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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 29, 2017 21:39:53 GMT -6
www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/03/28/adam-schiff-traitor-humanity/Adam Schiff is a Traitor to HumanityMarch 28, 2017 by Paul Craig Roberts "Adam Schiff is a traitor to the United States. Indeed, to all of humanity. Yes, he is a Jew, but America has many loyal Jews. What makes Schiff a traitor is not that he is a Jew. He is a traitor, because he is undermining American democracy and the forces for peace. The Clintons and the Democratic Leadership Council sold out the Democratic constituency, that is, the working class and peace, because they were convinced that they could get more money from Wall Street, the global corporations, and the military/security complex than they could from the labor unions. The labor unions were going to be destroyed by jobs offshoring and the relocation of US manufacturing abroad. This relocation of American manufacturing would destroy the budgets of the state and local governments in America’s manufacturing regions and result in fierce pressure on the public sector unions, which are being destroyed in turn. In short, Democratic Party funding was evaporating, and Democrats needed to compete against Republicans for funding from the One Percent. George Soros helped the Clinton Democrats in this transition, and soon there was no one representing the working class. Consequently, since Clinton the real median family income of the working class has been falling, and in the 21st century the working class has been buried in unemployment and debt. But the Democratic Party has prospered, and so have Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party raised far more money, especially from the One Percent, than Trump, who allied with the working class, in the past presidential election. Bill & Hillary have a personal fortune of $120 million at least, and $1.6 trillion in their personal foundation that supports their daughter. Using Government to get rich is an old trick in America, but the Clintons took it to new highs when they flushed the working class and became the whores for Wall Street, Israel, and the military/security complex. This is where the Democratic Party is today. The despicable Adam Schiff’s function is to discredit the presidency of Donald Trump by creating an atmosphere in which any interest in establishing normal relations with Russia, thus reducing the tensions that could result in nuclear war, is proof of being a “Putin agent” and a “traitor.” What Schiff is doing is making it impossible for President Trump to reduce the dangerous tensions between the nuclear superpowers that the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes created. These tensions can easily result in nuclear war, as I have often emphasized. It is extraordinary that Schiff, who endangers the existence of all life on planet Earth, is a hero of the liberal/progressive/left. The pressitute media whores love him. He always gets top billing as he urges on humanity to its final destruction. How is it that Donald Trump, who says he wants to reduce tensions with Russia is portrayed as a threat, while the liberal/progressive/left, the CIA, and the Democratic Party are portrayed as the salt of the Earth for promulgating nuclear war with Russia (and China)? I have no explanation as to why the peoples of the West, as ignorant and idiotic as they are, and their ignorance and idiocy are extreme, prefer nuclear war with Russia (and China) instead of normal relations. But the utterly evil Adam Schiff prefers nuclear war, and that is where he is leading the insouciant West. And you can bet your last cent that the media whores will continue cheering Schiff on."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 29, 2017 11:33:18 GMT -6
www.informationclearinghouse.info/46757.htmThe Surveillance State Behind Russia-gateinformationclearinghouse.info/46757.htm "Amid the frenzy over the Trump team’s talks with Russians, are we missing a darker story, how the Deep State’s surveillance powers control the nation’s leaders, ask U.S. intelligence veterans Ray McGovern and Bill Binney." March 28, 2017 By Ray McGovern and Bill Binney "Although many details are still hazy because of secrecy – and further befogged by politics – it appears House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was informed last week about invasive electronic surveillance of senior U.S. government officials and, in turn, passed that information onto President Trump. This news presents Trump with an unwelcome but unavoidable choice: confront those who have kept him in the dark about such rogue activities or live fearfully in their shadow. (The latter was the path chosen by President Obama. Will Trump choose the road less traveled?) What President Trump decides will largely determine the freedom of action he enjoys as president on many key security and other issues. But even more so, his choice may decide whether there is a future for this constitutional republic. Either he can acquiesce to or fight against a Deep State of intelligence officials who have a myriad of ways to spy on politicians (and other citizens) and thus amass derogatory material that can be easily transformed into blackmail. This crisis (yes, “crisis” is an overused word, but in this highly unusual set of circumstances we believe it is appropriate) came to light mostly by accident after President Trump tweeted on March 4 that his team in New York City’s Trump Towers had been “wiretapped” by President Obama. Trump reportedly was relying on media reports regarding how conversations of aides, including his ill-starred National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, had been intercepted. Trump’s tweet led to a fresh offensive by Democrats and the mainstream press to disparage Trump’s “ridiculous” claims. However, this concern about the dragnets that U.S. intelligence (or its foreign partners) can deploy to pick up communications by Trump’s advisers and then “unmask” the names before leaking them to the news media was also highlighted at the Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, where Nunes appealed for anyone who had related knowledge to come forward with it. That apparently happened on the evening of March 21 when Nunes received a call while riding with a staffer. After the call, Nunes switched to another car and went to a secure room at the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House, where he was shown highly classified information apparently about how the intelligence community picked up communications by Trump’s aides. The next day, Nunes went to the White House to brief President Trump, who later said he felt “somewhat vindicated” by what Nunes had told him. The ‘Wiretap’ Red HerringBut the corporate U.S. news media continued to heckle Trump over his use of the word “wiretap” and cite the insistence of FBI Director James Comey and other intelligence officials that President Obama had not issued a wiretap order aimed at Trump. As those paying rudimentary attention to modern methods of surveillance know, “wiretapping” is passé. But Trump’s use of the word allowed FBI and Department of Justice officials and their counterparts at the National Security Agency to swear on a stack of bibles that the FBI, DOJ, and NSA have been unable to uncover any evidence within their particular institutions of such “wiretapping.” At the House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, FBI Director Comey and NSA Director Michael Rogers firmly denied that their agencies had wiretapped Trump Towers on the orders of President Obama. So, were Trump and his associates “wiretapped?” Of course not. Wiretapping went out of vogue decades ago, having been rendered obsolete by leaps in surveillance technology. The real question is: Were Trump and his associates surveilled? Wake up, America. Was no one paying attention to the disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 when he exposed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as a liar for denying that the NSA engaged in bulk collection of communications inside the United States. The reality is that EVERYONE, including the President, is surveilled. The technology enabling bulk collection would have made the late demented FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water. Allegations about the intelligence community’s abuse of its powers also did not begin with Snowden. For instance, several years earlier, former NSA worker and whistleblower Russell Tice warned about these “special access programs,” citing first-hand knowledge, but his claims were brushed aside as coming from a disgruntled employee with psychological problems. His disclosures were soon forgotten. Intelligence Community’s Payback However, earlier this year, there was a stark reminder of how much fear these surveillance capacities have struck in the hearts of senior U.S. government officials. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that President Trump was “being really dumb” to take on the intelligence community, since “They have 6 ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Maddow shied away from asking the logical follow-up: “Senator Schumer, are you actually saying that Trump should be afraid of the CIA?” Perhaps she didn’t want to venture down a path that would raise more troubling questions about the surveillance of the Trump team than on their alleged contacts with the Russians. Similarly, the U.S. corporate media is now focused on Nunes’s alleged failure to follow protocol by not sharing his information first with Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats promptly demanded that Nunes recuse himself from the Russia investigation. On Tuesday morning, reporters for CNN and other news outlets peppered Nunes with similar demands as he walked down a corridor on Capitol Hill, prompting him to suggest that they should be more concerned about what he had learned than the procedures followed. That’s probably true because to quote Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men” in a slightly different context, the mainstream media “cannot handle the truth” – even if it’s a no-brainer. At his evening meeting on March 21 at the Old Executive Office Building, Nunes was likely informed that all telephones, emails, etc. – including his own and Trump’s – are being monitored by what the Soviets used to call “the organs of state security.” By sharing that information with Trump the next day – rather than consulting with Schiff – Nunes may have sought to avoid the risk that Schiff or someone else would come up with a bureaucratic reason to keep the President in the dark. A savvy politician, Nunes knew there would be high political cost in doing what he did. Inevitably, he would be called partisan; there would be more appeals to remove him from chairing the committee; and the character assassination of him already well under way – in The Washington Post, for example – might move him to the top of the unpopularity chart, displacing even bête noire Russian President Vladimir Putin. But this episode was not the first time Nunes has shown some spine in the face of what the Establishment wants ignored. In a move setting this congressman apart from all his colleagues, Nunes had the courage to host an award ceremony for one of his constituents, retired sailor and member of the USS Liberty crew, Terry Halbardier. On June 8, 1967, by repairing an antennae and thus enabling the USS Liberty to issue an SOS, Halbardier prevented Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats from sinking that Navy intelligence ship and ensuring that there would be no survivors to describe how the Israeli “allies” had strafed and bombed the ship. Still, 34 American seamen died and 171 were wounded. At the time of the award ceremony in 2009, Nunes said, “The government has kept this quiet I think for too long, and I felt as my constituent, he [Halbardier] needed to get recognized for the services he made to his country.” (Ray McGovern took part in the ceremony in Nunes’s Visalia, California office.) Now, we suspect that much more may be learned about the special compartmented surveillance program targeted against top U.S. national leaders if Rep. Nunes doesn’t back down and if Trump doesn’t choose the road most traveled – acquiescence to America’s Deep State actors." "Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years and conducted one-on-one briefings of the President’s Daily Brief under Ronald Reagan from 1081 to 1985. Bill Binney was former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA and co-founder of NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center before he retired after 9/11."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Mar 26, 2017 10:42:29 GMT -6
