Pelosi is a ghastly creature. She and her ilk – Feinstein,
Boxer, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom – have effectively destroyed California and
they did it on purpose. They
strive to import as many illegal migrants as possible; they've created and
fostered the homelessness and let it fester. California is now a socialist
disaster and the further destruction of the economy is just what they've
wanted. They see it as their chance to transform the state into Venezuela.
PATRICIA McCARTHY
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama and Biden administrations orchestrated the bailout of Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts, particularly in mortgage-backed securities, that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of speculation. As a result, social inequality increased to record levels. Corporate cash hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion was funneled into stock buybacks.
Pelosi is the presumptive leader of her party but has been part and parcel of the Russia hoax, the Kavanaugh spectacle, impeachment and her party's failure to grasp the seriousness of this virus when Trump did, when only one person in the US had died from it. The Democrat party as a whole has devolved into a Tammany Hall machine. Nancy Pelosi has long been their Boss Tweed.
Pelosi: Biden Sexual Assault Allegation Is a ‘Closed Issue’
1:52
Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dismissed the sexual assault allegations against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden as a closed issue.
Host Melber said, “I do want to play Joe Biden’s response. As viewers know, he has publicly addressed this allegation. Let’s take a listen.”
In a clip, Biden said, “It is not true. I’m saying unequivocally it never, never happened, and it didn’t. It never happened. I’m asking the secretary of the Senate today to identify whether any such document exists. If it does, make it public.”
Melber said, “Joe Biden speaking out just days ago on that allegation of a sexual assault. Now that he has given that answer, do you view this as a closed issue, or what is your response?”
Pelosi said, “Well, it is for me. I have said I am proud to support Joe Biden for president. I believe him when he says it didn’t happen. But I also believe when he says let them look into the records. And that’s what they should do. But I’m not going to answer this question again. I will just say I have every confidence that Joe Biden will be a great president of the United States. Not only because of the person of integrity that he is but the person of vision that he is for just some of the things you talked about, about health care for all Americans, about job security, about the kitchen table issues that he is so familiar with in his own family when his father lost his own job. Joe Biden is Joe. He brings those values and his personal experience to a vision for America that is about fairness and not trickle-down economics, but bubble up from that kitchen table, from working families in our country.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Nancy Pelosi, a ghastly creature, quite beyond the pale
Today, I am
proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States because he will
be an extraordinary president. He knows how to get the job done. When our
nation faced the Great Recession, it was Joe Biden who led the implementation
and the accountability of the Recovery Act, helping create and save millions of
jobs. Now more than ever, we need a forward-looking, battle-tested leaders who
will fight for the people, a president with the values, experience and the
strategic-thinking to bring our nation together and build a better, fairer
world for our children. For these and other reasons, I am proud to endorse Joe
Biden for president, a leader who is the personification of hope and courage,
values, authenticity and integrity.
Has anyone ever heard a bigger load of
sheer nonsense?
Any remotely sentient person knows by
now that Joe Biden is an intellectual lightweight, a plagiarist, corrupt to his
core (he has seen to it that every member of his family has become fabulously
wealthy thanks to his nefarious shenanigans), and that he is suffering from
rapidly advancing dementia. His
wife Jill seems to want to be first lady so badly she is willing to sacrifice
her husband's well-being to her own hunger for power. Maybe she
thinks she can be Edith Wilson, Woodrow Wilson's second wife, who ostensibly
ran the country after Wilson's massive stroke in 1919. He had suffered three previous strokes: 1896, 1906,
and 1913. Wilson
was an avowed racist and the first "progressive" president to attempt
the transformation of America. He was a nasty piece of
work. Obama was his direct descendent politically.
Joe Biden suffered two aneurysms for which he underwent brain surgery. He survived those operations
and remained a senator without distinction. As Robert Gates wrote in
his book, Joe Biden has been wrong on every foreign policy issue
for forty years. He
has always been a mediocre senator and everyone — the media and the DNC — knows
it.
Pelosi now seems to be almost as senile as
Joe. She stumbles and mumbles when speaking, forgets names, and is
often as completely nonsensical as Biden. She is so out of touch with the American people that
she can show off her fancy refrigerator and $13-a-pint ice cream as a
prescription for enduring the stay-at-home edicts. And now she is
endorsing a man the whole world knows is mentally deficient. The woman is a menace to society. And like the rest of the
left, she assumes the American people, at least her Democrats, are
mind-numbed idiots, that despite Biden's obvious mental problems, he can be
elected president.
