hardship,
particularly for the employees of those institutions, but the long term
prognosis was good for a restructuring of the financial market through
bankruptcies and takeovers. The alternative to allowing the market to impose
its own swift and harsh corrective involves imposing a massive burden on every
American citizen for generations to come for the trillions spent to prop up a
few dozen Wall Street moguls. Rather than have the taxpayers pay an inflated
sum to keep the banks responsible for the financial crisis alive, the nation
could have spared itself an assumption of massive debt and witnessed the demise
of these banks and the rise of new competing financial institutions based on a
solid financial model.
The Bush and Obama Administration’s role as Santa Claus for
Wall Street has kept from Wall Street the needed lessons that would have
otherwise come from the collapse of the major lending institutions. Painful as
it may seem to some, it is far better to allow the market to experience a
correction for profligate lending practices than to force the American
taxpayers for generations to come to pay for the bad decisions made by a few
and to let those few go without suffering a single consequence beyond temporary
embarrassment.
Obama paid $600,000 for a single speech
In the two years since
leaving the White House, former President Barack Obama has spent his time
raising and solidifying his position in the uppermost echelons of the top one
percent of Americans. Obama has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public
speaking events and made deals worth millions with multiple companies.
Despite his quip, made
during the depths of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made
enough money,” there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has
amassed so much wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a
speech in South Africa last year.
Since he left office,
the former president has given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate
audiences for hundreds of thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same
year he left office, Obama was officially recognized as one of the top ten
highest paid public speakers in the US.
Just last month, Obama
was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference
in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is Colombia’s largest marketing
and business event of the year and one of the largest in Latin America. Simply
titled, “A conversation with President Barack Obama,” his talk purportedly
addressed “influential growth strategies” in marketing and other aspects of the
marketing economy.
Colombia is infamous
for the corruption prevalent in its public sector and military,
which costs the country
$17 billion a year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its GDP.
Colombia exports half
of the world’s cocaine and its drug cartels have been known
to have a hand in
the government. Corruption and drug money are so rampant that
Colombia’s Inspector
General likened it to “the new cartel.”
While Obama warns of
the danger of “exploding inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted
to him for one night in Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household
in the US makes in a year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in
Colombia.
Notably, Obama’s purse
was nearly triple the amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious
speeches to Goldman Sachs that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall
Street stooges. Former President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech
when he toured Latin America in 2005.
A key factor in Obama’s
newfound and growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A
number of his public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and
investors. Obama has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large
investment and commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations.
According to records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency,
Obama bragged that his administration was “the only thing
between [Wall Street]
and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed
the robber barons and outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial
crisis a multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest
redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent,
spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
Under Obama’s watch the
stock markets soared as the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149
percent. Meanwhile, the “war on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with
Obama becoming the first president to spend every day of his two terms at war,
much to the delight of the military-industrial complex.
As the wars raged on
and the financial oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing
mountain of wealth being concentrated at the top of society, real wages
stagnated and an unprecedented opioid overdose crisis spun out of control.
Rising numbers of “deaths of despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among
the working class, resulted in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in
the modern era.
In addition to monetary
rewards for his service to the financial elite and military-intelligence
apparatus, Obama has been lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as
Richard Branson. Obama was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island
where the pair were seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s
exclusive resort.
Michelle Obama has also
benefited after the family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed
a $65 million book deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their
political memoirs. Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of
2018 with over 10 million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals
with Netflix and Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and
promoting diversity in entertainment.
Obama’s lucrative
post-White House career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and
financial elite epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US
government and the private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive
bribery for services rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him
with open arms.
They Destroyed Our Country
“They knew Obama was an unqualified crook;
yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet
they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They
understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made
him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)”
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.
OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA -WHY WALL
STREET, ILLEGALS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and the 1% LOVE HIM, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS
GETS THE SHAFT TO PAY FOR HIS CRONY CAPITALISM
CEO pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm
separating the rich and super-rich from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1
percent grew more than 11 percent between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of
the Obama “recovery”—while the incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually
shrank.
Meanwhile,
Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the
next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from
Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED
APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
OBAMA AND BIDEN: SERVANT OF
THE 1%
Richest one percent controls
nearly half of global wealth
The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls
48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.
The report found that the growth of global inequality has
accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial
assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE WALL
STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING
BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS
“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 AMERICAN THINKER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under
Obama-Biden and their bankster regime than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election
in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with
the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare
programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW
MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black
capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three
strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the
world.”