www.informationclearinghouse.info/46729.htmMarch 24, 2017 By Patrick Buchanan "Devin Nunes just set the cat down among the pigeons. Two days after FBI Director James Comey assured us there was no truth to President Trump’s tweet about being wiretapped by Barack Obama, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Trump may have had more than just a small point. The U.S. intelligence community, says Nunes, during surveillance of legitimate targets, picked up the names of Trump transition officials during surveillance of targets, "unmasked" their identity, and spread their names around, virtually assuring they would be leaked. If true, this has the look and smell of a conspiracy to sabotage the Trump presidency, before it began. Comey readily confirmed there was no evidence to back up the Trump tweet. But when it came to electronic surveillance of Trump and his campaign, Comey, somehow, could not comment on that. Which raises the question: What is the real scandal here? Is it that Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks? We have heard that since June. Is it that Trump officials may have colluded with the Russians? But former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and ex-CIA Director Mike Morrell have both said they saw no evidence of this. This March, Sen. Chris Coons walked back his stunning declaration about transcripts showing a Russia-Trump collusion, confessing, "I have no hard evidence of collusion." But if Clapper and Morrell saw no Russia-Trump collusion, what were they looking at during all those months to make them so conclude? Was it "FBI transcripts," as Sen. Coons blurted out? If so, who intercepted and transcribed the conversations? If it was intel agencies engaged in surveillance, who authorized that? How extensive was it? Against whom? Is it still going on? And if today, after eight months, the intel agencies cannot tell us whether or not any member of the Trump team colluded with the Russians, what does that say of their competence? The real scandal, which the media regard as a diversion from the primary target, Trump, is that a Deep State conspiracy to bring down his presidency seems to have been put in place by Obamaites, and perhaps approved by Obama himself. Consider. On Jan. 12, David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote, "According to a senior U.S. government official, (Gen. Michael) Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials … What did Flynn say?" Now, on Dec. 29, Flynn, national security adviser-designate, was not only doing his job calling the ambassador, he was a private citizen. Why was he unmasked by U.S. intelligence? Who is this "senior official" who dropped the dime on him? Could this official have known how many times Flynn spoke to Kislyak, yet not known what was said on the calls? That is hard to believe. This looks like a contract hit by an anti-Trump agent in the intel community, using Ignatius to do the wet work. Flynn was taken down. Did Comey turn his FBI loose to ferret out the felon who had unmasked Flynn and done him in? If not, why not? In today’s Wall Street Journal, Dan Henninger points anew to a story in The New York Times of March 1 that began: " 'In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election – and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Trump and Russians – across the government.' " " 'This is what they did,' " wrote Henninger, quoting the Times: " 'At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low classification level to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government – and, in some cases, among European allies.' " For what benign purpose would U.S. intelligence agents spread secrets damaging to their own president – to foreign regimes? Is this not disloyalty? Is this not sedition? On Jan. 12, writes Henninger, the Times "reported that Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed rules that let the National Security Agency disseminate ‘raw signals intelligence information’ to 16 other intelligence agencies." Astounding. The Obamaites seeded the U.S. and allied intel communities with IEDs to be detonated on Trump’s arrival. This is the scandal, not Trump telling Vlad to go find Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails. We need to know who colluded with the Russians, if anyone did. But more critically, we need to unearth the deep state conspiracy to sabotage a presidency. So far, the Russia-connection investigation has proven a dry hole. But an investigation into who in the FBI, CIA or NSA is unmasking U.S. citizens and criminally leaking information to a Trump-hating press to destroy a president they are sworn to serve could prove to be a gusher. As for the reports of Lynch-White House involvement in this unfolding plot to damage and destroy Trump the real question is: What did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it?"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 28, 2017 23:14:23 GMT -6
Once again, the Dems screw themselves again, by acquiescing to anti-populist Corporate Globalists (i.e. the Clintonista wing of the Democratic party)www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/02/tom-perez-and-the-democratic-establishments-plan-t.htmlTom Perez and the Democratic Establishment’s Plan to Stop ProgressivesFeb 27, 2017 By Walker Bragman "On Saturday, the contentious race for DNC Chair came to an end. In an unsurprising development, in line with the selection of 76-year-old Rep. Nancy Pelosi and 66-year-old Sen. Chuck Schumer to lead the party in the House and Senate, Democratic insiders opted to go with the establishment favorite and former Labor Secretary Tom Perez over progressive choices Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Samuel Ronan. To progressives, this latest move begs certain questions like why the party, in the face of massive left-wing mobilization, would continue to ignore the demands of progressive voters by selecting someone like Perez, whose soft stance on Wall Street and lobbyists, as well as the fact he was one of the architects of Hillary Clinton’s primary strategy to cast Sen. Bernie Sanders as the white man’s candidate, make him a divisive pick. Many felt as though President Trump and the GOP’s 2016 sweep didn’t teach them anything. But the party establishment never intended on changing. Organizations like Third Way and people like former Communications Director for Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated presidential campaign Jennifer Palmieri still wield massive influence and are hellbent on ignoring the paradigm shift. This is why the focus has been entirely on Trump as opposed to the problems that elected him, and why there are so many calls for “unity.” But if change isn’t their plan, what is? In a recent interview on the Mark Reardon Show in St. Louis, an unnerved Senator Claire McCaskill made the surprisingly frank admission—like a cry for help—that, in all likelihood, she will face a primary challenger from her left in 2018. One of Hillary Clinton’s strongest and most vocal allies during the election, McCaskill had been in hot water in recent weeks for her votes with the GOP to greenlight many of President Trump’s appointees. Prior to that, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), who had quickly emerged as a beacon of hope for disheartened neoliberals, had a similar experience over his vote against a largely symbolic amendment proposed by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to allow for the import of safe drugs from Canada to lower prices in the U.S. The establishment knows that if things continue like this, their days are numbered. However, the establishment also firmly believes the GOP will implode during Donald Trump’s presidency. Citing the President’s historically low poll numbers in his first hundred days along with the burgeoning scandals already enveloping his administration, they’re banking on it. So too do they believe that they’ll be able to use Trump’s record to win over enough of the progressive base to catapult them back into power in a few years. After all,as Perez himself said during the campaign, the Democrats’ real problems are “messaging” and voter suppression. And what of those who do not jump on board? Well, it is certainly no secret that many who were mobilized by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ populist campaign, were not officially Democrats before 2016. For decades prior to the election, the progressive left had been fractured into various factions, contributing to its overall weakness. One of Sanders’ great achievements was bringing these people back into the party. However, strong contrarian undercurrents remain as evidenced by repeated calls for “#DemExit.” It is this impulse to give up on the process that establishment Democrats are counting on when they ignore the populist outcries. They’re hoping that progressives leave their party because they want to avoid what just happened in California’s Democratic Assembly District Delegate Elections (progressives effectively took control of the largest state party in the country). But with this strategy the establishment is playing with fire. As of today, with the 2020 Census around the corner, the GOP controls an overwhelming majority of the governorships and state legislatures. As it stands, the establishment has no path to victory, occupying a sort of political no man’s land ever since Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Voters on both the left and right despise them. The most the establishment can do is convince enough progressives to pursue a nonviable third party route, thus empowering the GOP for sweeps the next two elections, and allowing Republicans to redraw the Congressional districts in such a way as to guarantee them control of the House for the next decade. Establishment types do not seem to understand the times we live in. They cannot wait out populism. Only change will ease calls for change. The worse things get under Trump, the worse Clinton’s allies will look for having put him in the White House, and the more the strength of the progressive movement will grow. The election of Perez as DNC Chair does not mean the war is lost for the left. Rather than doing what the insiders want them to do and retreating into a third party that has no chance of capturing enough state seats to redistrict by 2020, progressives must fight back and get even more involved, following California’s example. They must resist calls for unity, and take over in 2018."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 25, 2017 12:56:36 GMT -6
www.informationclearinghouse.info/46476.htmGreenwald: Empowering the Deep State to Undermine Trump is a Threat to DemocracyPosted February 17, 2017 - See more at: www.informationclearinghouse.info/46476.htm#sthash.uVoM0g5w.dpufTranscript NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re looking at the growing scandal over the Trump administration’s alleged dealings with Russia before and after the November election. In early January, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show and suggested the intelligence community may try to get back at Donald Trump. ...SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have 6 ways from Sunday at getting back at you. ...So, even for a practical, supposedly, hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this. AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, in January. Some supporters of Trump, including Breitbart News, are now accusing the intelligence agencies of attempting to wage a "deep state coup" against the president. Meanwhile, some critics of Trump are openly embracing such activity, like Bill Kristol, the prominent Republican analyst who founded The Weekly Standard. He wrote on Twitter, "Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state." So, still with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, speaking to us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Glenn, explain what the deep state is, and respond. GLENN GREENWALD: The deep state, although there’s no precise or scientific definition, generally refers to the agencies in Washington that are permanent power factions. They stay and exercise power even as presidents who are elected come and go. They typically exercise their power in secret, in the dark, and so they’re barely subject to democratic accountability, if they’re subject to it at all. It’s agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world’s worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads. This is who not just people like Bill Kristol, but lots of Democrats are placing their faith in, are trying to empower, are cheering for as they exert power separate and apart from—in fact, in opposition to—the political officials to whom they’re supposed to be subordinate. And you go—this is not just about Russia. You go all the way back to the campaign, and what you saw was that leading members of the intelligence community, including Mike Morell, who was the acting CIA chief under President Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and the NSA under George W. Bush, were very outspoken supporters of Hillary Clinton. In fact, Michael Morell went to The New York Times, and Michael Hayden went to The Washington Post, during the campaign to praise Hillary Clinton and to say that Donald Trump had become a recruit of Russia. The CIA and the intelligence community were vehemently in support of Clinton and vehemently opposed to Trump, from the beginning. And the reason was, was because they liked Hillary Clinton’s policies better than they liked Donald Trump’s. One of the main priorities of the CIA for the last five years has been a proxy war in Syria, designed to achieve regime change with the Assad regime. Hillary Clinton was not only for that, she was critical of Obama for not allowing it to go further, and wanted to impose a no-fly zone in Syria and confront the Russians. Donald Trump took exactly the opposite view. He said we shouldn’t care who rules Syria; we should allow the Russians, and even help the Russians, kill ISIS and al-Qaeda and other people in Syria. So, Trump’s agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted. Clinton’s was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they’ve been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him. There’s claims that they’re withholding information from him, on the grounds that they don’t think he should have it and can be trusted with it. They are empowering themselves to enact policy. Now, I happen to think that the Trump presidency is extremely dangerous. You just listed off in your news—in your newscast that led the show, many reasons. They want to dismantle the environment. They want to eliminate the safety net. They want to empower billionaires. They want to enact bigoted policies against Muslims and immigrants and so many others. And it is important to resist them. And there are lots of really great ways to resist them, such as getting courts to restrain them, citizen activism and, most important of all, having the Democratic Party engage in self-critique to ask itself how it can be a more effective political force in the United States after it has collapsed on all levels. That isn’t what this resistance is now doing. What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that. Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it. And yet that’s what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons’ allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it’s incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that. AMY GOODMAN: And The Wall Street Journal's report that says now intelligence officials are not giving President Trump all the information because they're concerned about what he’ll do with it, not to mention intelligence agencies of other countries deeply concerned about what Trump will do with it, and particularly concerned about what he might share with Russia? GLENN GREENWALD: Well, so, first of all, there’s a media issue here, which is that if you look at The Wall Street Journal report, it’s pretty much exactly the same as every other significant report about Russia over the last six months, many of which have proven to be completely false. It’s based on anonymous officials making extremely vague claims. Even The Wall Street Journal says, "We don’t know who’s doing this, withholding information. We don’t know how much information is being withheld." Secondly, the idea that Donald Trump is some kind of an agent or a spy of Russia, or that he is being blackmailed by Russia and is going to pass secret information to the Kremlin and endanger American agents on purpose, is an incredibly crazy claim that has been nowhere proven to be true. It reminds me of the kind of things Glenn Beck used to say about Obama while he stood at his chalkboard and drew those—those unstable charts that he drew, these wild conspiracy theories that are without evidence. We ought to have a serious, sober, structured investigation of the claims that Russia hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails and that there were improper ties between Donald Trump and the Russians, and that ought to be made public so that we can see the information. But this constant media obsession of leaking whatever someone whispers to them about Donald Trump and Russia, because they know it will get their reporters huge numbers of retweets on Twitter and tons of traffic by people who are being fed what they want to hear, is really feeding into the worst kind of hysteria and even fake news that the media says they’re trying to combat. These are really serious claims that merit serious investigation, and that’s exactly what we’re not getting. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, in a recent piece in The Intercept by one of your colleagues, they write, "If in fact all of this is 'non-sense,' Trump has the power as president to make that clear immediately—by declassifying all government intercepts of communications between Russian nationals and anyone in his orbit." So, do you think, Glenn, that Trump ought to be doing that? GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, it’s an interesting point, because, for example, there have been lots of claims made about the communications that General Flynn had with Russian diplomats and what these transcripts supposedly reflect, and yet nobody has seen the transcripts. We’ve seen little bits and pieces of them. We haven’t seen the whole transcript. We ought to see that whole transcript. And my colleague, Jon Schwarz, who wrote that piece, is absolutely right that it’s within President Trump’s power to order it instantly declassified. There’s no review of that decision, and then it could be made public. On the other hand, it is really bizarre, just as a reporter who has been in the middle of a controversy for the last four years about the leaking of classified information, to hear people suggest that the president now ought to take the most sensitive intercepts that the government is capable of obtaining, which is how they eavesdrop on Russian officials inside the Kremlin, and just toss them to the public like there’s no problem at all with doing that. I think that what you’re seeing here is this really disturbing double standard, that all we’ve heard since the war on terror is that classified information is sacred and anybody who leaks it is treasonous and satanic and belongs in jail for a really long time, and now classified information seems to be something that’s just a plaything, like something that we just toss around for fun if it serves a certain agenda. And I think that that’s one of the issues that’s bothering me about the way this discourse is unfolding. AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, we’re going to break, then come back and ask you about the Trump-Netanyahu news conference yesterday. We’re also going to want to talk about Yemen and the news that the Pentagon is considering U.S. ground troops in Syria. This is Democracy Now! We’re talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 4, 2017 22:25:34 GMT -6
from PaulCraigRoberts.org www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/02/03/leftwing-placed-trash-can-history-paul-craig-roberts/ The Leftwing Has Placed Itself In The Trash Can Of HistoryFeb 3, 2017 by Paul Craig Roberts "At a time when the Western world desperately needs alternative voices to the neoliberals, the neoconservatives, the presstitutes and the Trump de-regulationists, there are none. The Western leftwing has gone insane. The voices being raised against Trump, who does need voices raised against him, are so hypocritical as to reflect less on Trump than on those with raised voices. Sharon Kelly McBride, speaking for Human Rights First, sent me an email saying that Trump stands on the wrong side of “America’s ideals” by his prohibition of Muslim immigrants into the US. My question to McBride is: Where were you and Human Rights First when the Bush/Cheney/Obama regime was murdering, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and displacing millions of Muslims in seven countries over the course of 4 presidential terms? Why is it OK to slaughter millions of peoples, destroy their homes and villages, wreck their cities as long as it is not Donald Trump who is doing it? Where does Human Rights First get off. Just another fake website, or is McBride seizing the opportunity to prostitute Human Rights First in hopes of donations from the DNC, the Soros’ NGOs, the Isreal Lobby, and the ruling One Percent? Money speaks, and alternative voices need money in order to speak. As so many Americans are indifferent to the quality of information that they get, many alternative voices are thrown back to relying on whatever money is available. Generally, it is the money of disinformation, of information that controls the explanations in ways that favor and enhance the ruling oligarchy. Is this the position in which McBride has placed Human Rights First? Turn now to Truthout. This website says that Trump is demonizing Muslims by denying them immigration into the US. Where has Truthout been for the past 16 years? Did Truthout not notice that the George W. Bush regime said “We have to kill them (Muslims) over there before they (Muslims) come over here.” Did Truthout not notice that Obama continued the policy of “killing them (Muslims) over there”? How insane, how corrupt, does Truthout have to be to say that it is Trump who is demonizing Muslims? Trump has not said that he wants to “kill them over there.” He has said that if the masses of peoples we have dislocated and whose families we have murdered want to come here, they might wish to exact revenge. Having made Muslims our enemies, it makes no sense to admit vast numbers of them. According to Bush and Obama, we are supposed “to kill them over there,” not bring them “over here” where they can kill us as a payback for the murder machine we have run against them. This is common sense. Yet, the deranged left says it is “racism.” What happens to a country when the alternative voice is even more stupid and corrupt than the government’s voice?"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 22, 2017 23:21:43 GMT -6
from WallStreetOnParade.com wallstreetonparade.com/2017/01/obamas-perpetual-farewell-tour/Obama’s Perpetual Farewell Tour Jan 19, 2017 By Pam Martens "Hopeless -- Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (Book Jacket photo)The man who was compared to a Messiah when he won the presidential election in 2008 has been on an excruciatingly long goodbye tour. First there was his farewell speech to the United Nations in September. Next came his farewell tour across Europe in November – the Messiah’s last foreign trip. Then there was his farewell speech in the U.S. Yesterday, there was a tortuously vacuous farewell press conference, which toward the end, had the feeling that actors from central casting had replaced real journalists in the press room in order to memorialize the greatness of this President. Whenever I think about this President, I think of Bruce Dixon, the Managing Editor of the Black Agenda Report in 2008 during Obama’s first presidential campaign. The Black Agenda Report writes for black Americans. Dixon wrote the following in February 2008: We were also not among the converted as a result of spending months conducting a forensic examination of Obama’s campaign accounts. In May of 2008, we wrote the following: CounterPunch was also not among the converted. It published an anthology of articles on the red flags in the Obama candidacy, titled Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. CounterPunch editors, Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, describe the books as follows: Obama’s farewell press conference yesterday evoked images of his first press conference on November 7, 2008 as President-elect. On Obama’s right stood Larry Summers. On his left stood Robert Rubin. The President-elect was bookended by the very men who had played outsized roles in the events leading to the Wall Street financial collapse that was happening at that very moment. Summers and Rubin were standing there to symbolize that they would play important roles in shaping Obama policy. It gave new meaning to failing up. Both Rubin and Summers had served as U.S. Treasury Secretary in the Bill Clinton administration. Both had pushed for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and deregulation of derivatives, two key events that led to the epic crash of the U.S. financial system in 2008. Rubin had gone directly from the U.S. Treasury to the Board of Citigroup, the prime beneficiary of the deregulation, and collected over $125 million in compensation over the next decade. Citigroup is where Rubin went. Where Rubin had come from was Goldman Sachs, following a 26-year career there. (Goldman Sachs’ headquarters is currently under protest as a result of its tentacles extending broadly into every nook and corner of the Donald Trump administration.) Today, the opinion pages of Bloomberg News carries a harsh assessment of Obama’s eight years with this headline: “Obama’s Failing Was a Lack of Ambition.” But that’s not what happened at all. As we now know through the hard evidence of emails leaked by WikiLeaks, Obama was the sock puppet of Wall Street. (See related articles below.) Trump’s Goldman Sachs administration is simply the cleanup crew – and we don’t mean that in a good way. Related Articles: WikiLeaks: Citigroup Exec Gave Obama Recommendation of Hillary for State, Eric Holder for DOJWikiLeaks Bombshell: Emails Show Citigroup Had Major Role in Shaping and Staffing Obama’s First TermChanging the Culture of Wall Street Requires Ending Continuity Government in Washington"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 22, 2017 23:10:26 GMT -6
from The Huffington Post www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/sorry-but-trump-is-right_b_13954410.htmlSorry, but Trump is RightJan 4, 2017 by Ian Fletcher "Never have I seen a political issue so susceptible to tricky conceptual sleight-of-hand and weasel arguments as America’s trade mess. Specifically, our trade deficit. This deficit, which has fluctuated around the $500 billion per year mark for a decade, is real money, period. It is actual wealth that somebody pays to somebody else, and that somebody then owns and somebody doesn’t. That’s how money works. It isn’t Monopoly money, “paper” wealth, a accounting fiction, or any other category of nullity. But free traders persist in explaining how it somehow, mysteriously, isn’t real, doesn’t count, doesn’t affect anything important, etc. Case in point: Peter Navarro, the newly appointed head of Trump’s National Trade Council, was just bemoaning it. But then he got attacked by people like Dan Ikenson of the “conservative” Heritage Foundation and Noah Smith of Bloomberg News. Navarro is right and his opponents are wrong. So it’s worth reviewing, one more time, the inescapable basic logic underlying trade deficits, which makes clear why they can’t not matter. Here’s how trade works: Step 1) Nations engage in trade. Americans sell people in other nations goods and buy goods in return. “Goods” in this context means not just physical objects but also services. Step 2) One cannot get goods for free. So when Americans get goods from foreigners, we have to give them something in return. These things are represented by tickets called “dollars,” but it’s ultimately the things we trade. Step 3) There are only three things we can give in return: a) Goods we produce today. b) Goods we produced yesterday. c) Goods we will produce tomorrow. This list is exhaustive. If a 4th alternative exists, then we must be trading with Santa Claus, because we are getting goods for nothing. Here’s what a) - c) above mean concretely: a) is when we sell foreigners jet airplanes. b) is when we sell foreigners office buildings in the U.S. c) is when we go into debt to foreigners. b) and c) happen when America runs a trade deficit. Because we are not covering the value of our imports with a) the value of our exports, we must make up the difference by either b) selling assets or c) assuming debt. If either is happening, America is either gradually being sold off to foreigners or gradually sinking into debt to them. Xenophobia is not necessary for this to be a bad thing, only bookkeeping: Americans are poorer simply because we own less and owe more. As I said, it’s real money. Its effects - unemployment, deindustrialization, indebtedness - can be complex, and are debatable. But the underlying reality isn’t going away. And yes...President Trump should do something about it."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 22, 2017 13:09:17 GMT -6