Then came COVID-19. The left could
not believe its good fortune. All previous attempts to destroy
Donald Trump had failed because they were all fabricated hoaxes; Russia
collusion, the thoroughly discredited Mueller report, Ukraine quid-pro-quo,
impeachment. Pelosi was happily onboard with Adam
Schiff's phony impeachment scam; Schiff is the biggest fool in the
House, and thankfully, his unscrupulousness is gradually coming to light.
Pelosi dragged the impeachment process out
as long as possible. "Procrastination is also a subtle act of
corruption — it corrupts valuable time" (Amit Abraham). She was
playing power politics and paying absolutely no attention to
COVID-19. As late as the end of February, she was encouraging San
Franciscans to party in the streets for the Chinese New Year. She
opposed Trump's travel ban. Now she blames him for the virus
itself. The woman is a harpy. Nothing proves her lack of
concern for the country more than her predictable and prescribed endorsement of
Biden. The left and its governors intend to drag out the destruction
of the American economy for as long as possible in the mistaken belief that it
will ensure the defeat of President Trump.
Biden's mental decline is so apparent that
it is likely that the DNC will be forced to somehow select another candidate
before November. It had better not be Saint Andrew of Albany. He has managed his state's virus crisis
horribly. He is an arrogant, incompetent jerk. Ordering
COVID-19 patients into nursing homes and not to the hospital ship or the field
hospitals that Trump has speedily provided cost thousands of lives.
Pelosi is the presumptive leader of her
party but has been part and parcel of the Russia hoax, the Kavanaugh spectacle,
impeachment and her party's failure to grasp the seriousness of this virus when
Trump did, when only one person in the US had died from it. The Democrat party
as a whole has devolved into a Tammany Hall machine. Nancy Pelosi has long been their
Boss Tweed.
Pelosi is a ghastly creature. She and
her ilk – Feinstein, Boxer, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom – have effectively
destroyed California and they did it on purpose. They
strive to import as many illegal migrants as possible; they've created and
fostered the homelessness and let it fester. California is now a socialist
disaster and the further destruction of the economy is just what they've
wanted. They see it as their chance to transform the state into Venezuela.
Nothing proves their contempt for
hardworking Americans more than their embrace of this lockdown. Pelosi pretends
to revere democracy, but she means to foment and protect the plutocracy she
believes she has successfully brought into being.
The greatest evil which fortune can
inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition." (Vauvenargues)
Pelosi, Schiff, Schumer, et.al. are all small talents with great ambition who
have inflicted evil upon our nation.
Amid simmering crisis over sexual assault
charges
Nancy Pelosi endorses
Biden
28 April 2020
On Monday, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic
Party candidate in the 2020 presidential election. In an eleven-minute video,
Pelosi lavished praise on the pro-war, pro-corporate long-time senator and vice
president under Barack Obama, the most right-wing of the major contestants for
the nomination.
Pelosi called the
77-year-old, semi-senile political hack a “voice of reason” in the coronavirus
crisis and absurdly described him as “a leader who is the personification of
hope and courage, values and integrity.” In the midst of the greatest
corporate bailout in world history, she specifically praised Biden for his role
in the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street during the 2008–2009
financial crisis.
Pelosi’s endorsement
followed endorsements earlier this month by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, marking the line-up of the so-called
“progressive” wing of the party behind the candidate of the party apparatus,
whose official imprimatur was signaled by the endorsement the same week by
Barack Obama.
But the unity at the
top has not resolved the party’s deep crisis. Biden is despised by broad
sections of the working class and especially youth and younger workers, and
there are many indications that large sections of those, especially young
people, who supported the Sanders campaign may not accede to Sanders’
post-capitulation demand that they vote for Biden.
Their disquiet has been
increased by the news last week that Biden’s chief economic adviser is Larry
Summers, a key architect from the 1990s to the present of the policies of
deregulation and economic parasitism that have enabled the financial
aristocracy to monopolize ever greater portions of society’s wealth.
This has been
compounded by a simmering scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse against
Biden by Tara Reade, a one-time staffer in Biden’s Senate office, who filed a
complaint with Washington DC police in March accusing the then-senator from
Delaware of having assaulted her in 1993.
The alleged incident
occurred 26 years ago, there were no other witnesses, Reade did not file a
complaint with the police at the time, and the statute of limitations has long
since expired. Biden himself has said nothing, but his campaign has denied the
charges.
has no way of knowing
whether Reade’s allegations are true. One thing is clear, however. The response
of the Democratic Party and media organizations aligned with it, such as
the New York Times and the Washington Post,
which have spearheaded the #MeToo witch hunt and reveled in the “take down” of
dozens of prominent men on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual
misconduct, has exposed their rank hypocrisy.