“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 AMERICAN THINKER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech
to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but
begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
THE REAL
ECONOMY:
US “retail
apocalypse” expected to exceed annual high with more than 1,100 store closures
announced in one day.
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 the wealthiest of the
wealthy.
Why do all
global billionaires want wider open borders, amnesty and no E-VERIFY?
Biden defended the
wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth
inequality.
AMERICA:
THE ECONOMY IS RIGGED BY CONGRESS SO THE RICH BECOME SUPER RICH.
The
American middle class gets the tax bills for Wall Street’s crimes and
bottomeless bailouts!
Wealth
concentration increases in US.
The latest
research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor
Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the
global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who
benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have seen
their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the
population has suffered a major decline.
The past
40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has
subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever
more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have
captured all of the increase in national income over the past two
decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
“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 AMERICAN THINKER
Biden defended the wealthy in his speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
BILLIONAIRE
BETO “BETOMATIC” O’ROURKE PROCLAIMS AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION INVADING
“UNREGISTERED” DEMOCRAT VOTING ILLEGALS.
No word on
America’s homeless, housing or jobs crisis for Legals!
Joe Biden Fundraises with Wall
Street During Donald Trump Rally
CHARLIE SPIERING
18 Jun 201984
Former Vice President Joe Biden attended a
fundraiser with Wall Street donors during President Donald Trump’s campaign
kickoff rally in Florida on Tuesday.
The fundraiser was hosted by Eric
Mindich, the CEO of Eton Park Capital Management with about 100 donors
including Stephen Scherr, the executive vice president and chief financial
officer of Goldman Sachs, H. Rodgin Cohen the senior chairman at Sullivan &
Cromwell as well as former Clinton and Obama officials
Biden defended the wealthy in his
speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
“You know what I’ve found is rich
people are just as patriotic as poor people,” he said. “Not a joke. I mean, we
may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter
is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done.”
Biden warned that if Trump won
re-election, he would “literally fundamentally change the nature of who we are
and how we function.”
Biden boasted that Obama leaned on
him to help bring members of Congress together during their administration.
“Folks, I believe one of the things
I’m pretty good at is bringing people together,” he said. “Every time we had
trouble in the administration, who got sent to the Hill to settle it? Me. No,
not a joke. Because I demonstrate respect for them.”
Biden defended the wealthy in his
speech to the donors but begged them to be aware of wealth inequality.
AMERICA: THE RICH GET MUCH RICHER AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS
BLUDGEONED…. Illegals get the jobs!
*
Why do the billionaire class all want wider open borders and hordes
more “cheap” labor illegals? It’s all about keeping wages depressed for greater
profits!
*
“Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped
not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic elite. Big
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” Sen. Josh Hawley
*
“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
*
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at
the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it:
gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral,
immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That
should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ----
Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
*
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
*
"The tax
overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on
top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the
period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have
gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."
*
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
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.
*
Millionaires
projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019
While the wealth of the rich is growing at a
breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy,
skewed towards the very top.
At the end of 2014, millionaire
households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG.
This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24
trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.
By Gabriel Black
*
The massive increase in the value of the stock market,
which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that
the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of
all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren
Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America
combined last year.
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.
NO PRESIDENT SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS BEFORE AND
AFTER HIS PRESIDENCY THAT BARACK OBAMA.
Trump criticized Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s
economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion
to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I
think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
“The
response of the administration was to rush to the defense of the banks. Even
before coming to power, Obama expressed his unconditional support for the
bailouts, which he subsequently expanded. He assembled an administration
dominated by the interests of finance capital, symbolized by economic adviser
Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”
Practically
every cabinet appointee of Obama’s has close personal connections to the ruling
class, many having come directly from corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch
not a single executive at a major financial firm has been criminally tried,
much less sent to jail, for their role in the financial crisis.
“Attorney General Eric Holder's tenure was a low point even within the
disgraceful scandal-ridden Obama years.” DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP
Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the
10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
This
manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the Obama administration
and both big business parties to hand over trillions in pension funds and other
public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules America.
“Our entire
crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a
kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
“This was
not because of difficulties in securing indictments or convictions. On the
contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate committee in March of 2013
that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute the big banks or their
CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on the national economy.”
"One of
the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued
an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008
crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis”
was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that
effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of
the potential impact of central bank actions in driving
inequality between asset owners and labor."