from Strategic-culture.org www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/12/31/obama-failed-presidency.htmlObama’s Failed PresidencyDec 31, 2016 by Eric Zuesse "I’m a former lifelong Democrat, stating here a clear and incontestable fact: Barack Obama is a failed President. It’s true not just because of the sad realities such as that « Top Ex-White House Economist Admits 94 % Of All New Jobs Under Obama Were Part-Time» — or, as the economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Katz wrote in the original of that study: «94 percent of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements». («Alternative work arrangements» referred there to Americans who were involuntarily working only part-time jobs — they simply couldn’t find full-time, though that’s what they wanted.) In other words: Obama’s failure isn’t just because of America’s increasingly sales-clerk, and burger-flipping, workforce. And Obama’s failure is also not just because « Poverty Rose In 96 % Of U.S. House Districts, During Obama’s Presidency». (However, that reality turned out to be decisive in Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump on November 8th, as Nate Cohn pointed out in The New York Times on December 23rd, headlining, «How the Obama Coalition Crumbled, Leaving an Opening for Trump». Hillary was running on Obama’s poor record.) Obama’s failure is also because of other important reasons. Among them is the uncounted thousands of people who were killed in, and the uncounted millions of people who became refugees from, the places where Obama (or else his installed regimes) bombed and caused the residents to either die or flee. George W. Bush’s destructions of Iraq and even Afghanistan were now being followed by the destructions of Libya by Obama and Sarkozy, and of Syria by Obama and Saud and Thani and Erdogan, who armed the tens of thousands of jihadists and sent them into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad — and Bush’s destructions were followed also by Obama’s keeping in power the barbaric junta-regime that replaced the democratically elected Honduran Presiden Manuel Zelaya on 28 June 2009 shortly after Obama entered the White House (and this junta-regime, in turn, caused Honduras’s murder-rate to soar 50% to become the world’s highest, which then caused hundreds of thousands of Hondurans to flee and become undocumented U.S. immigrants, against which Donald Trump campaigned). The Obama regime has thus created far more misery outside America, than inside it. Failures such as those didn’t cost Hillary Clinton many (if any) votes (because most voters didn’t even know about these foreign-affairs matters), but those failures were actually even bigger than Obama’s failures in purely domestic U.S. policy matters (which voters do know about). Trump campaigned against ‘illegal immigrants’, but he never even called attention to those people’s fleeing the hells that the U.S. regime had created in not only Honduras but earlier in Guatemala and El Salvador — coups and U.S.-trained death squads. In noting Obama’s failures, I’m not a Republican; I’m no one who is condemning Obama for his allegedly being a ‘Marxist' ‘Muslim’, or some other imaginary distraction from the reality (a reality which is too Republican for Republicans to be able to criticize — so, they’ve insteadignored that reality, and cited fake ‘reasons’ against him, including ‘death panels’ and other fabrications, which Republicans then forgot about after their fraudulent allegations against him became clear, to all but insane people, as being just Republican lies). Obama is a failure not because he wasn’t sufficiently conservative or ‘Christian' (as Republicans had constantly accused him of having been), but instead because he wasn’t sufficiently progressive (nowhere close to being a progressive) — and, in many ways, he was actually far more conservative than any of his duplicitous campaign-rhetoric had pretended him to be. He’s an extraordinarily gifted liar — he was phenomenally successful at that. And I am not blaming Obama for congressional Republicans’ having been more obsessed with making him be a failed President, than they were interested in making America be a successful nation. Republicans lie at least as much as he does, just not nearly as skillfully. (They especially can’t feign compassion as skillfully as he.) This article thus does not blame him for what the overt Republicans were doing to cripple the little good he had actually tried to achieve — such as closing Guantanamo. It’s only about Obama’s failure. Obama’s failure was all his own — it’s not because of the good things that Republicans had blocked him from doing; it is instead because of the horrible things (such as his failed TPP, TTIP and TISA trade-treaties, and his successful 2011 killing of Gaddafi, and 2014 coup in Ukraine) that were central to his actual agenda — a conservative, even reactionary, agenda, which favored the interests of the hundreds of billionaires who control U.S.-based international corporations, above the interests of the 300+ million American people, whom the U.S. President is supposed to be serving. I voted for Barack Obama both times, because both of his opponents («Bomb bomb bomb Iran» McCain in 2008, and «#1 geopolitical foe» Romney in 2012) were clearly determined to focus America’s enormous military expenditures away from exterminating the jihadists and their Saudi funders, toward instead conquering Iran (McCain) and Russia (Romney), and also because Republicans — throughout at least the period extending from 1910 to 2010 — consistently had, in fact, produced a record of far less success with the U.S. economy, than did Democrats, and especially because neither McCain nor Romney had repudiated the very worst President in U.S. history (at least prior to Obama) and his atrocious record of lies and needless bloodshed and invasions: George W. Bush — Bush’s Party instead reaffirmed that monstrous President. And, consequently, I never expected Barack Obama to turn out to have been, quite possibly, even a worse President than Bush. Nobody expected that — except Republicans, for whom Bush wasn’t bad enough to satisfy them (and certainly not bad enough for them to apologize for — so, they did not apologize for him).... the Obama ‘Justice’ Department scored an all-time low number both of financial institution fraud prosecutions, and of white-collar-crime prosecutions. Obama came into power immediately after an economic crash that was loaded especially with financial-institution frauds. He protected the banksters. So, financial-executive-fraud prosecutions didn’t soar, like they should have; instead they plunged. Like Obama told the Wall Street bigs, near the start of his regime, on 27 March 2009, in private, inside the White House: «My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. … I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you… I’m going to shield you». And that’s what he did. And, on 20 September 2016, Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America’s Future, headlined « Banks Used Low Wages, Job Insecurity To Force Employees To Commit Fraud», so there was no way that the employees could keep their jobs except to do the crimes that they were being virtually forced by their bosses to do. The criminality was actually at the very top — where Obama had promised «I’m protecting you». So, the TARP’s Inspector General urged, on 26 October 2016 (since the President was refusing to prosecute those people), «that Congress remove the insulation around Wall Street CEOs and other high-level officials by requiring the CEO, CFO and certain other senior executives to sign an annual certification that they have conducted due diligence within their organization and can certify that that there is no criminal conduct or civil fraud in their organization». The Special Inspector General of TARP, Christy Goldsmith Romero, was proposing this, as being the way to make prosecutions, of these top-level fraud-executives, so easy that the Obama Administration’s claims — that there was no top-level fraud that could be prosecuted — would be an even more blatant, absurdly false, lie, than it had been. If this country were Ukraine, or even Russia, then Americans (trained by decades of a CIA-controlled ‘free press’) would say «Oh, of course those countries are corrupt, but America isn’t like that». But, at least under Barack Obama, ‘we’ were that. This was America — and ‘our’ President was protecting the elite fraudsters, instead of prosecuting them. Nonetheless, anyone who would say that the American people are not better off now than they were at the end of Bush’s disastrous Presidency would be either misinformed or lying, because there’s lots of data showing that, finally, eight years after Bush, Americans are better off than they were at the end of Bush’s miserable eight years (even though not yet better off than Americans were prior to Bush’s 2007-2008 crash). And the Administration published on December 15th its record of ‘successes’ «The 2017 Economic Report of the President» which was real but not adjusted for the fact that Obama came into office at the pit of the economic crash, which means that such ‘successes’ are almost inevitable, hardly a credit to Obama. But yet, the reality stands, that the Obama economic recovery was the weakest in the entire post-World-War-II period. Plus, the federal debt doubled on his watch, even while, as that Economic Report mentioned only in passing: «The United States has seen a faster increase in inequality in recent decades than any of the major advanced economies, and despite the historic progress made over the last eight years, the level of U.S. inequality remains high». Normally, after an economic crash, economic inequality reduces; but under Obama it remained at or near its pre-crash high. It was an economic record (and an invasion and coup record) of which any Republican President could justifiably have been proud (since conservatives favor inequality, a caste system) — but no Democrat could (except fake ones — such as Obama and the Clintons)."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 19, 2017 0:02:05 GMT -6
I recently sent a letter to congress, suggesting changes to Small Business Tax policy. I would like the members of this forum to read and critique this letter. Do you agree? How can I rewrite the document to help get my point across? As a middle aged engineer, I pointed out that age discrimination is "alive and well", especially in large to medium sized corporations, towards the end of the letter. Personally, I would like to be a productive, self employed member of society and not be forced to retire early without the proper retirement resources (i.e. live above the poverty level).... This is especially important for the middle aged (50+ year old) tech worker, since the tech industry is full of age discrimination. A middle aged tech worker is considered a dinosaur instead of a wise experienced worker (contrast this to the political, medical or legal professions). Here are some examples from my personal experience: while applying for tech jobs, I was getting no interest from job prospects until I removed my first 10 years of job experience, and removed the dates from my college graduation information....So Lets give the middle aged worker a chance to create their own jobs of the future.... Thanks for listening to me vent Amen
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 18, 2017 23:52:46 GMT -6
from PaulCraigRoberts.com www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/01/18/remember-don-siegelman/REMEMBER DON SIEGELMANJan 18, 2017 by Paul Craig Roberts "I hope that President Obama commuted Manning’s unjust sentence not as a sop to transgenders, but as a sign that a bit of humanity still remains in the outgoing war criminal president. Manning did his duty and reported US war crimes by releasing the astounding video of US troops murdering innocent people and journalists walking along a street and then murdering a father and his two young children who stopped to help the wounded left on the street by the US helicopter gunship or drone or whatever the murder device was. The video reveals US troops playing video kill games with real people. Manning’s reward was to be held for two years in solidary confinement in torture-like conditions, which little doubt left Manning fundamentally impaired. This illegal and unconstitutional treatment was followed by a kangeroo trial in which Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison for doing his duty. Julian Assange, also falsely accused and mistreated, must not turn himself over in exchange for the commutation of Manning’s sentence, or he will suffere the same fate. Any truth-teller who falls into the hands of the US government is doomed. The US government hates nothing worse than it hates the truth. Obama’s failures as president would fill an encyclopedia. Obama might have destroyed the Democratic Party by his failure to commute the sentence of falsely charged and falsely convicted Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Indeed, Obama could have ordered a US Justice Department investigation that almost certainly would have resulted in prison sentences for the Republican Alabama politicians, Republican US attorneys, Republican federal judges and Republican operative Karl Rove who participated in one of the most obvious frameups in human history. More than 100 Democratic and Republican former attorneys general and officials condemned the prosecution of Siegelman as politically-inspired prosecutorial misconduct. Yet Obama did nothing. By doing nothing for Siegelman, Obama demonstrated to every Democrat that they were on their own if they won elections in Republican political strongholds. Don Siegelman is the only person in the history of Alabama to have been elected to serve in all of the top four statewide elected offices. He was very popular and did extraordinary good for the people and state of Alabama. That the Republicans were able to remove from office and imprison the most decent man in Alabama public life despite eight years of a Democratic President and Department of Justice is a surefire indication that no Democratic politician can trust the Democratic Party to come to his aid when he comes under attack from the Karl Rove Gang. "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jan 14, 2017 14:06:55 GMT -6