The Times and
the Post failed to report Reade’s allegations for weeks
after the story was broken by Sanders supporter Katie Halper on her podcast in
March. In mid-April they posted articles emphasizing inconsistencies in Reade’s
story and insisting that it had to be carefully examined and Biden given the
presumption of innocence before reaching any conclusion as to his guilt.
The Democratic National
Committee has said nothing, nor has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,
Sanders, Warren or most of the dozen or so women on Biden’s short list for his
vice presidential running mate. Pelosi has spoken publicly only once on the
matter, telling MSNBC on April 17 that she was “satisfied” with Biden’s denial.
She appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program and was not asked by
moderator Jake Tapper about the issue.
The contrast between
the treatment of Biden by the Democratic Party and the pro-Democratic media and
the treatment of a host of targets of #MeToo sex charges could not be more
blatant. The mantra “believe women” that was proclaimed repeatedly, including
by Biden himself during the September 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme
Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has been supplanted by a sudden (dishonest)
affirmation of the democratic principles of due process and the presumption of
innocence.
What has been exposed
is the role of the #MeToo campaign as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Its
proponents have changed their tune because the McCarthyite methods of #MeToo in
this particular case cut across the interests of the Democratic Party and
substantial sections of the ruling class that are backing Biden in the contest
with Trump.
There are, however,
forces aligned with the Democratic Party that are pushing Reade’s allegations
and calling out the party apparatus for seeking to quash them. The Intercept has
published a number of articles as have some pseudo-left Sanders promoters,
including Jacobin magazine.
This opposition has
increased since the posting Friday by Newsbusters of a video clip from an
August 1993 CNN “Larry King Live” program in which a woman, identified by Reade
as her mother, calls in and cites the case of her daughter, who was “working
for a prominent senator and could not get through with her problems at all.”
The caller does not identify the senator and does not mention sexual
harassment, but the clip seems to confirm Reade’s claim that she told her
mother of the incident with Biden at the time.
The video has been
widely reported by Fox News and other right-wing media, but largely suppressed
by the rest of the corporate media.
Fox News reported
Monday that the hashtag #dropoutbiden was trending on Twitter on Sunday, until
it was allegedly removed. Nick Brana, Sanders’ former national outreach
coordinator, tweeted over the weekend that the Democratic National Committee
should either force Biden to drop out or “admit that suppressing progressives
is the true purpose of your party.”
Another former Sanders
senior adviser, Winnie Wong, tweeted: “The video of Tara Reade’s late mother
calling into Larry King to blow the whistle about Tara’s sexual assault is
being met with relative silence from a cadre of progressives right now and I
want you all to know that I see you. We all do.”
Within this context,
Pelosi’s abrupt endorsement of Biden appears to be an effort to contain and
silence the voices calling for him to step aside and make explicit the party’s
demand that the matter be dropped. Pelosi’s video appears to be part of a
circling of the wagons around Biden.
On Monday, the co-chair
of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal
(Democrat from Washington state), endorsed Biden, after having served as the
Sanders campaign’s national chair for health policy. Biden was the most
strident opponent of Sanders’ call for “Medicare for all” during the primary
contest, repeatedly denouncing it on the grounds that it would cost several
trillion dollars. Of course, both he and Sanders are now supporting a bailout
of the corporate-financial elite that has already reached some $10 trillion.
“I am ready to work
with him [Biden] to craft and then implement the most progressive agenda of any
candidate in history,” Jayapal said in a statement.
Her endorsement
followed that of two other former Sanders campaign officials. The Progressive
Congressional Caucus’s other co-chair, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, endorsed Biden
last week, as did Representative Ro Khanna of California. Pocan and Khanna
served as co-chairmen for Sanders.
There is nothing
progressive in the efforts of disaffected Democrats and their pseudo-left
allies to dislodge Biden on the basis of unsubstantiated sex allegations. Even
assuming that Reade is telling the truth, in which case Biden should be held to
account, the fact is that Biden and his party are guilty of far greater crimes.
The wars Biden
supported in Afghanistan and Iraq alone killed hundreds of thousands of people,
including women and children. The Obama administration, in which Biden served
as second-in-command, made drone assassination a major instrument of US foreign
policy, asserting the right to murder US citizens and carrying out the
assassination of at least three Americans. In 2010, Biden himself declared
persecuted journalist Julian Assange to be a “hi-tech terrorist.”