$2,198,468,000,000: Federal Spending Hit 10-Year High Through March;
Taxes Hit 5-Year Low
(Getty
Images/Ron Sachs-Pool)
(CNSNews.com) - The federal government spent $2,198,468,000,000
in the first six months of fiscal 2019 (October through March), which is the
most it has spent in the first six months of any fiscal year in the last
decade, according
to the Monthly Treasury Statements.
The last time the government spent more in the
October-through-March period was in fiscal 2009, when it spent
$2,326,360,180,000 in constant March 2019 dollars.
Fiscal 2009 was the fiscal year that began with President George
W. Bush signing a $700-billion law to bailout the banking industry in October
2008 and then saw President Barack Obama sign a $787-billion stimulus law in
February 2009.
JPMorgan shares climb after the bank posts record earnings
and revenue
Jamie Dimon arriving to testify before Congress. Aaron P.
Bernstein/Reuters
· JPMorgan reported first-quarter earnings
results on Friday, kicking off another earnings season for the largest US
banks.
JPMorgan
Chase reported record first-quarter results on both the top and bottom lines
Friday morning. Shares climbed 2.3% in early trading to $108.68.
Here's how
the results stacked up with Wall Street's expectations as compiled by Bloomberg.
· Adjusted net income: $9.18 billion versus $7.7 billion
expected
· Earnings per share: $2.65 versus $2.34 expected
· Revenue: $29.85 billion versus $28.4 billion
expected
· Expenses: $16.4 billion versus $16.7 billion
expected
"In
the first quarter of 2019, we had record revenue and net income, strong
performance across each of our major businesses, and a more constructive
environment," CEO Jamie Dimon said in the earnings release. "Even amid some global geopolitical
uncertainty, the US economy continues to grow, employment and wages are going
up, inflation is moderate, financial markets are healthy, and consumer and
business confidence remains strong."
A deeper
look into the numbers showed the trading and investment-banking businesses
exceeded expectations, though trading declined 17% from the year earlier:
· FICC sales & trading revenue: $3.73 billion versus $3.67 billion
expected
· Equity sales & trading
revenue: $1.74
billion versus $1.73 billion expected
· Investment-banking revenue: $1.75 billion versus $1.63 billion
expected
"The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism
for perpetuating this whole filthy system, in which "Wall Street
rules."
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.
Wall Street rules
The Federal Reserve sent a clear message to Wall Street on
Friday: It will not allow the longest bull market in American history to end.
The message was received loud and clear, and the Dow rose by more than 700
points.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain furloughed or
forced to work without pay as the partial government shutdown enters its third
week, but the US central bank is making clear that all of the resources of the
state are at the disposal of the financial oligarchy.
Responding to Thursday’s market selloff following a dismal
report from Apple and signs of a manufacturing slowdown in both China and the
US, the Fed declared it was “listening” to the markets and would scrap its
plans to raise interest rates.
Speaking at a conference in Atlanta, where he was flanked by his
predecessors Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen, both of whom had worked to reflate
the stock market bubble after the 2008 financial crash, Chairman Jerome Powell
signaled that the Fed would back off from its two projected rate increases for
2019.
“We’re listening sensitively to the messages markets are
sending,” he said, adding that the central bank would be “patient” in imposing
further rate increases. To underline the point, he declared, “If we ever came
to the conclusion that any aspect of our plans” was causing a problem, “we
wouldn’t hesitate to change it.”
This extraordinary pledge to Wall Street followed the 660 point
plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday, capping off the worst
two-day start for a new trading year since the collapse of the dot.com bubble.
William McChesney Martin, the Fed chairman from 1951 to 1970,
famously said that his job was “to take away the punch bowl just as the party
gets going.” Now the task of the Fed chairman is to ply the wealthy revelers
with tequila shots as soon as they start to sober up.
Powell’s remarks were particularly striking given that they
followed the release Friday of the most upbeat jobs report in over a year, with
figures, including the highest year-on-year wage growth since the 2008 crisis,
universally lauded as “stellar.”
While US financial markets have endured the worst December
since the Great Depression, amid mounting fears of a looming
recession and a new financial crisis, analysts have been quick to point
out that there are no “hard” signs of a recession in the United States.
Both the Dow and the S&P 500 indexes have fallen more than
15 percent from their recent highs, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ has entered
bear market territory, usually defined as a drop of 20 percent from recent
highs.
The markets, Powell admitted, are “well ahead of the data.” But
it is the markets, not the “data,” that Powell is listening to.