from Chris Hedges at truthdig.com www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_real_purpose_of_the_us_governments_report_on_alleged_hacking_by_russiThe Real Purpose of the US Govt’s Report on Alleged Hacking by Russia Jan 8, 2017 by Chris Hedges "Some thoughts on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election,” the newly released declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 1. The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment. The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media. 2. The second task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist smear campaign against independent media, including Truthdig, as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian government. The demise of the English programming of Al-Jazeera and TeleSur, along with the collapse of the nation’s public broadcasting, designed to give a voice to those not beholden to corporate or party interests, leaves RT America and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! as the only two electronic outlets with a national reach that are willing to give a platform to critics of corporate power and imperialism such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Ralph Nader, Medea Benjamin, Cornel West, Kshama Sawant, myself and others. Seven pages of the report were dedicated to RT America, on which I have a show called “On Contact.” The report vastly inflated the cable network’s reach and influence. It also included a few glaring errors, including the statement that “RT introduced two new shows—‘Breaking the Set’ on 4 September and ‘Truthseeker’ on 2 November—both overwhelmingly focused on criticism of the US and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent.” “Breaking the Set,” with Abby Martin, was taken off the air two years ago. It could hardly be tarred with costing Hillary Clinton the election. The barely contained rage of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at the recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on foreign cyber threats was visible when he spat out that RT was “promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights, et cetera.” His anger was a glimpse into how the establishment seethes with hatred for dissidents. Clapper has lied in the past. He perjured himself in March 2013 when, three months before the revelations of wholesale state surveillance leaked by Snowden, he assured Congress that the National Security Agency was not collecting “any type of data” on the American public. After the corporate state shuts down RT, it will go after Democracy Now! and the handful of progressive sites, including this one, that give these dissidents space. The goal is censorship. 3. The third task of the report is to justify the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a violation of the promise Ronald Reagan made to the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO in Eastern Europe opened up an arms market for the war industry. It made those businesses billions of dollars. New NATO members must buy Western arms that can be integrated into the NATO arsenal. These sales, which are bleeding the strained budgets of countries such as Poland, are predicated on potential hostilities with Russia. If Russia is not a threat, the arms sales plummet. War is a racket. 4. The final task of the report is to give the Democratic Party plausible cover for the catastrophic election defeat it suffered. Clinton initially blamed FBI Director James Comey for her loss before switching to the more easily demonized Putin. The charge of Russian interference essentially boils down to the absurd premise that perhaps hundreds of thousands of Clinton supporters suddenly decided to switch their votes to Trump when they read the leaked emails of Podesta. Either that or they tuned in to RT America and decided to vote for the Green Party. The Democratic Party leadership cannot face, and certainly cannot publicly admit, that its callous betrayal of the working and middle class triggered a nationwide revolt that resulted in the election of Trump. It has been pounded since President Barack Obama took office, losing 68 seats in the House, 12 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships. It lost more than 1,000 elected positions between 2008 and 2012 nationwide. Since 2010, Republicans have replaced 900 Democratic state legislators. If this was a real party, the entire leadership would be sacked. But it is not a real party. It is the shell of a party propped up by corporate money and hyperventilating media. The Democratic Party must maintain the fiction of liberalism just as the Republican Party must maintain the fiction of conservatism. These two parties, however, belong to one party—the corporate party. They will work in concert, as seen by the alliance between Republican leaders such as McCain and Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, to get rid of Trump, silence all dissent, enrich the war industry and promote the farce they call democracy." Welcome to our annus horribilis.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 24, 2016 8:52:23 GMT -6
from Yahoo Finance / AP finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-picks-china-hawk-lead-white-house-trade-224827614--finance.htmlTrump picks China hawk to lead new White House trade councilDec 21, 2016 by Paul Wiseman "In another sign that he intends to shake up relations with China, President-elect Donald Trump named economist Peter Navarro to lead a newly created White House council on trade. The University of California-Irvine professor, who advised Trump during the campaign, has sharply criticized China's economic and military policies in books and videos. In addition to leading the new White House National Trade Council, Navarro will be director of trade and industrial policy. In a statement, the Trump transition team said the creation of the council "demonstrates the president-elect's determination to make American manufacturing great again." Trump says China's unfair trade practices are responsible for wiping out American factory jobs. U.S. manufacturers have cut 5 million jobs since 2000. Trump has threatened to impose taxes on Chinese imports and to label China a "currency manipulator" for allegedly pushing its currency lower to give Chinese exporters a price advantage. Navarro, author of "Death By China," also endorses a hard line toward China. Navarro has dismissed warnings that imposing sanctions on China could trigger a destructive trade war if China retaliates by targeting U.S. imports. He and Wilbur Ross — an investment banker tapped to be Trump's Commerce secretary — have argued that China and other U.S. trade partners have more to lose in a trade conflict because they depend so much on the U.S. market. Trump has already rattled U.S.-China relations. Earlier this month, he broke protocol by taking a call from the president of Taiwan. China views Taiwan as a renegade province and considers any acknowledgement that it has its own head of state as a grave insult. Trump also said he did not feel bound by the longstanding "one-China" policy. Under that policy the United States recognizes Beijing as the sole government of China and acknowledges its claim to Taiwan but regards the status of the self-governing island as unsettled." ____
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 24, 2016 8:42:38 GMT -6
Trump has made his best nomination so far, by appointing anti-free traitor Peter Navarro to a lower level cabinet position.
There's some question about how much influence he'll have, since his position is subordinate to Commerce and Treasury Depts--at least on paper.
However, Treasury and Commerce secretaries are also subordinate to Trump himself. As such, it's uncertain how this will play out.
But appointing Navarro is certainly a positive sign, even if only symbolic, regarding Trump's stated opposition to unrestricted Free Trade and job outsourcing.rom Yahoo Finance www.yahoo.com/finance/news/the-biggest-fight-on-trade-may-be-among-trumps-own-team-190632987.htmlThe biggest fight on trade may be among Trump’s own teamDec 22, 2016 by Rick Newman "Donald Trump is speaking with 2 voices on trade, one of the hot-button issues that propelled him to victory on Election Day. Trump, the incoming president, alarmed free traders with protectionist rhetoric during the campaign, vowing to impose tariffs on Chinese imports and invoke other punitive measures if the nation’s trade deficit doesn’t improve. He has now backed that rhetoric by naming economist Peter Navarro to a new group called the White House National Trade Council. Navarro, a business professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of “Death by China” and many other books and articles claiming that Chinese mercantilism is decimating the US economy. He co-authored candidate Trump’s economic plan and fueled many of his protectionist ideas. Business groups hate Trump’s threat to shake up US trading relationships, since that would likely provoke retaliatory measures by China and other trading partners subject to new US restrictions. Most Fortune 1000 companies have some exposure to the Chinese economy. Navarro’s ideas, if implemented, could shut down an important source of growth for those businesses and thousands of smaller companies dependent on them. But the hawkish Navarro is an outlier, even in the Trump administration. Other Trump nominees are more comfortable with free trade and loath to risk a trade war with China, or anybody. Private-equity billionaire Wilbur Ross, Trump’s pick to head the Commerce Department, insists there will be no trade wars and says the main effort will be urging other countries to buy more US products. Ross has personally benefited from relatively free access to the Chinese market, and he knows how tit-for-tat sanctions would hurt American companies and the US economy. Trump’s Treasury nominee, Steve Mnuchin, is a Goldman Sachs alum and Wall Street establishmentarian who seems unlikely to threaten the global economic order that has enriched the shareholder class. And Trump’s pick to be ambassador to China, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, comes form a state that has benefited from open trade with China and other countries through agricultural exports that account for 22% of the jobs in Iowa. So Trump has set up a dichotomy on trade within his own economic team. The Trump transition team says Navarro’s trade council will generate “innovative strategies in trade negotiations,” study the evolution of the manufacturing sector and find better ways to match blue-collar workers with available jobs. On paper, such councils are subordinate to Cabinet-level officials such as the Commerce and Treasury secretaries. So Navarro will be an adviser while Ross and Mnuchin will be policymakers more likely to determine final outcomes. Trump, of course, will be the ultimate decider, and Navarro or anybody else inside or outside the White House could end up being more influential than Ross or Mnuchin, if he or she gets Trump’s ear at the right time. But Trump may be setting his economic team up for internal dissension if Navarro and his council feel ignored, or if Trump’s Cabinet picks feel undermined by lower-ranking White House operatives. Few administrations escape first-year palace intrigue as various appointees jockey for power, and Trump’s freewheeling, unconventional approach could generate more fireworks than usual. A year from now, whoever is still around can probably be declared the winner." --------------------------
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 18, 2016 23:45:00 GMT -6
sjlendman.blogspot.com/sjlendman.blogspot.com/2016/12/obama-vows-to-prove-unprovable.html Obama Vows to Prove the Unprovable Sunday, December 18, 2016 by Stephen Lendman A long ago disgraced US president appears part of an ongoing coup attempt to deny Trump the office he won - a terrifying scenario heading for full-blown tyranny if a way isn’t found to stop it. If successful, things will never be the same again. Be scared. Be very scared. Get involved to save the remnants of remaining freedoms before they’re gone and it’s too late. At his yearend press conference, the last one of his presidency, he vowed to prove the unprovable, saying: “We will provide evidence that we can safely provide, that does not compromise sources and methods. But I’ll be honest with you, when you’re talking about cybersecurity, a lot of it is classified and we are not going to provide it, because the way we catch folks is by knowing certain things about them that they don’t want us to know.” “The intelligence I’ve seen gives me great confidence in their assessment that the Russians carried out this hack - the hack of the DNC and the hack of John Podesta.” Fact: Obama lied like he always does. No US election hacking occurred - not by Russia or anyone else. Fact: Leaks from disenchanted Democrats opposed to Hillary’s candidacy supplied information to WikiLeaks - insiders, not foreign sources. Fact: Obama knows this, yet lied anyway, claiming nonexistent hacks. Fact: Whenever his so-called investigation is completed, he’ll provide no credible evidence of what didn’t occur, just rubbish claiming otherwise, most likely nothing, claiming “classified” information won’t be released. Obama barely stopped short of blaming Putin for what happened, saying “not much happens in Russia without” his involvement. Neither he or anyone in his government or serving it in any way interfered in America’s election. The charge is absurd on its face. It would be laughable if not for its serious implications - an attempt to stoke confrontation with another nuclear super-power, along with full-blown homeland tyranny if the coup plot succeeds. Obama: “Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not do this to us because we can do stuff to you.” Fact: His goal is heading things closer to war on Russia, along with denying Trump the office he won, wanting losing candidate Hillary installed as president, the way fascist dictatorships work. After his press conference, he left for a Hawaii vacation while parts of the world he set ablaze burn, likely advancing the anti-Trump coup plot, the likes of which never happened in America before. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Dec 12, 2016 23:20:57 GMT -6
