Then Congress rushed through a record $2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose main purpose was to provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve the necessary authority to bail out corporate America and Wall Street.
Top Harvard economist warns of 'mother of all
financial crises' amid coronavirus pandemic
|
April 01, 2020 04:24 PM
A top economist
predicted that the coronavirus could cause the "mother of all financial
crises."
Kenneth S. Rogoff, a widely
cited, leading economist at Harvard University, predicted that the novel
coronavirus could trigger an economic crash, both in the United States and
globally. “This is already shaping up as the deepest dive on record for the
global economy for over 100 years,” Rogoff said.
“Everything depends on how long it lasts, but if this goes
on for a long time, it’s certainly going to be the mother of all financial
crises," Rogoff said, who co-authored a comprehensive financial history
book entitled This Time Is Different:
Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
Last week, Congress approved and Trump signed a $2.2 trillion spending bill, the third relief
package designed to alleviate economic concerns of small businesses, large
corporations, and individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. It allocates $500
billion in loans to large companies, $350 billion in forgivable loans, and
provides $1,200 in direct cash payments to many U.S. citizens, among other
items.
Before the historic relief package was passed last week,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said lawmakers must
begin drafting a fourth relief package to deal with the coronavirus pandemic,
arguing that the bill that was making its way through Congress was insufficient
to address the needs of state and local governments, workers, and other
entities affected by the spread of the virus.
On Tuesday, the president advocated for a $2 trillion
addition to congressional economic relief bills designed to help workers and
businesses during the pandemic, saying he hopes to increase employment through
federal programs.
"With interest rates for the United States being at
ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It
should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on
jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase
4," Trump tweeted.
Since COVID-19 was first reported in the U.S., the Dow
Jones Industrial Average has precipitously fallen, plummeting from over 29,000
to approximately 20,900.
More than 911,000 people have
tested positive for the coronavirus globally. Of those, at least 45,000
have died from it, and more than 191,600 have recovered. The U.S. has seen at
least 206,000 confirmed cases, with nearly 8,400 reported recoveries.
Coronavirus deaths in US nearing 4,000 as Trump washes his hands of responsibility
The coronavirus killed at least 812 people in the United States Tuesday, the highest death toll since the pandemic began, while nearly 25,000 new cases were reported, bringing the total number infected to more than 188,000, the largest number in the world by far.
Along with the unprecedented scale of the infection, its sheer speed is staggering. On March 10, there were only 1,000 reported coronavirus infections in the United States. Three weeks later, it is nearing 200 times that level. Another such three weeks would see 40 million people infected in the United States.
The US death toll has not yet reached the level of Italy (12,428) or Spain (8,464), but that is only a matter of days. And White House officials continue to escalate their projections of the total number of deaths in a “best-case” scenario, setting the figure at a staggering 240,000, with Trump himself hinting that the total could be double that.
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, March 13, 2020, in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
Four countries—Italy, Spain, the US and France—have now seen more deaths than China, where the epidemic first broke out in the city of Wuhan last December. After 3,305 deaths, China claims to have largely suppressed the outbreak through systematic testing, contact tracing and quarantining of those exposed to the coronavirus.
The American media and the Trump administration continually describe efforts to counteract the coronavirus as a war, where the frontlines are being drawn in emergency rooms and ICUs throughout the United States, and especially in the New York metropolitan area, where half of all COVID-19 cases are located. On Tuesday the death toll in New York City itself hit 1,096, and 10,000 people were hospitalized, with 2,700 of them requiring ventilators.
But in this war, under the incompetent “commander-in-chief” Trump and his hapless lieutenants among the state governors, the troops are being sent into battle haphazardly, without weapons, and largely without regard for their own safety. Healthcare workers lack sufficient personal protection equipment, and they are being infected and incapacitated at an alarming rate, with many deaths.
In Spain, the healthcare workers accounted for 14 percent of the country’s cases, while in Italy, they accounted for 10 percent. The same process is under way in the United States. NPR reported that 345 employees of Boston’s four largest hospitals have tested positive for COVID-19. In New York City, hundreds of workers have fallen ill. At Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, 50 percent of the intensive-care staff have been infected.