Since World War II, bear markets have occurred, on average,
every five-and-a-half years. But if the present trend continues, the Dow will
reach 10 years without a bear market in March, despite the recent losses.
Now the Fed has stepped in effectively to pledge that it
will allocate whatever resources are needed to ensure that
no substantial market correction takes place. But this
means only that when the correction does come, as it inevitably
must, it will be all the more severe and the Fed will
have all the less power to stop it.
From the standpoint of the history of the institution, the Fed’s
current more or less explicit role as backstop for the stock market is a
relatively new development. Founded in 1913, the Federal Reserve legally has
had the “dual mandate” of ensuring both maximum employment and price stability
since the late 1970s. Fed officials have traditionally denied being influenced
in policy decisions by a desire to drive up the stock market.
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, appointed by Democratic
President Jimmy Carter in 1979, deliberately engineered an economic recession
by driving the benchmark federal funds interest rate above 20 percent. His
highly conscious aim, in the name of combating inflation, was to quash a wages
movement of US workers by triggering plant closures and driving up
unemployment.
The actions of the Fed under Volcker set the stage for a vast
upward redistribution of wealth, facilitated on one hand by the trade unions’
suppression of the class struggle and on the other by a relentless and dizzying
rise on the stock market.
Volcker’s recession, together with the Reagan administration’s
crushing of the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, ushered in decades
of mass layoffs, deindustrialization and wage and benefit concessions, leading
labor’s share of total national income to fall year after year.
These were also decades of financial deregulation, leading to
the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, the dot.com bubble of 1999-2000,
and, worst of all, the 2008 financial crisis.
In each of these crises, the Federal Reserve carried out what
became known as the “Greenspan put,” (later the “Bernanke put”)—an implicit
guarantee to backstop the financial markets, prompting investors to take ever greater
risks.
In 2008, this resulted in the most sweeping and systemic
financial crisis since the Great Depression, prompting Fed Chairman Bernanke,
New York Fed President Tim Geithner and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (the
former CEO of Goldman Sachs) to orchestrate the largest bank bailout in human
history.
Since that time, the Federal Reserve has carried out its most
accommodative monetary policy ever, keeping interest rates at or near zero
percent for six years. It supplemented this boondoggle for the financial elite
with its multi-trillion-dollar “quantitative easing” money-printing program.
The effect can be seen in the ever more staggering wealth of the
financial oligarchy, which has consistently enjoyed investment returns of
between 10 and 20 percent every year since the financial crisis, even as the
incomes of workers have stagnated or fallen.
American capitalist society is hooked on the toxic growth of
social inequality created by the stock market bubble. This, in turn, fosters
the political framework not just for the decadent lifestyles of the financial
oligarchs, each of whom owns, on average, a half-dozen mansions around the
world, a private jet and a super-yacht, but also for the broader periphery of
the affluent upper-middle class, which provides the oligarchs with political
legitimacy and support. These elite social layers determine American political
life, from which the broad mass of working people is effectively excluded.
The Federal Reserve is a key mechanism for perpetuating
this whole filthy system, in which “Wall Street rules.” But its
services in behalf of the rich and the super-rich only compound the
fundamental and insoluble contradictions of capitalism, plunging the
system into ever deeper debt and ensuring that the next crisis will be
that much more violent and explosive.
In this intensifying crisis, the working class must assert its
independent interests with the same determination and ruthlessness as evinced
by the ruling class. It must answer the bourgeoisie’s social counterrevolution
with the program of socialist revolution.
the depression is already here for most of us below the
super-rich!
Trump and the GOP created a fake
economic boom on our collective credit card: The equivalent of
maxing out your credit cards and saying look how good I'm doing right
now.
*
Trump criticized Dimon in 2013 for supposedly contributing to the country’s
economic downturn. “I’m not Jamie Dimon, who pays $13 billion
to settle a case and then pays $11 billion to settle a case and who I
think is the worst banker in the United States,” he told reporters.
*
"One of the premier institutions of
big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the
eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central
bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners
and labor."
*
"Overall,
the reaction to the decision points to the underlying fragility of
financial markets, which have become a house of cards as a result of the
massive inflows of money from the Fed and other central banks, and are now
extremely susceptible to even a small tightening in financial
conditions."
*
"It is significant that what
the Financial Times described
as a “tsunami of money”—estimated to reach $1 trillion for the year—has failed
to prevent what could be the worst year for stock markets since the global
financial crisis."