from the Fiscal Times Trump Continues to Aggravate Free-Traitor Conservativeswww.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/12/12/Big-Free-Trader-Trump-Aggravates-Free-Trade-ConservativesDec 12, 2016 By Rob Garver "President-elect Donald Trump over the weekend continued to exasperate free-trade conservatives, declaring in an interview with Fox News that allowing businesses to locate their production facilities where they want isn’t free trade, but rather, “dumb trade.” The comments came in a discussion with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace when Trump was asked if his policy of personally intervening when individual businesses decide to relocate production to other countries is consistent with Republican priorities. Trump last week pressured executives at the parent company of Carrier Corp., which makes appliances including air conditioners and furnaces, not to go forward with a plan to move one of the company’s Indiana-based plants to Mexico. He won a partial concession, saving hundreds of jobs, at least temporarily. Wallace began by pointing out that Trump himself runs a company, and asking how he would have reacted if President Barack Obama had called him up and said, “Donald, this is how I want you to do business.” Trump: I would have been honored. Wallace: Honored? Trump: I don’t have to do it myself. We have great people. We have top, top smart people. But it’s so easy to do, and we’re going to have to impose a major tax on companies that leave, build their products and think they’re going to sell it right through our border like we’re a bunch of jerks. Wallace: But what about the free market, sir? Trump: That’s not free market when they go out and they move and they sell back into our country. Related: Economic Growth Alone Won’t Make America Great Again Wallace: But that’s the free market. They made a decision-- Trump: No. That’s the dumb market. That’s the dumb market. I’m a big free trader, but it has to be fair. So what’s happened is we have lost, over a period of years -- short years -- 70,000 factories in this country. Chris, 70,000. I always tell people I think it’s a typo...we’re being stripped of our jobs. Trump went on to say that his preference is to entice businesses to stay in the U.S. by reducing taxes and slashing regulations. However, he said, faced with companies that insist on moving overseas, “the way you stop it is you impose a tax.” The President-elect has suggested that an appropriate levy would be 35% on goods that American companies produce overseas and try to sell back into the U.S. market. Trump’s trade position, for traditional free-trade conservatives, is at best frustrating. At worst, it’s maddening."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2016 12:59:04 GMT -6
as referenced in the previous post: Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" from Wikipedia "The Report on the Subject of Manufactures, generally referred to by its shortened title Report on Manufactures, is the third report, and magnum opus, of American Founding Father and 1st U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. It was presented to Congress on December 5, 1791 It laid forth economic principles rooted in both the Mercantilist System of Elizabeth I's England and the practices of Jean-Baptiste Colbert of France. The principal ideas of the Report would later be incorporated into the "American System" program by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky and his Whig Party. Abraham Lincoln, who called himself a "Henry Clay tariff Whig" during his early years, would later make the principles cornerstones, together with opposition to the institution and expansion of slavery, of the fledgling Republican Party. Hamilton's ideas formed the basis for the American School of economics. Economic plan[edit] Hamilton reasoned that to secure American independence, the United States needed to have a sound policy of encouraging the growth of manufacturing and secure its future as a permanent feature of the economic system of the nation. He argued these could be achieved through bounties or subsidies to industry, regulation of trade with moderate tariffs (not intended to discourage imports but to raise revenue to support American manufacturing through subsidy), and other government encouragement. These policies would not only promote the growth of manufacturing but provide diversified employment opportunities and promote immigration into the young United States. They would also expand the applications of technology and science for all quarters of the economy, including agriculture. The tariff[edit] Hamilton reasoned that tariffs issued in moderation would raise revenue to fund the nation. The tariff could also be used to encourage domestic (or national) manufacturing and growth of the economy by applying the funds raised in part towards subsidies (called bounties in his time) to manufacturers. Hamilton sought to use the tariff to: protect infant American industry for a short term until it could compete; raise revenue to pay the expenses of government; raise revenue to directly support manufacturing through bounties (subsidies) Subsidies to industry[edit] Hamilton reasoned that bounties (subsidies) to industry, which would rely on funds raised by moderate tariffs, would be the best means of growing manufacturing without decreasing supply or increasing prices of goods. Such encouragement through direct support would make American enterprise competitive and independent along with the nation as a whole. In part subsidies would be used to: encourage the spirit of enterprise, innovation, and invention within the nation; support internal improvements, including roads and canals to increase and encourage domestic commerce; grow the infant United States into a manufacturing power independent of control by foreign powers through reliance on their goods for domestic and especially defense supplies. Adoption by Congress[edit] Though Congress refused to accept Hamilton's proposals in 1791, due to opposition from James Madison and his supporters, much of Hamilton's third report would later be adopted by the United States Congress despite continued opposition to the support of industry through subsidy. Both sides agreed that manufacturing independence was desirable and necessary but disagreed on how to obtain it. The Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Party's main objection to subsidy was their fear that subsidy would lead to corruption and favoritism of certain sections of the new nation over others; namely the north over the agrarian south. This divide (north vs. south) would come up again and again in issues of economic policy until the outbreak of the American Civil War. It is often thought that Hamilton's report was completely ignored, but in fact "Hamilton worked to ensure that Congress enacted virtually every tariff recommendation in the report within five months of its delivery."[1] Hamilton's revenue-based trade policy, with its more moderate tariffs, meant that, by 1794, manufacturers had switched their support from the Federalists to the Republicans.[2] Opposition to the Report[edit] Leading opponents of Alexander Hamilton's economic plan included Thomas Jefferson (until later years) and James Madison, who were opposed to the use of subsidy to industry along with most of their fledgling Democratic-Republican Party. Instead of bounties they reasoned in favor of high tariffs and restrictions on imports to increase manufacturing; which interestingly was favored by the manufacturers themselves who desired protection of their home market.[citation needed] Although the Jeffersonian stance originally favored an "agrarian" economy of farmers, this changed over time to encompass many of Hamilton's original ideas,[3] while "the Madison administration helped give rise to the first truly protectionist tariff in U.S. history."[4]"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2016 12:49:51 GMT -6
Ian Fletcher has penned a short, but interesting article on the Huffington Post, titled "The Waterloo of Market Fundamentalism." It's main focus is on trade, tariffs, and "protectionism". He also refererences a Wikipedia article on Alexander Hamilton's recommendations to promote American industry, and protect it from excessive foreign competition. Hamilton's own recommendations were kind of blend of Protectionism (i.e, Tariffs), with a generous helping of Corporate Socialism (subsidies to Manufacturing). His policies were somewhat opposed by Jefferson & Madison, who advocated for even Higher Tariffs, but without the subsidies to manufacturing.
Clearly our forefathers advocated "Protectionist" policies, without which our country would have never become a manufacturing powerhouse.
It is these very "Protectionist" policies that need to be re-instituted today, to restore our manufacturing base and to "Make America Great Again." ...................... The Waterloo of Market FundamentalismNov 17, 2016 by Ian Fletcher (Author, ‘Free Trade Doesn’t Work,’ Advisor, Coalition for a Prosperous America ) "Trump’s election represents a lot of things, but one thing that doesn’t seem to have been quite noticed as much as it should be is this: it is the Battle of Waterloo, the final decisive defeat, of market fundamentalism. Market fundamentalism, for readers unfamiliar with the term, is the belief that free markets aren’t just good, they’re everything. This belief has been globally on the ascendant since the twin elections of Thatcher in 1979 in Britain and Reagan here in the USA in 1980. It went into metastatic overdrive with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. It was never really accepted in East Asia, though nations like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China found it convenient that America believed in it and therefore tolerated their “free market” trade surpluses - which were anything but. But the doctrine was swallowed deeply in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and much of the rest of the world in the 1990s. And, of course, here in the U.S. It has been in slow retreat since about Y2K. Latin America mostly repudiated it in the early 2000s. Now we read that Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that if Donald Trump is turning America protectionist, Great Britain will now be the world’s “champion of free trade.” Good luck with that, Madam 2.3% of world GDP. In reality, the game is over. With the world’s four largest economies — the U.S., China, Japan, and Germany, between them accounting for half the world economy — turned towards economic nationalism, this simply is the new global economic order. So market fundamentalism is finished internationally, its last redoubt. Domestically it’s been finished for a long time. Neither Thatcher, nor Reagan, nor Newt Gingrich nor George Bush actually reduced the size of government. The U.S., like all developed nations, has a mixed economy: about 40% government, maybe 20% heavily regulated capitalism, and less than 40% “pure” (or nearly so) capitalism. Free-market purists may sob over this reality. Students of America’s real economic history will be unfazed, as they will know that America’s real economic heritage is Hamiltonian, i.e. focused on making markets serve the national interest, however corruptly defined at any given moment. The economics profession that has played cheerleader to market fundamentalism for decades is headed for either a radical upheaval, or a fatal decline in its credibility, over the coming years. People were already asking “why didn’t economists foresee the Crash of 2008?” Unless Pres. Trump bungles protectionism so badly as to discredit an idea whose fundamentals are correct (I’m hoping not, but these things do happen), it will only get worse for the discipline in its current form. Luckily, the seeds of renewal in the profession have already been sown. Ralph Gomory and William Baumol’s book Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests is a fine starting point. Does this all mean a swinging back from the economic “right” to the economic “left?” Is socialism okay after all? No. For one thing, socialism isn’t even the issue here. For another, right and left aren’t really economic terms in the first place. They’re political terms that map imperfectly onto economics. The free-market Right is in big trouble. It’s probably finished for our lifetimes. But that’s not the only kind of right, as Mr. Trump has just shown everyone who had forgotten. The Republican Party prior to 1948 was protectionist. It looks like it will be again."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2016 12:44:52 GMT -6
Ian Fletcher has penned a short, but interesting article on the Huffington Post, titled The Waterloo of Market Fundamentalism. It's main focus is on trade, tariffs, and "protectionism". He also references a Wikipedia article on Alexander Hamilton's recommendations to promote American industry, and protect it from excessive foreign competition. Hamilton's own recommendations were kind of blend of both Protectionism (i.e, Tariffs), with a generous helping of Corporate Socialism (subsidies to Manufacturing). His policies were somewhat opposed by Jefferson & Madison, who advocated for even Higher Tariffs, but without the subsidies to manufacturing. Clearly our forefathers advocated "Protectionist" policies, without which our country would have never become a manufacturing powerhouse. It is these very "Protectionist" policies that need to be re-instituted today, to restore our manufacturing base and to "Make America Great Again."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 27, 2016 10:11:51 GMT -6
Below is an article by Ravi Batra from earlier this year. Though the initial focus of the article is somewhat outdated (the Greek Debt Crisis), the underlying logic & theory is still right-on-target.