The result is that in addition to the shortages of hospital rooms, ICU beds, masks, and ventilators, there is a growing shortage of medical staff who can cope with the increasing volume of patients seeking medical attention.
Meanwhile, hospitals and healthcare systems are threatening doctors and nurses who make their concerns over working conditions public. An emergency room physician, Dr. Ming Lin, in Washington state, was fired because he gave an interview to a newspaper complaining about inadequate protective equipment. Ruth Schubert, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Nurses Association, told Bloomberg, “Hospitals are muzzling nurses and other healthcare workers in an attempt to preserve their image.” Nurses who have spoken under conditions of anonymity with WSW S reporters said that they have been told they would be fired if they talked to the media.
In some cases, state governors have made statements that amount to a confession of bankruptcy. On CNN Live, Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland said, “We are all trying to get more testing, but this is a pinch point on testing, on supplies, and materials, and PPE and ventilators. Everybody in America knows we don’t have enough of these things … and without the tests we are really flying blind. We are guessing about where the outbreaks are, what the infection rates in the hospitals are, and the mortality rates.”
However, the Trump White House manages to combine moronic expressions of optimism (largely in the form of testimonials to Trump’s personal genius) with ever more ominous declarations that the death toll in the United States will reach six or even seven figures.
On Sunday, White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said that 100,000 to 200,000 deaths was a midrange figure that could be substantially lowered if proper measures were taken. On Monday, White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that 100,000 to 200,000 was now the floor, the best-case scenario if everything went perfectly, while Trump himself declared that a death toll in that range would represent “a good job” by his administration.
On Tuesday, Fauci and Birx presented a slide show to a press briefing indicating projections that without severe mitigation, total deaths due to COVID-19 could reach 1.2 million to 2.2 million. Birx admitted that even with strict mitigation efforts throughout the month of April, the number of deaths could range as high as 240,000. At the peak of such a “best-case” outcome, 4,000 to 5,000 people would be dying every day.
Shocking as such figures are, even more outrageous is the blithe indifference displayed by Trump personally and his closest aides to the likely results of their own policy of refusing to conduct a serious struggle to contain the pandemic, not merely mitigate it.
Trump himself, towards the end of the press “briefing” that lasted more than two hours—a clear indication, in and of itself, that the White House antivirus campaign is an exercise in political propaganda and media manipulation—made comments that amounted to a self-indictment for criminal negligence on a monumental scale.
“We’re going through the worst thing this country has probably ever seen,” he said. “Look, we had the Civil War. We lost 600,000 people, right? Had we not done anything, we would have lost many times that, but we did something, so it’s going to be hopefully way under that. But you know, we lose more here potentially than you lose in world wars as a country.”
Given that the US death toll in the Second World War was 405,000, Trump is saying, in his semiliterate and meandering way, that the US death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic could well be between 400,000 and 600,000.
There was remarkably little push-back from the journalists of the corporate media who appeared to be in a daze. While several media outlets had taken note that on Tuesday morning, more Americans had died from coronavirus than were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, not even this comparison, inadequate as it is, was made.
The US government’s response is best characterized as malign neglect to a pandemic that was both foreseen and preventable. With complete indifference to the fate of the people, the Trump administration’s primary focus was on ensuring the financial markets were protected. Only when the markets began to implode did the government’s machinery begin to churn to prevent its complete collapse. Everything else was deemed an afterthought.
First, on March 3, the Federal Reserve slashed rates by 0.5
percent, the most significant cut since the 2008 financial crisis.
On March 12, the Federal Reserve added $1.5 trillion of liquidity
into the banking systems by massively expanding short-term
loans to the banks to keep money markets stable and provide
banks with cash in hand. When the markets continued to
plummet on March 15, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a
full percentage point down to almost 0.00 percent. They also
resumed quantitative easing by purchasing $500 billion in
treasuries and $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities.
Then Congress rushed through a record
$2.2 trillion economic “rescue” bill, whose
main purpose was to provide the Treasury
and the Federal Reserve the necessary
authority to bail out corporate America
and Wall Street.
Comparing the gargantuan and energetic efforts to save the markets with the slapdash, indifferent and grossly incompetent actions in relation to public health, it is easy to see what are the priorities of the American financial aristocracy.