*
"A decade ago, as the financial
crisis raged, America’s banks were in ruins. Lehman Brothers, the storied
158-year-old investment house, collapsed into bankruptcy in mid-September
2008. Six months earlier, Bear Stearns, its competitor, had required a
government-engineered rescue to avert the same outcome. By October, two of
the nation’s largest commercial banks, Citigroup and Bank of America,
needed their own government-tailored bailouts to escape failure. Smaller
but still-sizable banks, such as Washington Mutual and IndyMac,
died."
*
The GOP said the "Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act" would reduce deficits and supercharge the economy
(and stocks and wages). The White House says things are working as
planned, but one year on--the numbers mostly suggest otherwise.
6 April 2009
A series of articles published over the weekend, based on financial
disclosure reports released by the Obama administration last Friday concerning
top White House officials, documents the extent to which the administration, in
both its personnel and policies, is a political instrument of Wall Street.
Policies that are extraordinarily favorable to the financial elite
that were put in place over the past month by the Obama administration have fed
a surge in share values on Wall Street. These include the scheme to use
hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to pay hedge funds to buy up
the banks’ toxic assets at inflated prices, the Auto Task Force’s rejection of
the recovery plans of Chrysler and General Motors and its demand for even more
brutal layoffs, wage cuts and attacks on workers’ health benefits and pensions,
and the decision by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to weaken
“mark-to-market” accounting rules and permit banks to inflate the value of
their toxic assets.
At the same time, Obama has campaigned against restrictions on
bonuses paid to executives at insurance giant American International Group (AIG)
and other bailed-out firms, and repeatedly assured Wall Street that he will
slash social spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
The new financial disclosures reveal that top Obama advisors
directly involved in setting these policies have received millions from Wall
Street firms, including those that have received huge taxpayer bailouts.
The case of Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic
Council and Obama’s top economic adviser, highlights the politically incestuous
character of relations between the Obama administration and the American
financial elite.
Last year, Summers pocketed $5 million as a managing director of
D.E. Shaw, one of the biggest hedge funds in the world, and another $2.7
million for speeches delivered to Wall Street firms that have received
government bailout money. This includes $45,000 from Citigroup and $67,500 each
from JPMorgan Chase and the now-liquidated Lehman Brothers.
For a speech to Goldman Sachs executives, Summers walked away with
$135,000. This is substantially more than double the earnings for an entire
year of high-seniority auto workers, who have been pilloried by the Obama
administration and the media for their supposedly exorbitant and
“unsustainable” wages.
Alluding diplomatically to the flagrant conflict of interest
revealed by these disclosures, the New York Times noted on Saturday: “Mr.
Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wields important
influence over Mr. Obama’s policy decisions for the troubled financial industry,
including firms from which he recently received payments.”
Summers was a leading advocate of banking deregulation. As treasury
secretary in the second Clinton administration, he oversaw the lifting of basic
financial regulations dating from the 1930s. The Times article notes that among
his current responsibilities is deciding “whether—and how—to tighten regulation
of hedge funds.”
Summers is not an exception. He is rather typical of the
Wall Street insiders who comprise a cabinet and White House team that is filled
with multi-millionaires, presided over by a president who parlayed his own
political career into a multi-million-dollar fortune.
Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international
economic affairs, worked for Citigroup and received more than $7.4 million from
the bank from January of 2008 until he entered the Obama administration this
year. This included a $2.25 million year-end bonus handed him this past
January, within weeks of his joining the Obama administration.
Citigroup has thus far been the beneficiary of $45 billion in cash
and over $300 billion in government guarantees of its bad debts.
David Axelrod, the Obama campaign’s top strategist and now senior
adviser to the president, was paid $1.55 million last year from two consulting
firms he controls. He has agreed to buyouts that will garner him another $3
million over the next five years. His disclosure claims personal assets of
between $7 and $10 million.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, was paid
$3.9 million by a Washington law firm whose major clients include Citigroup,
Goldman Sachs and the private equity firm Apollo Management.
Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, made
$227,155 last year from IndyMac Bancorp, the California bank that heavily
promoted subprime mortgages. It collapsed last summer and was placed under
federal receivership.
The presence of multi-millionaire Wall Street insiders extends to
second- and third-tier positions in the Obama administration as well. David
Stevens, who has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Housing
Administration, is the president and chief operating officer of Long and Foster
Cos., a real estate brokerage firm. From 1999 to 2005, Stevens served as a top
executive for Freddie Mac, the federally-backed mortgage lending giant that was
bailed out and seized by federal regulators in September.