Batra explains, once again, why cutting wages to balance budgets is conterproductive. Cutting wages does not "increase" employment. To the contrary, cutting wages "decreases" employment Cutting wages reduces worker/consumer buying power, thus resulting in less demand for production, which reduces demand for the very workers to provide that production. www.huffingtonpost.com/ravi-batra/monopoly-capitalism-and-t_b_7733086.htmlMonopoly Capitalism and the Greek Depression Jul 05, 2016 by Ravi Batra "Greeks have spoken, finally, with a resounding “no,” to another conditional bailout from the European Union. On Sunday, July 5th, with a vote of 61% to 39%, they said “oxi” to five years of crippling unemployment, poverty and debt that have been imposed on them by the failed policies of the Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund. Politicians and economists across the globe will predictably interpret it as a vote against austerity and in favor of government profligacy that justifies ever-rising budget deficits to preserve and create jobs. After all, the government deficits around the world have been extraordinarily high in the name of job creation ever since 1981. The Greek referendum is actually a vote against monopoly capitalism that now pervades the globe and has impoverished the poor and the middle class for decades, while enriching the rich beyond imagination. According to a United Nations report issued in 2014, just 85 people own more than half the world’s wealth. How did this all come about? Monopoly or crony capitalism is an economic system dominated by giant firms that charge high prices, pay low wages and extract huge productivity from their employees. The system differs from competitive capitalism, wherein smaller firms compete vigorously in terms of price, quality, and customer care. Crony capitalism flourishes through relentless and frantic mergers among large and profitable firms, leading to ever-growing labor productivity along with stagnant wages. Government profligacy makes it even stronger by raising its profits, which give it greater control over politicians hungry for campaign donations. Let us look at the process through the prism of supply and demand for goods and services. When supply exceeds demand, there are overproduction and hence layoffs that lead to unemployment and poverty. Supply derives from labor productivity and demand from wages. If productivity rises and wages don’t, supply rises while demand stagnates, resulting inevitably in overproduction and hence joblessness. Thus, poverty and unemployment arise not from austerity or low government spending but from a growing gap between productivity and wages. And the chief culprit for this growing gap is monopoly capitalism. Crony capitalism unleashed the Great Recession in the United States in 2007. By 2009, the recession had spread to the world and the Greek economy was in a free fall, requiring assistance from the European Union and the IMF. The Troika of European Commission, IMF and ECB then bailed Greece out, while imposing flawed policies on the nation. Greece’s own monopoly capitalism had already raised the wage-productivity gap, needing huge government spending by the Greek Government to maintain supply-demand balance inside the nation. In this milieu, the Troika demanded a 25% cut in wages, and a sharp reduction in the budget deficit. The results had to be catastrophic. As a numerical example, suppose supply at current prices is worth $500, demand or spending equals $300 and the budget deficit equals $200. Then Supply = $500 = Total Spending = $300 + $200, so that the supply-demand balance has been maintained with the help of the budget deficit, because then total spending and supply both equal $500. Now suppose the Troika forces a wage cut of $100 and a deficit reduction of $50; then spending will fall by $150, because consumer spending depends mostly on wages, especially in a serious recession. With a spending decline of 150, production falls to the level of demand, so now Supply = Total Spending = $350.Supply is the same thing as GDP, and when production falls, unemployment is bound to rise further. This is the process that transformed the Greek recession into a depression, with joblessness now exceeding 25%, and wages in a free fall. Politicians and the economic establishment frequently see wage cuts as a cure-all for joblessness. Such thinking is flawed and must be discarded. The culprit is monopoly capitalism, which is akin to a gorilla that must be tamed to restore the fortunes of the poor and the middle class. In terms of soaring poverty, the US economy is in the same boat as Greece. American poverty is now the worst in more than 50 years. Instead of monumental government deficits, we need to generate competition in various industries, so that wages catch up with productivity. But generating competition is easier said than done, but it can be accomplished by the president. And he can quickly do this without recourse to Congress by using existing laws."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 25, 2016 7:29:50 GMT -6
from Counterpunch.org www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/15/break-up-the-democratic-party-its-time-for-the-clintons-and-rubin-to-go-and-soros-too/Break Up the Democratic Party: It’s Time for the Clintons and Rubin to Go – and Soros TooNov 15, 2016 by Michael Hudson "In the week leading up to last Tuesday’s election the press was busy writing obituaries for the Republican Party. This continued even after Donald Trump’s “surprising” victory – which, like the 2008 bank-fraud crash, “nobody could have expected.” The pretense is that Trump saw what no other politician saw: that the economy has not recovered since 2008. Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the 1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups. Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered. National Income and Federal Reserve statistics show that all growth has accrued to just 5 percent of the population. Hillary is said to have spent $1 billion on polling, TV advertising and high-salaried staff members, but managed not to foresee the political reaction to this polarization. She and her coterie ignored economic policy as soon as Bernie was shoved out of the way and his followers all but told to join a third party. Her campaign speech tried to convince voters that they were better off than they were eight years ago. They knew better! So the question now is whether Donald Trump will really a maverick and shake up the Republican Party. There seems to be a fight going on for Donald’s soul – or at least the personnel he appoints to his cabinet. Thursday and Friday saw corporate lobbyists in the Republican leadership love-bombing him like the Moonies or Hari Krishna cults welcoming a new potential recruit. Will he simply surrender now and pass on the real work of government to the Republican apparatchiks? The stock market thinks so! On Wednesday it soared almost by 300 points, and repeated this gain on Thursday, setting a DJIA record! Pharmaceuticals are way up, as higher drug prices loom for Medicaid and Medicare. Stocks of the pipelines and major environmental polluters are soaring, from oil and gas to coal, mining and forestry, expecting U.S. environmental leadership to be as dead under Trump as it was under Obama and his push for the TPP and TTIP (with its fines for any government daring to impose standards that cost these companies money). On the bright side, these “trade” agreements to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at large are now presumably dead. For now, personalities are policy. A problem with this is that anyone who runs for president is in it partly for applause. That was Carter’s weak point, leading him to cave into Democratic apparatchiks in 1974. It looks like Trump may be a similar susceptibility. He wants to be loved, and the Republican lobbyists are offering plenty of applause if only he will turn to them and break his campaign promises in the way that Obama did in 2008. It would undo his hope to be a great president and champion of the working class that was his image leading up to November 8. The fight for the Democratic Party’s future (dare I say “soul”?) In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a bizarre request for young people (especially young women) to become politically active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange is that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to discourage millennials from running. There are few young candidates – except for corporate and Wall Street Republicans running as Blue Dog Democrats. The left has not been welcome in the party for a decade – unless it confines itself only to rhetoric and demagogy, not actual content. For Hillary’s DNC coterie the problem with millennials is that they are not shills for Wall Street. The treatment of Bernie Sanders is exemplary. The DNC threw down the gauntlet. Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party’s ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when 2KillingTheHost_Cover_rulefrom Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most voters’ minds. Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee (DNC) saw polls showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary losing. Did the Democratic leadership really prefer to lose with Hillary than win behind him and his social democratic reformers. Hillary doesn’t learn. Over the weekend she claimed that her analysis showed that FBI director Comey’s reports “rais[ing] doubts that were groundless, baseless,” stopped her momentum. This was on a par with the New York Times analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent probability of winning last Tuesday. She still hasn’t admitted that here analysis was inaccurate. What is the Democratic Party’s former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary’s wake by Robert Rubin’s Goldman Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama? If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed. It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted for Hillary. It didn’t even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned about their own job opportunities. The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years, blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the Federal Reserve Board’s statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests by the Democrats’ ethnic-identity politics. This election showed that voters have a sense of when they’re being lied to. After eight years of Obama’s demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. “Identity politics” has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work. If we are indeed experiencing a revival of economic class consciousness, who should lead the fight to clean up the Democratic Party Wall Street leadership? Will it be the Wall Street wing, or can Bernie and perhaps Elizabeth Warren make their move? There is only one way to rescue the Democrats from the Clintons and Rubin’s gang. That is to save the Democratic Party from being tarred irreversibly as the party of Wall Street and neocon brinkmanship. It is necessary to tell the Clintons and the Rubin gang from Wall Street to leave now. And take Evan Bayh with them. The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton’s pro-Wall Street administration. The Democrats need to do what Britain’s Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair’s Thatcherites. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: “Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington.”[1] Otherwise the Democrats will be left as an empty shell. Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move and appointing their own nominees to the DNC. If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead. An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary’s backer George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie’s supporters, by backing Howard Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American “Maidan Spring.” Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem was hubris. Hillary’s coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama’s rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary’s pretended embrace of Bernie’s opposition to TPP. The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary. Donald Trump is thus Obama’s legacy. Last week’s vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to “save his legacy” by supporting her as his Third Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance monopolies. Most of all, it was Hillary’s asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was “Putin’s candidate” (duly echoed by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama’s former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that “Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded.” It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors. Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people rise as the main profit center that Obamacare has offered the health-insurance monopoly. The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was defeated five years ago when it tried to capture Occupy Wall Street to make it part of the Democratic Party. It’s attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie’s supporters and other “real” Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let “socialism” be captured by the Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 21, 2016 0:17:27 GMT -6
Though I don't agree with George Will very often, he's made an excellent point in this article. from the NY Post nypost.com/2016/10/20/the-modern-us-campus-shouldnt-be-a-safe-space/ The modern US campus shouldn’t be a safe spaceOct 20, 2016
By George F. Will
"A specter is haunting academia, the specter of specters — ghosts, goblins and “cultural appropriation” through insensitive Halloween costumes. Institutions of higher education are engaged in the low comedy of avoiding the agonies of Yale.
Last October, the university was rocked to its 315-year-old foundations by the wife of a residential college master.
In response to a university memorandum urging students to wear culturally sensitive costumes — e.g., no sombreros — she wrote an e-mail saying it should be permissible for young people to be inappropriate, provocative or even offensive because “the ability to tolerate offense” is a hallmark of “a free and open society.”
After the dust settled from this, she and her husband left the residential college. And Yale had trampled in the dust the noble legacy of its 1975 Woodward Report.
Named for the chairman of the committee that produced it, historian C. Vann Woodward, the report was written after Yale’s awkward handling of some controversial speakers. Reaffirming freedom of expression’s “superior importance to other laudable principles and values,” the report said:
“Without sacrificing its central purpose, cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility or mutual respect. . . . It will never let these values, important as they are, override its central purpose.”
That purpose, as Hanna Holborn Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago, once said, is not to make young adults comfortable, it is to make them think. Since 1975, however, universities have embraced the doctrine that speech that offends people actually harms them, mentally and even physically.
Fortunately, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that some schools are having second thoughts about their “bias-response teams” that spring into action when someone says that someone has said something offensive.
These schools have noticed the obvious: When such teams elevate campus harmony to the supreme value, they become civility enforcers, with a chilling effect on speech.
America’s great research universities are ornaments of Western civilization, so their descent into authoritarianism and infantilization matters.