But there is another force to be heard from in this crisis—the working class. Instacart, Amazon, and Whole Foods workers have initiated strike actions against forced work under unsafe conditions. Workers at General Electric have protested, demanding their company begin producing ventilators. Many other workers are rebelling against being forced to remain on the job without protective gear.
As the crisis escalates, the decisive question is for the working class to develop a conscious political response, recognizing that it must fight the capitalist system as a whole, based on a socialist program.
TRUMP'S GOLDMAN SACHS CRONY
Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand
no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare
will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony
Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008
Mnuchin Courts Goldman Advisers to
Oversee $200 Billion Bailout
By
U.S Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
is seeking to tap executives from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms to help oversee more than $200 billion in bailout packages that the Trump
administration is proposing to ease the economic damage of the coronavirus
outbreak, people familiar with the matter said.
Mnuchin’s team is considering executives with broad experience to
help administer loans to airlines, hotels and other industries suffering as the
virus shuts down parts of the economy, the people said. The government is also
considering taking equity stakes in some companies in exchange for aid, a
program that financiers and bankers could administer.
Spokesmen for the Treasury didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Goldman declined to comment.
The White House and Democrats are negotiating with Senate
Republicans over a GOP draft stimulus bill that would create the bailout
program. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he’d like to hold a
vote on Monday.
During the last global financial crisis more than a decade ago,
Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner brought in additional staff,
including prominent Wall Street figures, to help manage the bailouts of U.S.
banks and auto companies.
Fed Expertise
Mnuchin is also looking for expert guidance as the Treasury
Department works closely with the Federal Reserve. Mnuchin this week authorized
the Fed to launch four separate emergency lending programs to keep cash flowing
into the U.S. economy.
The Fed is expected to launch more crisis-level programs that will
require authorization and help from the Treasury Department, which would have
to group individual companies in travel-related industries together to make them
eligible for Fed assistance. President Donald Trump has already singled out
Boeing Co. as needing government assistance in some form.
Mnuchin’s Treasury Department is
short-staffed. It has more than half a dozen vacancies in its senior political
ranks. The domestic finance department, which oversees the $16 trillion Treasuries market amd the Financial
Stability Oversight Board, has no undersecretary.
Deputy Secretary Justin Muzinich has been overseeing the unit
since June when Craig Phillips departed as a counselor. Muzinich is also
serving as acting undersecretary of the Treasury’s sanctions unit.
‘Government Sachs’ Reunites When
Mnuchin Dines With Goldman Pals
By
Picture this: Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin at a dinner table in New York, surrounded by Hank Paulson, Jon
Corzine and Gary Cohn, along with David Solomon. It’s not a Bernie Sanders
nightmare -- just the Goldman Sachs alumni dinner.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and
governments worldwide have a long history of swapping senior leaders, earning
the bank the nickname “Government Sachs.” But the firm often takes pains not to
look too chummy with its friends in high places.
That’s why some Goldman veterans said they were surprised last
month when Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, who has led the administration’s efforts
to reshape financial regulation, attended the firm’s annual dinner for retired
partners in New York’s Hudson Yards. While sitting in public office, especially
in positions that allow them to oversee Wall Street, former executives have
tended to avoid the soiree.
Mnuchin requested clearance to attend the dinner and received it,
according to a spokesman for the Treasury Department, who said he was there in
a personal capacity. A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment.
The Goldman alumni dinner is less a college reunion and more a way
to maintain ties between executives who’ve moved on to some of the most
powerful spots in banking, private equity, hedge funds and government.
Mnuchin, who left the firm in 2002,
was one of the dinner guests who’ve helped shape American policy in the 21st
Century. Paulson was Treasury Secretary at the depths of the financial crisis,
Corzine was a U.S. Senator and governor of New Jersey, and Cohn was the first
director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council. They were joined by Solomon, the
bank’s chief executive officer, and Lloyd Blankfein, his predecessor.
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both senators, are among the
Democratic presidential candidates who have criticized the bank. Trump
recruited the firm’s veterans for his administration even after one of his 2016
campaign ads showed Blankfein’s face as the candidate’s voice warned about a
corrupt global power machine.