It is not a question of
replacing Biden with some other servant of American imperialism and Wall Street
and promoting the middle class politics of racial and gender identity. The
crisis requires the mobilization of the mass of workers, who are increasingly
fighting back against the return-to-work campaign of both big business parties,
and behind them all genuinely progressive elements in the middle class, on the
basis of a revolutionary socialist program in opposition to the entire
two-party system and the ruling class it defends.
After the 2008 crisis, the Bush and Obama
administrations orchestrated the bailout of
Wall Street, buying up all the bad debts,
particularly in mortgage-backed securities,
that had been used as vehicles for an orgy of
speculation. As a result, social inequality
increased to record levels. Corporate cash
hoards rose to $2 trillion. Some $4 trillion
was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being
forced to pay for the economic consequences
of the pandemic,
the banks and corporations have simply
been bailed out
again, this time on a far larger scale. Once
again, the
crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to
restructure
class relations in the interests of the rich.
The Great Wall Street Heist of 2020
28 April
2020
The economic fallout
from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have devastating consequences for the
vast majority of the population in the United States. The new month begins on
Friday, which means that rents and mortgages will come due for tens of millions
of workers who have no income to pay for them.
More than 20 million
people have filed for unemployment benefits over the past five weeks. In March,
less than 30 percent of those who filed received any benefits. Millions more
are ineligible for any assistance.
Millions of people have
yet to receive anything, including the $1,200 federal cash stimulus, and are
desperately attempting to stave off destitution. Food banks are overwhelmed by
demand and are running out of staple goods. According to the Economic Policy
Institute, more than nine million people who lost their jobs have also lost
their health insurance through April 11, with millions more in the weeks that
have followed.
There are, however, two
realities, two
Americas. While the
economic destitution of
workers is being used
in an effort to drive
them back to work over
widespread
opposition, the
corporate and financial
oligarchy has seen its
fortunes increase.
Gigantic corporations,
many of which have massive cash hoards, are laying off employees while
continuing to pay executives. Entertainment giant Disney recently came under
public scrutiny over the fact that it has furloughed more than 100,000 workers
while maintaining its executive compensation program. But this is the general rule.
US billionaires, since
mid-March, have
increased their wealth
by $282 billion. The
collective fortune of
these 614 individuals,
which totals $3.2
trillion, has been buoyed by
the continued rise of
share values on Wall
Street, which increased
sharply again on
Monday.
A headline in the
German newsweekly Der Spiegel yesterday captured the
economic situation: “The death toll in the US is rising—so are the markets.”
Noting that while businesses remain shut down and joblessness exceeds by far anything
seen in American history, Der Spiegel writes: “So if the
fundamental economic data actually offer so little incentive to buy, what is
behind the rally? The solution to the riddle has three letters: Fed.”
The Fed—that is, the US
Federal Reserve—has made clear that it will do everything in its power to
support Wall Street. As a consequence, the markets keep going up. “If you
wanted to bet on price losses,” Der Spiegel remarks, “you
would have to bet against an institution whose funds are practically infinite.”
Beginning in March, as
the Trump administration and the media were downplaying the danger posed by the
coronavirus pandemic, the Federal Reserve began funneling money into the
markets—first by reducing interest rates to zero, then by initiating a raft of
programs to buy up assets from banks and corporations, providing them with cash
to purchase stocks.
The activity of the
Federal Reserve was endorsed unanimously by the US Congress in late March, when
it passed the “CARES Act,” which allocated $454 billion to finance up to $4
trillion in asset purchases. Every single senator voted for the CARES Act,
including the erstwhile “democratic socialist” from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
The Fed is spending
something on the order of $80 billion every day. The central
bank’s balance sheet is expected to increase to as much as $11 trillion, from
less than $4 trillion last year and less than $1 trillion before 2008. This
would bring the overall value of assets held by the Fed to nearly half the
entire annual economic output of the United States.
One should call things
by their right names. Terms such as “asset purchases” and “quantitative easing”
tend to obscure what is happening. This is plunder, thievery, robbery on an
unprecedented scale. Since stock ownership is overwhelmingly concentrated among
the rich, it is the rich who are benefiting.
The Great Wall Street
Heist of 2020 has been aided and abetted at every stage by the Democratic and
Republican parties. The various institutions of the state, including the mainstream
media, have exposed themselves as nothing more than the paid hirelings of Wall
Street, to put the matter delicately. Others might have more expressive terms.