Because conservatives are largely absent from faculties, and conservative students are regarded as a rebarbative presence, many conservatives welcome academia’s marginalization of itself by behavior that invites ridicule. But universities are squandering the cultural patrimony that conservatism exists to conserve.
And what happens on campuses does not stay on campuses. According to the Pew Research Center, American millennials (ages 18 to 34), fresh from academia, “are far more likely than older generations to say the government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive statements about minority groups.”
Forty percent of this cohort think government should be empowered to jettison much constitutional law concerning the First Amendment in order to censor speech offensive to minority groups.
Gerard Alexander, a University of Virginia political scientist, argues in National Affairs that a university’s “permanent population,” the faculty, is secure in tenure and maintains its monochrome intellectual culture by hiring from a Ph.D. pipeline that young conservatives are understandably reluctant to enter. He could have added that faculties’ ideological tendencies are reinforced by peer review of publications.
“Schools,” Alexander notes, “have applied millions of hours of work to the priority of improving racial, ethnic and gender diversity. Viewpoint diversity could be elevated to similar prominence and urgency.”
This would improve scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Their research concerns economic behavior, the meaning and importance of classic literature, which social problems matter most and the evidence about ways of addressing them, how to evaluate different ethical positions and legal systems, and which aspects of history most merit study.
Viewpoint diversity in faculties would, Alexander argues, at least pit one scholar’s susceptibility to “confirmation bias” — the tendency to seek, and be receptive to, evidence that buttresses one’s beliefs — against another’s different bias.
Academia just now needs a reminder akin to Florence Nightingale’s terse axiom that whatever else hospitals might do, they should not spread disease. Universities, as the word suggests, have many missions, but becoming safe spaces for faculty and student juvenility is not among them."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 21, 2016 0:11:01 GMT -6
Who gives a rat's ass how Trump met his wife?
Or whether he's telling the truth about how he met her???
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 12, 2016 12:08:06 GMT -6
www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/you-may-be-responsible-fo_b_12882914.htmlTrump won. Well, I guess I’m going to get the trade policy I’ve been fighting for for more than a decade! (About the rest of his agenda, no comment.) His supporters are presumably celebrating right now, so I want to address this to his opponents: Quite frankly, this outcome is in large part your fault. Why? Because you (not all of you, but most of you) are the people who consistently, for decades, dismissed, pooh-poohed, and sabotaged every decent, rational attempt to fix America’s disastrous trade policy. Trade wasn’t the sole reason Trump won, of course, but it was a big part of it. As I’ve written before, the essence of his strategy was recasting the Republican Party as an economic-nationalist movement. Trade is the issue that made him more than an anti-immigration crank. Trade, specifically her non-credible flip on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is the issue that exposed Hillary Clinton as a phony. And you? You were Democrats, so it was your natural political duty to care about the fates of people in our society who were suffering from economic problems. You didn’t. Instead, your loyalty was to an abstract ideal of cosmopolitanism that led you into an unthinking embrace of globalism. This is an ideal which even your rich friends in Shanghai and Berlin don’t believe in, most successful foreign countries being economic nationalists in one way or another. You were warned. Remember Ross Perot in 1992? The other crazy billionaire, back when this whole globalism business was just starting to get out of hand? Well, you rejected him, so now you get Trump. You had your chance, now you get your comeuppance. Of course, some of you didn’t fall for globalism and free trade because you were taken in by a shiny but spurious moral ideal. You actually thought the economics worked. Well, it doesn’t. If Pres. Trump does his job of backing America out of free trade correctly (I’m hopeful, but not certain), in eight years no sensible person will even be arguing about this. Some amount of moderate, rational protectionism has historically been part of the story of every successful economy. Lots of people, not just me, warned you that free trade doesn’t work. Look them up, read their books, figure this out. Here’s a partial list: Alexander Hamilton Friedrich List Henry Carey Abraham Lincoln Teddy Roosevelt Chalmers Johnson Ralph Gomory William Baumol Eamonn Fingleton Ha-Joon Chang Pat Choate Paul-Craig Roberts Alice Amsden Greg Autry Peter Navarro Herman Daly Ravi Batra Graham Dunkeley Alfred Eckes Sherrod Brown Leo Gerard Naomi Klein William Greider Alan Tonelson Kevin Kearns Michael Lind Edward Luttwak Richard McCormack Ralph Nader Clyde Prestowitz Erik Reinert
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Nov 12, 2016 10:50:16 GMT -6
I wonder if Student Loan debt is accounted for in these numbers. In other words, is Student Loan debt already subtracted from the total amount?
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Sept 4, 2016 22:34:27 GMT -6
I may sound overly conspiratorial, but there have been at least 5 recent deaths of Clinton contacts in the last several months. from Zerohedge www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-05/lead-attorney-anti-clinton-dnc-fraud-case-mysteriously-found-dead"So, to summarize, courtesy of Janet Tavakoli, the Clinton related body count so far this election cycle: Five in just under six weeks - four convenient deaths plus one suicide... 1) Shawn Lucas, Sanders supporter who served papers to DNC on the Fraud Case (DOD August 2, 2016) 2) Victor Thorn, Clinton author (and Holocaust denier, probably the least credible on this list) shot himself in an apparent suicide. Conspiracy theorists at Mystery Writers of America said some guys will do anything to sell books. (DOD August, 2016) 3) Seth Conrad Rich, Democratic staffer, aged 27, apparently on his way to speak to the FBI about a case possibly involving the Clintons. The D.C. murder was not a robbery. (DOD July 8, 2016) 4) John Ashe, UN official who allegedly crushed his own throat while lifting weights, because he watched too many James Bond films and wanted to try the move where the bad guy tries to…oh, never mind. “He was scheduled to testify against the Clintons and the Democrat Party.” (DOD June 22, 2016) 5) Mike Flynn, the Big Government Editor for Breitbart News. Mike Flynn’s final article was published the day he died, “Clinton Cash: Bill, Hillary Created Their Own Chinese Foundation in 2014.” (DOD June 23, 2016) It must be coincidence, right? If former Secret Service agent Gary Byrne is to be believed, this is business as usual for the Clintons...."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 21, 2016 14:18:02 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 21, 2016 13:50:54 GMT -6
I found exactly the same information at another site as well. The Home Ownership rate is the lowest on record. wolfstreet.com/2016/07/28/american-dream-homeownership-rate-record-low/The American Dream Plunges to Record Low July 28, 2016 by Wolf Richter "Something happened on the way when the concept of “home” transmogrified to a financialized “asset class” whose price the government, the Fed, and the industry conspire to inflate into the blue sky, no matter what the consequences. And here are the consequences. The Census Bureau, which has been tracking homeownership rates in its data series going back to 1965 on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, just reported that in the second quarter 2016, the homeownership rate dropped to 62.9%, the lowest point on record.It matches the low point in Q1 and Q2 of 1965 when the data series began. At no time in between did it ever fall this low. And it was down half a percentage point from 63.4% a year ago. The relentless slide has lasted for 12 years, from its peak of 69.2% in Q4 2004, which was when the Greenspan Fed’s low interest rates were boosting speculation in the housing sector, and prices were going haywire. At the time, the concept of “home” had already become an asset class that can never lose money, financialized and later shorted by Wall Street, subsidized by government agencies, and backstopped by the Fed. And this is what happened to homeownership rates afterwards: US-homeownership-rate-1965-2016-Q2 The 1.9% point drop from Q3 2014 (65.3%) to Q2 2015 (63.4%) was the largest 2-year drop in the history of the data series. It also coincided with steep increase in home prices. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the homeownership rate dropped to 63.1% in Q2, the lowest in the non-seasonally-adjusted data series going back to 1985. There are numerous reasons for this, some known and others still to be guessed at, including: •Rising home prices in an economy of stagnant wages (for the lower 80%) have pushed entry-level homes out of reach for many people. •Lower priced homes in many urban areas entail a huge and costly ($ and time) commute every day. And even then, these homes may be too much of stretch for big parts of the population in expensive urban areas. •First time buyers are having trouble saving for a down payment since they spend their last available dime to meet soaring rents. •Millennials have been blamed. They always get blamed for everything. They saw their parents deal with the American Dream as it turned into the American Nightmare, and they learned their lesson early in life. • The super-low interest rate environment hasn’t made homes more affordable because home prices, in response to super-low interest rates, have soared, and in the end, mortgage payments are higher than they were before. •Higher home prices entail other costs that are higher, including taxes, brokerage fees, and insurance. The fact that Housing Bubble 2 in most urban areas is now even more magnificent than the prior housing bubble that blew up with such fanfare, even while real incomes have stagnated for all but the top earners, is a sign that the Fed has succeeded elegantly in pumping up nearly all asset prices to achieve its “wealth effect,” come heck or high water. In this ingenious manner, it has “healed” the housing market. It’s 2-year bout of flip-flopping about raising rates just puts some lipstick on these policies that include the purchase of agency mortgage-backed securities, which the Fed continues to buy to replace those that mature and roll off its balance sheet. Just today, as part of its routine, it acquired $2.6 billion in agency mortgage-backed securities. On July 26, it acquired $2.0 billion. On July 25, $1.9 billion; on July 22, $1.3 billion, on July 21, $2.5 billion; on July 20, $1.9 billion…. and so on. As MBS mature and are redeemed, the Fed takes this money and goes to its primary dealers (list) and buys more of them, which puts downward pressure on mortgage rates and prevents the free market from playing any kind of role, all in the religious believe that inflating home prices beyond all recognition is somehow good for the economy and Wall Street, despite the consequences, such as plunging homeownership rates, as America turns from a country of homeowners into a country of renters, often dwelling in a corporate-owned financialized asset class. At the luxury end, something new is hitting the housing market: Manhattan and Miami are already getting mauled. Now it’s expanding to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, even Texas! Read… US Government Mucks up Money-Laundering in Real Estate, Puts Luxury Housing Bubbles at Risk."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Aug 16, 2016 22:02:34 GMT -6
Smartphones dumbphones are the worst innovation of recent times, and have successfully dumbed down conversation and communication in all areas they've touched, including the Medical field.
Nowadays, no subject of discussion is allowed to take more than 10 seconds to communicate.
Dumbphones have reduced a majority of conversations down to the level of bar-room small talk.
Now it's considered OK to interrupt anyone & everyone--at any time, 24 hours a day--with the most half-assed communication imaginable, which could be regurgitated without a millisecond of thought behind it.
What a great thing smartphones are!
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jul 23, 2016 10:38:58 GMT -6
The Greed Index is rising because of the anticipated election of Hillary Clinton for President.
She's the best friend Wall Street, the Financial Industry, & Free Traitors have ever had in the White House.
Her Plutocratic allies are just giddy about the prospects of a roll-back of financial regulations, & still more cheap foreign labor.
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