Saturday, March 21, 2020

TAKING DOWN AMERICA - WHO WORKS HARDER FOR THE CHINESE? TRUMP, OR THE RED DEMS? HILLARY, BILLARY, BIDEN AND FEINSTEIN & PIMP RICHARD BLUM?

Are America, and Trump, being played?


Our concern about Donald Trump in the campaign of 2016 was not about his personal morals.  The ultimate choice to vote for him was made easier by the manifest political criminality of Hillary Clinton.  And his emergence as an America First, America-loving president was a welcome relief after the apology tour presidency of Barack Obama. 
The concern about Donald Trump was that he had no ideological core.  His public political persona was that of a fairly standard liberal Democrat from New York, but one smart enough over his career to shift around and play both sides of the political aisle as necessary to support his business interests and ambitions.
But the problem with a leader with no ideological core surfaces in a time of crisis.  He will display who he really is.  Which may include a lot of good parts—i.e., he may have the street smarts of a New York real estate developer, and he may have an insightful and creative mind for addressing big challenges.  But with no governing philosophy developed over years of deeper thinking, he may not have that ‘true north’ of wisdom that filters and shapes the right steps to take to protect America.
That surely sounds like heresy to the mainstream Trump supporter, especially on the surface of evaluating his performance in handling the CCP Virus crisis.  Because on that surface, Trump appears masterful:  facing the cameras every day, demonstrating a president in command; offering confidence that America will prevail; and exercising the far-reaching powers of the Presidency to ‘care’ for Americans on a scale that no one would confuse with a philosophy of limited government.  His use of unprecedented wartime powers is winning praise from CNN’s Dana Bash, from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and from Squad member Ilhan Omar—that ought to tell you something about the non-ideological nature of how he is behaving.
But here’s the rub:  America has never been brought to her knees to the level happening right now, on Trump’s watch.  Not in the Civil War.  Not in WWI or WWII, and certainly not at any time during the Cold War.  Forty million Californians sheltered in place—by order of an American government official?  Schools closed from coast to coast; and restaurants closed in every major state…by order of American government officials?  And movements toward gun control and limited rights to gather—by order of American government officials? And nationalized healthcare achieved in important practical respects without the inconvenience of having to pass laws?
And all of this to fight a pandemic of still unclear comparative seriousness that originated in anti-American communist China, and is being cheered on, magnified and roiled relentlessly by the anti-American left, including especially the MSM. 
If this isn't a deliberate plot to take down America and every safeguard of American freedom, how would it look different if it was?
It feels increasingly like Americans are watching execution of a plan to take down America as a constitutional republic, and Trump as president, fed by a CIA-type psychological assessment of Trump that bet on his ‘go big’ instincts that are untethered by a deep ideological understanding and appreciation for what truly makes America exceptional and great.
One can almost picture the idea popping up in a John Brennan-type’s head:  Pandemic!  That’s the ticket.  There are a couple of generations of Americans who’ve dismissed God and faith; they can be counted on to be ‘frightenable’ out of their minds by the prospect of a runaway disease, and won’t raise a peep of dissent against any action government might take in the name of caring for them.  And Trump can be counted on to throw restraint to the winds.  There will be no real nod to the idea of trusting Americans and trusting American freedom to cope, adapt and overcome.  Trump could be counted on to embrace all-powerful nanny-state government on steroids.  By doing so as a so-called Republican with populist support, Trump could be maneuvered to deliver all necessary precedents for an eventual leftist president to overthrow the Constitution in the name of dealing with a ‘public health crisis’. 
Whether Trump wins re-election in 2020 matters less and less to the left; the pieces are in place; the ‘pandemic play’ has done the trick that Naziism, communism and socialism could not do from the outside.
So if it is a plot—who are the plotters?  Deep State intelligence holdovers in cahoots with the CCP?  Is George Soros in the mix?  Or is this just another conspiracy theory in the age of conspiracy theories?
We’d prefer to believe that it IS a conspiracy theory with no merit. 
But we would also have preferred to believe that America’s DOJ and FBI were not capable of the manifestly criminal behavior that they engaged in the runup to and aftermath of Trump’s election—all with the purpose of overthrowing the duly elected American president. 
We would have preferred to believe that no American Congressman would have been capable of the tyrannical abuse of the rule of law that Adam Schiff transparently engaged in to promote an impeachment and removal of the duly elected American president. 
And we would prefer to believe that we would never see America in the condition it is in right now—paralyzed by fear and ordered into passive submission by actions of the American government. 
And so we, along with millions of other Americans, are not sure what to believe about what is happening to this country in March 2020.  It feels like we are being played.
Eric Georgatos and wife Debbie operate the America, Can We Talk? media platform, with 4 day a week video podcasting by Debbie, and weekly written commentary, all centered around the importance and value of preserving America as founded.