After the 2008 crisis,
the Bush and Obama administrations orchestrated the bailout of Wall Street,
buying up all the bad debts, particularly in mortgage-backed securities, that
had been used as vehicles for an orgy of speculation. As a result, social
inequality increased to record levels. Corporate cash hoards rose to $2
trillion. Some $4 trillion was funneled into stock buybacks.
Far from being forced
to pay for the economic consequences of the pandemic, the banks and
corporations have simply been bailed out again, this time on a far larger
scale. Once again, the crisis is being utilized as an opportunity to
restructure class relations in the interests of the rich.
Everything turned over
to Wall Street will be paid, in one form or another, by the working
class--through austerity, the further destruction of social programs and
intensified exploitation. Hence the relentless campaign to return everyone back
to work, risking a new wave of the pandemic and the deaths of countless
thousands of people.
Such measures, we are
told, are necessary to “save the
economy.” But “the economy,” like the “American people,” is an abstraction. “The economy” that has been “saved” is the economy of the rich, capitalism. Every measure taken has been based on protecting the interests of the oligarchy at the expense of society.
economy.” But “the economy,” like the “American people,” is an abstraction. “The economy” that has been “saved” is the economy of the rich, capitalism. Every measure taken has been based on protecting the interests of the oligarchy at the expense of society.
Every policy has been guided by class interests.
A socialist response,
that is, one based on the interests of the working class, is of an entirely
different character. Trillions must be allocated, not to bail out Wall Street,
but to implement an emergency program to build up health care infrastructure
and provide protective equipment to all essential workers.
The loans and other
mechanisms through which the income of workers is earmarked for payments to the
banks must be immediately forgiven. Student debt ($1.5 trillion), car loans
($1.3 trillion) and credit card debt ($1.08 trillion) could all be wiped out
with the money that has been turned over to Wall Street, with trillions still
left over.
All workers must
continue to receive their full income for the duration of the pandemic. The highest
quality health care must be available to all, free of charge and on a
completely equal basis.
There must, moreover,
be real assistance to small businesses. The so-called Paycheck Protection
Program passed by Congress, ostensibly to aid small businesses, has turned out
to be another massive swindle for large corporations, including restaurant
chains, hotel conglomerates and hedge funds.
Such actions and other
emergency measures to secure the interests of the working class, in the United
States and internationally, could not and cannot be secured within the
framework of the existing state institutions.
The entire response to
the pandemic—from the initial downplaying of the threat to the failure to
organize any significant response, the massive handout to Wall Street and the
present campaign to force workers back to work even as the pandemic rages—is
proof of the Marxist theory of the state. The state is not a neutral body. The
financial oligarchy rules. It is their state. The
politicians are their politicians. The media is their media.
The logistics, food
production, health care, energy, manufacturing and other basic industries must
be restructured to meet social needs, under the democratic control of the
working class. The massive bailouts of Wall Street must be reversed, with the
social resources redirected to securing the financial well-being and health of
the working class.
Such policies cannot be
realized within the existing political system. They raise the necessity for the
revolutionary mobilization of the working class to take political power in its
own hands through the establishment of a workers’ government—that is, a
government of the workers, by the workers and for the workers—that will
implement the socialist policies required to save mankind from disaster.
Questions Swirl as Fed Meets Amid
Deepening Economic Crisis
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
27 Apr 20200
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve has largely calmed turbulent
financial markets. Yet a far tougher task remains: Helping rescue an economy
and job market that appear to be free-falling into the worst catastrophe since
the Great Depression.
Fed policymakers will meet Tuesday and Wednesday
against a backdrop of dismal data: More than 26 million Americans have applied
for unemployment benefits since the coronavirus forced widespread business
closures. Retail sales have dropped by a record pace. Home sales have plunged.
In the meantime, inflation has started to fall amid
the collapse in economic activity and is sure to sink further below the Fed’s
2% target level. With beleaguered hotels, airlines and retailers slashing
prices, inflation could fall to 1% or less by year’s end. That poses another
problem for the Fed: Declining prices can eventually lead consumers to delay
spending, thereby slowing the economy further.
In response, the Fed has slashed its benchmark
interest rate to near zero in two emergency moves and launched an alphabet soup
of lending programs — nine in total — to pump cash into financial markets. The
central bank has also bought about $1.4 trillion in Treasury securities to
ensure that banks can swap Treasurys for cash and keep rates low.
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