Then Congress rushed through a record $2.2 trillion
economic “rescue” bill, whose main purpose was to
provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve the necessary
authority to bail out corporate America and Wall Street.
TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
A massive tax cut for his plundering Goldman Sachs infested administration.
Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His
Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial Reviews: Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s
Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs,
GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama
was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big
Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers.
In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up
the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t
see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to
America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate
welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Gary Cohn: ‘I Am a
Globalist
— I Believe We Live in a
Globalized World’
18 Dec 2018211
0:54
Former President Donald Trump economic adviser and
former Goldman Sachs COO Gary Cohn, when asked
Tuesday on CBS’s “This Morning” about Trump calling him
a “globalist” and if it was an anti-Semitic remark,
proudly proclaimed himself as a globalist.
a “globalist” and if it was an anti-Semitic remark,
proudly proclaimed himself as a globalist.
“I’m
absolutely not offended by the term ‘globalist’ as I am a
globalist,”
Cohn stated. “I believe we live in a globalized
world.
I think the United States is an integral part of a
globalized
world. And we have to figure out how to live as a
good
citizen in a globalized earth — so do the Chinese, so do
the
Russians, so do the Middle Eastern countries.”
“We
are globalized. We cannot change that fact,” he
concluded.
CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR
BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
BANKSTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS
WHO IS TIGHTER WITH THE
PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON,
OBAMA or TRUMP?
PLUNDERING BANKSTERS? CLINTON,
OBAMA or TRUMP?
The Clinton White House famously abolished the Glass–Steagall
legislation, which separated commercial and investment banking. The move was
a boon for Wall Street
firms and led to major bank mergers that some analysts say helped contribute to
the 2008 financial crisis.
Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in massive speaking fees from
Goldman Sachs, with CNN documenting a total of at
least $7.7 million in paid speeches to big financial firms, including Goldman
Sachs and UBS. Hillary Clinton made $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs
specifically, and her husband secured more than
$1,550,000 from Goldman speeches. In 2005 alone, Bill Clinton collected over $500,000
from three Goldman Sachs events.
TRY TO SEPARATE THE CLINTON MAFIA AND DONALD TRUMP’S CRIMES FROM
THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS AT GOLDMAN SACHS!
Can’t be done!
NEW YORK — In the midst of a
public relations nightmare, former White House Deputy National Security Adviser
Dina Habib Powell took charge of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation,
helping to resurrect the big bank’s shattered image after it was implicated in
practices that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
GET
THIS BOOK!
Obamanomics:
How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate
Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
NEW YORK — In the midst of a public relations nightmare,
former White House Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Habib Powell took
charge of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation, helping to resurrect
the big bank’s shattered image after it was implicated in practices that
contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
Hillary Clinton is simply the epitome of the rabid self – a
whirlpool of selfishness, greed, and malignance.
It may well be true that Donald Trump has made his greatest
contribution to the nation before even taking office: the
political destruction of Hillary Clinton and her infinitely corrupt
machine. J.R. Dunn
"Hillary
will do anything to distract you from her reckless record and the damage to the
Democratic Party and the America she and The Obama's have created."
WHAT DID THE BANKSTERS KNOW ABOUT OUR ACTOR OBAMA THAT WE DIDN’T
KNOW?
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).
BARACK OBAMA HAS COLLECTED
NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS
JOHN McCAIN... what did the banksters know
back then???
NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH MONEY AS
JOHN McCAIN... what did the banksters know
back then???
BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
Wall Street firms have chipped in more than $9 million to Barack
Obama. Zurga/Bloomberg
Wall Street is investing heavily in Barack Obama.
Although the Democratic presidential hopeful has vowed to
raise capital gains and corporate taxes, financial industry bigs have
contributed almost twice as much to Obama as to GOP rival John McCain, a Daily
News analysis of campaign records shows.
“The administration has been pushing hard for a
settlement among state attorneys general, the nation's five
TRY TO SEPARATE THE
CLINTON MAFIA AND DONALD TRUMP’S CRIMES FROM THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS AT
GOLDMAN SACHS!
Can’t be done!