Biden Should Pick Warren as VP, Immediately

It would give him serious leverage on the single-biggest issue facing the nation.



Tuesday night, as Joe Biden was waiting for the polls to close in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona—states he would win handily—Elizabeth Warren published this Twitter thread:
Warren Tweet







This is brilliant. The moment to impose needed reforms on American industries is precisely when a crisis hits and they’re coming hat in hand to Washington asking for bailouts.
If I were Joe Biden, I’d immediately announce Warren as my vice-presidential pick. I’d further say that I agree with her bail out terms, and that while I don’t have a vote in the Senate, she does and she’s my proxy.
Such a move would give Biden serious leverage on a host of fronts.
First, by elevating Warren and her agenda, he’d be sending the message to Bernie voters that as president he really is willing to pursue serious structural change of the rules of American capitalism. Such a message would help unify the left and moderate wings of the Democratic Party while undercutting whatever argument Sanders still has for staying in the race.
Second, it would make Biden a power player in the immensely significant decisions that are going to be made in Washington in the coming weeks and months. Presuming he and Warren can come to terms—that is, he would have to agree to follow her lead on policy ideas but she’d have to agree that he’s the boss and not to go too far beyond what he’s comfortable with—her pronouncements on the Senate floor would be seen as the word of the presumptive Democratic nominee. As such, other Democratic lawmakers would be more inclined to support her positions. That would help unify the Democrats behind an aggressive set of demands they’d place before Mitch McConnell and, ultimately, Donald Trump, on the terms of any stimulus/bailout package. Every time Trump gives into a Democratic congressional demand, he would in essence be conceding to Joe Biden—months before the November elections.
This might sound fanciful. But is not far from the situation Biden’s boss Barack Obama found himself in during the winter of 2008-2009, when the auto industry sought billions of dollars in federal loans to stave off collapse in the midst of the financial crisis. Washington responded, but with stiff terms dictated mostly by congressional Democrats and Obama, who at the time hadn’t even been inaugurated.
Though Republicans refused to support a bailout bill, George W. Bush, as a lame duck, reversed himself and reluctantly agreed to use money from the TARP funds, created to fund the banks, for the auto industry bailout—precisely the position Obama had been advocating, and on the terms he’d called for—and months later, as president, Obama stiffened the terms when the auto companies asked for more money. The terms included the firing of car company CEOs and boards, elimination of unprofitable brands and dealerships, and new production of low-mileage cars, including electric models, in American plants (recall that part of the problem at the time was that Detroit had gone all in on SUVs and light trucks that they couldn’t move because of high oil prices).
Rightwing free marketers, as well as some on the left, condemned the auto company bailouts. But the truth is they not only saved the industry but helped keep the country out of another Great Depression–and the U.S. Treasury ultimately recovered all but about $9 billion of the $80 billion it invested in the industry.
All of this history will be revisited as the debate over the government’s economic response to the coronavirus picks up—including the fact that Trump was for the auto industry bailout before he was against it. By choosing Warren as his VP, Biden can put himself in the center of that action and start pushing Trump around on the single biggest issue facing the nation.



OBAMA-BIDEN AND THEIR 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.
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.

Biden Rewrites History 

of Supporting 2005 

BANKSTERS' 

Bankruptcy Bill

|
Posted: Mar 15, 2020 10:10 PM
Source: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Former Vice President Joe Biden was caught in a massive lie on the debate stage Sunday night, by his last-standing opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT). Biden claimed that he had no hand in the 2005 bankruptcy bill, when called out by Sen. Sanders:
“This is a little bit about leadership as well. Joe talked about bankruptcy, Joe, you helped write that bankruptcy bill,” Sen. Sanders said.


“This is a kinda circular logic.” — @BernieSanders to @JoeBiden on the Bankruptcy Bill.#DemDebate

Although Biden denies support of the bill, the evidence does not support his claim. Passed in 2005 by a bipartisan majority, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention And Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) altered the US Bankruptcy code, and made it more difficult to file for bankruptcy. The BAPCPA increased the threshold for bankruptcy in hopes of cutting fraud and abuse. The bill receives criticism from the far-left, including Sens. Sanders and Warren, who both claim that BAPCPA puts credit companies before consumers. Biden not only supported the bill, but sponsored it alongside GOP colleagues.


Did Biden seriously just say he didn't help write the bankruptcy bill?



the puzzling thing is that Biden is just pretending he wasn't a major champion of the bankruptcy bill, whereas Sanders has at least acknowledged this dynamic on gunshttps://twitter.com/davidaxelrod/status/1239354672122662912 


Biden’s denial of supporting BAPCPA is yet another example of the former Vice President running away from his record, in order to appease progressive voters.


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