Neal Wolin, Obama’s selection for deputy counsel to the president
for economic policy, is a top executive at the insurance giant Hartford
Financial Services, where his salary was $4.5 million.
Obama’s Auto Task Force has as its top advisers two investment
bankers with a long resume in corporate downsizing and asset-stripping.
It is not new for leading figures from finance to be named to high
posts in a US administration. However, there has traditionally been an effort
to demonstrate a degree of independence from Wall Street in the selection of
cabinet officials and high-ranking presidential aides, often through the
appointment of figures from academia or the public sector. In previous decades,
moreover, representatives of the corporate elite were more likely to come from
industry than from finance.
In the Obama administration such considerations have largely been
abandoned.
This will not come as a surprise to those who critically followed
Obama’s election campaign. While he postured before the electorate as a critic
of the war in Iraq and a quasi-populist force for “change,” he was from the
first heavily dependent on the financial and political backing of powerful
financiers in Chicago. Banks, hedge funds and other financial firms
lavishly backed his presidential bid, giving him considerably more than they
gave to his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain.
Friday’s financial disclosures further expose the bankruptcy of
American democracy. Elections have no real effect on government policy, which
is determined by the interests of the financial aristocracy that dominates both
political parties. The working class can fight for its own interests—for jobs,
decent living standards, health care, education, housing and an end to war.
“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are
employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG
($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
OBAMA and HIS BANKS: THEIR PROFITS, CRIMES and LOOTING SOAR
CRONY KING OBAMA: CURL: The Obamas live
the 1% life
OBAMAnomics:
FROM THE MAN THAT HATED AMERICAN BUT
LOVED AMERICAN BANKSTERS:
OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED LA RAZA DEM
THE GLOBALIST LEGACY OF A SOCIOPATH
Obama warns against “cynicism” at Ohio
State commencement address
7 May 2013
At a commencement address on Sunday at
Ohio State University, President Barack Obama counseled students not to be
“cynical” about government and politics.
There was an almost comically absurd
element to Obama’s remarks, delivered with his characteristic demagogy and
attempted gestures at profundity. In his first four years in office,
along with the first months of his second term, Obama proceeded to systematically
repudiate every campaign pledge and to deflate every illusion that, with the
assistance of a highly coordinated marketing campaign, led millions of people,
including a large number of young people, to vote for him in 2008.
The Obama administration handed trillions
of dollars to the banks; has overseen a massive attack on public education; is
leading the campaign to slash Social Security and Medicare, the core federal
retirement and health care programs; expanded the war in Afghanistan, led a war
against Libya, and is preparing a new war in Syria; and has asserted the right
to kill anyone, anywhere, including US citizens, without due process.
After this record of service to the
corporate elite, he declares: “When we turn away and get discouraged and cynical…
we grant our silent consent to someone who will gladly claim it. That’s how we
end up with lobbyists who set the agenda; and policies detached from what
middle class families face every day; the well-connected who publicly demand
that Washington stay out of their business—and then whisper in government’s ear
for special treatment that you don’t get.”
The references to the “whispers” of the
wealthy and well-connected is particularly rich, coming only a week after Obama
nominated Penny Pritzker for commerce secretary. The selection of
Pritzker—a longtime Obama confidant, billionaire heiress and owner of a private
equity company—only underscores the fact that the administration is a
government of, by and for the financial aristocracy. She will be the
wealthiest person ever to serve in a presidential cabinet.
Previous to his appointment of Pritzker,
Obama appointed Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC), one of the main financial regulators. White made millions of dollars as an attorney for banks responsible
for the financial crisis, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, whose
CEO, Jamie Dimon, called White the “perfect choice” to head the SEC.
Practically every cabinet appointee of
Obama’s has close personal connections to the ruling class, many having come
directly from corporate boardrooms. Under Obama’s watch not a single executive
at a major financial firm has been criminally tried, much less sent to jail,
for their role in the financial crisis.
As a whole, Obama’s speech was
characterized by a complete separation from the actual conditions facing the
graduates he spoke to, who confront joblessness, falling wages, and a lifetime
in debt. “You have every reason to believe that your future is bright,” he told
his audience. “You’re graduating into an economy and a job market that is
steadily healing.”
He added later, “The trajectory of this
great nation should give you hope.” Really? This is under conditions in which
over 11 percent of college graduates are unemployed a year after getting out of
school, and another 16.1 percent simply drop out of the labor force, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of those who do find a job are paid
barely enough to get by, let alone pay off student loans. Wages for young adults
are falling faster than any other part of the population, and are down by 6
percent in the past four years.