NEW YORK — In the midst of a public relations
nightmare, former White House Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Habib
Powell took charge of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation, helping to
resurrect the big bank’s shattered image after it was implicated in practices
that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
“Clinton also failed to mention how
he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to
make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of
millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
TOP EVIL CORPORATIONS LOOTING
AMERICA
Goldman Sachs TRUMP CRONIES – CLINTON CRONIES
JPMorgan Chase OBAMA CRONIES
ExxonMobil
Halliburton BUSH
CRIME FAMILY CRONIES
British American Tobacco
Dow Chemical
DuPont
Bayer
Microsoft
Google CLINTON CRONIES
Facebook OBAMA CRONIES
Amazon
Walmart
HILLARY CLINTON: The woman
who fought Barack Obama to be
America's
first dictator.
In the days of the Cold
War, the narrative of the arch-reactionaries and anticommunists revolved around
a conspiracy theory according to which the United States had been infiltrated
at the highest levels by agents of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1950s,
Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy led the anti-Soviet campaign, alleging that
Russian spies occupied top positions in the government, in universities, in
Hollywood and even in the military. According to McCarthy, “a conspiracy so
immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history
of man” implicated not only the Soviet Union but was also responsible for the
“loss of China” in the 1949 Chinese Revolution.
The “Red Menace” was
the pretext for attacking and delegitimizing all manifestations of social and
political opposition, including the Civil Rights movement, as the work of
“outside agitators” who received their orders from Moscow. It was Martin Dies,
the Democratic congressman from Texas and initiator of the witch-hunting House
Un-American Activities Committee, who declared in his 1940 book The Trojan
Horse in America that Moscow had “envisioned an unusual opportunity to create
racial hatred between the white and Negro citizens of the United States.”
In the late 1950s,
after the heyday of McCarthy, the political thread was taken up by the John
Birch Society, founded in 1958 by Massachusetts businessman Robert Welch, who
notoriously declared that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated,
conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
In 1964, Welch backed
the ultra-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, whose failed presidential
campaign was heavily influenced by John Stormer’s book None Dare Call It
Treason. “Will America continue to aid the communist enemy,” Stormer asked, “to
disarm in the face of danger, to bow before communist dictators in every corner
of the earth? The decision is yours.”
Nothing is dead in
politics. The legacy of McCarthyism is now being revived by the campaign led by
the Democratic Party and summed up in a hysterical screed published Wednesday
in the Washington Post by Hillary Clinton, the
self-professed former “Goldwater girl,” under the headline, “Mueller documented
a serious crime against all Americans. Here’s how to respond.”
According to Clinton,
“Our election was corrupted, our democracy assaulted, our sovereignty and
security violated. This is the definitive conclusion of special counsel Robert
S. Mueller III’s report.” The perpetrator again is Russia, which Clinton,
citing the Mueller report, claims has carried out a “sweeping and systematic”
attack on the United States.
The Clinton narrative,
which is the official line of the Democratic Party, is a monumental lie.
Responsibility for Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 elections is attributed
entirely to the operations of Russian bots and “Guccifer 2.0,” the persona of
the individual who supposedly hacked Democratic Party emails. Her campaign,
Clinton writes, was the “target of a Russian plot,” directed by President
Vladimir Putin, who “seeks to weaken our country.”
And what did this new
“conspiracy so immense” actually involve? According to the Mueller report
itself, organizations associated with Russia allegedly spent $100,000 on
Facebook ads. This is 0.12 percent of the $81 million spent by the Democratic
and Republican election campaigns themselves on Facebook ads, in a campaign
dominated by the $5 billion spent by the billionaire backers of the two parties
to buy the election.
As for the release of
Democratic Party emails, even if one accepts the unsubstantiated claim that it
was Russian operatives who turned them over to WikiLeaks, what the emails
revealed were true facts about the operations of Clinton and the Democratic
National Committee (DNC)—facts that the electorate had every right to know.
Among the documents released were Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs and other banks, for
which she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other leaked emails
exposed the corrupt efforts of the DNC to rig the primaries against Bernie
Sanders.
Clinton lost in the
2016 elections because the Democratic Party, in line with the class interests
it represents, made a calculated decision not to raise any social issues or
make any appeal to the working class in its campaign against Trump. Do Clinton
and company really expect the public to believe that Facebook ads put out by
Russian agents were behind the collapse in voter turnout in working-class areas
of Michigan, Wisconsin and other states?
The victory of the
billionaire demagogue Trump was the result of widespread disillusionment with
the Democratic Party after eight years of the Obama administration, which broke
every campaign promise and exposed as lies the empty prattle about “hope” and
“change.” Obama focused his energies on bailing out Wall Street and shoring
up the wealth of the corporate and financial elite.
In her column, Clinton
goes on to call for an alliance between the Democratic Party and the
Republicans. The situation calls for “clear-eyed patriotism, not reflexive
partisanship,” she writes. She urges Republicans to work with Democrats in an
intensified campaign against Russia—with or without the Trump administration.
She writes: “It’s up to members of both parties to see where that road map
[provided by the Mueller report] leads—to the eventual filing of articles of
impeachment, or not. Either way, the nation’s interests will be best served by
putting party and political considerations aside and being deliberate, fair and
fearless.”
Clinton wants a
bipartisan foreign policy that is “fearless” in its aggression against not only
Russia, but also China. “Unless checked, the Russians will interfere again in 2020,
and possibly other adversaries, such as China or North Korea, will as well,”
she warns. Unless Trump is “held accountable, the president will likely
redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda, including rolling back
sanctions, weakening NATO and undermining the European Union.”
Changing what needs to
be changed, such words could have been penned by Robert Welch himself.
Confronting a fascistic president, the Democrats have managed to frame their
entire opposition around a right-wing narrative. If the Democrats had their way
and Trump were removed—to be replaced, don’t forget, by the ultra-right Vice
President Mike Pence—it is almost certain that the immediate consequence would
be war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Inextricably connected
to the conflicts over foreign policy is the escalation of the attack on
democratic rights within the United States. Reprising the ravings of Dies,
social discontent is attributed to the nefarious efforts of Russia to “sow
discord” within the United States.
Significantly, Clinton
cites as a model the actions of the ruling class after the September 11, 2001
attacks, when “Congress established an independent, bipartisan commission to
recommend steps that would help guard against future attacks.” She concludes,
“We need a similar commission to help protect our elections.”
The September 11
attacks—a terrorist atrocity that killed nearly 3,000 people—were followed by
the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department, the Northern Command,
domestic spying, Guantanamo Bay, the institution of torture and drone
assassinations as government policy, and other crimes. The campaign of the
Democrats over the Russian “attack”—a lie fashioned from whole cloth—has been
accompanied by far-reaching moves to censor the internet under the guise of
combating “fake news.”
The Democrats’
warmongering and attack on democratic rights come together in the persecution
of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, whose enduring contribution to the
population of the world was the exposure of the crimes of American imperialism.
For this, Assange is currently imprisoned in Britain, facing imminent rendition
to the United States. The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning is in jail
for refusing to testify against him.
Such is Clinton’s
defense of “our democracy.”
All of this further
demonstrates that in the conflict between Trump and the Democratic Party there
is no progressive or democratic faction. The anti-Russia narrative has not been
challenged by any section of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders,
who is again seeking to cover up this warmongering party with a thin veneer of
social reforms that it has no intention of implementing.
The conflict between
the Democrats and the Trump administration is a conflict between two
reactionary factions of the ruling class. All those political organizations and
groups that are seeking to direct social opposition behind the Democratic Party
are playing the most criminal role. They are no less terrified than Trump and
the Democrats of the development of a genuine socialist movement of the working
class, which will oppose American capitalism and its wars.
TRY TO SEPARATE THE
CLINTON MAFIA AND DONALD TRUMP’S CRIMES FROM THEIR BANKSTER PAYMASTERS AT
GOLDMAN SACHS!
Can’t be done!
NEW YORK — In the midst of a public relations
nightmare, former White House Deputy National
Security Adviser Dina Habib Powell took charge
of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation,
helping to resurrect the big bank’s shattered image
after it was implicated in practices that contributed
to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
nightmare, former White House Deputy National
Security Adviser Dina Habib Powell took charge
of Goldman Sachs’s global charitable foundation,
helping to resurrect the big bank’s shattered image
after it was implicated in practices that contributed
to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
“Clinton also failed to mention how
he and Hillary cashed in after his presidential tenure to
make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of
millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
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