Most of the students that Obama addressed
Sunday will be so burdened with debt that they will delay or have to completely
put off starting a family or buying a home.
It is not surprising that Obama should
neglect to dwell on this disastrous situation, because his administration bears
responsibility for it. In the government-sponsored restructuring of the auto
industry, the White House insisted that the wages of new-hires be slashed in
half, setting the stage for vast reduction of wages throughout the economy.
Obama sought to paint opposition to the
government’s violation of democratic rights as right-wing hysterics.
“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of
government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity,” Obama said.
“They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should
reject these voices.”
This comes from a president who has personally
overseen the illegal assassination of thousands of people, including at least
three American citizens, in weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. The assertions of
executive power have been systematically expanded, going beyond those claimed
even by the Bush administration. The specter of a police state—the response of
the ruling class to growing social opposition—is in fact lurking around the
corner.
The moribund state of American politics,
of which the Obama administration is a principal expression, is, according to
the president, the fault of the American people. “Democracy doesn’t function
without your active participation,” he admonished. If politicians “don’t
represent you the way you want… you’ve got to let them know that’s not okay.
And if they let you down, there’s a built-in day in November where you can
really let them know that’s not okay.”
Such limp efforts to encourage illusions
in the viability of the “democratic process” in the United States will not go
very far. The experience of the past four years has not passed in vain.
Millions of people, including many of those in the audience at Ohio State, are
drawing the quite justified, if “cynical,” conclusion that the entire political
and economic system is rotten to the core.
Mounting evidence of international
collusion in Libor rigging - THE RAPE OF THE ECONOMY BY THE BANKSTERS
Mounting evidence of international
collusion in Libor rigging
OBAMA'S AND HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS
AT WORK:
JPMorgan’s investment arm, which includes
its energy group, collects $14 billion annually; in comparison, six months’
worth of fines would amount to a paltry $180 million.
THERE IS A REASON WHY THE BANKSTERS INVESTED HEAVILY IN OBAMA’S
CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION!
Records show that four out of Obama's top
five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs
($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup
($358,054).
Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the
Best-Managed Banks'
By Mary Bruce | ABC OTUS News – 2 hrs 31
mins ago
Obama: JPMorgan Is 'One of the …
Lou Rocco / ABC News
Just hours after a top JPMorgan Chase
executive retired in the wake of a stunning $2 billion trading loss, President
Obamatold the hosts of ABC's "The View" that the bank's risky bets
exemplified the need for Wall Street reform.
*
JPMorgan Chase investigated for manipulating California energy
market
By Oliver Richards
23 July 2012
The California
Independent Systems Operator (CalISO), the nonprofit organization that
coordinates the state’s electricity market, has alleged that JPMorgan
Chase& Co. manipulated the state’s energy market, resulting in at least $73
million in improper payments—costs passed along to the state’s energy
consumers.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS:
STILL SUCKING THE BLOOD OUT OF AMERICA
This manufactured crisis has, in turn, been exploited by the
Obama administration and both big business parties to hand over trillions in
pension funds and other public assets to the financial kleptocracy that rules
America.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican
alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world
hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
“This was not because of difficulties in securing indictments or
convictions. On the contrary, Attorney General Eric Holder told a Senate
committee in March of 2013 that the Obama administration chose not to prosecute
the big banks or their CEOs because to do so might “have a negative impact on
the national economy.”
OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE BANKSTERS
AND GLOBAL BILLIONAIRES
"One of the premier institutions of
big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the
eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a
government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama
will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact
of central bank actions in driving inequality between
asset owners and labor."
BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND THE RICH PARTNER WITH TRUMP TO
FIGHT … economic equality.
"JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who was known as Barack Obama’s
favorite banker and who has been a major donor to
the
Democratic Party, centered his annual letter to shareholders on a
denunciation of socialism."
BANKSTER
SOCIALISM
Dimon’s bank received tens of billions of dollars in
government bailouts and many billions more from the
Obama administration’s ultra-low interest rate and “quantitative
easing” money-printing policies. He told his shareholders that
“socialism inevitably produces stagnation, corruption” and
“authoritarian government,” and would be “a disaster for our
country.”… UNLESS IT IS SOCIALISM FOR BANKSTERS AND WALL STREET!
*
"This paved the way for the elevation of
Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling
oligarchy."
*
"The
very fact that the US government officially acknowledges a growth of
popular support for socialism, particularly among the nation’s youth,
testifies to vast changes taking place in the political consciousness of
the working class and the terror this is striking within the ruling
elite. America is, after all, a country where anti-communism was for
the greater part of a century a state-sponsored secular religion. No
ruling class has so ruthlessly sought to exclude socialist
politics from political discourse as the American ruling class."
*
Socialism haunts the
American ruling class In the two months since Donald Trump vowed in his
State of the Union Address that “America will never be a socialist country,”
the right-wing demagogue president and the Republican Party have embraced
anti-socialism as the defining theme of their campaign in the 2020 elections.
Wall
Street Warms Up to Elizabeth Warren: ‘She’s the Smartest,’ ‘Most
Policy-Oriented’ Democrat
22 Jul 201968
4:14
Wall Street is warming up to the idea of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
being the Democrat nominee for president against President Donald Trump in the
2020 election, interviews with executives and bankers reveal.
A Politico report details how Wall Street
insiders are becoming comfortable with Warren as the potential nominee to go up
against Trump and his “America First” agenda:
“I think
she is going to get the nomination because she’s the smartest, she’s
charismatic and she’s the most policy-oriented,” said one former top executive
at a large Wall Street bank who, like several interviewed for this
story, declined to be quoted on record saying anything nice about Warren. “Wall
Street is very good at accommodating itself to reality and if the reality is
the party is going to be super-progressive, they may not like Warren but she’s
a better form of poison than Bernie.” [Emphasis added]
…
“If she
were the nominee, there will certainly be people who will say that Donald Trump
represents everything that I’m against,” said Orin Kramer, a hedge fund manager who is
raising money for Buttigieg. “And they will find stuff that they like
about her and will vote for her.” [Emphasis added]
BLOG:
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY OF CRONY CAPITALISM IS THE PARTY OF BANKSTERS AND BOTTOMLESS
BANKSTER BAILOUTS... AND NO PRISON TIME!
Former adviser to President Obama and investor Robert Wolf
told Politico that
the financial industry has changed over the last few decades and that Wall
Street-types are vastly more aligned with the Democrat establishment than
Trump’s GOP.
“I don’t think the stereotypes of
the industry serve the same purpose as they used to,” Wolf said. “People who
work in corporate America and financial services may have the same views that
she does on 95 percent of the issues such as income inequality, student loans,
climate change, and others.”
Wall Street and Warren have at least
one major policy initiative in common: A full repeal of Trump’s illegal and
legal immigration reforms.
This
month, Warren released her
immigration platform that includes increasing overall legal immigration to the
U.S. to provide business with an even greater flow of foreign workers to hire
over Americans, as well as a decriminalization of illegal immigration, an
amnesty for all illegal aliens in the country, and an end of Trump’s reforms
such as his immigration ban from terrorist-sponsored countries and reduction of
the refugee resettlement program.
Like Warren, Wall Street executives
have railed against Trump’s immigration agenda — demanding that his
zero-tolerance policy at the U.S.-Mexico border be ended and opposing his travel
ban.
JPMorgan
Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has supported amnesty for illegal aliens
since at least 2016 when he announced support for the infamous “Gang of Eight”
amnesty, saying, “Let them stay and let them build companies.”
Last
month, Dimon said amnesty for illegal aliens was necessary
to grow the economy, saying, “If we do these policies right, America will be
growing a lot faster.”
Some
of the top multinational banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and
Morgan Stanley — have come out against Trump’s travel ban that
effectively stopped all
immigration from a handful of foreign countries that sponsor terrorism.
“This
is not a policy we support, and I would note that it has already been
challenged in federal court, and some of the order has been enjoined at least
temporarily,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote in a letter at the time. “Let me close by
quoting from our business principles: ‘For us to be successful, our men and
women must reflect the diversity of the communities and cultures in which we
operate … Being diverse is not optional; it is what we must be.'”
Meanwhile, Citigroup has promoted mass immigration as a
necessary component to growing the American economy in terms of increasing GDP.
A report released by
executives last year championed migration into the U.S., the United Kingdom,
and Germany.
For
decades, the big business lobby, Wall Street, and donor class have said mass
immigration is crucial to growing GDP in the U.S. though research has shown
that increasing legal immigration levels to an enormous ten million admissions
a year would only grow GDP by about 2.5 percent. Meanwhile, Trump’s
low-migration, high-wage economy has translated to 3.2
percent annual economic growth.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
No comments:
Post a Comment